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Age and agility in Sun City | Photographers Blog
Sun City, Arizona By Lucy Nicholson During the post Second World War baby boom 76 million Americans were born between 1946 and 1964. The first of them turned 65 in 2011, and as the baby boomers begin to retire, I decided to visit the original American purpose-built retirement community: Sun City, Arizona.
Mastering the violin’s making | Photographers Blog
By Alessandro Bianchi Although I have often relished the tender melody of the violin, it wasn’t until I met Mathias Menanteau that I realized the endless passion and mastery necessary for its creation. French luthier Menanteau was born on July 29, 1977 in Vendée, France. He moved to Newark, England and attended the international Newark Violin Making School to garner the skill of making and restoring musical instruments.
Traditional tattoo designs, like anchors, swallows, and nautical stars, are popping up on the arms and ankles of kids in every hip neighborhood from Brooklyn to Berlin, Sao Paulo to San Francisco. Yet these young land lubbers probably don’t even know the difference between a schooner and a ship, much less where the term “groggy” comes from. (Hint: Grog once referred to a watered-down rum issued by the British Royal Navy to every sailor over age 20.) “There’s no way to take a tattoo home, except in your skin.” In fact, contemporary tattooing in the West can be traced to the 15th century, when European pilgrims would mark themselves with reminders of locations they visited, as well as the names of their hometowns and spouses to help identify their bodies should they die during their travels. “The attractions of tattoos for itinerant populations are quite obvious,” says tattoo-art historian Matt Lodder .
Hello Sailor! The Nautical Roots of Popular Tattoos
The shady origins of five popular board games | Games Blog
(Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images News) Quaker extortionists and Monopoly? The Civil War and The Game of Life? We usually associate board gaming with family time, but several of the most popular games out there have some not-so-family-friendly origins.
Fighting Domestic Violence With Architecture and Design - Sarah Goodyear
What should a domestic violence shelter look like? It’s not something most people think about, or even want to think about. For so long, the whole issue of domestic violence has been pushed out of the public eye. Back in the 1970s, when the movement to provide safe places for women and children to escape their abusers was just getting started, shelters were often makeshift and improvised. They were usually single-family homes converted to communal dwellings, where several families would stay together while awaiting more permanent placement. No one in the larger community knew much about these shelters, because they were mostly kept secret – a tactic that was, at the time, thought to be the only way to keep survivors safe.There are at least 250,000 words in the English language.
20 awesomely untranslatable words from around the world
The Dog Days of Summer - What are they?
Everyone knows that the “dog days of summer” occur during the hottest and muggiest part of the season.
50 Mainly Pointless Facts You can impress Others with knowing! funny joke
1) The US interstate highway system requires that one mile in every five be straight. These straight sections function as airstrips in times of war and other emergencies.Here's a little-known fact: January 4th is National Trivia Day! Let's celebrate with some of our favorite facts from the @mental_floss Twitter account . 1.
45 Amazing Facts for National Trivia Day | Mental Floss
Paperwork Against the People
Paperwork Against the People Photo by redjar, 2000, Flickr creative commons The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork by Ben Kafka Zone Books, 2012, 182 pp. We are all familiar with tales of inept clerks wasting people’s time, focusing on inane procedural concerns at the expense of common sense and elevating the protocols of paperwork for their own sake over the functions bureaucracy is ostensibly intended to perform. We have all been to the post office; we’ve had to renew passports, file quarterly tax payments, fight phantom parking tickets. We’ve all had infuriating encounters with customer service divisions, the privatized bureaucracy of consumer capitalism.Few things make me want to put a paper bag over my head more than depictions of subcultures in pop culture. They’re usually so awkward and embarrassing that I feel bad for everyone involved, because these depictions are usually wildly inaccurate and misleading, since they’re developed by people who aren’t actually members of those subcultures. Works of pop culture created by subcultures, after all, rarely travel outside their own circles—and when they do, people are confused by them, because they don’t resemble the subculture they think they know. The only subculture that seems to be depicted with any degree of success is a specific strain of geek and nerd culture; the same strain that writes television shows and films movies and becomes successful, because creators can infuse their own experiences into their work.