CR top-ranked upright is Kenmore Progressive with Direct Drive 35922, for about $300

That's what I have! And why I bought it, I think, though that was several years ago. It works well, though I can't buy bags at the hardware store.

Ooh, I love those pictures.

Also, I have no problem with my cheapo featherweight upright vacuum. It works just fine for my purposes.

So I finally watched The Lost Room while I was up all night on Friday and: Yeah. That was satisfyingly fun. I think the most winning moment for me was getting the clock out of the safe. And it might have been because it was so late, but the part with the polaroid gave me the heebie-jeebies.

There were a few things I can't remember at the moment that bugged, but I think my only major complaint was that the director seemed to be trying much too hard occasionally.

Is/was there more discussion of it in Boxed Set? Because I'm like 1000 posts behind there but I'll try to catch up.

I think the most winning moment for me was getting the clock out of the safe.

Exactly. That was when I was like, "I gotta tell the buffistas about this one!"

I have a Hoover Windtunnel and it works very nicely. Dirt sensor, bagless (i realize this can be a polarizing feature), HEPA filter. It isn't light though.

What's up with the smell in NYC?

There was a ton of discussion in Boxed Set at the time. I have it on the tivo, I've watched about 1/2 an hour of it, but just havent' been moved by it. I've kept it on the tivo, and if the vagaries of other recordings copy over it, so be it.

drink.

Oh, if only that had occurred...wait, no, I'm pretty sure that's what I was doing with the water and my mouth and the glayvin.

But I'm still thirsty, and my skin keeps feeling dry despite lotion. It's not as bad as when I was in the ER last week--I was gasping and having trouble talking and swallowing. But I was blaming the dilaudid for that. Now I have no idea what it is about.

A while ago I talked about Michelle Goldberg and her book "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism." Here she interviews Chris Hedges about his new book "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America." Very interesting....

Salon link: [link]

eta:

People have a very hard time believing the status quo of their existence, or the world around them, can ever change. There's a kind of psychological inability to accept how fragile open societies are. When I was in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, at the start of the war, I would meet with incredibly well-educated, multilingual Kosovar Albanian friends in the cafes. I would tell them that in the countryside there were armed groups of the Kosovo Liberation Army, who I'd met, and they would insist that the Kosovo Liberation Army didn't exist, that it was just a creation of the Serb police to justify repression.

You saw the same thing in the cafe society in Sarajevo on the eve of the war in Bosnia. Radovan Karadzic or even Milosevic were buffoonish figures to most Yugoslavs, and were therefore, especially among the educated elite, never taken seriously. There was a kind of blindness caused by their intellectual snobbery, their inability to understand what was happening. I think we have the same experience here. Those of us in New York, Boston, San Francisco or some of these urban pockets don't understand how radically changed our country is, don't understand the appeal of these buffoonish figures to tens of millions of Americans.

What's up with the smell in NYC?

No one has identified what it is, but most of Manhattan and parts of NJ smelled like the sulfurous additive in natural gas all at once this morning.

(This, and my experience with an e. coli outbreak in college make me ever more amazed that anthrax is so easy to test for.)

Guys, I mentioned the calphalon omelette pans I got for Christmas that I used this weekend to make unbeatable eggs? I just found out that Calphalon is clearing out a lot of their stock, that's why these omelette pans (the 8" and 10" are sold together for $40) were so cheap. There's a ton of on-sale Calphalon items at Amazon right now. Just FYI!

bon bon-- are your pans the "simply calphalon" collection?