Herstory: Mary Seacole

I'd never heard of Mary Seacole, a Jamaican-born nurse, until I was given a script to read about her. She was the first nurse on the battlefield in the Crimean War--first, even though we've all been taught about Florence Nightingale, who came later. (And in fact, Nightingale said ugly things about Seacole, accusing her of running a brothel and getting soldiers drunk.  Sisterhood isn't always powerful.) She's got an amazing story. Read more about her on Wikipedia.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Seacole

Feminist (Non) Fiction Friday--the News Edition

Pauline Frederick c. 1955

When I was growing up, writing for school newspapers and thinking about going for a journalism degree, the three most visible women journalists were Barbara Walters, Pauline Frederick and Helen Thomas. (On the print side there was also Gloria Emerson and Frances FitzGerald, who both wrote fantastic books about the Viet Nam War.)
Later, there was Diane Sawyer, former beauty queen and Republican political strategist  (she helped write Nixon's memoirs), and Jessica Savitch, the weekend anchor at NBC who died tragically in 1983. I never watched the Today Show, so never had an opinion about Katie Couric one way or another. I never watched a single broadcast of her prime time news show. I just never really put her in the same category as other women journalists. But they came later.
The three women who shaped me were Barbar and Pauline and Helen.
I cannot tell you how completely betrayed I felt when beteran White House reporter Helen Thomas suddenly revealed herself to be an anti-Semite. I took it personally.
I remember Pauline Frederick as a UN reporter. I thought that sounded very glamorous. I could see myself doing that--using my French and maybe other languages I'd pick up on the side as I covered stories in far-off places.  The story is that when Pauline was first starting out, few men would agree to be interviewed by a woman so she approached their wives first.  She was the first female reporter to broadcast from China and she had an early interest in "electronic communication." She died more than two decades ago at the age of 82, but she would have felt right at home in the world of Twitter and FB and YouTube.
And then there's Barbara Walters. Every female journalist working today owes a big thank you to Barbara. She's always been an easy target for jokes about her questions ("If you were a tree what would you be?") but I've done my share of celebrity interviews and you know...sometimes questions like that are the only way to break through the wall and get something like a real answer,
Barbara. She worked her way up to that slot on Today and she paid her dues in a time when NO ONE would take a woman reporting hard news seriously.
Seriously.
That idea seems so quaint now.
Connie Chung was another journalist who was very visible in the late 20th century but she's kind of disappeared now. That's a shame.  Andrea Mitchell, another veteran reorter, is very visible right now, appearing at the RNC and DNC conventions, doing interviews from the floor while being virtually engulfed in balloons. She is a breast cancer survivor (this is Breast Cancer Awareness month) and a tough cookie who is in her mid-60s and shows no signs of slowing down.
When CNN came along it was thrilling because there was Bobbie Batista anchoring the news and just being awesome by her very presence. And then there was Christiane Amanpour, who was tough and beautiful and whip smart and reporting from war-torn countries. (I still had fantasies of being a war reporter myself.)

Chocolate Milk for Grownups--Coco Metro

I am all about the cheese (and the yogurt, and the sour cream and the butter) but I despise milk. My parents didn't force us to drink  milk once we were weaned, and we happily drank ice water at meals, or iced tea. When I used to eat cereal, I would splash on some milk, but only enough to moisten the cereal and only if it was non-fat milk. I just don't like the way milk tastes or the way it feels in my mouth. (My father's family owned a dairy farm and at my grandmother's house I once had milk pretty much straight from the cow.  It was NASTY.)
I don't even really like chocolate milk all that much. Of course I like chocolate, but most processed chocolate milks taste vaguely chemical-y to me, and the texture is kind of revolting too.
Today at my favorite grocery store, they were giving out samples of something called Coco Metro, though, and I hadn't eaten yet so I grabbed a sample.
It was delicious.
For one thing, even though there's a fair amount of sugar in the mix, what you taste is the chocolate and not the sweet. And the chocolate is high quality, dark Belgian chocolate so that the taste left in your mouth is that lovely, bitter chocolate finish of a fine truffle.
It's not cheap.  While other bottled chocolate milks are priced at around $1.59 (on sale for 99 cents most of the time), Coco Metro costs $3.79 a serving.
I don't always drink chocolate milk, but when I do, it'll probably be Coco Metro.

I do not think that word means what you think it means...

The word is FREE.
I keep seeing posts on FB with links to a Kindle book that's FREE only to find out that it's  not actually free to anyone but people who belong to Amazon's PRIME program. In other words...it isn't FREE.
And while we're on the subject of Kindle books, what's the deal with Kindle books being ... out of stock?  Seriously? 

The Difference between a Scary Movie and a Horror Movie

One of the scariest movies I ever saw was The Bedford Incident. It came out in 1965, at the height of the Cold War (only three years after the Cuban missile crisis of 50 years ago this month) and it really reflected the era. It's about an American Naval officer determined to confront a Soviet submarine that has violated territorial waters. It does not end well. It's told in an almost documentary style, as I recall and though I haven't seen it since college, when it was part of the curriculum of a dorm course in political cinema, I still remember how shaken I was by the ending.

When I took Driver's Ed in high school,  I was shown all those gory scare-fests that were so disturbing in some cases they were counter-productive. (I had a friend who was so put off by them that she didn't get her license until she was in her 20s. And a month after she got her license, she died in a car accident. I know, define irony.) I think that's why today I really hate the gory horror movies. I'm fine with "jump out at me" scary moments but I don't want to see blood and guts. Even if they are special effects.
The scariest movie I think I ever saw, though, was Jaws. I saw it the summer it came out and have seen it a couple of time since and since 1975, I have never, ever gone into the ocean past my knees.  I know the chances of being eaten by a Great White Shark are pretty unlikely--although they regularly cruise between the beaches of Santa Monica and Catalina Island--but in the lizard part of my brain, I know that it's still possible. Jaws literally altered my behavior. I'd been an avid body-surfer up to the point where I'd seen the movie. (Or as much of a body-surfer as you can be at Virginia Beach where a really high wave is three feet tall.)  I don't body-surf any more.  I am very, very aware that in the ocean, humans are just visiting.
Jaws made me jump more than any horror movie I've ever seen.

Separated at Birth--Paul Ryan and Dr. Oz?

Dr. Oz

Paul Ryan

They say "politics makes strange bedfellows." I saw a photo of Dr. Oz on a back issue of Prevention magazine and found myself wondering who he reminded me of. What do you think--Dr. Oz and Paul Ryan, twin sons of different mothers?

G. M. Malliet's A Fatal Winter

I just read G.M. Malliet's A Fatal Winter, and will be doing a full review soon. You can read the post I did for Criminal Element's Fresh Meat here.  A Fatal Winter is the second in Malliet's series about Max Tudor, a former MI5 operative-turned-vicar of a small English village called Nether Monkslip where the biggest problems facing the populace are who'll house the cat that runs around the hisoric church where Max preaches and whether poinsettias and holly are toxic.
After reading so much dark matter lately, reading Fatal Winter was like sinking into a warm bath scented with lavender.  I loved the characters. I loved the village. (I want to move there.) And I loved the description of the food at the Yuletide party at the end.  A Fatal Winter is highly recommended for those of you who love "traditional" mysteries.