KLEINMOND, South Africa (Reuters) - A South African inventor unveiled a new anti-rape female condom on Wednesday that hooks onto an attacker's penis and aims to cut one of the highest rates of sexual assault in the world.

"Nothing has ever been done to help a woman so that she does not get raped and I thought it was high time," Sonette Ehlers, 57, said of the "rapex", a device worn like a tampon that has sparked controversy in a country used to daily reports of violent crime.

I just got back from doing something I haven't done in over twenty years: playing wallball.

Now, Googling for "wallball" reveals several different games by that name. (Including, oddly, some stupid computer screen-saver program to train PHBs in their jargon. WTF?) But the proper way, of course, is the way my brother Jim and I used to play in the alley.

The house where I grew up was located at the confluence of two alleys T-ing together, our house at the top of the T, making a nice wide playing area out of the junction where they opened into each other. The house across the alleys to the right (looking up the T toward our house) was home to a snowball business that operated out of a truck; it was, to us, the "snowball truck yard", I don't think I ever knew the names of the people who lived there. The truck was kept on a parking pad at end of the yard, which was separated from the higher ground of the rest of the property by an cinder block retaining wall about six feet high. In the summer, the truck was out selling ice with flavored syrup most of the time, leaving us the perfect playing field.

Things I didn't know were out there: I was under the impression that the only source for the popular supplement glucosamine (believed to support joint health) was shellfish. Turns out there are vegan sources. Deva makes a glucosamine with MSM and CMO supplement that's available at vegan specialty retailers; KAL makes a vegan glucosamine that you're more likely to find at your local store. I will probably add this to my regimen...maybe to Piccolo's too, she's been having some knee problems.

This Guardian story mentions in passing:

Not only can operators pinpoint users to within yards of their location by "triangulating" the signals from three base stations, but - according to a report in the Financial Times - the operators (under instructions from the authorities) can remotely install software onto a handset to activate the microphone even when the user is not making a call. Who needs an ID card when they can do that already?

Well, maybe you can't go in person (yet), but you can send your name. The New Horizons mission to Pluto-Charon and the Kuiper Belt is collecting names which will be placed on a CD aboard the craft. Boldly go and sign up now!

http://www.organicconsumers.org/BTC/cocacola082405.cfm

So in 2001, Coca-Cola builds a bottling plant in Plachimada, India. And then a few months later, the local wells start running dry. And then it turns out that the "free fertilizer" they've been giving out to the locals is lead and cadmium-laden waste sludge from the plant - with no fertilizer value.

Said Veerendrakumar, member of parliament and editor of the influential 'Mathrubhumi' newspaper: ''The fact of the matter is that that water from underground sources is being pumped out free, bottled and sold to our people to make millions for cola companies while destroying the environment and damaging public health''.

Letter to the Editor, Baltimore City Paper, regarding Brian Morton's recent "Political Animal" column, Police State:

So Brian Morton is waking up to the fact that the U.S. is sliding into a police state ("Political Animal", Aug 24 2005). Great. The problem is that this is not a post-9/11 phenomenon, but a consequence of the "War on Drugs" that has been eroding American civil liberties for decades. And the irony is that Mr. Morton himself, in his previous position as spokesman for drug czar Barry McCaffrey, aided and abetted the process of increasing police power so the state could stick its nose into Americans' private choices.

This is so bizarre, I had to share. http://www.riverofdata.com/librariana/porn/index.htm

Librarians are always concerned about their image, and much attention has been paid to that image in novels, television programs, and advertising. However, there has been little attention paid to that image in pornography. I presented a paper on this topic at the 1990 Conference of the Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association in Toronto.