“This is a room cleano. A room cleano cleans up rooms. It has a mouth so it can tell you when it’s done cleaning the room. It will clean any room you tell it to if it has seen it clean.”
Unfortunately, I’d be in big trouble on account of that last bit. Maybe I’ll hold out for version 2.0.
I’m going to do a standing rib roast for dinner.
My grandmothers wouldn’t have found this thrilling. So see? Post-post modernism isn’t all about being cynical.
I just realized I overlooked this Rochester blog.
Now added to my links!
(She knits. I have knitted. Big difference. There is, in the bottom of my cedar chest, a partially finished sweater suitable for an 18-month old child. My daughter outgrew it approximately six years ago . . . )
— since your fair blogger hasn’t begun to get her head around that topic yet, and she’s not in curmudgeonly skeptic mode at the moment — this is still astonishing.
Not that women are driven a bit bonkers, from time to time, by our hormones. But that men are, too. Driven bonkers by women’s hormones. Only not in the way you thought:
Men . . . appear to step up mate-guarding strategies when their wives or girlfriends ovulate, even when neither is keeping track of the woman’s cycle, the research shows.
“It’s not just that men are more jealous and possessive when their partners ovulate, but they’re also more attentive to their partners and more giving to their needs,” said collaborator Steven W. Gangestad, a University of New Mexico psychologist.
We’re hopelessly entwined, aren’t we. Biologically — chemically entwined.
Wild.
[tags] health hormones [/tags]
A salad spinner.
Reasons:
1. Lettuce is probably sentient. Give the poor lettuce a little fun before its final demise.
2. Unwashed lettuce will kill you. You’re probably safer eating roadkill in August than unwashed greens.
3. Wet salad is horrid. It isn’t even salad, really. It’s raw soup.
4. Water on a salad plate, when you’ve finished your salad, is horrid.
5. There are only two other ways to dry lettuce, unless you want to wait a couple of days.
6. Drying lettuce with a hair dryer wilts it. While wilted lettuce salad is, admittedly, a culinary mainstay, no known recipe suggests wilting it with forced hot air.
7. The only other way to dry your lettuce is to daub it with something.
8. Daubing it with a dish towel will re-contaminate it with the pathogens you just washed off. Don’t you want to live?
9. Daubing it with paper towels is safer, but paper towels are made from trees, and cutting down trees is bad . . .
10. Never mind. I’m going back to work!
My daughter had an idea, this morning: spies should wear shoes that leave backwards footprints.
That way villains wouldn’t be able to tell where the spies are going.
“If you’re hungry, and in a pit, it’s better to have a ladder than something to eat.”
— my daughter
This newly-minted aphorism resulted from a rather delightful cognitive leap, btw. She — my daughter — was eating her first toasted English muffin (with butter and cinnamon sugar) (her first, because I tend to stick to whole wheat, bought-at-the-healthfood-store type food, but I’d made Eggs Benedict for New Year’s Day breakfast and have some leftover ingredients on hand, now)
and I mentioned that the only thing better than a store-bought English muffin was a homemade English muffin.
At which point, the child attempted to articulate something about the irrelevance of a homemade English muffin when she had a perfectly delicious storebought one, with butter and cinnamon sugar, right at hand.
What she was trying to get to, but being age seven didn’t have the precise words, was to argue for the importance of context.
So absent the ability to articulate an abstraction as an abstraction, she came up with the “hungry and in a pit” analogy.
I love my kid :-)
My sister brought a jigsaw puzzle along this weekend when our families re-congregated at my parents to celebrate New Year’s Eve.
It’s not something I would have thought of doing (the jigsaw bit) and I didn’t pay much attention when she first pulled out a table and dumped out the pieces (750, according to the box, 747 in reality).
Then some 24 hours later when I was driving back home, my daughter in the back seat looking for the letters of the alphabet on road signs, I realized what a treasure we’d been given. Working a jigsaw puzzle is a way for a few people you care about to gather around a table and share something, which isn’t the puzzle but your time. You’re facing each other — unlike when, for instance, people watch television together. You talk about whatever comes up, serious topics or lite topics or just how you’re certain that the particular piece you’re looking for is surely lost. You laugh, a lot. And if you pay attention, you realize how much you love each other and how comfortable you are together.
I wouldn’t have thought to suggest a jigsaw puzzle this weekend, but I’m awfully glad my sister did.
