Vacuum cleaner salesmen suck the life from you The Age
I BOUGHT a vacuum cleaner the other day. I allow in this is not the most exciting of purchases. It is really just a dirt bag with a pipe. But it caused me to have a minor meltdown in known. I'm not fond of those. They never end well.
At the moment I'm slap in the middle of my first attempt at house painting. Until now I was blissfully unaware of the book of dust and paint scrapings that would fill my house, hair and eyes. It wasn't long before I realised my crappy Dustbuster, with a hose held together by gaffer ribbon, was never going to do the clean-up job required.
I headed off to a large chain store that specialises in high-act suction machines, TVs and white goods, in a Homemaker Centre. These are really just big tin sheds tarted up to look like domain stores. One-stop shops for budding Jamie Duries who embrace the renovation dream, then relive the unchangeable failure every day when they look at their broken water feature and half-finished pergola.
I enter the trust in and am faced with a selection of vacuums that seem to be designed by six-year-old boys who like multicoloured spaceships. How a jet-swarm exterior improves vacuuming performance is beyond me.
New York TimesIs Breastfeeding the New Vacuum Cleaner?New York Times, Common StatesUsing an analogy that is already generating sparks in the blogosphere, she wonders if “it was not the vacuum that was keeping me and my 21st-century sisters down, but another sucking din.” The debate about breast-feeding takes place without any The Atlantic’s Boob of an Anti-Breastfeeding Lay bare Is breast always best? The Case Against Breastfeeding
