The epal hunt

Why should it be so hard to find an epal today?

Some years ago, I wrote to several people - some for several years - before everything changed with online groups and then blogging and online social networks.

I got to know more about some of those people than I know about myself. There was an intimacy which you don't get online. And I thought I'd like to go back to that because quite honestly, for me anyway, online social networks have become passe.

Naively I also thought that the internet would "provide", as it had done in the previous decade, ordinary unpretentious epal sites that didn't demand extensive information before joining, finding once having joined that these also now cater to the online social network set. That had easy to access long lists of keen epal seekers that could be connected with the very same day.

Nowadays, at what stage in the relationship build does the "request email address exchange" happen? And who makes the first move?

Is it, like, getting engaged?

I didn't realise it would be such a BIG ask!

Pat Condrell - someone who makes sense!

This makes a lot of sense ...

"Swearing Makes Pain More Tolerable

By LiveScience Staff

posted: 12 July 2009 10:05 am ET

That muttered curse word that reflexively comes out when you stub your toe could actually make it easier to bear the throbbing pain, a new study suggests."

Children of a stupid god - Pat Condrell

Children of a stupid god - 8 Translation(s) | dotSUB

Shared via AddThis

Nature gets it wrong .. again

Sometimes nature goes so horribly wrong







TV Documentary about a toddler born with eight limbs and believed by some to be the reincarnation of the multi-limbed Hindu goddess Lakshmi(correction.) She is set to undergo a 40-hour operation to remove half of her limbs.

Lakshmi Tatma was born joined to a 'parasitic twin' and will go under the knife at the hands of 30 surgeons to remove two of her useless arms and legs. The headless 'twin' is joined to Lakshmi at the pelvis and has its own spinal column and kidney.

Without the operation the little girl would never be able to walk or crawl and would be unlikely to live past her early teens, doctors said. The extraordinary eight-limbed baby was born in a poverty-stricken region of Bihar, India - on the day devoted to the celebration of the four-armed Hindu deity Vishnu.

Her mother Poonam Tatma said she believed her daughter was "a miracle, a reincarnation" of Vishnu.

Bring back the bonnet ...

Long before the dawn as I lay deliberating upon the mysteries of this reality, I wondered about why it was, after WWII, that westerners on the whole, in general - and mostly - have stopped wearing hats as an everyday thing.

Save, of course, for those who wear baseball type caps. As casual headgear, these curiously peaked caps have crossed the great divide of fashion sense and attained acceptablity among men and women.

And crikey, I even have one to wear in the spa through daylight hours.

While hubby has a collection of them. In the daytime he doesn't leave home without one but then we live in a 'sunburnt country'; and it would be sensible for all Australians to 'slip on a hat' through the hot weather, wouldn't it?

But most of us choose to face the world bare-headed (although for babies and young children we might make an exception).

I guess I'm curious about the psychological underpinnings of this (me and origins!). I wonder what social shift occurred in the westernised world to label the wearing of hats as making a person look 'stupid', causing people to lose the habit of wearing in the everyday what is a very practical item of clothing?

In Tribute to Maudi - 1990-2009

After 19 years of knowing you

The first lonely morning
because you are not here
The space where your cat bowl used to sit
is empty
Your water and food dishes are gone
Your cover where you slept.
It too is gone

The doors, the windows,
we overnight would leave open for you to have fresh air
are closed
The fans we would leave on 24/7 for your comfort
are turned off

I feel the emptiness of the rooms as I pass through them
The everyday expectation I could count on of your morning greeting
is dashed against the hard place of mortality
and with all my heart I miss you
Without you
things will never feel the same again

Bill Bryson

Hiking the Appalachian Trail

Notes from a Small Island

Don't worry .. Be happy

Bill Bryson wrote the book "Notes from a Small Island" in 1995, which I'm in the processing of listening to courtesy of my passion, lately, for audiobooks. I'm not going to re-invent the wheel, I'll just use an explanation from Wikipedia. "The author had decided to move back to his native United States but wanted to take one final trip around Great Britain, which had been his home for over twenty years."

Part way through the story he finds himself taking a side journey to Weston Super Mare, and he says:

"The way I see it there are 3 reasons never to be unhappy.

First, you were born.

This in itself is a remarkable achievement.

Did you know that each time your father ejaculated, and frankly he did it quite a lot, he produced roughly 25 Million spermatzoa, enough to re-populate Britain every 2 days or so.

For you to have been born, not only did you have to be among the few batches of sperm that had even a theoretical chance of prospering, in itself quite a long shot. But you then had to win a race against 24,999,999 or so other wriggling contenders, also rushing to swim the English channel of your mother's vagina in order to be the first ashore at the fertile egg of Berloine (spelling), as it were.

Being born was easily the most remarkable achievement of your whole life. And think. You could just as easily have been a flatworm.

Second, you are alive.

For the tiniest moment in the span of eternity you have the miraculous privilege to exist.

Third, you have plenty to eat, you live in a time of peace, and "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Around the Old Oak Tree" will never be No. 1 again.

If you bear these things in mind, you will never be truly unhappy. Though in fairness I must point out that if you find yourself alone in Weston Super Mare on a rainy Tuesday evening, you may come close."

BRILLIANT! This man is a genius in his understated way, almost as understated if he were English.

Old Faithful - centre of controversy

Old Faithful Geyser WebCam - hey, this is streaming, which means the picture changes every 20 seconds or something. How much patience have you got? Test yourself here.

Sometimes the headlines just make you laugh "Yellowstone, not yellow snow: 2 seasonal park workers fired after urinating into Old Faithful"
BOB MOEN Associated Press Writer 7:34 PM EDT, May 14, 2009

Here's a picture of Old Faithful pee'ing. Upwards.

Unfortunately we don't have a picture of the two guys pee'ing down into the geyser.

But in the age of the internet, that doesn't matter a whole lot.



It was reported by Yellowstone officials that "The geyser was not erupting at the time."

*SNORT* *GUFFAW*

Is Mexico getting back to normal?

Quote of the week

"Of course it is, don't you see the drug gangs have started killing people again?" a smiling man told the BBC while rushing to catch the green man sign at a road crossing."

Luck-y Khanzir

Link to story

Khanzir is the world's luckiest pig - if only he had a girlfriend.

He lives in a zoo in Afghanistan, given to the zoo by China in 2002, and it was a really good plan because this country is a bacon-free zone. This is not to say, no pigs allowed - just no pork products allowed. While the country may be a hellhole for humans to live in, Khanzir, with no fear of being turned into pork kebabs, lives in porker heaven with deer and goats.

That is, until visitors to the zoo worried that Khanzir, the sole - single - one and only known pig in the whole of Afghanistan - might be carrying the H1N1 virus. Just because he's a pig.

The visitors looked at the only known pig in the whole of Afghanistan and said "Mmm, a pig." Pausing, then "What do we know about pigs?" And then, "Arrgh! A pig! Swine flu!". I know! A real zealous use of exclamation marks.

So Khanzir was sent to quarantine away from his deer and goat pallies, but he gets a large room with a view and plenty of fresh air, so that's not so bad, and it may not be for too long.

In the meantime, the zoo's director, Mr Saqib, is turning his attention to the thought of the girlfriend issue. But he says "It is a dangerous and difficult time to get a new pig for our pig".

Feel the love, this guy dotes on that pig.

And don't even think about bringing swine flu to Australia. You're going to get disinfected!!!

Chanel No. 5

"Coco Chanel commissioned Ernest Beaux to make six perfumes. They were labelled No. 1, No. 2, etc. through No. 6. It was bottle No.5 that was to Chanel's liking and became the chosen formula."

Link - Chanel No. 5

I'd always stupidly thought that Coco Chanel had some direct involvement in the mixing of her famous potion.

Chanel No 5 was a favourite perfume of mine when I was in my twenties. It was not heavy but distinctive. I considered it so, anyway.

I don't wear perfume any more as it happens, I have an allergic reaction to strong smells. Which is not only a shame but a huge handicap since so many others are not so likewise troubled.

However, I read in this article that "Laboratory tests have shown that Chanel No. 5 contains secretions from the perineal glands of civet cats. Civet is a powerful fixative, making the scent last a long time."

After protests that civet is harvested in a cruel way, in 1998 the Chanel company took the generous, and some might say astute, course of replacing civet with a synthetic substitute.

I can't tell you how that's affected the perfume, read above vis a vis the allergy thing.

But I can tell you that I was affected with a special warmth for the Wertheimer family.

Link - Laelaps - Is there a civet in your perfume?

"Why not just cut out the middle-man and press a civet’s butt to your arms, neck, or chest?"

Well said that woman!

The increase of age .. the retention of optimism

At 58 and thinking of my youth - of course I miss the health, the physical strength, the vitality, the exhuberance for life but I also miss the naivity ... sometimes.

And yet I don't really want to go back to being a sweet young thing - and, that, despite that life was very tough sometimes - but youth gave to me a beguiling optimism, a sense that all things would work out alright in the end, that fair play was possible and that we humans would arrive at a watershed, leaving behind the old, ugly way of managing things and, to the fore, a Star Trekkian existence with distant stars in our reach and the cosmos our oyster. The human race or those able to trace their origins back to the human race, living long and prospering - forever after.

And I still love all the old Star Trek films which perhaps more than any individual built into me a belief in human nature as offering solutions to the problems our kind has struggled with century in, century out .. but into the new century it's been kind of hard not to notice that people are still making the same dumb mistakes for the same dumb reasons.

Even so, I still can't quite erase that old feeling of, we're going to make it. Or those who follow in our footsteps will.

But not by waiting for outside help. It's got to come from us.

Because, we're all we've got.

Evolution versus Creation cartoon