art, me, Art Institute, places, Chicago: At 19, I fell in love with this painting and then did not “find” it again for 25 years … and when I walked in the room, it had the same impact that it did on me a 19 … so as I am contemplating a visit to Chicago this year, I can’t wait to walk up to her again. Do you have a painting that transcends time with you?
The Song Of The Lark 1884 – Breton Prints – Easyart.com.
A few rooms down, Jules Breton’s “The Song of the Lark,” depicting a farm girl in twilight holding a sickle and singing, received the group’s approval for its comprehensibly concretized values, though Saad mostly talked about Willa Cather’s eponymous novel.
via Objectivists on Art | The Chicago Weekly.
-and-
Jules Breton – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
lions, Art Institute, Chicago,places, traditions, terms: I really did not believe that “wreathing” was a verb … it is … I would like to attend the Wreathing of the Lions in Chicago.
Kick off the holiday season with the Art Institute’s annual Wreathing of the Lions. After the ceremony, watch a performance of “Favorite Things” by HS2 at 11:00 in Griffin Court. Then visit a drop-in workshop to create a Welcome Home Wreath inspired by your favorite Art Institute treasures.
via The Art Institute of Chicago: Calendar: Events.
Apple MacBook Air: Maybe my next toy …
So, if you’re a light-duty user, you might be able to adopt one of the new Airs as your main laptop. If you’re a heavy-duty user, who needs lots of power and file storage, they’re likely to be secondary machines.
Overall, Apple has done a nice job in making these new MacBook Airs feel more like iPads and iPhones without sacrificing their ability to work like regular computers. But, as always with Apple, you’ll pay more than you will with Windows PCs.
via Review: MacBook Air Has iPad Feel | Walt Mossberg | Personal Technology | AllThingsD.
high school, senioritis, culture, success stories: I think CMS was attempting this with its Senior Project, buti n my opinion it falls short. It takes a lot of energy and money to pull off.
For many, the boredom starts in October, after early applications are filed.
Quite a few principals agree that we need to reinvent senior year. It should be a chance for teenagers to make the transition from the predictable routines and 42-minute blocks of secondary school to the self-discipline, public speaking and teamwork that is vital in college and many careers.
I know about Ralph Vasami because as classmates at Woodlands High in Hartsdale, N.Y., we both were transformed by WISE, also called the Wise Individualized Senior Experience.
While pursuing our projects off campus, we received credit for 12th-grade English and social studies. We worked closely with teachers we chose as mentors. At the end, we had to stand in front of our classmates and make presentations.
Mr. Vasami recalls himself as an ordinary student with ordinary ambitions at an ordinary high school. “I wasn’t even sure if I was going to college,” he says. But through the experiential learning of WISE, he found his calling.
He went on to Lyndon State College in Vermont; as soon as he graduated, a job was waiting at the company where he had been an intern. Three decades later, Mr. Vasami is chief executive of that company, Universal Weather & Aviation Inc., which has 1,300 employees in 20 countries and $860 million in annual billings.
The other day, I went to see my favorite high school teacher, Vic Leviatin. He and two other Woodlands teachers, Andy Courtney and Toni Abramson-Matthews, nurtured WISE from a pilot project in the early 1970s. As it spread to 60 public and private schools, it became one of the few education reforms I’ve seen that actually delivers what it promises.
via A Potential Vaccination for ‘Senioritis’ – NYTimes.com.
bookshelf, culture: we talked about relationships and food at our wasabi retreat … I really think there is something here.
Author Mark Kurlansky’s lastest book, Edible Stories, a “novel in sexteen parts,” brings together stories of relationships and food, from Tofurkey to tripe, not to mention Belons and boudin.
via Edible Stories | The Food Section – Food News, Recipes, and More.
Great Recession, emotional toll, financial toll:
A new Washington Post poll shows that concerns about housing payments have spiked since 2008 despite some improvements in the overall economy. In all, 53 percent said they are “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” about having the money to make their monthly payment. Worries are the most intense among those with lower incomes and African Americans.
These concerns can be boiled down to one thing: jobs, said Karen Dynan, who worked as an economist for the Federal Reserve and on President George W. Bush’s council of economic advisers.
via Most Americans worry about ability to pay mortgage or rent, poll finds.
random, technology, internet, marketing: I still do not understand how these companies make money. Compete Top 50: Bing And Ask Rise – MySpace, MapQuest And Flickr Fall.
prayer, analysis: I have enjoyed Sunday school classes where we have analyzed the Lord’s Prayer line by line. This analysis of the Serenity Prayer (used by AA and Al-Anon) is interesting. I do not agree with her/his analysis, but enjoyed working through it. Thoughts on a Prayer by Alex Kearns | LikeTheDew.com.
economics, single biggest economic issue in our lifetime: Puts it front and center for me …
The need is tremendous. The nation’s network of water systems was right at the bottom of the latest infrastructure grades handed out by the American Society of Civil Engineers, receiving a D-minus. Jeffrey Griffiths, a member of the federal government’s National Drinking Water Advisory Council, told The Times: “We’re relying on water systems built by our great-grandparents, and no one wants to pay for the decades we’ve spent ignoring them. There’s a lot of evidence that people are getting sick. But because everything is out of sight, no one really understands how bad things have become.”
What has always struck me about this issue is that there is a desperate need to improve the nation’s infrastructure and a desperate need for the jobs and enhanced economic activity that would come from sustained, long-term infrastructure investment. But somehow the leadership and the will to move forward on the scale that is needed are missing.
via The Corrosion of America – NYTimes.com.
gLee, movies: Many of my friends thought it was the WORST episode. I had watched RHPS in anticipation of the episode (having seen it twice before in college and never a fan … too weird for me). But I felt there was some merit in the message, as did Rolling Stone. (aside – this may be the first time I have quoted Rolling Stone.)
He ultimately decides to cancel the musical and delivers the episode’s message: “Rocky Horror isn’t about pushing boundaries or making an audience accept a certain rebellious point of view… [The midnight shows] were for outcasts, people on the fringes… searching for anyplace where they felt like they belonged.” With that, the entire ensemble delivers a rousing, G-rated rendition of Rocky’s most popular tune to close out the show.
Bottom Line: Can Adam Shankman direct every episode? Glee has been on an upward climb in season two, peaking with last night’s episode. In two weeks: Puck is back, and the girls tackle “Livin’ On a Prayer.”
via ‘Glee’ Playback: ‘Rocky Horror Glee Show,’ Best Episode Yet | Rolling Stone Music.
movies, romantic comedies, bookshelf, random: Whatever … It is only a structure … but what will make this an interesting romantic comedy? Also love the reference to “Love Actually and Valentine’s Day treatment.”
We never expected we’d have to write that headline. Moviegoers will soon be treated to a romantic comedy based on the parenting handbook, What To Expect When You’re Expecting.
The 600-page handbook by Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel has helped millions of expectant parents (including this GalleyCat editor) cope with pregnancy. Currently, there are 14.5 million copies of the book in print.
Entertainment Weekly has the scoop: “Lionsgate has confirmed that they will adapt the bestselling pregnancy bible What To Expect When You’re Expecting and intend to give it the Love Actually and Valentine’s Day treatment. In other words, we’ll see a series of intertwining vingnettes with enough star wattage to blind most any moviegoer.”
via What To Expect When You’re Expecting Will Be Adapted as Romantic Comedy – GalleyCat.
health, diet: I think I’ll pass on this one … figuratively, that is …
Because I did enjoy the floaty sensation, but more than that, I loved what generations before (and undoubtedly after) me loved about fasting: the triumph, however briefly, over sensuality.
I wasn’t thinking about food. I wasn’t thinking about drink. I wasn’t even thinking about sex. The appetites that rule me every single day were my slaves, for once. By that third day I wasn’t craving anything. I was free.
via The Juice Cleanse – A Strange and Green Journey – NYTimes.com.
good Samaritan, teach your children well: I hope I would stop … I hope my children would stop …
“I just did what I teach kids to do, which is try to treat others as you want to be treated,” Odoms said.
“If anything, I was ticked off at the people driving by,” she said. “Even if they were scared, they should have at least stopped and talked to her and gotten some kind of information.”
via Driver who helped impaled woman: ‘People kept passing her’ – Chicago Breaking News.
libraries, education, Chicago, Great Recession: Another example of how our infrastructure is the victim of the Great
Recession. (And yes, i view libraries as infrastructure.)
But the situation at Whittier is hardly unique. Citywide, 164 public schools — nearly 1 in 4 elementary schools and 51 high schools — do not have standalone libraries staffed by a trained librarian.
…
 Teacher Sharon Gonciarczyk, green sweater, works with students in what qualifies as a library at Durkin Park Elementary School, a windowless room that doubles as a supply area. (Terrence Antonio James, Chicago Tribune / October 24, 2010) |
If they want to explore a wider world of books or get help with research from a trained librarian, children in Chicago often have to look beyond their school.
Many of the city’s public schools lack libraries, a situation that made a group of mothers in Pilsen so angry they commandeered the ramshackle field house at Whittier Elementary School for more than a month.
The mothers won, and the Chicago school board is set to vote Wednesday on measures including a library for Whittier that should end the protest.
But the situation at Whittier is hardly unique. Citywide, 164 public schools — nearly 1 in 4 elementary schools and 51 high schools — do not have standalone libraries staffed by a trained librarian.
A lack of money and space and the competing need for new technology mean libraries are often left out of school plans even as students in
Chicago Public Schools struggle to meet national standards in reading.
Even at those schools that do have a library, which by CPS’ definition means at least one part-time teacher-librarian is on staff, the situation is sometimes far from ideal.
At Durkin Park Elementary School on the Southwest Side, half of a dank and windowless supply room doubles as a library. Only a few children can squeeze into the 12-foot-by-15-foot space, with barely any room to sit down to browse through a book.
“Yeah, I’m frustrated,” says Durkin Park Principal Dan Redmond. “I know we’re better off than most schools, but when I go to other schools (with better libraries) and I see what they have, it breaks my heart. It doesn’t seem fair.”
It’s not just older neighborhood schools that go without libraries. Jones College Prep, a selective enrollment high school, is one of a handful of elite schools within CPS without a library. The school’s library was replaced about five years ago with a classroom for computers and tutoring programs.
Principal Joseph Powers hopes a library will be included in a new $111 million building for the school that was approved last month.
“I feel like it’s a deficiency for the school,” Powers said. “A full-service library or media center can serve as an academic hub for the school. It becomes a place for strong student scholarship where kids go to get resources and learn from the expertise of the librarian or media specialist.”
About one-quarter of the elementary schools without libraries and nearly half of the high schools without them — 25 of the 51 — are charter schools, according to the most recent data available.
Last week, district CEO Ron Huberman said he wishes all schools had a library. But with $7 billion in unmet building needs throughout the system, he said, it’s just not possible.
“We’re having to make do,” he said. “That doesn’t mean kids don’t read, don’t have books. It just means there’s no designated space (for a library).”
Libraries became an integral part of the school experience after Congress approved $100 million for building and expanding school libraries through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.
But over time, principals confronted with crowded classrooms, the need for expensive and ever-changing educational computer software, and tighter budgets have replaced full-time librarians with part-timers and volunteers, and converted library space to other uses.
“There are many schools that have (only) classroom libraries because librarians have become a discretionary purchase,” says Barbara Radner, director of the Center for Urban Education at DePaul University. “They’ve gone from being a school essential to now becoming perceived as an option.”
via 164 Chicago public schools without libraries because of lack of space, funds and competing needs – chicagotribune.com.
journalism, media: opinion v. reporting … I always said that I never knew Walter Cronkite was a liberal and that I did know that about Dan Rather, and it was one reason, maybe the reason, that Dan Rather “was no” Walter Cronkite.
Still, I am not here to defend NPR. I just like facts to be separate from opinions, and that brings me to the large issue: we now live in a world with two types of journalism. This is a relatively new fact and, judging by the hubbub surrounding the Juan Williams firing, takes some getting used to. With the exception of the very young, everyone reading this grew up on fact-based—not opinion-based—mass media. (Yes, I know there are those on the right who think this a fantasy, but that’s what makes horse racing.)
In the old days, you might have thought you knew the political mind of many journalists, but it was not necessarily so. They were quite careful not to imbue their reporting with their personal biases. If they didn’t they tended to get fired in much the way Mr. Williams was by NPR.
Call it wishful thinking or a bias of unfounded conceit, but it is human nature to ascribe our personal perspective to those we watch, hear or read. At least it is until they give us incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. I thought a few former ABC, CBS and NBC correspondents were liberals like me until they took up with Fox News and denounced their former employers. (I’m not sure if it was wishful thinking or conceit in my case, but I’m leaning toward the latter.)
Spurred by the emergence of talk radio’s Rush Limbaugh in the 80’s, opinion became profitable. Then Roger Ailes’s particular genius saw that one could parade opinion as fact, and Fox News, a sister product to The Wall Street Journal in the News Corporation panoply, was born, signaling in turn the birth of a new, at least on a mass market scale, brand of journalism that wears its heart on its sleeve. Sure, specialty publications like The Nation and The New Republic have been around for years, but their subscriber base has always been rather modest when compared to the millions of viewers for Fox News Channel and more recently—and less grandly—MSNBC.
Viewed through this lens, the moment where a reporter or analyst for a news agency that has strict and specific rules about its employees’ conduct in the public square was bound to come. NPR says they had already warned Mr. Williams that his opinion-driven appearances on FNC constituted a breach of those rules, and had requested that his NPR affiliation not be noted in on-screen descriptions. He knew very well that he could not stand with one foot in the fact-based world of journalism and the other in the opinion-based world. This day was bound to come. There is a new line and the ethical implications are just dawning.
via NPR: Most Recent Casualty of the New Journalism by Jon Sinton | LikeTheDew.com.
architecture, Apple, Chicago: Chicagoans are architectural snobs, you know …
The tightly controlled Apple publicity machine isn’t making much of the fact that the company’s new store in Chicago’s Clybourn corridor (left) looks an awful lot like another Apple store in, of all places, an outdoor shopping center in Scottsdale, Ariz. (below)
On the face of it, importing a cookie-cutter design from that architectural nowhere to Chicago, the first city of American architecture, is an insult, particularly because Apple last year opened a custom-designed store, complete with an elegant glass roof, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
But some prototype designs are better than others, and while this one, which made its debut Saturday, has minuses, it is hard to argue with the outcome: a sleek, minimalist object, bracingly transparent, that also delivers a major upgrade to the cityscape.
via Cityscapes: Apple tweaks its cookie-cutter; new store in Chicago is less than original, but still upgrades the cityscape.
baseball, baseball cards, Honus Wagner, children’s/YA lit: Since Honus and Me: A Baseball Card Adventure was one of Edward’s favaorite books as a kid, I just jumped all over this story … add nuns and it makes it even more interesting!.
Sister Virginia Muller had never heard of shortstop Honus Wagner.
But she quickly learned the baseball great is a revered figure among collectors, and the most sought-after baseball card in history. And thanks to an unexpected donation, one of the century-old cards belongs to Muller and her order, the Baltimore-based School Sisters of Notre Dame.
The Roman Catholic nuns are auctioning off the card, which despite its poor condition is expected to fetch between $150,000 and $200,000. The proceeds will go to their ministries in 35 countries around the world.
via Nuns auctioning rare Honus Wagner baseball card – MLB – SI.com.
science, the future:
An international consortium of scientists says it has identified and catalogued the vast majority of genetic variations among people, a huge step toward the ultimate goal of mapping nearly all such differences in humans’ biological blueprints.
The project, which will cost $120 million over five years, is expected to speed efforts to study the roles genes play in many diseases, including diabetes and coronary ailments.
The 1000 Genomes Project Consortium, as it is known, used the latest technology to sequence the entire genome of 179 people and the protein-coding genes on 697 others. By studying populations of European, West African, and East Asian ancestry, the researchers are able to compare genetic information between individuals and also across different populations.
Its findings were published in related papers in Nature and Science on Wednesday.
The pilot phase identified 15 million genetic differences among the people studied, more than half of which had never been seen before, according to a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature. That means the database—which will be available to researchers world-wide—will list 95% of the genetic variations found in people, according to comments during a briefing by Richard Durbin of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, co-chairman of the project steering committee.
via Most Human Gene Variations Identified, Scientists Report – WSJ.com.
cars, if I had a million dollars, followup, movies, James Bond: …well, a billion … I would buy this for John!
An Aston Martin driven by Sir Sean Connery in James Bond films has gone under the hammer for £2.6m.
The DB5 was the star of Thunderball and Goldfinger
The 1964 DB5 – dubbed the most famous car in the world – was bought at an auction for well under the guide price of £3.5m.
via James Bond’s Aston Martin DB5 Star Of Goldfinger And Thunderball Sold For £2.6m | UK News | Sky News.
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