All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

FDA approves first once-weekly drug treatment regimen for hemophilia – UPI.com

Source: FDA approves first once-weekly drug treatment regimen for hemophilia – UPI.com

Mientras unos y otros pelean – Santiago Galicia Rojon Serrallonga

Derechos reservados conforme a la ley/ Copyright

Mientras la gente se aborrece y se odia tanto en sus pueblos y ciudades, y las naciones se declaran la guerra por cualquier motivo, me refugio en mi buhardilla, en la biblioteca de mi casa, entre tinta y papeles, con la intención de encontrarme conmigo, inspirarme, fusionar las letras del abecedario y formar palabras diferentes a las que hoy escucho proferir en las calles, en las plazas y en los espacios públicos. Juego con las letras en las páginas que esperan mi arte y mi inspiración. Escribo, incansable, los susurros, las pausas y los silencios que me dicta el alma cuando platico con mi ser, conmigo, con la vida, con la temporalidad y con el infinito, con la arcilla y con la esencia, y traigo sus mensajes al mundo, a la gente, a los hombres y a las mujeres que hoy andan perdidos en rumbos de destino incierto. Y mientras los otros, aquellos que organizan las guerras y ambicionan el poder absoluto a nivel global, utilizan las letras, los acentos, la puntuación, los signos y las palabras para envenenar los sentimientos de la gente, contaminar sus pensamientos y ensombrecer sus anhelos, ilusiones, esperanzas y sueños, en un presente tóxico que augura un porvenir de infortunio, yo escribo humildemente, no en busca de aplausos ni de reconocimientos públicos, sino con la idea de cultivar flores que se traduzcan en amor, libertad, alegría, paz, justicia, armonía y evolución. Simplemente, trato de segar los abrojos del lenguaje con el objetivo de sustituirlos con flores y plantas fragantes, hermosas y magistrales.

Derechos reservados conforme a la ley/ Copyright

Source: Mientras unos y otros pelean – Santiago Galicia Rojon Serrallonga

Snarky Snippets Version MCXLVII | Filosofa’s Word

An article in The Guardian caught my eye and made me growl first thing this morning … here’s a brief excerpt:

Katie Nickolaou, a Michigan-based meteorologist, said that she and her colleagues have borne the brunt of much of these conspiracies, having received messages claiming there are category 6 hurricanes (there aren’t), that meteorologists or the government are creating and directing hurricanes (they aren’t) and even that scientists should be killed and radar equipment be demolished.

“I’ve never seen a storm garner so much misinformation, we have just been putting out fires of wrong information everywhere,” Nickolaou said.

“I have had a bunch of people saying I created and steered the hurricane, there are people assuming we control the weather. I have had to point out that a hurricane has the energy of 10,000 nuclear bombs and we can’t hope to control that. But it’s taken a turn to more violent rhetoric, especially with people saying those who created Milton should be killed.”

Death threats!  Meteorologists are getting death threats because of the utter stupidity of people who believed Margie Greene’s ridiculous lie!!!  It is time to get rid of any politician who stirs the pot in the manner that Margie and numerous other Republican politicos are doing!  They are a threat not only to meteorologists, but to us all!


I bet you didn’t know this, but Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis is smarter than … well, than most everybody, but certainly smarter than all the meteorologists and climate scientists in the world.  He might be even smarter than … oh, what’s his name?  You know … that guy who wears a dead animal on his head and paints his face orange?  Yep, DeSantis has declared that the two hurricanes that hit his state, and the numerous tornadoes spawned by the latest one, Hurricane Milton, are not the result of human activity driven climate change … they’re just “kind of normal”.  In fact, Ron is so convinced (or so he says) that climate change is all a big hoax that back in May he signed legislation deleting most references to the words “climate change” from the state’s laws and removing emissions reductions as a priority for energy policy. It also bans the construction of offshore wind turbines off Florida’s coasts, weakens regulations on natural gas pipelines, and prevents cities from banning appliances like gas stoves.  Yet another Republican fool…

Source: Snarky Snippets Version MCXLVII | Filosofa’s Word

Does Home Matter to You? + Learning to See Place by Sherrie Flick – Happiness Between Tails by da-AL

How important is home to you? And what does home mean to you? Is it a place? Is it where you were born? Or where you grew up? I grew up moving every four months to two years. As a writer, it gave me lots to contemplate and lots to write about. (Click here to read about my novels here.)

By the time I was 15 I had attended eleven schools, lived in 18 apartments, 11 schools, 13 cities, spread out over 2 countries. So for me, home is people more than place. By that, I don’t have a lot of sentimentality about “family“ defined by genetics, because that’s not where I’ve found the most acceptance. For me, genuine family are the people to whom I can reveal anything, yet they’ll still root for me -– and in the same way, I’ll do that for them!

The actual town I live in, Lakewood, California, is so wonderful that I’ve come to regard it as home as well! Years ago, when I lived in nearby cities, I actually felt sorry for coworkers who lived here! At the time, it was known for being conservative and homogenous. Fortunately, it’s evolved into a wonderful example of diversity and open-mindedness. On my block alone, I have kind neighbors from all walks of life, all parts of the world, and all beliefs. Like the rest of the country, Lakewood has plenty of room for improvement, but we’ve I’m so very proud of the strides we’ve made over recent decades.

Our local TV channel, which covers local city council meetings and the rest of what’s going on locally, recently celebrated a 40 years! They invited residents to videotape brief messages, so here’s mine…

 

 

Today’s guest blog post is by Sherrie Flick, who lives in Pittsburgh. She’s authored a novel, two short story collections, and the new essay collection Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist. Her third story collection is due out in April 2025. Click here for more about her and her writing here.

Here she shares about how where she grew up, Western Pennsylvania, helped shape who she is today. She returned to after a decade away. As a writer, she says she always had trouble seeing the region, so she tackled it within her latest essay collection. Her experiences there, she says, made her into “a creative coming-of-age of a mill-town feminist. I ultimately came to understand that the region helped form my ideas of self and also my particular feminism…

Selfie of black and while photo of author Sherrie Flick.
Author Sherrie Flick.

Learning to See Place by Sherrie Flick

Why am I here? This is the question behind my recent collection of essays Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist. Here, being Pittsburgh. Here, being Western Pennsylvania, a region I grew up in and then left, planning to stay gone forever. But that isn’t how it worked out—like a homing pigeon out on a run I took a long loop from east coast to west coast to Great Plains and back. How? Why? I asked myself, eventually. And then I started writing about it. 

Cover of Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist by Sherrie Flick.

I grew up in a dying and then dead mill town: Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. I think part of my inability to see it geographically had to do with its death. The town disappeared before my eyes. A thriving city center and then a closed down one and me as a high school kid at the center of the change, thinking about new horizons. 

I became a writer—publishing story collections and a novel. I became a feminist influenced by the labor and grit of my hometown combined with the theory I learned at universities. I didn’t write about my homeland or my origin story. I didn’t use its setting in my fiction, or really think about it all that much. For decades. Even after I’d returned. 

And then I decided to think about it deliberately, observing all of the hows and whys of the region starting with the hilly, hard-to-maneuver-around neighborhood I had settled in: The South Side Slopes. It’s a steep place—high above everything, crisscrossed with tilted and heaving city steps, populated with little houses where the workers used to live back when the mills ran 24/7. We nestled in. I planted a garden, not thinking about why. 

Then I started walking the steps—winded and huffing at their tops where there were luscious and weird views of Pittsburgh and its three rivers. I thought about the steps and in thinking and hiking them, a moment came when my eyes opened, when I could see a kind of distinct beauty I’d become immune to earlier in my life. I wrote place-based essays one observation at a time, recreating the geography and the blips and sputters that one can pull from the negative space in a life. This is how I came to be reacquainted with my homeland—by walking it and replicating it and its people on the page, trying to figure out the hows and whys of staying in one place instead of moving on, what it meant to be rooted. 

Many people think this region of Pennsylvania is beautiful. The mills are gone. The sky is blue. And the rocky, hilly, tree-filled geography is inviting. I can see it now. Sort of. 

“As I walk the Mission Street steps they’re straight and lean. From the bottom to the top it looks like Bubby, my Yorkie, and I will climb right into the clouds. In fact, in historic photos many city step landings look like diving boards out into a vast, awaiting city.

…It used to bustle up here. Tiny houses packed with big families, workers on three different shifts clomping up and down these steps. 

In a black-and-white photograph from 1930 that I find in the University of Pittsburgh digital archives, a tall corner store rises at the base of the steps where I’m standing right now. Every Day Milk, Mother’s Quick Oats, and Heinz pickles are displayed through its plate glass window, which boasts Salada Tea in simple arched lettering. A metal sign tacked onto its wooden clapboard front poetically declares: Eat / Denver / Sandwich / Candy 5 Cents.

Now it’s nothing. Air.” 

– excerpt from “Finding Home,” Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist, University of Nebraska Press, 2024.

Source: Does Home Matter to You? + Learning to See Place by Sherrie Flick – Happiness Between Tails by da-AL