Soybeans make you gay

More weird science from the religious far right's favorite news service -- World Net Daily.

"There's a slow poison out there that's severely damaging our children and threatening to tear apart our culture." A warning from WND columnist Jim Rutz on the dangers of soy products.

Technical question

Why is it that so few bloggers use the alt and title attributes with blog images? Title can also be used with links. Is there some rule I don't know about? I don't often attach these to links but I try to use them whenever possible with the images I post. Keep in mind that not all of your visitors can see the screen and it lets them know what the image is and how it relates to the text.

Thank you, Purple Twinkie, and fluxipoop, for titling your links. It makes your pages even more interesting and informative.

Just a few left to visit

There are only ten I haven't visited. Yet.

Click here to create your own map of states you have visited.

It's worse than we thought...

Don't let the U.S. religious right wingers hear about this or we will all end up inside a piece of pita bread.

My French Blog

I was checking to see who had visited my blog today and noticed there was somebody from France. Wondering how he or she found my blog I checked to see what this person had used for search terms and, voila!, my blog popped up in French. Love it.

Click on the image below to see it big enough to read.

The Joy of Pool

Last Monday I was doing some pool cleaning and working on the filters -- getting ready for winter. Although the pool has been too cold to swim in since the middle of September, it is pretty to look at when it's clean and sparkling. At one point I mishandled some chlorine pellets and I got my lungs full of the choking gas. I had to sit down for a few minutes. And until the next morning I had a tightness in my chest and the constant taste and smell of chlorine. Yuck. I will learn to be more careful.

While I was cleaning the pool the water level was high. Tuesday I noticed the level was down about an inch. Wednesday it was down four inches. Thursday it was down by four feet and obviously we had a leak. A bad one.

The pool people sent their man over to check it out and he said we needed a new vinyl liner. The pool and the liner are over ten years old. And a liner lasts about ten years, so our time had come. It will be fixed in a couple of weeks (for several thousand dollars). But we were expecting this to happen -- in a year or two maybe. Oh well.

Last night was very cold and there was a possibility of a freeze. So we had to bring the Polaris pool-cleaning robot in so it wouldn't freeze and crack open. It had to be in a warm place, so like a pet seal we put it in the bath tub for the night.

The Polaris attaches to the pool pump by a long hose and it slowly rolls along the bottom and sides of the pool vacuuming up sand and leaves. Its movements are quite life-like and fun to watch. Especially if it's a warm sunny afternoon and you have had a few drinks.

My lungs have recovered, the Polaris had a warm night and soon the new, deep blue liner will be installed and we will have 22,500 fresh gallons of clear, clean water in the pool. That's a lot of water, and for those of you in the rest of the world it's about 85,000 liters.