Evelyn Carnahan-O'Connell

A digital illustration of the infamous French queen, for my mother’s Christmas gift.

It’s the man on the bus touching me, thinking he had a right to my body.

It’s the man who called me a fat cow for telling him to watch where he was going because he almost ran me over.

It’s the saleswoman yelling “WHY DONT YOU SPEAK MY LANGUAGE” to a Muslim man.

It’s my mom telling my sister being gay is a phase.

It’s my classmates saying women wearing revealing clothes are “asking for it”.

Orville and Wilbur Wright’s patent for their “Flying Machine” has been found! 

In 1979, select pages from the patent file were loaned out for the 75th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first flight. However, after the loaned pages were returned to the National Archives, the patent file went missing – until this week! As part of the National Archives’ Archival Recovery Program, an archivist in Kansas City discovered the file had been misfiled among more than 269 million pages of patent records held by the National Archives (@usnatarchives).

The recovered patent was submitted by the Wright brothers on March 23, 1903. It was initially rejected, so they hired a patent attorney in 1904 and it was granted on May 22, 1906, as U.S. Patent 821,393. The last time the patent was displayed was at the @smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in 1979.

Select pages of the Flying-Machine patent will be on display in the National Archives’ West Rotunda Gallery starting on May 20, 2016, in celebration of the 110th anniversary of the document.

For more information on the Archival Recovery Program, visit archives.gov/research/recover.

 So, I figured I would shed a little light on it for all of you.

I watched this show religiously as a kid, and I’ve been looking into it again recently (a lot) just out of the sake of curiosity. There’s a lot of great stuff going on with this show.

To start, eight of its ten regular human cast members are people of color.

There’s Susan and Gordon, played by Dr. Loretta Long and Roscoe Orman…

Maria and Luis, played by Sonia Manzano and Emilio Delgado…

Alan, played by Alan Muraoka…

Chris played by Christopher Knowings…

Leela, played by Nitya Vidyasagar…

Finally, Mando, played by Ismael Cruz Cordova.

The show also has a single mom named Gina (played by Allison Bartlett-O’Reilly) who adopted a child named Marco from Guatemala and is raising him on her own.

There’s also a bilingual Muppet named Rosita, played by Mexican-born puppeteer Carmen Osbahr.

The diversity on the show has allowed storylines like Leela celebrating the Indian holiday of Rakhi…

and Rosita having to deal with Mexican stereotypes in one of her story books.

The show also introduced a Muppet named Segi (named after the adopted daughter of the show’s head writer) who was introduced to sing a song about loving her natural hair.

Segi also had to deal with a story book saying that a teddy bear in a toy store is “too brown,” and therefore not good enough. This leads to a great song sung to her by Leela, Chris, and Mando.

The show also touches on subjects normally not covered on children’s television, like when Big Bird was being bullied for being too big and too yellow…

and Rosita having to deal with her father becoming wheelchair-bound after getting wounded in battle.

Deadly explosions stunned Brussels on Tuesday morning, killing at least 26 people and injuring many more. In wake of the attacks, cartoonists and social media users shared their images of Tintin, Snowy and their friends — some of Belgium’s finest exports — to symbolize their solidarity with the city.

Thomson and Thompson — the beloved, bumbling detectives in the series — are reassuring the public. Snowy is being comforted by another dog. Tintin is crying tears of red, white and black.