Lydia Schoch

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Here is this week’s list of blog posts, charts, poetry and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

The No B.S. Truth About Popups. Popups are those annoying ads that suddenly appear in front of whatever it is you’re reading on some websites. I’m taking Karol Gadja’s challenge: I will never direct you to sites that use this kind of marketing.

Revisiting My Childhood Library. This makes me wonder about my childhood haunts. Are they as glorious as I remember them? One day I’ll take a road trip through South Carolina, Wyoming and Ohio to find out!

How to Focus in the Age of Distraction. Timeless advice for all of us.

Striking Graphics Make Philosophy Easy to Understand. There’s not much else I can add to this one. The title says it all.

The Names. In honour of the 10th anniversary of September 11. The names of those who died that day lie behind and beyond all of the politics and rhetoric that have been woven into it.

Good stuff:

When I was a kid my ears always perked up when a pastor told stories during his or her sermon.  It was even better when he or she let the audience figure out the meaning of the story for ourselves. Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung is an entire book of traditional Buddhist stories about love, forgiveness, suffering and joy.

I grinned my way through it, cover to cover!

What have you been reading?

Photo by David Goehring

Grant yourself a moment of peace,

and you will understand

how foolishly you have scurried about.

Learn to be silent,

and you will notice that

you have talked too much.

Be kind,

and you will realize that

your judgment of others was too severe.

– Ancient Chinese Proverb

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, photos, videos and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

A Story Without Words. This is exactly what the title describes. More stories should be told this way!

How to Seem Good at Everything. There is definitely some truth to this. The trick, though, is figuring out what would be a really dumb move to make ahead of time.

Glass Beach. A century ago residents of Fort Bragg, California used this beach as a dump. When the North Coast Water Safety Board began cleaning up the area in the 1960s  they discovered that the glass littering the shore was too difficult to remove. Mother nature stepped in and what was once trash now shimmers in Glass Beach.

How to be Around People When You’re in a Crappy Mood. Another fantastic advice post.

Bridging the Gap. Sometimes what Suggestion Saturday needs more than anything are some photos of a resourceful little snail.

We need one of these in every community:

Carol Bennet McCuaig’s Encountering the Wild  makes me want to move to the country and figure out how to keep the wildlife from devouring my garden.

What have you been reading?

This is great.

I wonder what serious poetry would sound like if no one read it with the poetry voice?

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, comic strips, videos and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

From Why Do I Write?:

 “I’m a writer,”  I said, scarfing my own little stash of meatballs.  Guy lifts eyebrow.  “Oh? So waddya write?”   “Words, words, words…..” I cleverly parry, borrowing from Hamlet.

Why dance, why paint, why blow notes and air through a tuba…because we have to.  But what does that really mean?

Dear Bruised Fruit. I loved this.

From Rewilding Etiquette:

Imagine a future where the most revolutionary changes in our world have not come from nanotech, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence or even space development–but from cognitive science and a deepening understanding of how humans function (or not) in groups.

How Babies Get Out. One of the funniest stories I’ve heard in a long time. It’s hard to believe there was ever a time in which this sort of thing was possible.

Carol Tavris’ Mistake Were Made (but not by me) is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve read this summer. Every single one of us justifies our prejudices or dumb choices by filtering out what we believe about those decisions. Tavris explains how and why we do these things and what we can do to uncover our blind spots.

What have you been reading?

Forgotten Heroes is a series of posts about extraordinary men and women who are (probably) not remembered by the average person.  Previous heroes include Josephine Butler and John Howard. 

If you know of a forgotten hero who should be included in this series let me know about him or her in the comment section or via my contact form. 

Time: 1930s.

Place: Kitchener, Ontario.

Imagine having eight, ten, twelve children not because you dreamed of raising a large family but because it was illegal for health care providers to teach you about family planning.

When our grandparents or great-grandparents were young this was the reality for many families in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada. (I don’t know enough about the history of other countries to say what their laws were on the subject but I am planning to research this for a future Forgotten Heroes post!)

The U.S. had Margaret Sanger working to change this. The U.K. had Marie Stopes.

And Canada had Alvin Ratz Kaufman. After the Great Depression forced him to lay off workers Kaufman was alarmed to see what the lives of his former employees were like. He noticed that employees with larger families understandably had a tougher time keeping everyone fed and clothed and thought that having access to safe, reliable contraception would help them.

In the 1930s he founded the Parents’ Information Bureau (PIB) and hired health workers to go door to door in poor neighbourhoods explaining how to use certain contraceptives and which doctors were willing to sterilize people (even though it was illegal.)

Between 1935 and 1960 the PIB helped about 200,000 Canadian women take charge of when or whether to have more children. Deciding to send health care workers to women instead of expecting women to line up at a clinic helped the PIB reach women who ordinarily may not have participated in such a thing.

Contraception was not only illegal then but highly controversial as well. Only a few years earlier the Lambeth Conference in 1930 made the Anglicans the first Christians to post a statement supporting the use of contraception instead of calling it a sin.

It would be disingenuous for me to hide the fact that Kaufman was part of the eugenics movement. Yes, some of the other people in that movement grossly violated human rights in the name of improving the human race but none of my research on Kaufman has ever indicated that he forced anyone to have (or not to have) children.

Kaufman simply believe in the power of information.

And for that I am deeply grateful.