Senior Women Web

Julia Sneden wrote: The strangest Christmas of all was the Christmas of the Goose. John, my husband, was born in the wrong century. His vision of Christmas is informed by a heavy dose of Dickens and merrie olde England. It’s not enough to watch every version of A Christmas Carol that is shown on television, year after year. He hangs an Advent wreath over the center of the dining table. He sings along with the Advent hymns on a CD of the Canterbury Cathedral Choir. He sings The Boar’s Head in Latin as I carry in the roast. He reads Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales aloud to the family every Christmas Eve. He puts Christmas crackers at each place at table. He has even been known to remind us about Boxing Day. more »

In Rumors of War, Wiley draws from a series of paintings he created in the early 2000s when, inspired by the history of equestrian portraiture, he replaced traditional white subjects depicted in large-format paintings with young African American men in street clothes. At that time, these works were a reaction to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly two decades later, Wiley’s public sculpture, taking its name from a biblical phrase found in Matthew 24:6, addresses the violence that continues not just in the Middle East but every day on the streets of this nation. Rumors of War also offers an exquisite example of how to imagine and develop a more complete and inclusive American story. more »

Data collected in ILINet may disproportionately represent certain populations within a state, and therefore, may not accurately depict the full picture of influenza activity for the whole state. Differences in the data presented here by CDC and independently by some state health departments likely represent differing levels of data completeness with data presented by the state likely being the more complete. Nationwide during week 50, 3.9% of patient visits reported through the U.S. Outpatient Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Network (ILINet) were due to influenza-like illness (ILI). This percentage is above the national baseline of 2.4%. more »

Sections read like poetic romance, others like adventure, some like fantasy of the best and most convincing kind, some like philosophy. The pace varies much in the way one's daily experience might in a place where the only means of transport are one's own legs, horses, or boats without motors. The reader is fully immersed in a complete new life in a very few pages, and by the last of over a thousand, has been in some way imprinted. The outstanding characteristic of Islandia is that it will leave no reader unmoved, or even untouched. To make your way through this tour de force of imagination will change you, according to what aspect of it touches you most closely. more »