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Loyal League of Yiddish Sons of Erin

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 20, 2013| Leave a Comment »

In case you missed it (ICYMI, as they say on twitter), National Public Radio had a delightful story about Irish Jews last weekend:

“St. Patrick’s Day in New York now means parades and green beer. But 50 years ago, it also meant green matzo balls at the annual banquet of the Loyal League of Yiddish Sons of Erin. The league was a fraternal organization of Irish-born Jews.

“The major migration of Jews to Ireland started in the 1880s and ’90s, says Hasia Diner, who teaches history and Judaic studies at New York University. Thousands moved [to Ireland], primarily from Lithuania. …

” ‘Then the Irish Jews, as Jews historically did, they went to where there were better economic opportunities,’ Diner says.

“A lot of Irish Jews found those opportunities in New York. Like many immigrant groups, they kept their culture alive in the New World. And in the early 1960s, they formed the Yiddish Sons of Erin.

“According to member Rosalyn Klein, the whole thing started as a joke. … A restaurant took out a newspaper ad for a meeting of Irish Jews. Klein thinks they didn’t really expect people, but a lot of them showed up.

” ‘And most of them had lived in Dublin, so it was kind of this mishpocha getting together again,’ she says.”

For many years after, a big Jewish St. Patrick’s Day celebration was held in New York and was de rigeur for politicians and celebrities.

More here.

Photo: SmittenKitchen.com.
This is a normal matzo ball. I couldn’t find a green one.

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Refugee Gardens and Wooden Nickels

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 19, 2013| 2 Comments »

Once upon a time, mine workers were paid in paper chits that could be redeemed at the company store. (Remember the song “Sixteen Tons,” by Tennessee Ernie Ford and “I owe my soul to the company sto’ “?)

A while back I saw a story in the NY Times about refugee gardens, and there was a picture of someone using wooden coins to buy produce. It turned out that people were not being paid in wooden coins as miners were paid in paper. Instead, the City of San Diego was encouraging poor residents to pursue good nutrition by giving them wooden coins for shopping at farmers markets.

The coins were really just a footnote to Patricia Leigh Brown’s story, which focuses on a national movement to help immigrant farmers get back into the occupation they know best.

“Among the regular customers at [San Diego’s] New Roots farm stand are Congolese women in flowing dresses, Somali Muslims in headscarves, Latino men wearing broad-brimmed hats and Burundian mothers in brightly patterned textiles who walk home balancing boxes of produce on their heads.

“New Roots, with 85 growers from 12 countries, is one of more than 50 community farms dedicated to refugee agriculture, an entrepreneurial movement spreading across the country. American agriculture has historically been forged by newcomers, like the Scandinavians who helped settle the Great Plains; today’s growers are more likely to be rural subsistence farmers from Africa and Asia, resettled in and around cities from New York, Burlington, Vt., and Lowell, Mass., to Minneapolis, Phoenix and San Diego.”

Read how it works. (And click on the slide show to see the wooden coins. My eyes were drawn to them because my father’s favorite “good-bye” line to toddlers always was, “Don’t take any wooden nickels”!)

Photo: Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times
Khadija Musame, right, with a customer from Somalia at the New Roots Farm stand in San Diego.

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Revisiting Mister Smarty Plants

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on March 18, 2013| 7 Comments »

The plant-identification site Mister Smarty Plants, which I first blogged about here on May 23, 2011, just keeps getting better.

One innovation from the past year has been rounding up tweets containing photos of flowers and plants that people around the world want help identifying and bringing them to the site to be identified by the growing number of readers.

I used to get a lot of identifications right, but Mister Smarty Plants queries are quite exotic now, which makes the site both exciting and challenging.

Today, John announced a new design with special features like kudos to the week’s most successful plant identifiers.

The Smarty Plants concept has always been that the more people who come to the site with their questions, the more who will be available to identify plants. John has been persistent about finding new ways to reach the folks who need the service.

Even if you think you don’t know much about plants, check it out. It’s almost like playing a game, and believe it or not, there are people in other parts of the world who don’t know what a dandelion is.

MisterSmartyPlants

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Higher Ground Farm

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 17, 2013| 2 Comments »

Brian sent me information about Higher Ground Farm, which is putting down roots on the roof of the Design Center in South Boston.

“A roof farm is a type of green roof. A green roof is a system of layers that is laid over an existing roof. A green roof is beneficial to a building owner and the community because it protects the existing roof, doubling to tripling its life, thereby saving money and keeping materials out of the landfill.

“Green roofs also reduce a building’s energy costs by insulating in the winter and cooling the rooftop in the summer. Finally, green roofs temper the effects of two common urban environmental problems – combined sewer overflow and the urban heat island effect.

“A series of roof farms throughout the city will capitalize on the environmental benefits of green roofs while also increasing access to fresh, healthy food. Higher Ground Farm will operate several roof farms throughout the greater Boston area, utilizing previously unused space while providing additional rental revenue to a building owner.

“Roof agriculture has the potential to be a job-producing boost to the economy, and a completely environmentally sustainable business sector that can set Boston apart from other cities. Higher Ground Farm will utilize the resources of our top-notch universities to study roof agriculture, which will position Boston as a leader in the field. Finally, Higher Ground Farm will be a space where our community can reconnect to productive green space and learn about sustainable city planning.” More.

I also found a video interview about it that you will like, here.

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Friendship

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 16, 2013| 5 Comments »

At around age 2-1/2, small people begin to be ready for friendship. My almost-three-years grandson plays with his friend now, instead of just in the same space.

They understand each other’s words. They find the same things funny — leaning way, way back on the swing, climbing back up the chute of the double slide, feeding wood chips to mitten puppets, getting ready to kick the ball down the hill when suddenly it decides to go ahead without you.

I spent a little time Saturday morning with my grandson, his friend, and her mother. I told the mother how much I love the learning-language stage. She agreed and gave me an example of how it can be confusing when one word has two meanings.

She said she had told her daughter that the new baby brother had no teeth you could see but that the teeth were in his gums. Sometime later, when her daughter asked what she was chewing and she answered that she was chewing “gum,” the little girl thought her baby brother’s teeth must be in there.

Two and a half is a time so full of strange new things, she probably didn’t think it was any stranger than anything else.

A WordPress blogger in Australia [subsequent correction: not Australia but B.C Canada in the Okanagan] has another cute story, here.

Hungry mitten puppets

get ready to kick

the ball got away

casting light, not shadow

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My Cousin the Tree Artist, Cont’d

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 15, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Facebook can be annoying, but I guess it does sometimes pay to be on it.

After “liking” a number of my cousin Sally Frank’s nature photos and art over the years, I finally figured out via Facebook that much of her work is on a WordPress blog — and she has had the blog longer than I have had this one.

Trees are a specialty. Often she will start with a photograph like the one below for inspiration. She then turns to printmaking, which you can learn about at her blog.

“Ms. Frank uses centuries-old printmaking techniques like etching and aquatint on copper plates, as well as innovative methods like solarplate intaglio. She says that although her work is grounded in drawing, she finds the unpredictable nature of printmaking inspirational and exciting.” More.

This photo reminds me of the strangler fig that I saw years ago in Costa Rica, a tree that wraps itself around a host and literally loves it to death. The host tree crumbles, and only the strangler is left — with an empty space inside.

Sally’s photo probably has a happier story — perhaps a nymph turned into a tree to escape danger.

Photo called “bound”: Sally Frank

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Dragon and Chimera

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 14, 2013| 4 Comments »

According to wikipedia, “The term chimera has come to describe any mythical or fictional animal with parts taken from various animals.” Which explains why it has been appropriated in genetics where it relates to the phenomenon of different creatures sharing T-cells.

Anyway, I have a brother who studies chimerism and its potential application for organ-transplant retention. I may not have this quite right, but I think if you could have enough of the cells of an organ donor in you when you get a transplant, you wouldn’t need to take antirejection drugs.

I had been trying to explain this to people when I decided to go out for a walk in Fort Point Channel. Eerily, this sign greeted me.

chimera

I think it’s an eclectic gift shop or interior decorator business.

Other signs and portents on the same walk related to Suzanne and Erik’s Year of the Dragon baby.

dragon on roof

dragon sculpture in fort point

Who is the dragon artist? I need to know more.

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A Tale of Three Houses

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 13, 2013| 6 Comments »

I was thinking about houses this past weekend.

First, there is this house on the grounds of a private school near where I live. I snapped it on my walk.

Concord Academy Treehouse

Second, there is this house on a Hudson River Estate falling down around the ears of the latest, impecunious generation.

Photo of Rokeby, a 43-room house on the Hudson River, by Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times. New York Times story here.

Third, there is a tiny house that a Hampshire College student is living in as a senior project.

James Sullivan writes, “As a child, Hampshire College senior Nara Williams hated being told to pick up after herself. This semester, she’s learning to keep things tidy — very tidy.

“For her senior project, she is living in a 130-square-foot house to explore the realities and benefits of living small.

“A few weeks ago, Williams took delivery on a model home used as a showcase for the Tumbleweed Tiny House Co., a leader in the burgeoning ‘small house’ movement. …

“The housing project, Williams said, is her inquiry into ‘viable alternatives’ to the American dream. Blogging about the experience, she is raising questions about property ownership, material goods, consumption, sustainable living, and other issues in an era marked by housing and environmental concerns.”

Read about Rokeby, the Hudson River estate passed down through too many generations, and read about the tiny house, and pray that no one bequeaths you anything like the former. A tree house or a tiny house are what you want if you prefer to own property and not have property own you.

Update: Omigosh, a scathing memoir is just out on what it was like to grow up at Rokeby — reviewed in the Globe, here

Photo: Darren Durlach/Globe Staff
Boston Globe story here.

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Books with Pictures that Move

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on March 12, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Optics maven Gregg just tweeted this link from Wired‘s GeekMom blog.

In the 2010 entry, Judy Berna writes about discovering a clever artist/inventor called Rufus Butler while working in her local library.

“The whole thing started with a baby board book that joined our collection at the library. …

“When you move the book left to right, the picture actually moves. We took turns playing with it and more than one of us almost went into a trance by its hypnotic movements.  …

“Then [my family and I] found ourselves in an art studio over the weekend, somewhere in the back woods of Massachusetts. Taking up one full window was a display of these amazing ‘moving’ discs. Each was a different picture and each moved in the same way the pictures on the library board books moved. …

“Once I got home I looked up their website, Eye Think.  Eye Think’s founder, Rufus Butler, is an artist, filmmaker, and inventor. He was so fascinated with optical illusions that he began creating these new ways to trick the eye. …

“The spinning circles that caught my eye in the art store are called CiniSpinners and come in an impressive variety of pictures. When you click on the web page picture, a moving sample pops up. There’s a little girl skipping rope. And fingers playing a piano. …

“Many animals are represented too. A dragonfly hovers, a dolphin frolics in the water. An adorable penguin waddles to and fro. My nine year old and I had to click on every single one, just to see which one was the best.  (My personal favorite: swimming man, with splashing water and all.)

“(Fun geek fact: After contacting Mr. Butler and sharing my enthusiasm for his products, he admitted that he himself had been the model for the swimming man. His wife videotaped him doing a swimming stroke as he laid across a kitchen chair, then he added the splashing water when he refined the picture in the studio.)” More.

Photo: Eye Think Inc.

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Mongolian Bling

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 11, 2013| Leave a Comment »

We caught a bit about this movie on Link TV yesterday. I zeroed in on the contrasts. The documentary Mongolian Bling is about both the traditional life and the hip-hop life in Mongolia.

The film’s website says, “Forget about nomads and monks! It’s hip hop that’s making Mongolia move in the 21st century. Mongolian Bling jumps into the thriving music scene in the capital, Ulaanbaatar, and follows stars as they rap nationwide … But beyond this bling lies a failed democracy, and a dying ancient culture that the elders mourn the loss of. While many artists still aspire to the West, a handful are using hip hop to try and salvage their country’s flailing democracy, and bringing Mongolia’s rich musical history into their modern beats and rhymes.”

Poke around in the site, here, to learn more about the participants.

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Thoreau the Scientist

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on March 10, 2013| 4 Comments »

When you take pretty much the same walk every day, camera in hand, you may have trouble finding new things to photograph. You may look in vain for something different, puzzling, or mysterious.

But there is something to be said for combing the same territory over and over, as scientists are finding from studying the detailed record keeping of Henry David Thoreau.

“ ‘As far as I know, there is more information about the effect of climate change in Concord than any other place in the United States,’ said Richard Primack, a Boston University biologist who calls Concord a living lab for his research. …

Primack, writes Kathleen Burge at the Boston Globe, “has researched how climate change has affected the flowering times of plants, comparing modern data with the information Thoreau collected between 1852 and 1860. Primack and his lab found that for every 1 degree Celsius increase in mean spring temperature, plants bloom about three days earlier. …

“Primack came to his work about a decade ago, when he decided to change the direction of his research. He had been studying the effects of climate change on plants and animals in southeast Asia and decided, instead, to focus on his home state.

“But when he began searching for older records of plant flowering times in the United States, he came up short. Finally, after six months, someone told him about Thoreau’s journals.

“This was kind of a gold mine of data,” Primack said. “As soon as we saw it, we knew it was amazing.” More from the Globe.

Keep an eye open for the upcoming Thoreau exhibit at the Concord Museum April 12 to September 15, described here.

cross over the bridge

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Island Poetry Workshop, April 11-14

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 9, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Nancy Greenaway, owl poet, is passing along the website of the Block Island Poetry Project and details of this year’s gathering.

From the website: “The Block Island Poetry Project is turning 10, and we are so excited about it that we are outdoing ourselves with a 4-day celebration featuring the usual fun and extraordinary work which has become our hallmark. In addition, we are honoring our decade together with an anthology of poems written during, or as a result of, Poetry Project workshops.”

The website continues, “Unpretentious, textured, authentic, practical, frisky… that’s who we are at the Block Island Poetry Project, and that’s why our series is like no other.”

The 2013 featured poets are Li-Young Lee  and Coleman Barks.

According to poets.org, Lee was “born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. His father had been a personal physician to Mao Zedong while in China, and relocated the family to Indonesia, where he helped found Gamaliel University. …  ‘What characterizes [Lee’s] poetry is a certain humility …  a willingness to let the sublime enter his field of concentration and take over, a devotion to language, a belief in its holiness.’ ” More on Lee, here.

The Coleman Barks website says that he is “the author of numerous Rumi translations and has been a student of Sufism since 1977. His work with Rumi was the subject of an hour-long segment in Bill Moyers’s Language of Life series on PBS.” More on Barks, here.

The featured poets will be joined by a range of other poets, teachers, editors, and publishers. Rhode Island’s new poet laureate, Rick Benjamin, will also stop by.

(Perhaps one of my favorite Rhode Island poets, Kate Colby, will get to this workshop some year.)

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Positive Deviants

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 8, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Don’t you love that term? I needed to know more and found it at the Governing blog.

“Darwin’s theory of natural selection was simple but significant,” write Emily Malina and Kara Shuler at the blog. “Variation occurs naturally within any population, and nature will favor and spread characteristics that are advantageous for survival. Like a species, a workforce can go through a similar evolutionary process driven by individuals with unusual but favorable behaviors.

“These outliers, or ‘positive deviants,’ sometimes bend the rules, but their practices enable their success and survival in the workplace. …

“This positive deviance approach is grounded in a systematic process that includes identifying outliers and the specific behaviors that contribute to their success, and then scaling those behaviors across the workforce. It can be especially useful when other efforts have failed to bring about the desired results, and it is more effective when the issue requires behavioral change instead of technical solutions.”

Asakiyume, I think you will like the example the authors give. It’s about some outlier prison-guard behavior in Denmark.

“Burned-out prison guards: The prison environment, with its stressful conditions and psychological burdens, has historically resulted in high absenteeism and early retirement among guards.

“Danish prison-system officials looking to address this problem began by observing the behaviors of resilient guards, those with five or fewer days of missed work. They found that ambiguity in inmate-intake protocols allowed for positive deviants to emerge. The rule called for guards to gather background information from new inmates, and the common approach was an interrogation-style interview.

“Instead, the deviant guards offered inmates a tour of the prison facility and engaged them in a conversation. This small but powerful difference not only better equipped the guards to deal with the stresses and mental challenges of their jobs but also improved behavior of the inmates under their supervision, as evidenced by fewer violent threats and greater enrollment in treatment programs.” More.

Gate_sea_Aug08

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The Wisdom of Crowds

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 7, 2013| 2 Comments »

New York has solicited design concepts for giving its old payphones new life. Now the city is asking “the crowd” to pick its favorite.

As Amar Toor writes at The Verge, “The City of New York this week announced the six finalists in its Reinvent Payphones challenge — an initiative that invites students, urban planners, and designers to propose their visions for the payphone of the future. The finalists were selected as winners in six different categories, and are now in the running for the Popular Choice Award, to be determined later this month.

“Not surprisingly, interactive and digital features play a major role in most of the six designs, including NYC/IO, winner of the Community Impact category. Created by Control Group and Titan, the proposal calls for the city’s phone booths to be replaced with high-tech kiosks, replete with transparent screens that pedestrians could use to not only make calls, but find restaurants, pay parking tickets, or surf the web.”

Read about all six designs, here. “You can vote for the best design on the New York City Facebook page until March 15th.”

And speaking of tapping the wisdom of crowds, Suzanne would love to have you vote on a logo for her new line at the birthstone jewelry company that hosts Suzanne’s Mom’s Blog. Targeted at young women and girls, the new line is going to be called Stellina — it’s the younger sister in the Luna & Stella family. The voting ends tomorrow, March 8. Do take a look at the logo designs, here, and vote if you have a minute.

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Canada: Where Camels Roamed

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 6, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Signs of a prehistoric camel have been found in the frozen north.

John rode a camel in Egypt a year ago, and my grandson still talks about it, but the camel found in Canada would have looked a little different. (Wikipedia has an image, here.)

Ian Austen writes at the NY Times, “A group of scientists reported on Tuesday that they had found fossilized remains of a giant camel, with a shoulder height of perhaps nine feet, in Canada’s frigid high Arctic.

” ‘It’s a surprise when you first hear it,’ said Natalia Rybczynski, a paleontologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, who discovered the bone fragments in 2006. ‘But the Arctic in the winter was like a desert at that time.’ …

“The remains were found about 750 miles north of what was previously the northernmost known camel fossil, a giant found in Canada’s Yukon Territory in 1913.

“It’s just kind of stunning that it’s more than 1,000 kilometers away,” said Dr. Rybczynski, the lead author of a paper about the camel published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

“She had accompanied a group of scientists to Ellesmere Island, which is in the Nunavut territory, who were studying the climate history of the region. At the time when the oversized camel lived, about 3.5 million years ago, the island was considerably warmer and covered by boreal forest. Still, it had unusually severe winters that lasted about six months, Dr. Rybczynski said.”

More.

Gate_sea_Aug08

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