Archive for June, 2004

Dave goes on tour

Just imagine being left out to play in just diapers, fed by a warm nanny, or being laid down for a nap or diaper change! It is all up to you!

Do you like going out for walks in just a diaper? When was the last time you cuddled up warmly in a soft, warm crib? What is your favourite drink from the bottle — milk or juice? Does your diaper need a change?

It is hard to imagine a place where you can truly be a baby without the fear of society barreling down on you. But in this warm, sunny, and ultra-friendly nursery in beautiful Thailand, such a place exists!

– A B Nursery, Thailand

like wtf

While in Paris we kept seeing signs outside shops advertising goods and several of them advertised “Les Tampons”. We thought it was a little strange for these shops to proudly proclaim their sanitary wares. Since returning home I’ve translated “Les Tampons” and found it means plug. How apt.

I’m back from Paris and I had a wonderful time in Paris. Actually, I’ve been back since Friday but I’ve been catching up on sleep because we’d tried to fit so much sightseeing in I’m rather knackered.

C and I stayed in a small 2-star hotel in Paris but in the suburbs to save money. We used the excellent metro system each day to travel into the city centre. I was impressed with the frequency of trains, we never had to wait long.

We went up the Eiffel Tower in a cable car, but only to the first level because I’m a wimp. The views of Paris were amazing. There was a post office, restaurant and toilets on this level. C used the toilet so he could claim he’s pissed on the Eiffel Tower.

I think the highlight of my holiday was a visit to the Pompidou Centre which is a great piece of architecture. The Pompidou Centre houses some fantastic and some ridiculous modern art. Some pieces leave you asking “why bother?” and some make you squeal with excitement. One such exhibit which has really touched me for some unknown reason is Roman Opalka’s “OPALKA 1965/ 1-∞”

We also visited Champs Elysees, Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, Sacre Coeur, Orsay Museum and the Louvre. Monet’s paintings were beautiful but the Mona Lisa looked small and grubby.

*snigger*… anyways, answers on a postcard if you know where this picture comes from.

I have a fortnight off work and tomorrow I’m heading off to Paris for 6 nights and then back to U.K. for a bit of camping somewhere. That’s if the airport roof doesn’t collapse on me at the airport.

pandas are bouncing back

Menstruating women in rural Zimbabwe have no access to sanitary protection. Ann Cotton, executive director of the charity Camfed, says: “Pads are unavailable or too expensive, so they use crushed bark wrapped up in old cloth or bits of sacking as padding. Inecitably, this causes infection – and the broken skin can increase the risk of getting sexually transmitted diseases. Many girls don’t know how to make safe, effective pads.”

Camfed works with 250 schools, teaching girls how to make safe pads from local materials, but they desperately need income to continue the lessons and to buy materials. To donate go to www.camfed.org/html/give.html

Not on the Label – Felicity Lawrence

I had been smuggled into a large chicken factory by a meat and hygiene inspector who was worried about standards in the poultry industry. We were gazing into a hot water-tank into which the dead birds were being dipped at the rate of 180 a minute, to scald the skin and loosen the feathers before they went into the plucking machine.

It was 3 p.m. and as at many factories the water was only changed once a day. It was a brown soup of faeces and feather fragments and at 52C “the perfect temperature for salmonella and campylobacter organisms to survive and cross-contaminate the birds”, the hygiene inspector pointed out. We moved onto the whirring rubber fingers which remove the feathers. “Plucking machines exert considerable pressure on the carcass which tends to squeeze faecal matter on to the production line. It only takes one bird colonized with the campylobacter to infect the rest. The bacteria count goes up tenfold after this point”, he continued. I found myself wondering who had the job of counting.

“But free-range and organic birds…” I started to ask without wanting to know the answer. “…nearly all come through the same plants, yes. There’s no difference except that in plants which process organic birds you can tell the organic ones. They are used to being allowed to run about a bit so they try and escape are shackled.”

Half of the chicken on sale in UK supermarkets is contaminated with campylobacter. Campylobacter causes a nasty kind of food poisoning with severe, often bloody, diarrhoea.