Category: Uncategorized

WordPress is being extra special today and won’t let me upload any images, so you will just have to imagine that peppy yellow 7 Quick Takes logo here.

When I banned reading at the table, my kids used to do dramatic readings of condiment labels.  The mustard was the best.

Sadly, the length of a mustard label is about as long as I am able to sustain my attention while I’m reading, lately.  If you have but attention the size of a mustard label, then that is not very good.  It means that you have all these tabs open all the time, and you are totally going to go back and read more carefully because you can see this is good stuff.  If you leave the tab open long enough, you may actually finally get around to reading the thing, and then you’re like, “Wow, that was great.  I should write about it.”  And then you have to leave the tab open for another day . . .

Anyway, here are the things I read and liked but never did write about this week:

–1–

Via John Herreid, a huge, fascinating collection of short first-hand accounts of things that happened during the Civil War.

–2–

From Eve Tushnet (DID YOU KNOW SHE IS WRITING A BOOK?), some “Snow Day Thoughts” that I loved, especially this:

 The Dutch portraits were a striking contrast to all the Spanish stuff we saw in other parts of our trip. I’m not sure I’ll ever love Rembrandt, but I did find his cloudy, lumpy-faced people very beautiful and relatable. There’s a gentleness to his work, at least in the paintings we saw in New York. The Dutch people also often looked worried or questioning. They lacked that “mask of command” intensity which the Spaniards typically had. The Spaniards were basically either in ecstasy, or staring right at you like, “AD MAIOREM DEI GLORIAM. *drops mic*”

 

–3–

Good stuff:  Let your husband love you.

[G]uys are weird. Once they fall in love with you, there’s nothing you can wear, no amount of weight you can gain, and no lack of make up that will make them see you any differently. You are their love, their bride, and after he’s been at work all day, you are a sight for sore eyes.

So instead of rolling your eyes, huffing and puffing, throwing out gut kicking comments about how he has it easy, doesn’t understand, is lazy, a jerk, whatever comes to your beautiful stressed out brain… BREATHE. Look away from your day and see the man that won your heart.

Let your husband love you.

Because he needs to love you. As much as you need to receive the love he has for you, he needs to be received. He needs to be welcomed, embraced, and loved. Even if the last thing you want is to be touched or to hear how amazing you look when you feel insecure and disgusting. Let him love you. Don’t push him away. If you do, I can guarantee there will come a day when your cold shoulders and eye rolling will have trained him to stay away. There will be a day when you will need to be hugged and need to be reminded of how amazing you are and he won’t know how to tell you.

 

–4–

Not one but two new free resources for art online:

the Virtual Library: An open, online repository of more than 250 Getty publications from our 45-year publishing history, available as high-quality scans to read online, or to download in their entirety, for free. 

and

As part of an increasingly common trend (the British Library did a similar thing at the end of last year) Wellcome Images has released tens of thousands of images from its archive into the public domain.

 –5–

This is driving me crazy, because I can’t find it anywhere. I heard a story on the radio about a young oceanographer who wanted to record sound in the Mariana Trench.  So he came up with a glass sphere, half the size of a basketball, with recording equipment attached to it.  You just drop it overboard, and down, down, down it goes.  It sits there, recording, for six weeks.  Then, when it’s all done, it’s preset to jettison some weight, and slowly rises to the surface, and a strobe light starts to blink, to let you know where it is.

Isn’t that lovely?  The fellow let it go, and thought, “I may never see it again.” He had spent $50,000 developing it, and nobody really thought it would work.  He sweated out the six weeks, and when it was time to fetch it, he went out on a bridge and looked out across the dark, dark ocean.  Just a wall of black, with nothing but darkness to be seen.  He looked and looked, and there was nothing but darkness, and then the guy next to him casually says, “Ah, there it is.”

And so he got his glass ball back, full of sounds from the darkest, coldest, heaviest bottom of the sea. He went home and plugged it in to download all the sound, and went to bed. And when he woke up in the morning, it was like Christmas:  he knew that, waiting for him, was a sound that nobody on earth had ever heard before.  And he had fetched it with his glass ball.

I didn’t make this up!  I heard it! But I can’t find it anywhere.

 –6–

Wow, this is turning into a long post.  Here is something I never ever considered writing about, but it made me laugh, especially after all these Real Beauty campaigns and “OMG this model didn’t have her armpit fold airbrushed out, OMG OMG this will change the world.”  Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a good trend, but I still liked Nine Unretouched Photos of Disney Princesses That Disney Doesn’t Want You to See

–7–

And finally the real reason Pope Francis said that the internet is a gift from God.

Phew!  Happy weekend. May all your tabs be closed.