Make a pact with the devil

This weekend we bought a washing machine and I plumbed it in. I was quite pleased with myself. It all works and there was no water over the kitchen floor this morning. What’s even better is the fact that, due to on-going issues at RBS, the money for it has not been debited from our account. I suppose it will happen, but for now it’s free. We gave the new machine a test run overnight. It has a distinct advantage over the one which it replaced in that it heats the water and doesn’t continue to slowly fill the drum with water after the cycle has completed. The new one has a special thing that allows you to delay the star so you can load it up at bed time and it finishes when you wake up.

I’ve decided that if I ever get the opportunity to make a pact with the devil that would allow me to play piano like Allen Toussaint, I’m going to do it.

Egypt has a new democratically elected president this morning. The Egyptians don’t appear to have fully embraced the concept of democracy however in that it is not clear that how much power the military is prepared to let him have. You’d have thought that they might have talked this over before the election wouldn’t you? It is their first stab at democracy however, so I suppose we should give them some time to iron out the bugs.

I love this story from Germany about a new supermarket where the management decided that a good opening day gimmick would be to offer free groceries to the first 100 customers who were prepared to shop naked. That link is probably NSFW by the way. Apparently supermarket manager Nils Sterndorff was surprised by the popularity of the offer. Police claim more than 250 naked people showed up, some of whom camped out overnight to be in with a chance. To avoid a stampede, naked people were allowed into the shop only in groups of 20. It is not clear whether all 250 naked people received free shopping.