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

Ice and Snow Festival. Photographs of massive ice and snow sculptures in Harbin, Heilongjiang.

I Really Love Christmas Now That I’m an Atheist. I really wish I could say the same thing. Spending time with loved ones and eating a great meal becomes more appealing every year but it’s still overshadowed by how grouchy and short-tempered many people are in public. It sucks the joy out of December for me. 🙁

From Science as Magic:

Magic makes impossibility fun and amusing. It creates a zone where you can expect to be mistaken about how things work, and just as easily return to normal once you leave that zone. We wouldn’t want all our lives to mystify and confuse us, but being stupefied for an hour or so seems to be just fine.

Hero from Miguel Endara on Vimeo.

Habibi is a unique story I’ve been having trouble condensing into a few short sentences. It’s about the lives of and intense bond between two child slaves, Dodola and Zam, who live in the middle east.

What have you been reading?

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

What colourful butterflies!

Photo by Böhringer Friedrich

Opinion Warning Signs. Sometimes opinions are more a sign of group loyalty than they are an individual’s genuine interpretation of the truth. This list includes warning signs to look out for when this sort of thing may be happening. Many behaviours on the list are also compelling reasons why I get to know new friends really well before opening up to them about certain topics.

We Agree to be Offended by Certain Words. Not sure what I think about this yet. It’s definitely a good thing to have thick skin and give ignorant people the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, why do we so often expect the person being harassed to be a perpetual object lesson/good representative of his or her group? Isn’t there something to be said for holding everyone to high standards?

From Killing Donald Evans:

The day before I killed Donald Evans I did not even know he existed.

From How I Read:

Give other genres a chance. Do you mostly read literary fiction? Read a sci-fi. Do you mostly read fantasy? Read something by Jane Austen. Do you mostly read Christian fiction? Read a book on Buddhist spirituality.

What a creative way to tell a love story:

Here’s another Dr. Seuss book you may not have read before –  You’re Only Old Once! It’s a lighthearted look at something many of us will be/are lucky enough to live to see: old age.

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   Ghandl and Skaay, Laura Secord and Elijah McCoy. 

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: 1887

Place: New York City.

One night a 23-year-old woman named Nellie Bly checked into a working class boarding house but refused to go to bed, telling fellow boarders that she was afraid they thought she was crazy.

Her behaviour was so unusual that they quickly came to the conclusion Nellie was mentally ill. The police were summoned the next morning. When Nellie stood before the judge she said she didn’t remember anything that had happened that night.

The judge thought she’d been drugged. Several doctors examined Nellie and decided that she was insane. Nellie was sent to the Woman’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in the hope that she could be cured.

Her undercover assignment for the New York World had finally begun.

Nellie’s days consisted of sitting on hard benches in frigid temperatures while rats crawled around piles of human (and other) waste decomposing on the floor. Patients drank dirty water and ate spoiled meat, gruel and “bread” that was basically dried out dough. The most dangerous patients were tied to one another with ropes.

No one wasn’t allowed to speak or move. Anyone who broke these rules ran the risk of being verbally or physically abused by the nurses. Nellie broke them anyway. She wasn’t a medical professional but many of the women she spoke to seemed no more mentally ill than the average person outside of the asylum.

The conditions of the asylum weren’t created only out of malice – 125 years ago our understanding of mental illness was embryonic. We didn’t realize that depression and other diseases are involuntary, that someone with one of these illnesses cannot just snap out of it.

Nellie was released from the asylum after ten days at the request of her employers. Ten Days in a Mad-House, her report on these experiences, brought so much attention to the conditions these women lived in that a grand jury launched it’s own investigation into the asylum.

As a result of this report the funding for the asylum was increased by $850,000 and the criteria for the examinations that lead women to being committed to that asylum were revamped. This lead to fewer people without mental illness being committed.

None of these changes happened overnight and there was (and is) still a lot of work to do in the destigmatization and effective treatment of chronic mental illness.

But we’ve come a long way thanks to Nellie Bly.

The trees are bare now, each day is colder and shorter than the last and three long months of ice and snow are just around the corner.

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “When the Year Grows Old” captures the tinge of melancholy I often feel at this time of year. 

        I cannot but remember
When the year grows old–
October–November–
How she disliked the cold!

She used to watch the swallows
Go down across the sky,
And turn from the window
With a little sharp sigh.

And often when the brown leaves
Were brittle on the ground,
And the wind in the chimney
Made a melancholy sound,

She had a look about her
That I wish I could forget–
The look of a scared thing
Sitting in a net!

Oh, beautiful at nightfall
The soft spitting snow!
And beautiful the bare boughs
Rubbing to and fro!

But the roaring of the fire,
And the warmth of fur,
And the boiling of the kettle
Were beautiful to her!

I cannot but remember
When the year grows old–
October–November–
How she disliked the cold!

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, illustrations, photographs, comics, articles and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Virginia Francie Sterrett’s Fairy Tale Illustrations are magical. If only she could have lived to know her own happy ending.

Young, Gay and Homeless. I was blinking back tears halfway through the article. Had I been born into a different family this so easily could have been my life.

National Flags Made Out of Food. Delicious and educational!

The 75 Best LIFE Photos. Not every photograph in this collection seemed worthy of inclusion in this sort of list. The vast majority of them, though, were absolutely incredible.

The Enigma of Amigara Fault. A spine-tingling tale of what happens when human-shaped holes are discovered near a fault line.

So it turns out that I didn’t actually read all of Dr. Seuss’ books as a kid. Recently I stumbled across a few of his less known works. Everyone – young, old and somewhere in-between – should read I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew. The narrator of this book wants to escape his troubles by finding Solla Sollew. The question is, will he make it?

What have you been reading?