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No kidding, watch the Lemon Aid ads for male ED; in the background is an Ashanti fertility doll. The same doll appears on the set of Will and Grace.
Dear Readers, have you seen dolls where you least expect them? I'd love to hear about it, please comment! Meanwhile, here are some photos of the toy exhibit at the Putnam Museum. Enjoy.
Happy 4th, we, the USA, are 245 years old today. Despite it all, we should be proud. We granted freedom and gave people civil rights in less than 200 years, where others have taken in some cases, thousands of years. For those who want to take down statues and memorials, please remember that those who do not learn history, and the lessons of the past, are condemned to repeat the past, and not in a good way.
How many of this cancel culture movement have ever heard of The Cultural Revolution in China? Not many, I fear. In a communist dictatorship like China's, they would not be able to protest and criticize as they do in the US. We aren't perfect, no, and the US has made mistakes, but on the other hand, we have laws to rectify those mistakes. One of those is the Supreme Law of the Land, the US Constitution, which has been amended to grant individual rights and to rectify past wrongs. Many of those ignoring it today, event hose in power who are ignoring it took an oath to uphold it, as did I in my career. Shame on them for behaving like hypocrites and traitors to gain a few votes.
On this 4th, I'd like to hear The Star Spangled Banner. How many you out there, especially those of you who take a knee and make fun of it, know that it is prison literature. Francis Scott Key was being held prisoner on a ship by the British during the War of 1812. He wrote the poem because he was watching the American flag, and he know that as long as it was flying, the United States was still the United States.
Had we lost that war and fallen under a monarchy, I promise you we would not be having the protests we have had, or the calls for anarchy, and all kinds of historical destruction. And, it was a serious war. Even today, a bill circulates in Parliament regarding us, the original "colonies" inviting us to joint the commonwealth, or telling us we can become British citizens any time we want.
Red State, Blue State, liberal, conservative, whatever ethnicity, if we hold citizenship, we are Americans. We need to remember that on this of all days.
I am neither Democrat nor Republic; I vote for the person. I am a citizen by birth, though my father, grandfather, and grandmother were naturalized citizens. My grandfather served in World War I; he was an FDR Democrat. My Dad served in the US Air Force and the Royal Hellenic Air Force. He was in the US for over 60 years of his life, and he loved his country. My family has served in World War I, World War II, in The Gulf War, the Korean War, and the National Guard during Vietnam.
We are more like most people, than an exception.
So happy 4th, and God Bless the United States, and be safe!
Experience with
writing and dolls: Currently, I blog
about dolls for
My chapbook, Sappho, I should have listened was published by 918studio. I have won honorable mentions in poetry contests sponsored by The Lawton Doll Company and The Bettendorf Public Library. I have also had poems published in small publications.
I was the expert doll collecting guide for About.com, owned
by The New York Times, and maintain
12+ blogs of my own including
Besides these activities, I am the author of The Subversion of Romance in the Noels of Barbara Pym (The Popular Press, 1998). I also have chapters in The Gothic World of Anne Rice (Popular Press) and Emerging Perspectives; Virginia Woolf (Pace University Press, 1993).
I am a lecturer on dolls and have taught two courses on them
for CommUniversity.org. Two books I have
written on dolls included A Bibliography
of Dolls and Toys and With Love from
Tin Lizzie: A History of Metal Heads, Metal Dolls, Mechanical Dolls and
Automatons, Both published by American Doll and
The Greyden Press has awarded me a Silver Award for a memoir and two novels , and I have won awards for local poetry contests sponsored by public radio station WVIK. I was a guest twice on Art Talks with Bruce Carter and Scribble with Don Wooten and Roald Tweet. Atlas Obscura interviewed me for a piece on Celebrity Dolls and I have been contacted by Inside Edition and The Today Show about dolls. I was a guest on an Irish radio talk show, The Sean Moncrieff Show as well. My Author’s pages are on Amazon.com, GoodReads, and 918studio.
Here is a summary of my other writing experience with dolls and other topics:
2014-2018: Director of Social Media
for Antique Doll Collector Magazine,
Puffin Publications. Maintains Antique Doll Collector Magazine
Blog and other social media sites including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram,
Tumblr, ISSUU, Stumble Upon, LinkedIn, Reddit, Flickr, and Pinterest. Also contributes monthly column on
collectibles.
Grant Evaluator
for SAU’s Ubiquity of Work. 2010-2011, for Ballet Quad Cities 2004, for
November
2013 MMLA, paper presented “The Invention of Hugo Cabret and
Automatons,” Theme of Convention: Art and Artifice.
November 2012 MMLA; three papers: Rumer Godden’s
Adaptation of Iconic Themes in Adult and Children’s Literature; Sarah
Crewe’s Financial and Emotional Obligations in A Little Princess; Debt
in Popular Culture - Debt portrayed in 2 Broke Girls, Sex and the City,
and American Pickers v. The
Grapes of Wrath, The Hunger Artist, and Bartleby the Scrivener.
A Creative Writing Primer.
Midwest Writing Center 2012
Outloud Anthology. Midwest Writing Center 2012.
The Legend of Tugfest. Editor and
Contributor. LeClaire, 918studio.
April 2012
Sappho, I should Have
Listened. LeClaire, 918studio. April 2011.
Clara and the War: A
little Girl’s Story of Fascist/Nazi Occupied
“Frank Yerby.” Encyclopedia
of The
Co-contributor to NCA Self Study for KU in pursuit of
approval of AAS and BS programs in Criminal Justice and Paralegal Studies. 2001
"Every Picture Tells a
Story" on Virginia Woolf and Diego Velasquez in Summer 2000 Virginia
Woolf Miscellany.
"Teacher
Preparedness" The MLA Newsletter, Spring 1999.
Student Guide and Course Development: Fundamentals of
Legal Writing and Research I (Distance Learning Program),
Student Guide and Course Development: LA
200Administrative Law (Distance
Learning Program),
Review of I, Vampire,
in Passing Glances, a Cyber Bibliography of Virginia Woolf.
"Victorian Christmas
Dinners: Feasts and Festivities." Hope and Glory: A Journal Devoted to
the Eclectic World of Queen
Published more than 60
academic and creative articles in various popular magazines and periodicals
including online, including Spring 1999 MLA Newsletter; Summer 2000 PMLA
Millennium Edition; and “Sandi You Found Me”: Monthly doll newsletter.
Multiple presentations at
professional conferences in Law and English since 1985.
Guest Blogger for R. John
Wright Design Blog.
Curriculum Development: Under
Bill Weston and Karen Evans, MS Legal Studies Courses in Intro to Law and
Jurisprudence; with Robin Throne and Jeff Gettleman, various AAS and BS course
for July 2000 and October 2001 HCL Visits.
Under Dr. Ed DeJaegher, helped
design MBA courses, Reviewed Masters Courses in Education, humanities, and
Criminal Justice, developed DC 1-1 Diversity and Culture class, and a proposed
program of study in Diversity and Culture.
We could call this, Gravity's Rainbow!
“Nature had spoken to
him.”
Skyward
for July 2021.
David
H. Levy with Roy L. Bishop.
Gravity is one of the most fundamental things in physics.
Everything and everyone has gravity. The more massive something is, the more
gravity it has. When you jump into the air, Earth’s gravity brings you back
down. What you cannot see while you are in the air is that your gravity brings
Earth towards you just a wee little bit, off-setting the extra push away from
you that your feet gave Earth when you jumped.
Isaac Newton presented the first ever mathematical description of
gravity in 1687. I admit that I know nothing about gravitation, except that it
is all around me. I do recall the myth that Newton was sitting under a tree
when an apple fell on his head.
Supposedly, he then formulated his law of gravity. Did the apple
actually fall on his head? I doubt it. But at his childhood home in the village
of Woolsthorpe, England, he probably did witness an apple fall from a tree.
During the last half of the nineteenth century physicists realized
that Newton's theory of gravity did not accurately describe the orbit of
Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun. Mercury's elongated orbit precesses
slightly faster than Newton's theory predicts. Several unsuccessful attempts
were made to account for this discrepancy.
Newton’s theory, which assumes that gravity is a force, held sway
for more than two centuries, until superseded by Albert Einstein’s General
Theory of Relativity in 1915. A decade earlier, Einstein realized that mass and
energy are two aspects of one thing, and that space and time are interrelated,
a blended spacetime. With General Relativity, Einstein treated gravity not as a
force, but as the geometry of spacetime. The geometry of spacetime is curved by
the mass-energy of matter, and the curvature instructs matter how to move.
Now comes the hard part. When Roy Bishop, emeritus professor of
Physics at Acadia University, pointed out to me that gravitation is geometry,
and not a force at all, I didn’t believe him at first. But Dr. Bishop is the
most brilliant person I have even had the privilege of knowing. Recently he
described gravity this way, and he is right:
“Einstein spent several years
in an eventual successful attempt to include gravity in a modified description
of spacetime. Early in his progress toward that goal Einstein had what he
called the happiest thought of his life — that if a person were to fall off the
roof of a house, while falling she would not feel a force of gravity. Before
she falls, she feels the force of the roof supporting her. When her fall comes
to its abrupt halt she feels the ground pushing against her. If she cannot feel
a force of gravity while she is falling, why pretend that she felt a force of
gravity when the roof supported her before she fell, or that she feels a force
of gravity when she is lying on the ground?
“When thinking about the
falling lady, Einstein had the fantastic insight that perhaps gravity never was
a force. By late in 1915 he had that insight in elegant mathematical form such
that the resulting theory, General Relativity, can be used to make precise
predictions concerning gravitation.”
Einstein was elated when, on November 18, 1915, he found that his
General Theory of Relativity predicted the measured precession of
Mercury’s orbit. According to his friend and biographer Abraham Pais: “This
discovery was, I believe, by far the strongest emotional experience in
Einstein’s scientific life, perhaps in all his life.” Pais then continues with
five words that crystallize that profound experience: “Nature had spoken to
him.” After several years of work, on that day Einstein knew that he was the
only person on Earth who understood gravity!
Today, there are thousands of people who understand gravity. Roy is one of them. Most of us, including me, are not one of
them. But reading it described so well
is one of the pleasures we can feel as we try to appreciate the wonderful
cosmos in which we live. Not only does General Relativity correctly predict the
precession of Mercury’s orbit, but it is essential to the programs used in the
GPS navigation system, and it describes the gravitational waves (ripples in the
geometry of spacetime) generated by two coalescing black holes, directly
detected 100 years after 1915 by LIGO, the Laser Interferometer
Gravitational-Wave Observatory.
(End)
