Heating up and cleaning up

Yesterday I wrote about the superb collection of advertisements on the Guardian.co.uk site. Today I've just come across the many photographs taken during the heatwave in England.

A book that belonged to my grandparents is still on our bookshelves. It's a collection of black and white photographs by some of the past masters of photography. I've drifted through this book umpteen times, (particularly when I was a child), and the photographs are now like old friends. The faces in most of the photos are long gone, of course; a few of the children may still survive as elderly people. But these shots are the top of their range. And yet, the photos that appear on the Guardian website are as good, in many cases, if not better than these old masters.

The digital camera has such an ability to snap some moment in time, and capturing the moment is often what's needed to produce a work of art, photographically. Furthermore the superb rendition of colour that digital gives us excels most of the colour photos that were formerly regarded as top quality. If not excels, certainly equals.

It's a bit of a leap from there to colon cleanser reviews, but I'll leap it anyway. Does anyone else feel a little queasy when colon cleansing is mentioned? Colon cleansing is apparently a name for a broad range of alternative medical therapies. These are meant to remove fecal waste and unidentified poisons or toxins from the colin and intestinal tract. The cleansing is either done orally, or (yechh) by using a hose - a bit like cleaning out the gutter in late Autumn.

But the thing about this cleansing process is that it's doing something that doesn't need to be done. The body quite happily cleans out its own system (that's what you have all that wonderful inner tubing - the bowels - for), and flushing stuff out of there (apart from being a job I would not like to do to anyone) can actually damage the interior of the rectum. Stuffing more pills or liquids down your throat in the hope that it's going to do you some good is, to me, not a good idea.

Well, at least in the link above they warn you about the pitfalls of going in for this sort of treatment. Personally I think we take enough chemicals and mixes as it is.