Good Morning All…
It was so distressing for to see one of our Sky Dancing family have such a traumatic reaction to one of our post a few days ago, I could somewhat understand, as my rape experience comes back in nightmares…and even in flashes of memory during times when I least expect it. But I could not think of anything to say, of any words to offer that would be consoling…it was like I froze up. I was afraid to even look at the comments yesterday. I did not want to face up to it.
Why couldn’t I do that? What was making me recoil from the blog like that?
I feel so bad, and still do not know what to say to my dear one, who know who she is…
I’ll try to keep from lingering on the issue, but there are a few disturbing stories I am bringing y’all today that will probably rub salt in old wounds.
First some good and happy news, on Friday Bill Elliott’s son Chase Elliott won his first Nationwide Series NASCAR race: Dawsonville’s Chase Elliott wins first Nationwide race at Texas
Hometown hero Chase Elliott used a strong move on the outside to pass Kevin Harvick for the lead at Texas Motor Speedway and then sailed away his first career Nationwide Series victory.
The 18-year-old won in his sixth career start and is the second youngest winner in series history. He’s roughly four months older than Joey Logano, who was 18 years and 21 days when he won his first career Nationwide race in 2008.
Elliott won in a Chevrolet for JR Motorsports, driving the No. 9 as a tribute to his father, 1988 Cup champion Bill Elliott.
“I can’t believe it, just to have the opportunity to race with these guys at JR Motorsports, just to have this opportunity is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for any racer who wants to make it to the top,” Elliott said. “It just means the word for me to be here.”
Elliott became the fourth driver in Nationwide history to earn his first series victory at Texas, joining Dale Earnhardt Jr., Kurt Busch and Trevor Bayne.
Chase is finishing his senior year of high school…my dad worked for Bill here in Banjoville when Chase was born…and it is a funny thing. See, Daddy put up the wallpaper in Chase’s nursery, and now look at what the kid has done!
On another personal note, hurray: UConn beats Florida 63-53 to make NCAA final. (I went to UConn for my Paralegal degree…)
And…one more, the title of this post is referring to the Housewife Bakery in Tampa, Florida.
When I was a little girl we would drive by this bakery every day except Sundays. It was on the way to my ballet studio…and the name of the place always pissed me off!
I would always complain, “Why would they call that Housewife bakery, how sexist!”
Ugh, it still rubs me the wrong way.
Okay on with the rest of the links.
News on MH370: Second pulse detected in hunt for missing Malaysia Airlines plane
A Chinese ship searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane has detected a pulse signal for a second time, Australian co-ordinators say.
Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston called the discovery in the southern Indian Ocean an “important and encouraging lead” but warned that there was no confirmation of a link to flight MH370.
He told reporters that the second signal was monitored for about 90 seconds and was detected less than 2 km (1.2 miles) from the original.
Update on a case in China where the school children were poisoned to death: Chinese kindergarten head sentenced to death for child poisoning | The Raw Story
A Chinese court has sentenced the head of a kindergarten and an accomplice to death for killing two children with poisoned yoghurt in northern China, state-run media reported Sunday.
Kindergarten head Shi Haixia poisoned the children last year in a revenge attack aimed at a rival school in Hebei province which had higher enrollment, state broadcaster CCTV reported.
A court in Hebei sentenced Shi and an accomplice to death, while another person was given a five-year jail sentence, the report said.
Two village girls died after their grandmother found the yoghurt, which was laced with rat poison and placed on a roadside along with several notebooks, state media reported earlier.
The children, whose ages were not given, were found “foaming at the mouth,” the report said. One died before reaching hospital while the other died after receiving treatment.
China has a shortage of state-run kindergartens, and competition between private profit-driven institutions can be intense.
And in another horrifying news story dealing with a young girl: Senegalese law bans raped 10-year-old from aborting twins | Global development | theguardian.com
A 10-year-old girl who is pregnant with twins after she was raped by a neighbour has been forced to continue with her pregnancy after human rights campaigners lost their fight to secure a legal route to abortion.
The plight of the girl, who is five months pregnant and lives in Ziguinchor in the south, highlights the heavy cost women and children are paying for a Napoleonic law on abortion that is still in force in the former French colony.
“She is going to have to go through with the pregnancy,” said Fatou Kiné Camara, president of the Senegalese women lawyers’ association. “The best we can do is keep up pressure on the authorities to ensure the girl gets regular scans and free medical care.
“Senegal‘s abortion law is one of the harshest and deadliest in Africa. A doctor or pharmacist found guilty of having a role in a termination faces being struck off. A woman found guilty of abortion can be jailed for up to 10 years.”
It is sickening.
But there is more disgusting shit…this time back here in the US: 6 suspended amid Missouri school rape allegations – Yahoo News
Months after vowing to boost security at a Kansas City school where a student says she was dragged to a room and raped, district officials have suspended six employees amid new allegations from a 14-year-old girl who alleges a boy repeatedly raped her at school.
The girl in the latest case, who the police report describes as autistic, told authorities the 14-year-old boy raped her “on numerous occasions” over the last month at Southwest Early College Campus while a 13-year-old girl stood in the hall as a lookout. The boy and the alleged lookout were charged Wednesday in juvenile court with one count each of rape and sodomy and ordered to remain detained Friday.
The school district began its own investigation after learning of the new allegations Wednesday. Kansas City Public Schools Superintendent R. Stephen Green said in a statement released Thursday the district has placed “a number” of school employees on administrative leave and that other personnel could be put on leave depending on the outcome of the district’s probe.
“Once the investigation is complete, a final decision will be made about whether they will continue as employees of KCPS or will be dismissed,” Green said in his statement.
Please read more of the details of all these stories at the links.
I am going to move on to more newsy reads for you after the jump.
Okay, it looks the people in California are fed up with the anti-vaccine nutjobs: O.C. measles outbreak spurs officials to call for immunizations – latimes.com
A measles outbreak in Orange County — by far the largest in the state — has prompted health officials to step up their campaign to have parents immunize their children, an effort that has run up against a “vigorous anti-vaccine movement” that has taken root across the country.
Orange County now has 22 reported measles cases, a number that has nearly doubled in the last two weeks. There had been only three reported cases of measles in the previous five years. Statewide, the number of cases has grown to 51.
Though Orange County has only a slightly higher rate of parents who opt out of immunization requirements than the state average, there are pockets — particularly in the county’s more affluent southern communities — where larger numbers of parents are choosing not to immunize their children, said Dr. Matt Zahn, medical director for epidemiology at the county Health Care Agency.
“We know that there is a vigorous anti-vaccine movement in this country,” Zahn said. “So events like this are difficult, but they’re important to highlight because we want to make sure people realize that there’s reason that you need to get your child vaccinated.”
In order to protect the larger community, health officials said it’s possible that unimmunized children could be ordered to stay home for a couple of weeks if their school or day care reports a case of measles.
They should be ordered to have their shots…period.
Hey, all these images of housewives getting groceries the old-fashioned way brings up this latest Amazon news: Amazon adds delivery of groceries, household goods with Amazon Dash | The Raw Story
Amazon.com Inc launched a new product named Amazon Dash on Friday that allows the user to add groceries and household goods to their shopping lists using the company’s AmazonFresh service.
A black-and-white hand-held wand-shaped remote-control features a microphone, speaker as well as a bar-code reader and links directly to the user’s AmazonFresh account.
However, the device is available only for users of the AmazonFresh which currently operates exclusively in Southern California, San Francisco and Seattle. The device is free during the trial period, according to the product’s website.
However, signing up for Amazon Dash is by invitation only while the AmazonFresh service is currently available only Southern California, San Francisco and Seattle.
Hmmm…
I don’t think it is such a big deal. In places like NYC they have delivery service for drugstores and grocery too. I remember they used to have Borders/Barnes and Noble delivery too when I lived there. (Before the Kindle of course.)
This next story is from St. Pete Florida, and really is unbelievable: Man who mistook body for prank fired
A front desk clerk who mistook the body of a 96-year-old woman for a mannequin before arranging to have the corpse dumped into a trash bin Thursday has been fired.
“He is no longer with us,” said Sheryl Case, the office manager at Peterborough apartments, a 16-story subsidized building in downtown St. Petersburg that is reserved for people ages 62 and above.
How the hell the guy did not realize it was a real corpse is beyond me.
A resident of the building, the woman hoisted herself over a balcony wall with the help of a stool before plummeting from her 16th floor apartment to the parking lot, police said. A suicide note was left behind.
The front desk clerk, Ronald Benjamin, 61, who has worked at the building for nine years, went out for a smoke at 4:30 a.m. and saw the body in the parking lot, but thought it was a mannequin placed there as part of an April Fool’s Day prank, police said.
When his relief came at 6 a.m., she told him she thought it was a body, but he maintained it was a mannequin, police have said. It was decided that if it were a mannequin, it had to be taken out of the parking lot and put in a trash bin.
Benjamin enlisted the help of a woman and her teenage son who were delivering newspapers to help him dispose of the body.
It was only after a maintenance worker showed up at 8 a.m. and looked into the dumpster — and recognized it as a body — that authorities were called.
WTF?
In other WTF news, only this WTF being sarcastic not actually a serious WTF question like above. Zandar Versus The Stupid: Last Call For The Roaring 20′s
New wealth numbers show that for the first time since the Gilded Age of the late 1920′s, the concentration of America’s total wealth in the hands of the wealthiest one percent is now above one-fifth.
Take a look at the graph at the link.
Now, on to a new Vogue Italia campaign that is causing a stir. It made me think of the film “The Eyes of Laura Mars” but you decide.
Vogue Italia Trivializes Domestic Violence With Glam Fashion Shoot
Italian Vogue, the fashion glossy known for courting controversy (sometimes with shockinginsensitivity) is at it again — this time, the magazine is raising awareness for violence against women by having models pose as high-fashion horror movie victims, screaming helplessly as they’re threatened with various weapons. Great!
As with the other articles in today’s post, go read the rest at the link.
Another overseas connection for you, this time an op/ed from the Guardian. It is about the shitass Judge who let that DuPont heir remain at home after raping his baby girl. The heir, the judge and the homeless mom: America’s prison bias for the 1% | Sadhbh Walshe | Comment is free | theguardian.com
She makes some good points, nothing we have not said ourselves, but take a look at some of the comments. Interesting.
Alright!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We can get to the fun stuff.
You know the links that are not all that depressing, the special interest goodies.
How forgotten Spanish masons’ tiles transformed American cities | Al Jazeera America
Have you ever noticed the vaulted tile ceilings of the Oyster Bar inside the Grand Central Terminal? Have you ever walked under the polychrome tile arches and vaults of the Elephant House of the Bronx Zoo?
The Museum of the City of New York is revealing a secret kept for decades behind many iconic American public buildings.
At least 200 of New York’s most prominent Beaux-Arts landmarks were built more than a century ago by a father-son team of masons from Spain.
Not only did Rafael Guastavino Sr. and his son (also named Rafael) help build some of the nation’s most iconic structures between 1881 and 1962, they also revolutionized American architectural design and construction with their tile-vaulting system.
Isn’t that subway station beautiful?
I guess Michael Jackson had an album planned when he died 5 years ago. They are finally releasing it, There’s a new Michael Jackson record coming this May · Newswire · The A.V. Club
The only thing is this cover art…take a look.
I don’t know, but that made me laugh like hell. The album is call…Xscape. You can take it from there.
This post is getting loooong!
So on the quick like:
Tomb With Pyramid Entrance Excavated in Egypt – Archaeology Magazine
A 3,300-year-old tomb that had a 23-foot-tall pyramid at its entrance has been excavated at an ancient cemetery in Abydos. The underground burial chambers of the elaborate tomb, which was looted as least twice in antiquity, still held a red-painted sandstone sarcophagus for a scribe named Horemheb in one chamber, and Shabti figurines for a man named Ramesu in another. The disarticulated skeletal remains of three to four men, 10 to 12 women, and at least two children were also recovered.
If 3,300 year old remains don’t float your boat, how about some nice Black Death victims?
BBC News – Black Death skeletons unearthed by Crossrail project
Skeletons unearthed in London Crossrail excavations are Black Death victims from the great pandemic of the 14th Century, forensic tests indicate.
Their teeth contain DNA from the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis and their graves have been dated to 1348-50.
Records say thousands of Londoners perished and their corpses were dumped in a mass grave outside the City, but its exact location was a mystery.
Archaeologists now believe it is under Charterhouse Square near the Barbican.
They plan to expand their search for victims across the square – guided by underground radar scans, which have picked up signs of many more graves.
Crossrail’s lead archaeologist Jay Carver says the find “solves a 660-year-old mystery”.
Was the Black Death Airborne? – Archaeology Magazine
The Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century was not spread by fleas on rats, according to a new study of plague DNA extracted from 25 skeletons unearthed in London last year. Tim Brooks of Public Health England thinks that the Yersinia pestis bacterium must have been transmitted through coughs and sneezes in order for it to have spread through the population so quickly. Archaeologist Don Walker and Jelena Bekvalacs of the Museum of London add that the skeletons show that the people were in poor health when the plague struck—they suffered from rickets, anemia, malnutrition, and bad teeth. A study of the wills registered at the Court of Hustings by archaeologist Barney Sloane estimates that as many as 60 percent of Londoners succumbed to the Black Death. “As an explanation [rat fleas] for the Black Death in its own right, it simply isn’t good enough. It cannot spread fast enough from one household to the next to cause the huge number of cases that we saw during the Black Death epidemics,” Brooks told The Guardian.
Holy shit…am I right?
Isn’t it bubonic… don’t you think
The medieval blogosphere has been abuzz with news of the English skeletons from the days of the Black Plague of 1348. The Washington Post, for instance, announces that “Everything you know about the Black Death is wrong“. The find really is interesting for what it shows about the life of 14th-century Londoners — according to a Guardian article:
The skeletons at Charterhouse Square reveal that the population of London was also in generally poor health when the disease struck. Crossrail’s archaeology contractor, Don Walker, and Jelena Bekvalacs of the Museum of London found evidence of rickets, anaemia, bad teeth and childhood malnutrition.
[...]
How, then, to explain the virulence of the medieval plague? At this point, the news of the find merges with reporting of a theory held by unrelated researchers that this was pneumonic plague, not bubonic plague:
According to scientists working at Public Health England in Porton Down, for any plague to spread at such a pace it must have got into the lungs of victims who were malnourished and then been spread by coughs and sneezes. It was therefore a pneumonic plague rather than a bubonic plague. Infection was spread human to human, rather than by rat fleas that bit a sick person and then bit another victim. ”As an explanation [rat fleas] for the Black Death in its own right, it simply isn’t good enough. It cannot spread fast enough from one household to the next to cause the huge number of cases that we saw during the Black Death epidemics,” said Dr Tim Brooks, a scientist from Porton Down, who was not part of the Crossrail team, will put forward his theory in a Channel 4 documentary, Secret History: The Return of the Black Death, on Sunday.
Which is of course contrary to what most people think. Note, though, that Tim Brooks is unrelated to this current find and hasn’t examined the skeletons. Nor is the pneumonic theory brand-new.
Well, if that still does not pop your cork…perhaps this: 700-Year-Old Poop Barrels Still Stink, Researchers Say
Ah, the sweet smell of raw history.
Archeologists excavating the Medieval town of Odense in Denmark recently uncovered some barrels of old poop. Estimated to be about 700 years old, the buried latrines are said to have kept their contents in “excellent condition.”
Apparently, they smell just awful.
[...]
The area is just ripe with archeological gold: brick houses, half-timbered houses and stables have all been found there. But it’s the old town’s communal toilet that seems to be getting everyone’s attention — for one reason or another.
Why study old poop? To find out what people ate in the Middle Ages.
“Preliminary results of analysis show that raspberries were popular in Odense in the 1300s. The contents also contain small pieces of moss, leather and fabric which were used as toilet paper,” archeologist Maria Elisabeth Lauridsen told Discovery.
Oh, medieval shit that still stinks like shit?
Innit lovely?
On to a little travel piece, with meat: In Spain, a Family Reunion, Centuries Later – NYTimes.com
At twilight, I roamed a honey-colored labyrinth of brick houses in Segovia’s medieval Jewish quarter, walking a cobblestone path in the footsteps of my distant ancestor from 16 generations ago.
In the shadows, I reminded myself that every element in his story is true: a Vatican power struggle; an Inquisition trial that confused our family’s religious identity for generations; and a neighborhood infested with spies, from the queen’s minions to the leather maker and butcher.
Yeah, go check it out.
Next up, so real amazing pictures. These will get you thinking hard and long about the problems we all face every day. These Are Photos Of Childrens Bedrooms. But They Represent Something Much, Much More.
Millions of people from around the world are currently experiencing very different childhoods. Some are living in abject poverty, lacking basic food and sanitation, while others are more fortunate by being born in a country where those things are guaranteed and usually taken for granted.
When photographer James Mollison was asked to come up with an idea for engaging with children’s rights, he found himself thinking of his bedroom: how significant it was during his childhood, and how it reflected what he had and who he was.
And with that, he made it his mission to create Where Children Sleep – a collection of stories about children from around the world, told through portraits and pictures of their bedrooms.
And finally, last week I posted an article about how smart goats are…well, wonder what happens when a smart goat mates with a sheep? Ya get a little Geep: If you’ve ever wondered what a goat/sheep lovechild would look like, today is your lucky day | Odd News – Yahoo News
Today we take you to the fair nation of Ireland, where a farmer has a curious new addition to his farm – a geep. Geeps are the offspring of goats and sheep, and though the term is usually attributed to goat-sheep hybrids that have been artificially created, the term is also often applied to the naturally born ones as well. Paddy Murphy of Kildare told the Irish Farmers Journal all about the little fella.
A few months ago, Mr. Murphy had noticed from afar what he thought appeared to be a goat…being amorous…with his sheep. He told Irish Farmers Journal, “I came home then and I was asking a few lads, and they said nothing had happened. Here we are now, five months later this is the progeny of a goat out of a Cheviot (a breed of small sheep) ewe.”
(Irish Farmers Journal)
The geep, who doesn’t have a name yet, was born about a week ago and seems to be perfectly healthy. Murphy told RTÉ News, that his farm’s new addition is “absolutely thriving,” and that, “He’s running around a lot quicker than the other lambs which were born.” He also noted that his mother’s love is unwavering despite his odd appearance, “The ewe has taken to him like he’s just another lamb. There’s no difference in how he’s been reared.”
There is video and more pictures at the link…such a cute little thing. You think the fella has his father’s intellectual capabilities? Or will he be just another sheep in the crowd.
Have a great day and share your Sunday reads with us in the comments below.