Stuff ...

The sound of the coffee machine warming up is a bit like that weird throat singing you often find used on the sound track of films about the occult.

Can I just say, oooh, ick?!

And just look at the size of the mango we bought (other fruit included for scale). Yes, Mr Brown is allowed to eat bananas again.

I read this in Salon.com today,
"Last year in Herat, as I was walking with an Afghan colleague to a meeting on women's rights, I spotted an ice cream vendor in the hot, dusty street. I rushed ahead and returned with two cones of lemony ice. I held one out to my friend. "Forgive me," she said. "I can't." She was wearing a burqa.
It was a stupid mistake. I'd been in Afghanistan a long time, in the company every day of women encased from head to toe in pleated polyester body bags. Occasionally I put one on myself, just to get the feel of being stifled in the sweaty sack, blind behind the mesh eye mask. I'd watched women trip on their burqas and fall. I'd watched women collide with cars they couldn't see. I knew a woman badly burned when her burqa caught fire. I knew another who suffered a near-fatal skull fracture when her burqa snagged in a taxi door and slammed her to the pavement as the vehicle sped away. But I'd never before noted this fact: It is not possible for a woman wearing a burqa to eat an ice cream cone.
We gave the cones away to passing children and laughed about it, but to me it was the saddest thing."
She's right, it is a very sad thing.