ASTHMA AND CARPET

Remanufactured Dyson DC17 Animal Cyclone Upright Vacuum Cleaner

Having already revolutionized the vacuum with the world-renowned patented Root Cyclone technology, Dyson takes it another step further with the new Dyson Absolute with Level 3 Root Cyclone technology. Dyson Absolute has constant suction, better pick-up across all floor surfaces, is easier to use, and out clean all other vacuums, room after room. Designed for pet owners, this Animal version boasts a mini turbine head to clean fur from stairs, sofas - even cars - and it comes with a low reach floor tool, perfect for cleaning under beds and other furniture. Factory Reconditioned

i found this really interesting(:
read:


By Cathy Newman
Photograph by Steve McCurry

She remembers the moment. The photographer took her picture. She remembers her anger. The man was a stranger. She had never been photographed before. Until they met again 17 years later, she had not been photographed since.

The photographer remembers the moment too. The light was soft. The refugee camp in Pakistan was a sea of tents. Inside the school tent he noticed her first. Sensing her shyness, he approached her last. She told him he could take her picture. "I didn't think the photograph of the girl would be different from anything else I shot that day," he recalls of that morning in 1984 spent documenting the ordeal of Afghanistan's refugees.

The portrait by Steve McCurry turned out to be one of those images that sears the heart, and in June 1985 it ran on the cover of this magazine. Her eyes are sea green. They are haunted and haunting, and in them you can read the tragedy of a land drained by war. She became known around National Geographic as the "Afghan girl," and for 17 years no one knew her name.

In January a team from National Geographic Television & Film's EXPLORER brought McCurry to Pakistan to search for the girl with green eyes. They showed her picture around Nasir Bagh, the still standing refugee camp near Peshawar where the photograph had been made. A teacher from the school claimed to know her name. A young woman named Alam Bibi was located in a village nearby, but McCurry decided it wasn't her.

No, said a man who got wind of the search. He knew the girl in the picture. They had lived at the camp together as children. She had returned to Afghanistan years ago, he said, and now lived in the mountains near Tora Bora. He would go get her.

It took three days for her to arrive. Her village is a six-hour drive and three-hour hike across a border that swallows lives. When McCurry saw her walk into the room, he thought to himself: This is her.

Names have power, so let us speak of hers. Her name is Sharbat Gula, and she is Pashtun, that most warlike of Afghan tribes. It is said of the Pashtun that they are only at peace when they are at war, and her eyes—then and now—burn with ferocity. She is 28, perhaps 29, or even 30. No one, not even she, knows for sure. Stories shift like sand in a place where no records exist.
Time and hardship have erased her youth. Her skin looks like leather. The geometry of her jaw has softened. The eyes still glare; that has not softened. "She's had a hard life," said McCurry. "So many here share her story." Consider the numbers. Twenty-three years of war, 1.5 million killed, 3.5 million refugees: This is the story of Afghanistan in the past quarter century.

Now, consider this photograph of a young girl with sea green eyes. Her eyes challenge ours. Most of all, they disturb. We cannot turn away.

"There is not one family that has not eaten the bitterness of war," a young Afghan merchant said in the 1985 National Geographic story that appeared with Sharbat's photograph on the cover. She was a child when her country was caught in the jaws of the Soviet invasion. A carpet of destruction smothered countless villages like hers. She was perhaps six when Soviet bombing killed her parents. By day the sky bled terror. At night the dead were buried. And always, the sound of planes, stabbing her with dread.

"We left Afghanistan because of the fighting," said her brother, Kashar Khan, filling in the narrative of her life. He is a straight line of a man with a raptor face and piercing eyes. "The Russians were everywhere. They were killing people. We had no choice."

Shepherded by their grandmother, he and his four sisters walked to Pakistan. For a week they moved through mountains covered in snow, begging for blankets to keep warm.

"You never knew when the planes would come," he recalled. "We hid in caves."

The journey that began with the loss of their parents and a trek across mountains by foot ended in a refugee camp tent living with strangers.

"Rural people like Sharbat find it difficult to live in the cramped surroundings of a refugee camp," explained Rahimullah Yusufzai, a respected Pakistani journalist who acted as interpreter for McCurry and the television crew. "There is no privacy. You live at the mercy of other people." More than that, you live at the mercy of the politics of other countries. "The Russian invasion destroyed our lives," her brother said.

It is the ongoing tragedy of Afghanistan. Invasion. Resistance. Invasion. Will it ever end? "Each change of government brings hope," said Yusufzai. "Each time, the Afghan people have found themselves betrayed by their leaders and by outsiders professing to be their friends and saviors."

In the mid-1990s, during a lull in the fighting, Sharbat Gula went home to her village in the foot

Cowboys & Aliens: gold brick (flattened, obviously), viral event where locations were tweeted and you had to run to get a brick (and I mean RUN. Oh the asthma attacks!) If you got there early enough, they were also giving out the Drew Struzan art poster (bottom). Bricks contained either a t-shirt or vinyl wrist blaster (pic later in stream), as well as a card with a rip-off section. If it said "congratulations" you won two passes to the red carpet premiere of the movie on Saturday, and went to the Cowboys & Aliens saloon to exchange for the pass and lanyard shown. The gold wristband was when you showed up on Saturday. Lenticular Slurpee cups were a giveaway at the movie (or purchase at 7-11).
Hard Rock wristband is from the Jon Favreau/Drew Struzan signing. Mini movie poster from there as well.
Slurpee cup with light-up wrist blaster I purchased at 7-11

Clinical tests show that reducing exposure to allergens in house dust is beneficial to allergic patients. Allersearch X-Mite deactivates allergens so they can no longer provoke an allergic response. Specially formulated for use on carpets, it is effective on allergens from dust mites, pollens, molds, pets and insects. X-Mite is easy to apply. Just sprinkle onto carpet; distribute with a broom or brush; allow to dry; remove by vacuuming. One treatment lasts two months and covers 150 square feet, about one 10' x 15' carpet.

<< Arhiva >>