Senior Women Web

Author: SeniorWomenWeb

  • Chicago Celebrity and Style: Bertha Honore Palmer

    An exhibit currently at the Chicago History Museum spotlights Mrs. Bertha Honoré Palmer with glimpses of her wardrobe and jewelry through a Flickr slide show.

    “On the anniversary of Bertha Palmer’s 160th birthday, the Museum presents a selection of her clothing and other personal effects to honor one of the most significant figures in Chicago history. On display in the Costume and Textile Gallery, the exhibition features fourteen ensembles. The gowns are among the most opulent examples of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century dress.”

    Palmer followed fashion custom and trend, yet her own strong opinions were her ultimate guide. Her personal style was nothing short of extravagant, de rigueur for the new American rich, and by embracing this tradition Palmer commanded attention and respect in all of her endeavors. For example:

    Callot Soeurs, Evening gown, 1921

    “This stunning evening gown is one of the most beautiful creations from the House of Callot Soeurs in the museum’s permanent collection. It is one of dozens of Callot Soeurs pieces worn by Mrs. Potter Palmer II and then later donated to the Chicago History Museum. Unfortunately, the beautiful gold lame brocade fabric, micro-seed bead trim, and large brooch are so heavy that the very light and sheer shoulder straps started to disintegrate. Furthermore, the weight of the gown was so heavy on the straps that the lame started to split under its own weight. Although conservation will eventually fix these problems, staff could simply not fix it in time for the opening in Chicago.”

    “Mrs. Palmer was the undeniable queen of Chicago society in the late-nineteenth century and into the twentieth, but her renown reached well beyond this city. This was a woman who entertained three American presidents at her home. She was the only woman in the United States’ official envoy at the Paris Exposition of 1900. She was related to European royalty, she golfed with King Edward, she dominated Paris and London’s elite social circles. An American leading London society?! She was in no uncertain terms a celebrity.”

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  • The Holiday Hustle Hassle

    Rose Mula writes: Christmas shopping has become my second least favorite activity (the first is having a root canal); and it gets progressively worse each year as it becomes increasingly harder to figure out what to buy people that (1) they would like, and (2) they haven’t already bought a more expensive version of for themselves.

  • NPR’s Program, Safe Driving For Seniors: Officials Get Creative

    NPR Radio’s All Things Considered broadcast an overview of what is being done nowadays to help seniors adapt to coping with aging in relation to their driving skills. Since the transcript is not available presently, we’re excerpting a part of the program:

    “Are you sitting too far forward when you drive, to make up for getting a little shorter?” or “Are you not using a seat belt, because it’s tough to reach back that far?”

    And, she says, older drivers often need help positioning their rearview mirrors.

    “The way mirrors are recommended to be positioned now are dramatically different than the way all of us learned to drive because the roads are so much more complicated,” Rogers says. “There’s much more traffic than [when] we were young drivers. We really want to have mirrors that are pulled out.”

    Tattling On Bad Drivers

    While these are programs to help older drivers continue driving, the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles’ grand driver program is about getting older drivers — and other impaired drivers — to stop driving.

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  • LuEsther Mertz Library, NYBG, Fruits and Flowers of Winter

    The Mertz Library, a part of the New York Botanical Garden website, has constructed an online exhibit that offers a timely subject: Winter Fruits and Flowers.

    “Fruits and Flowers of Winter features items drawn from the Mertz Library’s rare books, folios, archival materials, manuscripts, and original artwork, exploring the pageantry of winter’s beauty.

    “In 1712, Joseph Addison, an English essayist wrote in his a daily paper, The Spectator, an article introducing the concept of the all-green winter garden whose ‘trees only as never cast their leaves.’ Addison contrived a winter garden saying, ‘there is something unspeakably cheerful in a spot of ground which is cover’d with trees that smile amidst all the rigour of winter, and give us a view of the most gay season . . .’ “

    “The exhibition features more than 60 splendid works of botanical illustration that brighten and illuminate the season. Seventeenth-century items illustrate advances in hothouse construction, enabling the growth of fruits and flowers indoors in winter. Exotic plants collected for local and foreign trade during this period of exploration enriched the collections of botanical gardens and private horticulturists. A rare post revolutionary era New York City plantsman’s account ledger provides a glimpse of the number of exotic ornamentals from Europe and Asia, recently brought into the trade, and being kept the winter for a fee.”

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  • Making Thoughtful Plans For a Retirement Home

    Joan Cannon writes: We used a retirement location guide that brought up such important issues to us as proportion of women to men (many places are almost entirely populated by females); availability of a cottage arrangement; attitude towards pets; cultural and other amenities within a reasonable distance, and much more.

  • Frontline’s The Card Game; An Examination of Credit Card Practices

    From a Frontline press release about the upcoming PBS program about the consumer loan industry and its impact on a fragile national economy:

    As credit card companies face rising public anger, new regulation from Washington and staggering new rates of default and bankruptcy, FRONTLINE correspondent Lowell Bergman investigates the future of the massive consumer loan industry and its impact on a fragile national economy.

    In The Card Game, a follow-up to the Secret History of the Credit Card and a joint project with The New York Times airing Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2009, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), Bergman and the Times talk to industry insiders, lobbyists, politicians and consumer advocates as they square off over attempts to reform the way the industry has done business for decades.

    “The card issuers could do anything they want,” Robert McKinley, CEO of CardWeb.com, tells FRONTLINE of the industry’s unchecked power over consumers. “They could change your interest rate. They could impose an annual fee. They could close your account.” High interest rates along with more and more penalty fees drove up profits for the industry, Bergman finds, as the banks followed the lead of an aggressive upstart: Providian Bank. In an exclusive interview with FRONTLINE, former Providian CEO Shailesh Mehta tells Bergman how his company successfully targeted vulnerable low-income customers whom Providian called “the unbanked.”

    “They’re lower-income people-bad credits, bankrupts, young credits, no credits,” Mehta says. Providian also innovated by offering “free” credit cards that carried heavy hidden fees. “I used to use the word ‘penalty pricing’ or ‘stealth pricing,’” Mehta tells FRONTLINE. “When people make the buying decision, they don’t look at the penalty fees because they never believe they’ll be late. They never believe they’ll be over limit, right? … Our business took off. … We were making a billion dollars a year.”

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  • Wet With Blood; The Investigation of Mary Todd Lincoln’s Cloak

    The Chicago History Museum (which was previously the Chicago Historical Society) has a number of fascinating sources online for the viewer. This booklet, Wet With Blood, is one of them.

    “Being a full and graphic account from a reliable authority of the BLOODY EVIDENCE of PRESIDENT LINCOLN’S assassination, including sketches of all principal characters in any way connected with the lamented event and other items of FACT and INTRIGUE not to be found in any other work of the kind. Full of illustrative engravings. Published by the Chicago Historical Society & Northwestern University, price 50 cents.”

    Prologue

    “One of the most powerful artifacts in the Chicago Historial Society’s collection is a cloak allegedly worn by Mary Todd Lincoln on the evening her husband Abraham was assassinated in April, 1865.”

    “Mary purportedly gave the cloak to Elizabeth Keckly, a former slave and personal confidante, who swore that it was ‘wet with blood’ on the fateful night.”

    “Join a collaborative team of historians and scientists exploring the mysteries of the cloak …”

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  • A New Museum Destination: Cafesjian Center for the Arts

    Consider a mural by Armenian painter Grigor Khanjyan; an exhibit of photographs by Patti Boyd (the ex-wife of Beatle George Harrison and guitarist Eric Clapton); an installation of 24 Swarovski light socks; and Dale Chihuly’s Ikebana installation. The newly opened Cafesjian Center for the Arts in Yerevan, Armenia could be considered a worthy addition to the museum world.

    Indeed the glass collection is one of the most important holdings of glass art in the world, declares the text for the section: “This collection of more than 1,200 works includes one of the most comprehensive glass collections in the world. It is particularly rich in the work of the Czech couple Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová, whose work revolutionized the use of glass as an artistic medium. Other important glass artists in the collection include Dale Chihuly, Bohumil Elias, Pavel Hlava, Jaromír Rybák, Ivana Šrámkova, Bertil Vallien, Lino Tagliapietra, Mark Peiser, and Hiroshi Yamano.”

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  • Does Exercise Contribute to Arthritis? Assessing and Improving Value in Cancer Care

    Two respected sources for medical information have released reports recently:

    The Harvard Medical School; The knees of Framingham

    In 1948, more than 5,200 residents of Framingham, Mass., volunteered for the Framingham Heart Study, which has produced major insights into the causes of heart attack and stroke. In 1971, scientists began a new study of the children of the original volunteers and the spouses of those children. Between 1993 and 1994, 1,279 members of the Framingham Offspring Cohort enrolled in a study of exercise and arthritis. Their average age was 53.

    All the volunteers were free of arthritis when the study began. Each answered detailed questions about their patterns of exercise, including walking, jogging, being active enough to work up a sweat, and their overall exercise level. All the people provided information about knee injuries and symptoms of knee pain and stiffness. In addition, all the volunteers were weighed and measured, and they each had a full series of knee x-rays.

    Between 2002 and 2005, the subjects answered the same questions about knee pain and injury, and the x-rays were repeated. All the x-rays were independently evaluated by two experts who had no knowledge of the subjects’ exercise histories.

    When the results were tallied, the researchers found no link between exercise and arthritis of the knee. The most active people had the same risk of arthritis as the least active, in terms of both symptoms and x-ray abnormalities.

    Read the rest of the Harvard Medical School Article.

    Another report of interest regarding health and treatments is: Assessing and Improving Value in Cancer Care, Workshop Summary: (Note: Workshop Summaries contain the opinion of the presenters, but do not reflect the conclusions of the IOM.

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  • Shopping for Children: Mahar Drygoods

    On Mahar Drygoods’ site, there’s a quote from the Phantom Tollbooth which might sum shopping for children that’s inexpensive but charming:

    “So many things are possible,

    just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.”

    – Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

    Toys at Mahar include a Spooky House Decorating Kit that comes with over 70 felt decorations that stick to a gingerbread-style spooky house. Operating on the same principles as vintage flannelgraphs the wool felt decorations of glowing windows, grinning jack-o-lanterns, a murder of crows, creeping vines and rickety tilting tombstones and tied with a smart baker’s box tied with red and white baker’s twine. For an infant, there’s a set of Jurassic Teething Blocks and for the older more theatrical child, a doorway puppet theater.

    The site has a downloadable knitting pattern for a Mummy Bunny. (I haven’t knitted a bunny but I have knitted an original sweater pattern for my oldest granddaughter’s stuffed bear.)

    “We’re so pleased to offer the downloadable knitting patterns of HandMadeAwards, a family design venture featuring the amazing toy designs of Monica Rodriguez Fuertes. All of the patterns have been perfected by Monica’s mother and expert knitter Loly, and translated into easy to understand PDF documents by her sister Cristina. From their home base in Spain, this family affair has created some of the most brilliantly detailed and thoughtfully designed knit toys we’ve ever seen.”

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