From here:

A PENRITH mum has appeared on national TV to explain why she is still breastfeeding her daughter who is nearly eight – and why she gave her older daughter breast milk as a ninth birthday present.

Veronika Robinson appeared on the Channel 4 programme Extraordinary Breastfeeding as a passionate advocate of allowing children to decided when they give up breast milk.

Elizah is approaching her eighth birthday and is not happy at the prospect of giving up her daily feed. “I don’t want to be weaned. I want to breastfeed for ever,” she said.

In an interview before the TV programme, 38-year-old Veronika described her reaction when Bethany asked for breast milk for her ninth birthday. “I was delighted, if a little taken aback,’ she said.

“I’d stopped breastfeeding Bethany when she was five – though I was continuing to feed her younger sister, Elizah – but obviously she clearly remembered what a wonderful feeling it had been. It was the best thing she could imagine and, presented like that, it seemed like a great idea.”

Veronika, who edits an alternative-parenting magazine called The Mother continued: “My girls were brought up to think it was completely normal to ask for a breast in a shop,” she says. “That’s bad enough when they are toddlers, but when they are big girls, people get freaked out by it.

Can I get a show of hands of who is going to be in Ohio in April? I will for the latter half of the week…

For the last couple of months I’ve noticed that in front of every cash register in every drugstore there are well placed display stands of a product called Airborne. If you haven’t seen it before, it’s really clever. Here’s their site for additional goodness.

The packaging depicts a fearful person surrounded by coughing, sneezing plane passengers, classroom students, theater goers, etc. cowering under a looming collection of malicious creatures that the viewer is encouraged to interpret as germs, viruses, etc. Even though one looks like the SwineTrek, another has cilia, so they’re totally biological.

The best part of the display is this statement in huge letters:
“Created by a second grade school teacher!”

Yes! Brilliant! This company deserves every penny it makes. They take a placebo with negligible manufacturing costs, pour all capital into marketing to fearful, credulous Americans, and watch the money come in on trucks. Yet another, “why didn’t I think of that?”

A tip of the hat to you, Airborne. Well done!

Wired has an article on a proposed windfarm for some town in upstate NY. The usual not-in-my-backyard arguments are asserted with regard to aesthetics and property values. But here are some new arguments against it that you might not have heard before:

Group members also warned of health problems ranging from strokes caused by the sunlight as it pulsates through the spinning turbine blades to mange in cattle. Others claimed that women living near the wind farms are having as many as five menstrual cycles a month.

…one speaker compared the sound of the spinning blades and whirring machinery (which most people find inaudible from fairly close distances) to the noises Nazi troops tortured Jews with during the holocaust.

The headline speaks for itself.

The only defensible use for this is if your normally-quadrupedal pet suddenly lost use of 3+ limbs.

The White House sent The Onion a cease-and-desist letter regarding the parody site’s use of the presidential seal. From the NYT:

“It is inconceivable that anyone would think that, by using the seal, The Onion intends to ‘convey… sponsorship or approval’ by the president,” wrote Rochelle H. Klaskin, the paper’s lawyer, who went on to note that a headline in the current issue made the point: “Bush to Appoint Someone to Be in Charge of Country.”

From a former Blockbuster executive:

We had the option to buy Netflix for$50 million and we didn’t do it. They were losing money. They came around a few times,” he recalls. Instead, in 2000, Blockbuster inked a 20-year exclusive video-on-demand pact with Enron as the energy conglom launched into telecom. Blockbuster canned the pact after nine months. Netflix is now worth $1.4 billion. Blockbuster’s market cap is about $850 million.