Nicholas Kristof writes in The New York Times: If you’re a woman held up in an isolated area, stick out your stomach, pat it and signal that you’re pregnant. You might also invest in a cheap wedding band, for imaginary husbands deflect unwanted suitors
Author: SeniorWomenWeb
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Call Me Woman Who Swims With Turtles
Ferida Wolff writes: They have always been seen as mystical creatures, a symbol of longevity and bring good luck into a house. Some say that if you dream of a turtle, it foretells of an incident that will bring amusement or an improvement in business. (more…)
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Calm Sea Palace at the Garden of Perfect Clarity*
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum is hosting Baroque, (1620 -1800); Style in the Age of Magnificence. Some selected paragraphs:
“Baroque was the first style to have a significant worldwide impact. It spread from Italy and France to the rest of Europe. Then it travelled to Africa, Asia, and South and Central America via the colonies, missions and trading posts of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and other Europeans. The style was disseminated through the worldwide trade in fashionable goods, through prints, and also by travelling craftsmen, artists and architects.”
“Chinese carvers worked in Indonesia, French silversmiths in Sweden, Italian furniture makers in France. Sculpture was sent from the Philippines to Mexico as well as Spain. London-made chairs went all over Europe and across the Atlantic. The French royal workshops turned out luxury products in the official French style that were both desired and imitated by fashionable society across Europe. But Baroque also changed as it crossed the world, adapting to new needs and local tastes.”
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Galileo’s Instruments and the Outflow Water Clock
Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute is displaying in an exhibition titled Galileo, the Medici and the Age of Astronomy, one of those gorgeous brass instruments that resemble jewelry: an armillary sphere.
All ages can participate in Science in Play, a game that was created to accompany the exhibit.
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Changing Lives Through Literature
The University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth is the site of a project, Changing Lives Through Literature; An Alternative Sentencing Program. Participants who had been sentenced from the bench by a judge or may have been selected from clients at a particular court by a probation officer met for the first time:
“In the fall of 1991, Robert Waxler, Robert Kane, and Wayne St. Pierre, a New Bedford District Court probation officer (PO), initiated the first program at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth where Waxler is a professor in the English Department. Eight men were sentenced to probation instead of prison, with an important stipulation: they had to complete a Modern American Literature seminar run by Professor Waxler… For 12 weeks, the men, many of whom had not graduated from high school and who had among them 148 convictions for crimes such as armed robbery and theft, met in a seminar room at the university. By discussing books, such as James Dickey’s Deliverance and Jack London’s Sea Wolf, the men began to investigate and explore aspects of themselves, to listen to their peers, to increase their ability to communicate ideas and feelings to men of authority who they thought would never listen to them, and to engage in dialogue in a democratic classroom where all ideas were valid. Instead of seeing their world from one angle, they began opening up to new perspectives and started realizing that they had choices in life. (more…)
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Book Reviews: Mother Warriors and Cancer; 50 Essential Things to Do
Mother Warriors
by Jenny McCarthy, © 2008
Plume Books/Penguin Group
Paperback: 217 pp plus 27 pp of resources
If you know anyone with a child who has received a diagnosis of autism, information about this little book, along with the author’s earlier book Louder Than Words, is well worth passing along. It is a recounting of McCarthy’s struggle to help her own son, Evan, recover from autism, both while she was a single parent, and now with the help of Jim Carrey, her life partner.
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Music and the Brain
“In music one must think with the heart and feel with the brain.”
George Szell
The Library of Congress presents a series and section labeled as Music and the Brain. Lectures, conversations and symposia focus on the recognition of research combining neuroscience and music. Scientists and scholars, composers, performers, theorists, physicians, psychologists, and other experts joined in creating a two-year series.
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When to Retire, Reconsidered
Pew Research has published a new brief concerning a Social & Demographic Trend entitled The Threshold Generation. What follows are some segments from that release:
“Overall, 37% of full-time employed adults of all ages say they have thought in the past year about postponing their eventual retirement. This proportion swells to 52% among fulltime workers ages 50 to 64. Members of this so-called “Threshold Generation” are twice as likely as younger workers to say they never plan to retire (16% vs. 8%).”
Moreover, the Thresholders who do plan to retire someday say they plan to keep working, on average, until they are age 66 — when they would be four years older than the age at which current retirees age 65 or older report that they stopped working.
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Giftshopping at an Eco-friendly destination
The combination of floral enameled products with newly-popular-again Indigo and Batik items as well as kurtas for mothers and children make this an appealing site.
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Depression Babies Remember
The National Bureau of Economic Research has released a working paper that, for many of us, relates to our particular set of experiences with investments generated from the period 1964 to 2004.
In Depression Babies: Do Macroeconomic Experiences Affect Risk-Taking (NBER Working Paper No. 14813), co-authors Ulrike Malmendier and Stefan Nagel confirm that experience over a lifetime strongly influences where households choose to place their investments.