Friday, December 22, 2017
Tuesday, December 12, 2017
THIS is Soooo Beautiful
Anonymous Donor Pays Off Layaway Items for 200 Families
December 12, 2017 Updated: December 12, 2017 11:05am
An anonymous donor has paid off all the items on layaway at a Pennsylvania Walmart, giving 200 families a holiday gift.
WJAC-TV reports that staff members at the Everett store say this is the second year in a row that the anonymous donor has made such a gift.
Store veteran Barbara Kearns says she's never seen generosity and humility on this scale before.
The Walmart staff has been making calls to families with the news, letting them know their Christmas gifts on layaway are paid off.
Nobody knows who the secret donor is, not even the Walmart staff. They just call him "Santa B."
In total, the staff says the donor paid a total of $40,000.
Friday, September 15, 2017
The stunning underwater picture this photographer wishes ‘didn’t exist’
California nature photographer Justin Hofman snapped the picture late last year off the coast of Sumbawa, an Indonesian island in the Lesser Sunda Islands chain. The 33-year-old, from Monterey, Calif., said a colleague pointed out the pocket-size sea creature, which he estimated to be about 1.5 inches tall — so small, in fact, that Hofman said he almost didn't reach for his camera.
“The wind started to pick up and the sea horse started to drift. It first grabbed onto a piece of sea grass,” Hofman said Thursday in a phone interview.
Hofman started shooting.
“Eventually more and more trash and debris started to move through,” he said, adding that the critter lost its grip, then latched onto a white, wispy piece of a plastic bag. “The next thing it grabbed was a Q-Tip.”
Hofman said he wishes the picture “didn’t exist” — but it does; and now, he said, he feels responsible “to make sure it gets to as many eyes as possible.” He entered the photo and was a finalist in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition from the Natural History Museum in London.
“I want everybody to see it,” he added. “I want everybody to have a reaction to it.”
Hofman, an expedition leader with EYOS Expeditions, said he was wrapping up an expedition in December 2016 when he photographed the sea horse.
As he watched the creature through its journey, he said, his “blood was boiling.”
Hofman said the garbage had washed in, polluting their spot in the sea with sewage that he said he could smell and taste, and that the sea horse was searching for a raft on which to ride it out.
“I had this beautiful, little tiny creature that was so cute, and it was almost like we were brought back to reality — that this is something that happens to the sea horse day in and day out,” he said.
“It’s a photo that I wish didn’t exist but now that it does I want everyone to see it,” Hofman wrote beneath the image. “What started as an opportunity to photograph a cute little sea horse turned into one of frustration and sadness as the incoming tide brought with it countless pieces of trash and sewage. This sea horse drifts long with the trash day in and day out as it rides the currents that flow along the Indonesian archipelago.
“This photo serves as an allegory for the current and future state of our oceans. What sort of future are we creating? How can your actions shape our planet? ” he said.
Hofman said that he has since received messages from people all over the world.
“Some of them feel heartbroken, some of them feel frustrated,” he said, adding some in Indonesia acknowledged they have a problem with plastic pollution.
Indonesia is the world's second-largest producer of marine pollution, dumping 3.22 million metric tons of plastic debris per year, according to data published in 2015 by Environmental Health Perspectives. The country has vowed to reduce such waste by 70 percent by the end of 2025, according to the United Nations.
Maybe, Hofman said, the photo, and others like it, can be catalysts to create change.
“We are really affecting our oceans with our negligence and our ignorance,” he said.
Friday, July 21, 2017
The Un-Pretty History Of Georgia's Iconic Peach
During peach season, Georgia's roads are dotted with farm stands selling fresh peaches. Year-round, tourist traps sell mugs, hats, shirts and even snow globes with peaches on them. At the beginning of the Georgia peach boom, one of Atlanta's major roads was renamed Peachtree Street. But despite its associations with perfectly pink-orange peaches, "The Peach State" of Georgia is neither the biggest peach producing state (that honor goes to California) nor are peaches its biggest crop.
So why is it that Georgia peaches are so iconic? The answer, like so much of Southern history, has a lot to do with slavery — specifically, its end and a need for the South to rebrand itself. Yet, as historian William Thomas Okie writes in his book The Georgia Peach, the fruit may be sweet but the industry in the South was formed on the same culture of white supremacy as cotton and other slave-tended crops.
Peaches, which are native to Asia, have been growing haphazardly in the United States since they were brought over by Europeans in the 17th century. But it wasn't until the latter half of the 1800s that aspiring horticulturists began to try and grow the peach as an orchard crop. In 1856, a Belgian father-and-son pair, Louis and Prosper Berckmans, purchased a plot of orchard land in Augusta, Ga., that would come to be known as Fruitland. Their intention was to demonstrate that fruit and ornamental plants could become just as important an industry in the South as cotton, which was ruining the soil with its intensive planting.
The Georgia Peach Culture, Agriculture, and Environment in the American South
by William Thomas Okie, Hardcover, 303 pages
Horticulture slowly became accepted as a gentleman's pursuit. But it wasn't until the end of the Civil War and the abolishment of slavery that the sudden availability of labor gave peaches the perfect opening. After the war, "fruit growing, which to the cotton planter was a secondary matter, [became] one of great solicitude to the farmer," Prosper Berckmans wrote in 1876. By the 1880s, Fruitland had grown so large and essential that it mailed 25,000 catalogs every year to horticulturists in the United States and abroad.
Freedmen now needed year-round employment, and the labor requirements of the peach season — tree trimming and harvest — fit perfectly with the time of year when cotton was slow. Though the story of the post-bellum South is often one of industrialization and urbanization, it was also a time of redefining what agriculture would mean without the enslaved labor plantation owners had relied on.
"Cotton had all these associations with poverty and slavery," says Okie, an assistant professor of history at Kennesaw State University in Georgia.
The peach had none of that baggage.
While King Cotton was still an important part of the Southern economy, town councils began sponsoring peach festivals and spreading marketing materials that sung the praises of Georgia-bred peaches like the famous Elberta Peaches.
"Tellingly," Okie writes, "the only role mentioned for Black southerners in the great Georgia Peach Carnival was as members of the opening procession's 'Watermelon Brigade' " — about 100 African-Americans who marched with the racially laden fruit balanced on their heads.
Gentleman farmers saw fruit cultivation as something particularly refined and European, and a craze for all things "oriental" gave peaches an even greater allure. This cultured crop fit in with the narrative white Southerners were eager to tell about themselves after the Civil War. "Growing peaches for market required expertise that seemed unnecessary with corn and cotton, which any dirt farmer could grow," Okie writes. To succeed, peach farmers had to be able to access horticultural literature and the latest scientific findings. Both required literacy, as well as a certain level of education that was still out of reach for many newly freed men and women.
An undated photo shows peach pickers being driven to the
orchards in Muscella, Ga. Black labor was essential for the success of
the peach crop, even if African-Americans were rarely credited for the
importance of their work.
In addition to the cost of the trees and horticultural education, it took three or four years of expenses without income before trees would reliably produce fruit. Peaches required so much capital to grow that few African-Americans could afford to start their own orchard. When women were referred to admiringly as "Georgia peaches," it was a reflection of their light, rosy skin more than the state where they were from. (In an act of reclamation, a black gospel singer born in 1899 as Clara Hudman would go on to use the stage name "Georgia Peach.")
Of course, black labor was essential for the success of the peach crop, even if African-Americans were rarely credited for the importance of their work. Fort Valley State University, a historically black school in the epicenter of Georgia's peach region, would not have existed without the peach industry. It was created with the promise of educating African-Americans to be better workers in the orchards. But decades after its founding, it became a "Tuskegee-like institute" that was important for the Civil Rights movement in that region, Okie says. The college was involved in marches and demonstrations; Jo Ann Gibson, an organizer of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, was a 1936 graduate.
Many states remain associated with a particular food or agricultural product well after the product's importance has waned. Florida now grows far fewer oranges for consumption than many states, though the Sunshine state still produces a lot of juicing oranges. But these agricultural connections remain important for more than just marketing slogans or choosing a design for the state license plate.
"In a world of ephemerality and digital presence, there's something fundamental about the wind and the weather and the soil and microorganisms that make the environment we live in," Okie says.
For better or worse, Okie's book explains, peaches have become the story of the New South and its environment as much as cotton represents the Old. He adds, "To have a cultural icon with its roots deep in the physical landscape of the South is important."
Friday, June 30, 2017
What Are We Here For?.......
Beloveds,
I had
to share this with you. I've reworked a story that features a phrase the
reknowned philosopher Donald Duck shared with his nephews that has stuck
with me for many years. It helps me to remember, 'What I Am here
for'....I share it with you below.
Click this link after reading my short fable and looking at the photo, for a beautiful true story that illustrates Donald Duck's message. If you click the large dark space, you'll hear an audio of the humble hero telling the story in his own voice.
Gotta tell you~The WONDERFUL CHARACTER of the MEN OF THE GOLDEN STATE WARRIORS, the MLB umpire in the article below, Colin Kaepernick, the always gracious and intelligent Williams Sisters ~ American Athletes are stepping up as truly worthy ROLE MODELS.
Gotta tell you~The WONDERFUL CHARACTER of the MEN OF THE GOLDEN STATE WARRIORS, the MLB umpire in the article below, Colin Kaepernick, the always gracious and intelligent Williams Sisters ~ American Athletes are stepping up as truly worthy ROLE MODELS.
I lovu~
Kendke
Donald
Duck was out with his 3 nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie having a great
day on the river. They were having a good time, except for Dewey, who'd
wanted to stay home and read. Waddling along, they saw a man showing an
excited young boy how to put a fish on a fishing hook. Further on, two
birds seemed to play tag in the air above them. Dewey's attitude just
got angrier seeing so much fun around him, when suddenly they looked up
to the bridge high above the river. There, they could see a small crowd
of people, tightly gathered around one spot.
Dewey finally blurted out, "Unca Donald, what are we here for???"
Focusing on the scene on the bridge, and sensing his nephew's frustration, Donald Duck quietly responded, "To help the others".
This
seemed to satisfy the other boys, and even Dewey thought about it,
shrugged his shoulders and smiled for a moment. Then, this most pensive
of his nephews, turned his head and asked his uncle, "So what are the others here for?".........
Major League Baseball Umpire Saves Woman on Pittsburgh Bridge
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/29/534906623/not-on-my-watch-mlb-umpire-helps-save-woman-on-pittsburgh-bridge
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