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Discolor Online

Weblog of the sweetest person you never want to piss off.

 

Happenings

My friend JD has a sidebar on his blog for what he calls "Miscellaneous Flotch". I don't have a sidebar for flotch but I've decided to post a list of a few Happenings that have caught my attention recently.


First woman allowed to swim in public in Saudi Arabia. Women may get the vote in 2009. (Iraq granted women the right to vote in 1948.)

Recycled poetry, dangerous because of who last held the box "My body exists politically in a way I can not prevent."

Baghdad Burning's anonymous blogger is leaving. "It's difficult to decide which is more frightening- car bombs and militias, or having to leave everything you know and love, to some unspecified place for a future where nothing is certain." 2 million Iraqis (about 10 percent of the pre-war population) have fled the country already.

The first ever plant/human hybrid is to be approved for commercial scale cultivation. The plant is rice spliced with human DNA that will make it grow a protein found in human breast milk.

There is no Secret. JD reviews The Secret and smacks fuzzy-headed dreamers with a dose of reality: "Visualizing checks in the mail will not make them magically appear."

"Chocolate" of the future. Apparently it's cheaper to substitute some yummy hydrogenated oils for cocoa butter in "chocolate" confections, so big chocolate companies are looking for permission to call these new non-cocoa-butter-containing concoctions "chocolate". Tell the FDA what you think.

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