Vine Wood | Dragon Heartstring

This weekend, I will export all of my Tumblr blogs, save the backups to a hard drive, and delete my account. I appreciated the platform for longer-form posts, my friends’ posts, memes, and my favorite fandoms. It’s been real. After eight years, I have moved on. 

Best known for her performances in the original Broadway run of Rent, the television series Glee, and the Disney animated film Frozen, Idina Menzel is an amazing actress and singer and Jewish to boot. Here’s how we know:

-Idina’s family is of Russian and Eastern European Jewish background. [x]

-Idina attended Hebrew school, but ultimately dropped out before she finished prepping for her bat mitzvah (but not before getting her haftarah down!). [x]

-Idina has been known to sing in Hebrew, often in the form of her haftarah portion, at her concerts. [x]

-On raising her son and any possible future children, Idina says that she plans on raising them Jewish and with an awareness of Jewish history. She says that she feels a strong connection to Jewish culture. [x]

While British and American suffragettes get all the attention, Japan had a contemporary suffragette movement. It began after the Meiji Restoration when major educational and political reforms started educating women but excluding them from participation in the new “democratic” government. By law, they were barred from joining political parties, expressing political views, and attending political meetings. Japanese women, more educated then ever and slowly participating in Japan’s workforce, began fighting for the right to participate in the new civil democracy as well.

Unfortunately, when Western white women began winning the right to vote after World War I, Japanese women’s participation in politics was still fighting for basic rights. In 1921, for instance, a court ruling overturned the law forbidding women from attending political meetings. This led to a flowering of women’s suffrage organizations in the 1920s, in addition to literary circles which began publishing feminist magazines during the interwar period.

“Growing up, I always assumed I would go into space. But I knew full well that people expected me to behave a certain way. I bucked the system. I don’t want mothers sayin’ ‘put that mud down, stop doing the because you’re going to ruin your dress.’ You get dirty sometimes. Who cares? You cannot do some of these things and keep your hair all nice.”—Mae Jemison

Today’s TechMAKER reached for the stars and then some. Mae Jemison saw the gender and racial discrimination in space exploration, but that didn’t stop her from becoming the very first African-American woman in space. 

“They were going to the moon. I computed the path that would get you there. You determined where you were on Earth when you started out, and where the moon would be at a given time. We told them how fast they would be going, and the moon will be there by the time you got there.”—Katherine Johnson

We’re highlighting a couple of important TechMAKERS this week for Women’s History Month. These women have made incredible strides in STEM, despite the challenges they faced entering professional and academic fields that are overwhelmingly male-dominated.

It was only recently, with the release of Hidden Figures, that Katherine Johnson received the public recognition she deserved. There was not much visibility granted to a woman of color working at NASA in the 1960s.

Katherine made innumerable contributions to our space program, but the most important was being part of the team that put an American on the moon. She calculated the trajectory analysis for the mission because the computer they used was known to be faulty. We repeat: Katherine Johnson’s calculations were more trusted than that of NASA’s computers. 

Salima Ikram (b.1965) Is a Pakistani born egyptologist who is the leading expert in animal mummies. She was the co-founder and co-director of the Animal Mummy Project at the Egyptian Museum, which was the first modern, large-scale, non-destructive study of animal mummies undertaken anywhere in the world. This study is important because Egyptian animal mummies were not valued or studied by earlier egyptologists, even though they can teach us a lot about the environment, culture, and religion of Ancient Egypt. She also teaches classes on how to mummify animals in the Egyptian tradition.

Ikram was also a co-director for dozens of archaeological excavations and surveys in Egypt, including the excavation of KV 10 and KV 63, two of the most recent complexes opened in the Valley of the Kings Pharaonic Necropolis

WANT THIS? GIVE THE LIBRARIES MORE DAMN MONEY.

As one account put it “you get 24/hr libraries when you pay for 24/hr libraries”.

so jizzing your anger all over them does nothing? to? solve? the problem? they’re just expressing an opinion

They can actually make sure they know what their local library’s hours are (many do not, and indeed the threads at twitter and to some extent this one make that pretty clear), and write to and even participate in the local bodies involved in funding (voting being far, far from the only way you can actually influence civic politics), as well as participating in many libraries as a volunteer (which, gosh, might make one feel needed as well), particularly in the literal conversation programs featured in many libraries designed to do exactly what OP is talking about.

We do movie showings where we offer free soda and popcorn, all you can drink or eat. We do craft events (everything from instant pot to knitting to stargazing) and rentable kits that have everything from gopros to backgammon. We have a computer room free to any patron that wants to use it. We copy and fax and for two months we have volunteer accountants doing free tax help to anyone that needs it. We have a sizeable movie collection in addition to books that patrons can check out. We’ve offered museum discounts and blood drives and zoo tickets and events where little kids can climb on fire trucks. We run classes - free by the way - to teach adults and kids how to use programs and how to surf the internet and how to use computers in general. We run events where local civic services meant to help people who need it all come together so they can tell people who they are and what they offer. We even have running subscriptions to a few dozen magazines and about two dozen local area newspapers, most of which are available via apps if you enter your library card number so you don’t even need to come into the library to read them.

We try to tell people this stuff via twitter, facebook, city-run web pages with big old calendars on them, even the odd radio ad.

And we are a rural library, literally a hundred miles from anywhere, running on a shoestring budget and librarians dedicated enough to do the work on not-even-subsistence level wages.

“In 1927 the library initiated its ‘book wagon’ service, thereby expanding its outreach not only to deposit stations, but county schools, ‘book stops’ in villages and even country crossroads. By 1940, the Library operated three bookmobiles that were large enough for patrons to select books inside, eliminating many of the difficulties of winter service to remote areas…

The first wagons were one-ton trucks with custom-made glass doors on the outside that swung up to reveal more books in one place than many country people had ever seen. Each one came with a librarian, a profession even rarer in country parts… Bookmobile service grew steadily after WWII as the county population exploded. Only in 1988 did a network of new suburban branches and a new rural mobility undercut the need for Bookmobiles.“

-John Fleischman, Free & Public: One Hundred and Fifty Years at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County 1853-2003

25 July 1938                                              20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

Dear Sirs,

Thank you for your letter. … I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject - which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.

Your enquiry is doubtless made in order to comply with the laws of your own country, but that this should be held to apply to the subjects of another state would be improper, even if it had (as it has not) any bearings whatsoever on the merits of my work or its suitability for publication, of which you appear to have satisfied yourselves without reference to my Abstammung.

I trust you will find this reply satisfactory, and remain yours faithfully

J.R.R. Tolkien.

(Letter 30)

More historical info: The publishing house was Rütten & Loening. The letter is quoted from The Letters of JRR Tolkien. Tolkien wrote another letter that sidestepped the question and left it up to his editor which one to send. Judging by the response I’m guessing the editor sent the strongly-worded version.

While the letter Tolkien received was probably not directly from the Nazi party, the publisher’s inquiry in 1938 is one example of the party’s legal control of the press. In 1936 the principal owner of Rütten & Loening, Wilhelm Ernst Oswalt, was required by the Reichsschrifttumskammer (Reich Literature Chamber) to sell the publishing house or close due to his Jewish ancestry. Under new ownership and overseen by the Nazi bureaucracy, the publisher ceased business with Jews. (see below for more on the Reichsschrifttumskammer)

Wilhelm Ernst Oswalt’s father had converted from Judaism to Protestantism but, according to the 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws, Oswalt was considered half-Jewish. In 1942, he reportedly forgot to wear the required discriminatory Jewish yellow star. He was transported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he ultimately died. His co-owner, Adolf Neumann, had fled to Norway and then Sweden and lived until 1950.

Here is Oswalt’s Stolperstein (stumbling stone commemorating the last residence of a victim of the Nazis), located outside his former home in Frankfurt.

The Reichsschrifttumskammer was tasked with administering the literary profession. That included censorship and forcing Jews, homosexuals, and “criminals” out of the industry. It was one of seven chambers under the auspices Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer), a branch of the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (Reich Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda). That ministry was founded in 1933 and overseen by the infamous Joseph Goebbels. By 1938, when Tolkien received his letter from the publisher, Goebbels’ ministry already exercised control of the German press.

One cat, Simon, was given the rank “Able Seacat Simon” after dutifully killing rats and mice that were destroying the HMS Amethyst’s food supplies. The ship had come under fire during the Chinese civil war and many of its crewmen had died. The cat had been gravely injured, too, but he picked out the shrapnel himself – seriously – and went straight to killing the rodents that were overrunning the ship. He unfortunately passed from his injuries two weeks before he was scheduled to receive the Dickin Medal. To this day, he is the only cat to receive this award.

Meanwhile, somewhere on the other side of No Man’s Land…

Meet Percy, mascot of HMLS (D20) “Daphne” with Lt Drader. Both survived the War, and Percy retired to live out his peacetime life in the Drader family home.

(Here’s a video clip; given how noisy, hot and smelly early tanks were, Percy seems remarkably unfazed.) 

A US Army tank cat, Mustard of the 321st, with a Renault FT light tank and its driver Sgt Postal…

A Royal Artillery kitten (the battery mascot)…

Pincher of HMS Vindex on what looks like a Sopwith Pup scout…

Togo, ship’s cat of HMS Dreadnought (though I’ve also seen “HMS Irresistible”)…

Ship’s cat of HMS Queen Elizabeth atop 15″ main battery…

And speaking of big ships and big guns…

Jewish children at Hebrew School in Harlem; c.1940s