Reminder: Send Your 2014 Calendar Pet Photos Now!
Deadline for sending your pics to Beth S. at [email protected] is this Thursday, October 31. All profits go to Cole’s chosen rescue group MARC (Marion Animal Resource Connection). Beth’s specifications:
I’m looking for the highest resolution images possible. The photos themselves won’t be that large, but the largest and highest resolution images people can send the better. I have photoshop and can do some remediation on images as necessary.
I haven’t gotten everything downloaded yet but I have about 100 photos (some are of the same animal) so far. Far less than last year but more manageable…
Ask them to please name the file, if they can, with the name(s) of the pet(s) in the photo. If they can’t, like they are sending from their phone, and they are sending multiple photos of multiple pets to give a brief description along with the name in the email like “yellow lab on couch is fido” or “black cat on left is spot and orange cat on right is tiffles.”
Send your pics (don’t be shy, neither your art nor your pet(s) need to be ‘show quality’) to [email protected]. Any problems, you can also send them to me at [email protected] (or click on my name under ‘Contact’ in the right-hand column).
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A further note: We like all kinds of pets — previous calendars have included rabbits, horses, and at least one turtle. Here’s a note from commentor Aji about the photo at the top:
… We have a multitude of rescues (all five of our dogs, all with tearjerker stories), but also horses. One in particular that will have been with us 6 months as of October 17th. He was starved to the point that he was a few days away from dying, was completely dehydrated, had serious health issues, and had been horribly abused and neglected…
Anyway, he has a new life, and a new name, and it turns out the we are now the owners of a full-blooded, registered American Quarter Horse (in addition to our other four horses). But he’ll always just be my miracle horse.
Link to Aji’s full story about Miskwaki (Red Earth) here and here.
Reminder: Send Your 2014 Calendar Pet Photos Now!Post + Comments (57)
For a Good Time In Cambridge — Hendrik Hertzberg/Ta-Nehisi Coates Edition (reminder)
Hey, all you Greater-Boston folk, a reminder:
Tonight at 7 at MIT, Ta-Nehisi Coates will talk to Hendrik Hertzberg about the state of opinion journalism…
and the related matter of the debased (my word) state of American politics.
Location: 32-123, which translated out of MIT-speak, denotes the big first floor lecture hall in the Gehry-designed building known as the Stata Ctr., located at the corner of campus where Vassar St. hits Main. See this interactive map for details.
Ta-Nehisi, as most here know, is a blogger and senior editor at the Atlantic Monthly, writing about race, culture, politics, history, hip-hop, e-gaming, French language studies and anything else that comes to his notice. Winner of the National Magazine Award for his essay “Fear of a Black President” he is also, to my great pleasure, my colleague in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing Program. Hertzberg, senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker led the New Republic won three NMAs, while taking home the hardware (is there any?) for his solo commentary at the home of the monocle and the top hat. As I noted the first time I plugged this event, “he is one of those writers on whose work other writers take notes. He takes writing very, very seriously — talking to one of Ta-Nehisi’s classes yesterday he let them know that the craft isn’t just hard for beginners, that he still sweats and agonizes over getting right with every single piece he publishes.
In other words — whether you want to know about the craft or the content of major-league political analysis, this should be a fun evening.
For those of you who cannot make your way to 02139 tonight, we will be recording the event, and though it may take a little bit, we’ll get the video up in reasonably short order. I’ll let y’all know when and as that happens.
Image: Lesser Ury, In the Cafe Bauer, 1898
For A Good Time In Cambridge, Take Two: Hendrik Hertzberg-Ta-Nehisi Coates edition
Once again: all y’all in the greater Boston area, something surpassing cool to do next Tuesday, October 29. Ta-Nehisi will be talking with New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg at 7 p.m. The event description isn’t up on the MIT calendar yet, but it’ll read something like this:
Hendrik Hertzberg has been one of the most influential opinion writers in and around Washington for decades. Most of his career has been spent at the home of the monocle and the top hat (The New Yorker), but he’s also had two stints as editor of The New Republic, during which he led the publication to three National Magazine Awards.
Hertzberg returned to The New Yorker for good (so far) in 1992, and is now senior editor and staff writer (mostly of the Comment section in Talk of the Town). He’s won yet one more National Magazine Award — in 2006, for his opinion writing. In between writing gigs, he’s also worked as a speechwriter for President Carter and has done a pair of tours as a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has three books to his credit, including the 2009 reissue of his 1976 prefiguring of data journalism and visualization, One Million.
The other thing to know about Hertzberg is that he is one of those writers on whose work other writers take notes. Ta-Nehisi Coates and he will talk about how writing opinion can and/or should be informed by the practices and habits of journalism — and much more, including, no doubt, something about what to make of the current predicaments of American politics.
I don’t think I’m breaking any confidences to tell you that Ta-Nehisi basically reveres Hertzberg — for the reason hinted at above. Hertzberg works his writing. Don’t be fooled by the light touch of which he is capable: that comes from the kind of effort John Kenneth Galbraith had in mind when he said (I paraphrase from memory) “the treasured note of spontaneity critics find in my writing comes in between the seventh and eighth draft.”
Ta-Nehisi and I talk a lot about that: how to write with honesty, passion, and perhaps above all a love of beauty in words that isn’t just about aesthetic — it’s how you infuse your argument with power and meaning both. I’ve never met Hertzberg, but Ta-Nehisi tells me that it’s that kind of thing that he studies in the work. So those of us who love the craft, who want to get better at it, should have a lot to chew on Tuesday night. And, of course, Hendrik Hertzberg has a bit to say about the bitter comedy that is contemporary American politics, so there’s that — should be good for this crowd.
A couple of housekeeping notes. I’ll be moderating the event, so it’ll be good to put faces to names/handles of any Balloon-Juicers in the crowd. Another thing: last time I promoted one of these in this space we had Chris Hayes and Ta-Nehisi together in a hall waaaaay too small for the crowd, and too many got turned away. We’re in the biggest lecture hall in MIT’s Stata Center this time, (r00m 123) three times bigger than that first venue, so don’t be deterred.
I’ll probably be posting a reminder or two a little later, but for now, consider yourself invited.
Images: Paul Cezanne, The Artist’s Father, Reading “L’Événement,” 1866
Thomas Eakins, The Writing Master, 1882
BJ Pet Calendar 2014: Second Call for Photos
Once again, Beth S. has most graciously agreed to assemble the Balloon Juice Pet Calendar for 2014, with all profits going to Cole’s chosen rescue group MARC (Marion Animal Resource Connection). Beth’s specifications:
I’m looking for the highest resolution images possible. The photos themselves won’t be that large, but the largest and highest resolution images people can send the better. I have photoshop and can do some remediation on images as necessary.
Send your pics (don’t be shy, neither your art nor your pet(s) need to be ‘show quality’) to [email protected]. Any problems, you can also send them to me at [email protected] (or click on my name under ‘Contact’ in the right-hand column). Deadline is Thursday, October 31, so Beth has time to put the whole massive project together and get it into print in time for year-end gift-giving.
Questions, ideas, suggestions — leave a comment below.
ETA: Stories are not required. Only photos will appear in the calendar, but if you do send a story, I may use it here on the blog as a mood-booster…
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And here’s the story that goes with the picture at the top, one of the photos already submitted, from commentor Summer:
BJ Pet Calendar 2014: Second Call for PhotosPost + Comments (38)
Never Too Late for A Presidential Library…
From today’s Washington Post, a most fortuitous story:
… Washington’s revealing copy of the first Acts of Congress is one of the jewels in the elegant, new George Washington library that opens Friday at his historic homestead, Mount Vernon.
The Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon is a $106 million project designed to be the international center for Washington scholarship, with a trove of his personal books and manuscripts at its core.
The enterprise aims to elevate Mount Vernon from a popular tourist stop among the region’s pantheon of historic sites to a place of rigorous Washington research as well….
[Washington’s] floor-to-ceiling bookcase — his “book press,” he called it — held many of the 900 or so bound volumes and hundreds of maps, newspapers and pamphlets he owned.By 1797, he seems to have run out of room. He wrote a friend that he wanted to build one more thing: a structure to house “my Military, Civil & private Papers, which are voluminous and may be interesting.”
But Washington died short of that goal in 1799.
Now, more than 200 years later,“we are building his dream,” said Ann H. Bookout, head of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, which owns and operates Mount Vernon…
Which reminded me — as of this writing, with only four days left, Anthony Clark is still some fifteen hundred dollars short on his Kickstarter project:
As I said on Monday, I’d really like the chance to read “The Last Campaign”!
Never Too Late for A Presidential Library…Post + Comments (31)
President Obama’s Speech at the UN
Here’s the full transcript, from the Washington Post; I’ll put up a video link if one becomes available.
Via John B. Judis at the New Republic, who had his own interpretation:
President Barack Obama’s speech Tuesday to the United Nations was his most significant foreign policy statement since becoming president. It showed he had clearly learned something from the recent “red line” fiasco in Syria. The speech also displayed what has always been the most attractive feature of Obama’s foreign policy, one that clearly sets him off from his predecessor—his willingness to court erstwhile enemies and adversaries, or to put it in negative terms, his not possessing what my former colleague Peter Scoblic called an “us versus them” view of the world….