whes:
Doing it right.
#home #Maryland #doIreallyhavetogobacktoNewYork? (at Patuxent River)
Malala Yousufzai was discharged from the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham as an inpatient yesterday. She will return regularly for appointments and again in late January/early February for surgery.
A Science Guy’s Place in the Sun: How Bill Nye keeps his home humming with solar panels, energy-efficient windows and a range of green gadgets.
Obit of the Day (Historical): Eleanor Roosevelt (1962)
Fifty years ago today, former First Lady and “World’s Most Admired Woman” Eleanor Roosevelt passed away at the age of 78. Here are some fascinating facts about one of the most remarkable people in U.S. history, male or female:
- Her first name was actually Anna.
- Her parents passed away before she was nine years old. She was raised by her grandmother.
- She became engaged to her fifth cousin, once removed, Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1903.
- They married in 1905. She was escorted down the aisle by her uncle, President Theodore Roosevelt. Since she was also a Roosevelt, she never changed her name.
- She did not want her husband to be president.
- She was the first First Lady to schedule and hold press conferences. They were for female journalists.
- Beginning in 1935 and lasting until her death in 1962 she wrote a daily column titled, “My Day.” She wrote six columns a week, except the week of FDR’s death in April 1945 - she only wrote four.
- She was appointed to the U.S. delegation of the United Nations by President Harry Truman. When she first joined the body every delegate rose and applauded her arrival.
- She was encouraged to run for governor and senator from New York. Some even pushed her to run for Vice-President. When Truman was asked about having Mrs. Roosevelt as a running mate he replied, “Why, of course, of course. What do you expect me to say to that?”
- She left the UN in 1953 and remained outside of politics until the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960. He appointed her to the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. She would serve on the Peace Corps Advisory Board and chaired a public hearing on the violence against civil rights workers.
- When she passed away, it was the first time numerous First Ladies attended the funeral of another. In attendance were Bess Truman, Jackie Kennedy, and Lady Bird Johnson (future First Lady). Also in attendance were Presidents Kennedy, Truman, and Eisenhower.
Family/Personal:
- Eleanor Roosevelt’s great-great-great grandfather administered the oath of office to George Washington at his first inauguration.
- She had six children, five survived to adulthood: Anna Eleanor, Jr., James, Elliott, Franklin Delano, Jr., and John Aspinwell. They had a baby, also Franklin Delano, Jr., who died at the age of seven months.
- Her mother nicknamed her “Granny” because she was “very plain [looking]” and “old fashioned.” Eleanor would later say, “No matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and honesty are written across her face, she will be beautiful.”
- She was the tallest First Lady at 5’ 11”. (Michele Obama is tied with Mrs. Roosevelt.
Sources:
www.nytimes.org (her 1962 obituary)
Images:
Top left - Eleanor Roosevelt, circa 1888, courtesy time.com and copyright HULSTON/GETTY
Top right - Eleanor Roosevelt, 1898 (age 14), courtesy about.com and FDR Library
Center - Official White House portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt, 1949, painted by Douglas Glanville Chandor, courtesy www.whitehousehistory.org “Anna Eleanor Roosevelt greatly expanded the role of first lady through her press conferences, news columns, speeches, travels, and activism. She used the White House to support causes ranging from reforming child labor to providing for the poor in Appalachia to combating the effects of the Depression.”
Bottom left - Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt sitting on the steps of their Hyde Park home, 1906, courtesy of history1900s.about.com and FDR Library
Bottom right - Eleanor Roosevelt, circa 1960s, courtesy of www.janicehollybooth.com
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How Pete Souza became President Obama’s secret weapon
A New Jersey teenager who launched a campaign to get Hasbro to make a gender-neutral Easy-Bake Oven is expected to meet with the toy company Monday afternoon. According to The Associated Press, the oven’s team at Hasbro invited 13-year-old McKenna Pope of Garfield, N.J., to share her thoughts and ideas. McKenna wants the company to make the pink and purple oven in more boy-friendly colors and also feature boys in their marketing for the toy. The oven, she says, reinforces gender stereotypes to the point that her younger brother thinks boys shouldn’t cook. “We continue to enforce this stereotype that men don’t cook, they work,” Pope says in a YouTube video created as part of her effort to get Hasbro to change the way it makes and markets the toy oven. Her online petition has garnered 44,000 supporters since it was launched in November and has the backing of top chefs like Bobby Flay.
Last Christmas, photographer Wes Naman and his assistant Joy Godfrey were wrapping presents in Naman’s photo studio when Godfrey randomly put a piece of scotch tape on her nose and pulled it into an awkward position. Naman followed suit by applying the tape to his lips.
Seeing the silliness contained in a simple household item turned a light on in Naman’s head. Fast-forward one year and the idea has blossomed into a project he calls Scotch Tape, in which he uses this pliable plastic to completely cover and distort people into zombie-like caricatures of themselves.
“I thought it would just be a fun side project but as it started to progress people really started to get into character and go over the top,” says Naman, who is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
See more of the smushy-fun over @ Raw File.
New York Giants’ Victor Cruz Pays Tribute to Jack Pinto, Six-Year-Old Newtown Victim
In 2012, Mercy Corps sent photographers to cover some of the most remarkable stories around the world.
Here are our Ten Best Photos of the year.
A former Craigslist call-girl-turned-schoolteacher-turned-writer describes the world that awaits people who leave the sex trade:
After working in the sex trade for around seven years, I met a guy I sort of liked. He had a major problem with what I did for money. Getting to know him stopped as soon as it started. That’s when I knew: I no longer wanted to sell “the girlfriend experience,” as we called it in the industry, in other words, selling sex but acting as if the guy and I were on a “real” date. I wanted to be an actual girlfriend. I wanted to use the academic degrees I had worked hard to earn. For me, I realized, sex work and the “straight” life couldn’t mix. I wanted out—just like so many critics of the sex industry would advise.
That wasn’t so easy. I faced a constellation of challenges that made transitioning out of the trade incredibly difficult. It took me multiple tries to leave sex work for good. When I left in 2007 to become a public-school teacher in New York City, I ultimately lost my job after blogging about my past. Today, in honor of International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, I’m here to tell you about another kind of indignity sex workers face—not on the job, but when they leave the trade.
Whether sex workers love, hate, or feel ambivalent toward their job, most don’t intend to work in the industry forever. But the complicated reasons people enter the trade—including but not limited to economic factors—are the same complicated factors that make it difficult to leave.
Can You Tell a City By Its Blocks?
What if city blocks could be extracted, isolated, stripped of all but their essential form, and lined up like soldiers for inspection? Would we know Paris or Berlin by the sum of their parts?
French artist Armelle Caron has satisfied this curiosity in “Tout bien rangé,” an assembly of what Caron calls “graphic anagrams” of well-known cities. The series, whose title translates roughly as “All in order,” is composed of digital images of cities printed on canvas — cities whole and cities disassembled, catalogs of parts for some Borgesian Ikea project.
Read more. [Images: Armelle Caron]
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