fantastical Friday: May 16, 2014

my worlds collide: while shopping for fancy foods to feed friends for a night of snacks and cocktails while we watch the newest version of “Much Ado About Nothing,” I learned about the 45 hours of training I’ll need to volunteer at a local domestic violence shelter. It hadn’t properly sunk in until I realized I had to ring a doorbell just to be allowed into the facility. I’m quite seriously considering UNICEF or Peace Corps volunteer work. This seems a valid start.

girls & education. it should be our core message and focus, the world over.

“Learning is more effective if a lesson or experience is deliberately coupled with time spent thinking about what was just presented, a new study shows.”

groups are working with young men, and grown men, to help them better become the first line against sexist and violent behavior.

fantastical Friday: May 9, 2014

Blue sky, yellow sun, green grass: spring has sprung. Time to do more, be more, and help others.

outbreaks of polio in Syria, Cameroon, and Pakistan have caused an international public health emergency, according to the World Health Organization. The lack, due to civil war and campaigns against vaccination, of the most basic of vaccination medicine “could result in failure to eradicate globally one of the world’s most serious vaccine preventable diseases.”

Progress has been made, with Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau admitting his group’s involvement in the abduction of hundreds of schoolgirls from their school in Chibok, Nigeria. Unfortunately, the group then kidnapped eight more girls, and is threatening to sell them into slavery or marriages as well.#bringbackourgirls.

Fascinated by the technology helping prosecutors in new Nazi concentration camp cases in Germany. “Using digital technology, he created a three-dimensional model of Auschwitz-Birkenau, with the help of officials in Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria, that allows for a 360-degree view of the camp. It can be programmed to show what an individual guard could have seen from a specific vantage point.”

fantastical Friday: May 2, 2014

After a quick clean-up of typos and grammar on the first draft, I’m shelving the book until at least mid-June. It’s been handed around to trusted friends and colleagues, and I need to wait and look at it with fresh eyes and constructive criticism. Unsurprisingly, I’m already itching to get in on another project, so I’m beginning research on a {shockingly true} story from the same little town I grew up in, where a woman in the 1870s claimed to have romantic letters from John Wilkes Booth, still alive and then in the British Virgin Islands. Continued novelization awaits. Last night, I sat in judgement on the thesis presentations of seniors from my alma mater’s Honors Program. Fascinating stuff kids are getting up to these days.

Bob Hoskins passed this week. One of my favorite film-watching moments is when he gets his kit off and demands everyone else does the same in Mrs. Henderson Presents.

it is wonderful to see big stars reminding men of what constitutes sexual assault…but impossibly disappointing that they have to.

“One half [of a group of 100 preschoolers] got a talk about helping, while the other half heard about being helpers…Preschoolers who got the talk about being helpers actually dropped their toys to offer aid 20 percent more often than kids who heard a lesson about helping,” found researchers at the University of California at San Diego.

I love my state {ahem, Commonwealth}, and I adore the linguistic nuances available to listen to here.

Short hair, don’t care. “ ‘There is this unspoken sisterhood when you see another woman with short hair who has made the decision to go against the crowd and do something so bold,’ she said. ‘You meet eyes and exchange a knowing smile.’ ”