Run, don’t walk, your fingers over the keyboard to click on this link. It takes you to Joanna Newson singing “The Sprout and The Bean”. Something horribly, charmingly, weirdly loveable and tuneful about this performance.

Yesterday we went to see "Flushed Away". If you're at the mall shopping and need a sit-down break, this is good. Not great, but good. I enjoyed it and Benny and Sadie sat through the whole thing.

Thanks so much to those who keep clicking the link to my blog at HamptonRoads.com, the local newspaper. I'm trying to beat down a blogger who only posts about once every two months but still gets a zillion hits because his blog is about electronic games, a popular subject.

Slowly and surely with your help I defeated the blog which is a celebration of alcohol, the one called Bar Stories. That was a great effort. Love y'all. Keep on clicking. Now on target: the nonblogging games blogger. "Click at will, Mr. Sulu!"
Link in the post below.

I have a request of all you people kind enough to read this blog. Please go to my blog at the newspaper and check it out. I've just been doing it for a week and a half. The site stats come out soon and it's going to hurt my feelings to have a way low number of page views as compared with people who have blogged there for a while. All any of the bloggers will see is the numbers. Nowhere does it say, "Joanna's low numbers are because she has just a few days here as compared with everyone else's tenure in office." So please help me out by going to that site. Click on it a few times/day for a little while. You don't even need to read it. Click and run.

Here's the link.

On the list of blogs, click on "I SAW THAT".

Thanks.

I started another blog, one under the auspices of the local newspaper, The Virginian-Pilot. Check out the truly splendid faux toe of Porque Choppe at the top.

This was Leona's day to clean my house. She no longer employs the person assisting her last time. Today she showed up with three new helpers. She brought two of them indoors, took them over the house, top to bottom, instructing them what to do and what not to do. Carried in several buckets of cleaning implements and products. Then she and a third new assistant left for another house up the street. She whispered to me, "Please keep an eye on them. They're new." Hm.

I had things to do so I pretty much ignored them since I could hear them working upstairs, the vacuum going, etc. I tied little Porque on the porch since one lady claimed to be afraid of dogs; she'd been bitten.

After a while I took all my bedding out of the dryer where it was finally done. I carried it upstairs and left it on the bed, went back downstairs.

Mostly I worked on origami bats. I'm making white origami bats with red sequin eyes. Depending how a bat is folded, it can stand up, stand upside down, be in horizontal flying position. I was busy making decorations for the dinner here on Sunday evening.

After a few hours the ladies seemed to be nearly done. The one woman asked me where I go to church and when I told her I'm Episcopalian, she told me very sternly that I should obey the Bible where we are instructed to, "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord." She added that she knows of scripture references which obligate us to dance before the Lord, too. She asked, suspiciously, "What do Episcopalians believe?"

I told her that Episcopalians believe pretty much what all other Christians believe, that our main difference is that we like a liturgical service, nice and quiet and restful.

Whacking the dust rag around wrathfully, she told me that this is not good enough. I need to put some energy into my worship or it isn't right. I told her that once I tried to visit a church with a three-hour service, plenty of noise and dancing, and it took me a week to recover. I've got to stick to the more soothing, quiet type of service. She shook her head admonishingly. Clearly, she thought I was about to go to hell because I attend a church where it's too darn quiet. She gave me a hard look and told me that her brother is pastor of a store-front church a few blocks away where people know how to do things right. She repeated the name of the church and added, encouragingly, that it's across from the hardware store. She thought of another good point, "It don' us'ally run mo'den' two oh free owuh." I replied, "Way too long for me." She looked disgusted.

After a while the hubub died down. The vacuum quieted. The ladies dragged all their stuff out onto the porch, then came back in looking uncertain. I thought they were waiting for Leona to come back and critique their work, so I told them to sit down and be comfortable...and I got diet Cokes for them.

Sitting there, both ladies told me horror stories about their physical and family problems. One woman has had so much surgery that she's a regular Frankenstein. More interestingly, she's lost 40 pounds and is still losing...and looks like she should continue along those lines for about another 100 pounds. The other lady told about awful trouble with rheumatism, broken bones that didn't heal right, pain and agony with each step she takes. Yeesh! I began to feel like Simon Legree, causing these folks to work and hurt themselves.

Finally, they stood up and left, telling me that Leona would return to get her cleaning supplies, but they had to get to their homes.

They were gone. The quiet was nice. The house looked good.

Shortly Leona came back. She looked around and blew up, "I knew it! Those two! Look at this floor!!! Look at the baseboards!!" Her helper ran upstairs and yelled, "They didn't make this bed!" The helper did that and some other things upstairs while Leona redid quite a bit of the other work downstairs. I paid Leona and she and her helper went home. That lady has a hard life. She works like few other people I've met.

Anyway, when everyone was really gone, I put pasta in the microwave, set a lavender-scented candle in the sink after running some water. I ate the pasta. The candle soon scented the entire house. Every surface gleams. It's all good. Ahhhhhhhh. I like cleaning-lady day.

This morning for several reasons I watched videos which show the president making a fool of himself. At first I wondered if these were modified electronically to make Mr. Bush look really bad. For instance, there were three in which clearly he was drunk at press conferences. There were two where he was picking his nose almost up to his elbow. In a number of videos he did verbal bloopers. After a while it occurred to me that these videos span quite a bit of time. Then something else...I reflected that anyone caught on film as much as this man will surely be at a disadvantage from time to time. Finally, I found myself thinking that he's kind of a likeable guy, no pretense, none of that pompous ass stuff one finds so thick on the ground in the presence of politicians. He may be a corn pone, a drinker, a nose picker, a person who gets his tongue tangled, but he does laugh at himself. I had to quit watching in case what I saw influenced me to stop scorning the man.

The theme of each video was that President Bush is mentally defective. Hm...maybe so, but he's more likeable than John Kerry. God, please, don't let the Democrats pick another undead candidate like that. Such people may be worthy, they may be intelligent, they may not embarass us in public, but I don't like them. So, in the interest of electing Democrats next time, I hope these videographers give it up, stop, let it go. The thing is that even when he's being a dope, President Bush, in all these videos, comes across as a human being, not as a detestable blowhard. Watching him I got an Alfred E. Neumann-went-to-Washington kind of feeling, but it wasn't entirely a bad thing.

Searching for info re. Kazakhstan, I ran across a blog by a fellow who has spent ten years working in Kazakhstan through a United Nations subdivision. He recorded several English-speaking people telling their experiences. Most made an effort to be PC. Two did not.

BREAD...One of those said that to the non-urban Kazakh, bread is almost a sacred substance due to the rarity of non-meat foods. There is no such thing as wasting even a scrap of bread, should one be lucky enough to get some. Living in the city, Almaty, she did have access to bread and each morning after breakfast, she fed bread crumbs to the birds outside her door in the street. Neighbors remonstrated with her earnestly that this showed disrespect for the struggles of Kazakh people some of whom never even get to taste bread. She ignored the rhetoric and continued to feed crumbs to the birds until one day when a peculiar chain of circumstances began with her strewing crumbs and ended with her going to a doctor to have her wrist stitched where she'd sustained a serious cut. The neighbors assured her that this turn of events was a judgement on her for wasting bread.

T P...Another speaker told of the shortage of toilet paper and warned that visitors to Kazakhstan should bring with them all the toilet paper they might need during their entire trip. On the one hand, they could possibly encounter a bit of TP, but likely not. In restaurants/hotels, none is in the bathrooms. When you want some, you must call down to the desk which might send up one small sheet off the roll, if they admit to having any at all. Most Kazakhs live out and about on the steppes, mobile with their herds. They have no indoor plumbing. For city people, the quest for toilet paper usually begins and ends with newspaper/pages of magazines and a waste paper can beside the toilet. Can't flush newspaper. Travelers to Kazakhstan are urged to bring with them a product called Urinelle, a funnel-like thing a woman can use to more easily access the hole-in-the-floor type of toilet common there. With this type of toilet, there may be no way to insert paper of any kind into the toilet, so, once again, travelers are encouraged to bring little one-sheet wipes to use as potty paper and then to carry away with them. How do you carry around used "toilet paper"? Well, travelers are instructed to bring lots and lots of zip lock plastic bags to use in keeping TP until there's an opportunity to dispose of it. What do natives use? No mention anywhere.

The Borat movie opens in about a week. Suddenly information about Kazakhstan abounds in the media. For people like me who consider the movie a spoof, this recent flood of info comes as a shock. Except in bigger cities, Kazakh food seems uniquely, horribly different. Kazakh natives eat mostly meat and they prefer portions which in the USA would never even make it into the grocery store. For example the head of a sheep, especially the brain. Another appreciated item; fried camel offal. Huh? Offal? Here you go: offal is the viscera and trimmings of a butchered animal often considered inedible by humans. We're talking ears, noses, guts, genitals, organs, eyeballs, etc. Fried camel offal. Well, now. Here, for example, is a camel kidney looking like, like, like...a camel kidney.

These people eat the animals they have, which are horses, camels and sheep. They eat dairy products derived from horse, sheep, and camel milk. Without refrigeration anywhere along the way. And they sluice down their meals with vodka, which, the more you think about it, makes perfect sense. Women, the offal of the human race in that part of the world, drink tea, must face mealtime stone sober. Sentenced to a stretch in Kazakhstan, I, certainly, would lose weight. An Asian nation as one big spa, you might say.

On the one hand, it's admirable that Kazakhs do not sit around pining for fruit and vegetables, but make do with what they have...which is meat. On the other hand, oy.

The stuff still sitting on my porch after six uninterrupted weeks is there owing to my deference toward the precautionary principle. What it is, a person's got to question, "If I carry that laundry stuff we used at the beach back into my home laundry, what might be the result?" According to the precautionary principle, if there is no evidence to support the notion that something is harmless, then we should assume that the product is harmful. I could only know that lavender-scented laundry products would not trigger migraine in the neighbors if I went door to door and asked questions. Not having done this, I shouldn't just go ahead and swamp the neighborhood in lavender smell out the dryer vent. The precautionary principle applies the reverse of innocent until proven guilty to products, policies, and behaviors.

OK. I lied. That stuff is just on the porch because I don't want to carry it in. The box will probably still be there on the porch when I drop dead at some future time. I just wanted to use the words 'precautionary principle' in a few sentences. I finished reading Michael Crichton's book State of Fear a few minutes ago and he really does not like the 'precautionary principle', a concept I'd never heard of until reading this book. I've got to find a way to introduce those words in conversation soon. "The fact that you've made a practice of pottying your dog in my yard leads me to believe that you've applied the precautionary principle to the notion that allowing your dog to potty in your own yard will not result in your children picking up dog parasites through their bare feet." Something like that.