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

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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.