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Posts Tagged ‘postaday’

Women Get a New Chance

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 27, 2013| Leave a Comment »

My daughter-in-law passed this along. Her colleague, who is related to the founder, told her about it.

Becca Stevens, an Episcopal priest on Vanderbilt University’s campus in Tennessee, founded the Magdalene in 1997 to provide practical and emotional help to women often regarded as outcasts — ex-offenders, addicts, street people.

According to the website: “For two years, we offer housing, food, medical and dental needs, therapy, education and job training without charging the residents or receiving government funding.

  • Our six homes function without 24-hour live-in staff, relying on residents to create a supportive community, maintain recovery, and share household tasks.
  • Women come to Magdalene from prison, the streets and from across the Southeast and the country. …

“After four months, the women find work, return to school and/or enter Magdalene’s job training program at Thistle Farms, a social enterprise. …

“Magdalene’s programs are grounded in its 24 spiritual principles that advocate living gracefully in community with one another.”

The website also describes the Thistle Farms products: “By hand, the women create natural bath and body products that are as good for the earth as they are for the body. Purchases of Thistle Farms products directly benefit the women by whom they were made.

“Thistle Farms employs over 40 Magdalene residents or graduates. While working at Thistle Farms, women learn skills in manufacturing, packaging, marketing and sales, and administration. It is a supportive workplace where women acquire the skills they need to earn a living wage. Employees have the opportunity to put a percentage of their earnings in a matched savings account provided by Magdalene.” Read more.

Thistle Farms provides lots of ideas for holidays when you especially want to give gifts that help people. (This year I gave a few gifts from SERRV, for example, and my sister-in-law gave care packages from nonprofit San Francisco food incubator La Cocina, and people who bought charm necklaces at Luna & Stella, gave part of the cost to FreeArtsNYC.)

The products are all of such a quality as to make you want them at other times of year, too.

Photo: http://www.thistlefarms.org/
Women who work in the Thistle Farms Cafe head off for vacation Dec. 24.

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Artful Recyling Facility

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 26, 2013| 5 Comments »

No reason a recycling facility can’t have an attractive design, right? As long as it isn’t expensive.

Michael Kimmelman wrote for the NY Times last month about a municipal facility that must make the recycling staff there feel good about going to work.

“Recycling in New York is a scrappy business,” Kimmelman writes. “Billions have gone toward building water tunnels, power plants, subways and sewage treatment facilities, but little toward an infrastructure of recycling. …

“But a Sims Municipal Recycling Facility will open shortly at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal in Sunset Park. The city’s first big, state-of-the-art plant for processing discarded plastic, metals and glass, it promises jobs to nearby residents and, as the cost of exporting garbage out of state rises, some savings for the city. …

“The facility is understated, well proportioned and well planned — elegant, actually, and not just for a garbage site. It is an ensemble of modernist boxes squeezing art, and even a little drama, from a relatively meager design budget. …

“Instead of letting engineers design the plant, as often happens at an industrial site, Sims hired Selldorf Architects, a glamorous New York firm known for doing Chelsea art galleries and cultural institutions. …

“The idea? Partly to game the public review process, but also to build a well-designed plant — welcoming to the public, beckoning from the waterfront.” More here.

Photo: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
A look inside the new Sims Municipal Recycling Facility in Brooklyn.

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Shoveling Out Neighbors

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 25, 2013| 2 Comments »

In the spirit of the Season, I thought I would share this community-building story from Boston. It shows what can happen when you give the gift of time. It started it out as a one-shot practical thing, shoveling out a neighbor who can’t do shoveling.

And then it grew.

Billy Baker writes at the Globe, “Michael Iceland showed up in front of a stranger’s house in West Roxbury, put his shovel into the snow, and made someone’s day.

“Inside the house was an older woman, and she was stuck, unable to get out of her door, worried she could not get to her mailbox to pay her bills.

“Iceland, 36, a Jamaica Plain resident, cleared that path for her, made a new friend, and felt great about himself in the process.

“It is a common story in the Snow Crew. The brainchild of Joseph Porcelli, the Snow Crew is an online tool to connect the elderly, the ill, and the disabled to people with willing backs. …

“The Snow Crew, Porcelli quickly realized, was about more than snow.

“ ‘Originally, I thought I was addressing a problem, that people needed to be shoveled out,’ he said. ‘It turns out that was a symptom of a larger problem of people not knowing each other and not being connected to their neighbors.’

“That small gesture, helping a stranger, made them no longer strangers. From it, many have reported developing ‘extremely profound relationships on both sides of the equation,’ said Dale Mitchell, executive director of Ethos, a nonprofit in West Roxbury that became a partner in the Snow Crew.”

I wonder what comparable community-building activity happens in places without snow. In spite of all the problems snow causes, I do love it, not least because a neighbor you hardly know may see you are stuck and come over with the snow blower.

More here.

Photo: Joanne Rathe/ Globe staff

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Neighborhood Parties

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on December 24, 2013| 2 Comments »

ajiri-tea

The secret to neighborhood parties is to leave while it is still fun. We have three this week. I feel lucky to live where people do this.

This year my house gift is A Jiri Tea from Kenya: “100% of profits support Orphan Education in Western Kenya.”

At the first neighborhood party, I stayed about 45 minutes. I had nice chats with four women, but you know, sometimes I get in a rut and bring up the same topics I have brought up for years.

The first woman and I talked about the parking situation on the street and how train commuters park all day although they are not supposed to.

The second woman and I talked about the parking situation on the street and how the town did a study and never pursued any recommendations.

The third woman and I talked about how great the new minister is but how the old assistant minister was given a bum deal.

The fourth woman and I talked about her daughter-in-law’s work helping Chinese nationals invest in the U.S. economy for an EB-5 visa. I definitely didn’t talk about EB-5 visas at a party in the past. I just learned about them at a September conference.

Here I am at the office holiday party, where I contributed a gumdrop tree (below) for the Yankee Swap, and the person who got it decided it would become her Christmas tree this year. I left this party early, too.

2013-office-holiday

gumdrop-tree

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Snowflake Art

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 23, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Michelle Aldredge runs an outstanding arts blog called Gwarlingo. Recently, she wrote about snowflake art by the identical twins who created the Big Bambú installation at the Met. (I wrote here about the second life of Big Bambú when it was done being art.)

Asks Aldredge on December 21. “What do photographs of snow have to teach us about artistic originality?

“Today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, and snowflakes have been on my mind, specifically the snowflakes of Doug and Mike Starn.

“Born in New Jersey in 1961, Mike and Doug Starn have worked collaboratively in photography since the age of thirteen. …

“The Starns’ approach [to snowflakes] is partly science, but mostly art. It took the brothers years to hammer out the logistics that would allow them to capture flakes during their fleeting existence — there were microscopic lenses, plasma-emitting lights, snowstorm photo sessions. But the results speak for themselves. There is a poetic quality about their flakes.” More.

The twins called Os Gemeos, whom I wrote about here are an artistic team, too. In fact, they say, they always know what the other twin is thinking as they work on giant murals like the one they did in Dewey Square, Boston.

After seeing the musical Sideshow, I became aware that even Siamese twins may have very different personalities, but it’s intriguing to think about the close communication many twins have.

 Art: Doug + Mike Starn, from the series alleverythingthatisyou, 2006-2007.

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Iceland Has Elves

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on December 22, 2013| 7 Comments »

Jenna Gottlieb of the Associated Press has a great story about elves.

“In this land of fire and ice,” she writes, “where the fog-shrouded lava fields offer a spooky landscape in which anything might lurk, stories abound of the ‘hidden folk’ – thousands of elves, making their homes in Iceland’s wilderness.

“So perhaps it was only a matter of time before 21st-century elves got political representation.

“Elf advocates have joined forces with environmentalists to urge the Icelandic Road and Coastal Commission and local authorities to abandon a highway project building a direct route from to the tip of the Alftanes peninsula, where the president has a home, to the Reykjavik suburb of Gardabaer. They fear disturbing elf habitat and claim the area is particularly important because it contains an elf church. …

“It’s not the first time issues about ‘Huldufolk,’ Icelandic for “hidden folk,” have affected planning decisions. They occur so often that the road and coastal administration has come up with a stock media response for elf inquiries, which states in part that ‘issues have been settled by delaying the construction project at a certain point while the elves living there have supposedly moved on.’ …

“Terry Gunnell, a folklore professor at the University of Iceland, said he was not surprised by the wide acceptance of the possibility of elves.

” ‘This is a land where your house can be destroyed by something you can’t see (earthquakes), where the wind can knock you off your feet, where the smell of sulfur from your taps tells you there is invisible fire not far below your feet, where the northern lights make the sky the biggest television screen in the world, and where hot springs and glaciers “talk,” ‘ Gunnell said.

” ‘In short, everyone is aware that the land is alive, and one can say that the stories of hidden people and the need to work carefully with them reflects an understanding that the land demands respect.’ ”

More.

John Bauer 1913 illustration found at nordicculturespot.blogspot.com

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Silent Night: The Opera

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 21, 2013| 10 Comments »

We watched a lovely thing on PBS recently, an opera about the Christmas armistice in World War I. You have probably heard of it. The combatants decided to take Christmas off. A movie was made about it, taking a few liberties with the story. Then the Minnesota Opera Company commissioned  composer Kevin Puts to write an opera based on the movie.

From the composer’s website: “Silent Night is an opera in two acts by composer Kevin Puts and librettist Mark Campbell, based on the 2005 film Joyeux Noël, directed by Christian Carion and produced by Nord-Ouest Production. Commissioned by Minnesota Opera with co-producer Opera Company of Philadelphia, it opened on November 12, 2011 at the Ordway Theater, St. Paul Minnesota … The opera is sung in English, German, French, Italian and Latin.“

The interplay of the five languages was charming, especially when the German officer translated English into French and French into English so the three main officers could understand one another.

Read Allan Kozinn’s comments about this Pulitzer Prize winner at the NY Times ArtsBeat blog, here.

I will say that, delightful as it is to see the soldiers put down their arms and show each other pictures of loved ones back home, it makes the misery and futility of war doubly painful as the men are ordered back to battle and the camera pans over the lifeless bodies and the very young faces.

Peace is something to think about at Christmas. Ordinary people just want to live in peace.

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Berklee Flash Mob at Boston Museum

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on December 20, 2013| 2 Comments »

This story at WBUR radio was fun.

Reporter Andrea Shea says, “It starts off kind-of guerilla with its hand-held camera shots of people in the Museum of Fine Arts’ Shapiro Family Courtyard. But soon the now-trending video captures the swift bloom of a holiday-spirited ‘flash mob.’ At least that’s what the MFA is calling it. It’s actually more of a ‘pop-up’ performance by 50 or so students from Berklee College of Music.

“Music stands appear, followed by a posse of string players and a choir. Their rendition of ‘O Holy Night’ peaks with soloist Mark Joseph. This surprise concert came together on last Saturday. The video was posted Wednesday.”

As of this posting had nearly 182,550 views.

Shea continues, “What’s being dubbed the ‘XMAS flash mob’ was 25-year-old Berklee grad Evan Chapman’s idea. He’s in charge of an organization called the Loft Sessions that showcases up-and-coming artists. …

” ‘It’s a little surreal to be honest,’ he said, ‘I mean, in the back of my head I think I was hoping it would do this well — but I never thought that it would.’ ” More.

A commenter on YouTube says of the video, “OK, so maybe this is a sort of poser version of a flash mob in that it was so incredibly well organized with microphones and folks bringing their instruments and music and such…but it ROCKS nonetheless! Why didn’t I go to Berklee when I had the chance?!?!”

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Doing Well and Doing Good

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

Fellow parishioner Phil Villers has a strong social-justice side, having volunteered for years with Amnesty International and similar organizations. He also runs businesses. Bella English recently wrote about his latest venture for the Boston Globe, describing how the for-profit company benefits low-income people around the world. 

Writes English, “Phil Villers has founded several high-tech companies, but the one he oversees now offers something much more basic: a way to alleviate hunger in developing countries. GrainPro, Inc., which Villers runs out of Concord, makes airtight, impermeable bags of polyvinylchloride, similar to the material used by the Israeli Army to protect its tanks in the desert heat.

“The bags are critical because about one-fourth of grain products grown in developing countries or shipped to them — rice, peanuts, maize, seeds, beans — are lost to insects or rodents, or rot in cloth or jute storage bags.

“GrainPro’s ‘cocoons’ are made of the same material as the company’s bags, and … can reduce grain losses from 25 percent to less than 1 percent, Villers says. [The] company concentrates on hot and humid countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. …

“ ‘We eliminate the need for pesticides, and we can protect food supplies against all kinds of calamities such as typhoons and earthquakes,’ Villers says.

“During Typhoon Haiyan, which recently devastated the Philippines, the rice, cocoa, and seeds stored inside the cocoons were protected. In fact, GrainPro’s products are all made at a factory on the former US Naval Base at Subic Bay, 75 miles from Manila.” More.

One thing I would’ve like English to ask him about is how the plastic gets recycled. Too often one public good seems in conflict with another public good. More than likely, Villers has a plan for recycling.

Photo: Essdras M Suarez/ Globe Staff
“We eliminate the need for pesticides, and we can protect food supplies against all kinds of calamities such as typhoons and earthquakes,” said Phil Villers, on his “ultra-hermetic” grain bags and storage “cocoons.”

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Language and Personality

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 18, 2013| Leave a Comment »

The other day I was chatting with my three-year-old grandson about language. I can’t remember how we got started, but I found myself talking to him in “Goose Latin,” which was all the rage when I was about 10. He listened with a bemused look on his face and then said politely, “I don’t know that language.”

I may not be able to speak anything but English and a few lines of French poetry, but I do love learning about language. So I appreciated receiving this tidbit from the Economist magazine on how language interacts with personality.

The reporter RLG writes, “Many multilinguals report different personalities, or even different worldviews, when they speak their different languages.

“It’s an exciting notion, the idea that one’s very self could be broadened by the mastery of two or more languages. In obvious ways (exposure to new friends, literature and so forth) the self really is broadened. Yet it is different to claim—as many people do—to have a different personality when using a different language. A former Economist colleague, for example, reported being ruder in Hebrew than in English. So what is going on here?

“Benjamin Lee Whorf, an American linguist who died in 1941, held that each language encodes a worldview that significantly influences its speakers. Often called ‘Whorfianism,’ this idea has its sceptics, including The Economist, which hosted a debate on the subject in 2010. But there are still good reasons to believe language shapes thought. …

“Bilinguals usually have different strengths and weaknesses in their different languages—and they are not always best in their first language. For example, when tested in a foreign language, people are less likely to fall into a cognitive trap (answering a test question with an obvious-seeming but wrong answer) than when tested in their native language. In part this is because working in a second language slows down the thinking. …

“What of ‘crib’ bilinguals, raised in two languages? Even they do not usually have perfectly symmetrical competence in their two languages. But even for a speaker whose two languages are very nearly the same in ability, there is another big reason that person will feel different in the two languages. This is because there is an important distinction between bilingualism and biculturalism.

“Many bilinguals are not bicultural. But some are. And of those bicultural bilinguals, we should be little surprised that they feel different in their two languages.”

If you’re interested, there’s a great deal more explanation at the Economist, here.

Photo: Alamy

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A Farm in Your Backyard

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 17, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Did you catch Luke Runyon’s story about a trend in suburban housing that sites homes near farms for the fresh food? It was at National Pubic Radio today (courtesy of Harvest Public Media).

According to Runyon, “There’s a new model springing up across the country that taps into the local food movement: Farms — complete with livestock, vegetables and fruit trees — are serving as the latest suburban amenity.

“It’s called development-supported agriculture, a more intimate version of community-supported agriculture — a farm-share program commonly known as CSA. In planning a new neighborhood, a developer includes some form of food production — a farm, community garden, orchard, livestock operation, edible park — that is meant to draw in new buyers, increase values and stitch neighbors together.

” ‘These projects are becoming more and more mainstream,’ says Ed McMahon, a fellow with the Urban Land Institute. He estimates that more than 200 developments with an agricultural twist already exist nationwide. …

“In Fort Collins, Colo., developers are currently constructing one of the country’s newest development-supported farms. At first blush, the Bucking Horse development looks like your average halfway-constructed subdivision. But look a bit closer and you’ll see a historic rustic red farm house and a big white barn …

“When finished, Bucking Horse will support more than 1,000 households. Agriculture and food production are the big draws, [developer Kristin] Kirkpatrick says. Land has been set aside for vegetables. There will be goats and chickens, too, subsidized by homeowners. Soon they’ll be hiring a farmer for a 3.6-acre CSA farm. There’s also a plaza designed for a farmers market, and an educational center where homeowners can take canning classes.”

Sounds like fun. Read more.

Photo: Serenbe Farms
Paige Witherington is the farmer at Serenbe Farms, a 30-acre certified organic and biodynamic farm adjacent to a housing development outside Atlanta. It’s one of more than 200 subdivisions with an agricultural twist nationwide.

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Fishing: The Way It Was

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 16, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Photo of Tommy Martian carrying a Tilefish: Doug Kuntz

For some great photos of the fishing industry the way it was, check out a photo essay at Narratively on “The Last Fishermen of Long Island,” by Doug Kuntz and Tara Israel.

Writes Israel, “A few miles west of the big commercial fishing docks in Montauk you will find the baymen of East Hampton. Working in small crews, sometimes even individually, these families have been fishing the waters of their ancestors for nearly 400 years, using the same methods that were passed to the early European settlers by Native Americans.

“The same few crews, usually comprised of fishermen (and a few women) who are related to each other, set pound traps out in the bay, while a smaller number haul nets out of the ocean. …

“If you ask any of these men to describe how they lift the pound traps or set the nets in the ocean, they usually reply with, ‘You have to see it to understand.’ ” Read more here.

The elegiac text blames regulations that were devised to limit overfishing by bigger outfits but that catch all fishermen in one net. It’s a requiem for a vanishing way of life.

Photo of Chet Kent and a blowfish: Tara Israel

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The Bunny Didn’t Eat the Celery

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on December 15, 2013| 2 Comments »

Last night as we pulled into our snowy driveway, a rabbit ran in front of the headlights. I thought he must be hungry and cold. But this morning, I saw that he hadn’t found the celery I put out, and the apple was buried.

Here is the celery and a few other recent photos: a church’s advent wreath, a frosty leaf, a suitable wreath for a coffee shop, my dogwood in snow, winter footwear on the MBTA subway, and Rudolph cookies.

121413-celery-for-bunny

wreath-at-Tri-Con-church

frosty-leaf

Main-Streets-Market-Cafe

New-England-snow-2013

shoes-on-the-MBTA

Rudolph-cookies

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Helping the Deaf Hear the Music

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 14, 2013| Leave a Comment »

A while back, I wrote about the BBC National Orchestra of Wales launching a series of concerts to bring the joy of music to deaf children and adults, here.

I’ve been thinking about that lately. If you don’t love Christmas music, you might say that people who have hearing loss are better off at this time of year. But I like that there are so many initiatives to help the deaf enjoy Christmas music and other sorts of music.

Did you see this Clarke Canfield story in the Boston Globe? He writes about a sign language interpreter of lyrics who is adding a whole new level of fun to rock music — delighting the hearing and nonhearing alike.

“Teaming American Sign Language with dance moves and body language, [Holly Maniatty] brings musical performances alive for those who can’t hear,”  he writes, “Her clients are a who’s who of rock, pop, and hip-hop: Bruce Springsteen, Eminem, Mumford and Sons, Jay-Z, Billy Joel, Marilyn Manson, U2, Beastie Boys, and Wu-Tang Clan, to name a few.

“Along the way, videos of her fast-motion, helter-skelter signing have become popular online.

“There’s the video of Springsteen jumping down from the stage at the New Orleans Jazz Fest and joining Maniatty and another interpreter. There, he dances and signs to ‘’Dancing in the Dark.’’

‘‘ ‘Deaf people were commenting, “Oh, the Boss knows he has deaf fans. That’s awesome,’’ ‘’ she said. ‘When artists connect with their interpreters, they also connect with their deaf fans.’

“In another video, rap artist Killer Mike approaches Maniatty in front of the stage after noticing her animated signing.

‘‘I’ve never seen that before .”… At a Wu-Tang performance, Method Man took notice of her signing, came down from the stage, and joined her.”

Read all about it here. See her dancing with Bruce Springsteen here.

 Photo: Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press

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The Old World Never Died

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 13, 2013| 4 Comments »

Erik is in no danger of giving up Sweden. Today he and Suzanne took my grandson to a Santa Lucia celebration in a friend’s house, and Erik helped with the singing and wore a pointy hat that I never knew was part of the deal. (I always thought the Santa Lucia ceremony was just about a girl with candles in her hair.) Swedish customs are living on in Rhode Island.

In Queens, New York, customs from home countries are not only flourishing but being passed to new generations. I liked a story on the topic by Lynnette Chiu at Narratively.

“As soon as the children conclude their routine,” she writes, “the 300-capacity ballroom echoes with the sound of coins hitting the dance floor. The young boys in lederhosen and girls in scarlet dirndl dresses break formation and a scramble ensues to collect the loose change and dollar bills tossed their way by family and friends. The joy is in the gathering rather than the gains; as per tradition, they obediently deposit their loot in the outstretched aprons of the dance group’s older girls.

“While the movements of Die Erste Gottscheer Tanzgruppe—The First Gottscheer Dance Group—are the occasion of the day, it’s the older generation who are doing most of the afternoon’s dancing. …

“Meticulously set tables accommodate pitchers of Hofbrau, wine bottles and cocktail glasses, leaving the family-style platters of chicken cutlet, pork loin and all the trimmings jostling for real estate. …

“What began as a place to preserve and celebrate Gottscheer culture has now become a go-to locale for other communities in [the Ridgewood neighborhood of Queens] to nurture their own traditions. Along with numerous quinceañeras—rite of passage fifteenth birthday parties for Latin American girls—Gottscheer Hall hosts the gatherings of the Ridgewood Nepalese Society, and recently opened its doors to the Ridgewood Market, where artsy vendors hawk vintage wares and DIY baubles.” Read more at Narratively.

Photo: Aaron Adler

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