As the U.S. slips into recession, a daughter reflects on Dorothea Lange's photo, which has come to symbolize the Depression.
'Migrant Mother' remembered (3:41)
A friend sent me the original CNN video but I could not embed it for some reason. Luckily I found it on YouTube. I found it very interesting to learn the real story of the most famous photograph from the Great Depression from one of the children in the picture. She is the little girl on the left with her head on her mother's shoulder.
Watch and listen. There is a very timely message at the end.
You will love this heartwarming story! Max is my hero.
Twelve-year-old Max Wallack was recently named the winner of Design Squad's Trash to Treasure competition — a contest that inspired kids to repurpose trash into practical inventions.
So just what was the brilliant idea Max came up with? Wallack invented a “Home Dome,” a structure made of plastic bags filled with Styrofoam packing peanuts, designed to serve as a temporary shelter for homeless people and disaster victims. It also would help relieve landfill growth. Max was awarded a $10,000 prize provided by the Intel Foundation, but said: “I don’t really care about the money. I care about helping people.”
This isn’t the first big win for Wallack either! “When I was six,” Max said, “I won an invention contest that included a trip to Chicago. While there, I saw homeless people living on streets, and beneath highways and underpasses. I felt very sorry for these people, and ever since then, felt that my goal and obligation was to find a way to help them. My invention improves the living conditions for homeless people, refugees, or disaster victims by giving them easy-to-assemble shelter.”
Reprinted from the Wall Street Journal When we were students, young and poor, a friend of mine would give his family books for Christmas. Library books. He would seek out works well matched to his relatives’ interests, check them out, wrap them up and deposit them beneath the tree, leaving his loved ones the single task of returning them to the library once they had been read.
An Indian giver, some would say, and more correctly so than they might think. Years ago when I first set out to write a book about gift-giving and art, I thought it would be useful to figure out how that phrase came into being. The first recorded use turns out to appear in Thomas Hutchinson’s 1765 history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the implication being that something odd had happened when the Puritans first met up with Native generosity. “An Indian gift,” one footnote reads, “is a proverbial expression signifying a present for which an equivalent return is expected.” Over two centuries later we still use the phrase, its sense now broadened to refer to anyone who gives a gift with the clear expectation that the recipient should not keep it.
The experiences that Hutchinson’s forebears were trying to name turn out to demonstrate a simple ethic well known in all traditional gift-exchange societies: The recipient of a gift is more its custodian or steward than its owner. “The gift must always move” is the old wisdom, meaning that what we have received from others must eventually be passed along again, either the actual gift itself or something of similar value and meaning. ~read more...
Color Pencils, 2006 Artist: Jonna Pohjalainen, Helsinki Location: Pedvale, Latvia
I used local aspen in my work because of its lively forms and beautiful, grey colour. While you sharpen your pencils you can see time passing by. Colours bring joy and happiness in our everyday life. I chose a place of of my work because of the sunsets. You can sit and meditate near my work and look at the sunsets. Without sun there are no colours and life!
Henry Ford with Model T in 1921. American industrialist and pioneer of the assembly-line production method.
I wonder what he would have to say about the pitiful state of the American automobile industry?
Maybe all those boys in Washington should take a break today and read some words of wisdom from Henry Ford.
Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.
If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.
The best we can do is size up the chances, calculate the risks involved, estimate our ability to deal with them, and then make our plans with confidence.
A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.
People can have the Model T in any color--so long as it's black.
As an industrialist Henry Ford’s #1 rule was: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.
Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets.
I do not believe a man can ever leave his business. He ought to think of it by day and dream of it by night.
It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.
The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time. A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large. All Fords are exactly alike, but no two men are just alike. Every new life is a new thing under the sun; there has never been anything just like it before, never will be again. A young man ought to get that idea about himself; he should look for the single spark of individuality that makes him different from other folks, and develop that for all he is worth. Society and schools may try to iron it out of him; their tendency is to put it all in the same mold, but I say don't let that spark be lost; it is your only real claim to importance.
I could not believe my luck when I found this fabulous horse-blanket dog coat for Webster at a church bazaar several years ago. Needless to say he loves it. Isn't he handsome?
Can't get enough of Tina Fey? Go out and buy the January 2009 issue of VANITY FAIR. She's on the cover and there is an in depth interview inside by Maureen Dowd.
Tina Fey has rules. They’ve guided the 38-year-old writer-comedian through marriage, motherhood, and a career that went into hyperdrive this fall, when her Sarah Palin impression convulsed the nation, boosting the ratings of both Saturday Night Live and her own NBC show, 30 Rock. Backstage at S.N.L., where “Palin” met Palin, and at the home Fey shares with her husband and daughter, the author reports on how a tweezer, cream rinse, a diet, and a Teutonic will transformed a mousy brain into a brainy glamour-puss.
This is a screen shot from my computer. You can enlarge the picture but it is not a live link. Please watch the YouTube video below and learn about Toms Shoes plan to give away 30,000 pairs of shoes to children in Ethiopia in just 30 days. For each pair you buy, Tom's gives away a free pair to these needy children. Open up your hearts. This is a win/win for everyone. You get a pair of shoes with free shipping for yourself or someone on your gift list and an Ethiopian child gets a pair too. So you get and give at the same time!
Please watch!
UPDATE...GOAL REACHED...37,000 pairs sold!
Please post about this wonderful humanitarian endeavor on your blog and choose one of their many banners to display in your sidebar. Mine is at the top and will stay there for the whole month of December.
Tina at Gal Friday is displaying a banner in her sidebar.
Let me know how you are participating and I will add your name to the list.
Friends of TOMS is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to mobilizing, connecting, and empowering individuals who want to give further aid to communities served by the TOMS One for One mission.
If you would like to donate to their movement to eradicate Podoconiosis in Ethiopia, you can send your donations to:
Friends of TOMS 3025 Olympic Blvd. Studio C Santa Monica, CA 90404
Rare Monhegan Island-style red-breasted merganser drake carved by Augustus Aaron Wilson (1864-1950) of South Portland, Maine, circa 1900, with carved crest and eyes, relief-carved wings, and a slightly turned head, 16½" long (pre-auction estimate $100,000/150,000). One of three known from the same rig, it was purchased from a fish shack in Cape Porpoise, Maine, in the early 1980’s. Bidding opened at $55,000, and Christie's auctioneer John Hays knocked it down for $124,900 to a New York collector in the salesroom. The underbidder was on the phone.
Allegory of the Masonic Virtue of Wisdom, oil on canvas, 40¼" x 48", signed and dated “S. Jones 1836” and inscribed with the words “Wisdom” and “Strength.” Estimated at $20,000/30,000, it sold to New York collectors in the salesroom for $56,250, underbid on the phone.
Estimated at $20,000/40,000, this small folk art chest sold for $23,750 to a dealer in the salesroom.
Description: Grain-painted seed box, attributed to John Palm Boyer (1833-1901) of Brickerville, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, 1870- 1900. It has its original white porcelain pulls, and each drawer is inscribed with the name of a seed. The high bracket feet, scalloped skirt, porcelain drawer pulls, and slanted lid are typical of Boyer’s work. Made of recycled wood, this one incorporated a shipping box for Johnson & Son, a wood finish company, as the baseboard. Three rows of six drawers are unusual; most have three rows of an odd number of drawers and a fourth row of smaller drawers. For more information on seed chests, see John Long and John Boyer: 19th-Century Craftsmen in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania by Donald Herr, published by the Heritage Center of Lancaster County in 2006.
I think it pays to be in the audience if you really want something.
Take care of your antiques and they will take care of you.
In this beautiful, hand-drawn animation, director Hyun-Min Lee explores childhood memories of life with her mother in Korea. A heartwarming, autobiographical tribute, "The Chestnut Tree" was nominated for the 2008 Annie Award for Best Short Subject.
Sit back, relax and watch "THE CHESTNUT TREE" in widescreen.
