A completely useless thing that I am inordinately pleased with.  My username is AurorNettle19413 and to the surprise of no one I’m in Ravenclaw.  Let’s be friends?

dan-gria:

REBLOG TO SUPPORT RUE AND CINNA

Recently the actors who play Rue and Cinna have come under attack from Racist fans of the Hunger Games. Reblog if you support the casting of Amandla Stenberg, the adorable and talented actress who plays Rue, and Lenny Kravitz, the unquestionable genius who plays Cinna.

http://www.eonline.com/news/hunger_games_lenny_kravitz_amandla/304193?cmpid=sn-000000-twitterfeed-365-top_stories&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=twitterfeed_celebrities_top_stories&dlvrit=79438

Cinna is my favorite character in the books, and Lenny Kravitz did an excellent job playing him.  Anyone who disagrees can fight me.

Amandla Stenberg was also superb and significantly contributed to moving me to weep for a solid fifteen minutes. 

theatlantic:

Remembering the Nazi Scientist Who Built the Rockets for Apollo

Few figures in the history of technology provoke a reaction as quickly as Wernher von Braun. The rocket scientist was a card-carrying Nazi who built the world’s first ballistic missile with slave labor from concentration camps. As the war wound down, he surrendered to the Americans and took his rocket-building team and talents to the United States. Eventually, he became a leader in the American space program, building the rocket (the Saturn V) that carried Apollo 11 to the moon. Today would have been his 100th birthday. He died in 1977.

Roger Launius, a senior curator in the Space History Division of the National Air and Space Museum, wrote a nuanced evaluation of the man’s life.

Wernher von Braun was a stunningly successful advocate for space exploration and has appropriately been celebrated for those efforts. But because he was also willing to build a ballistic missile for Hitler’s Germany, with all of connotations that implied in the devastation and terror of World War II, many of his ideals have also been appropriately questioned. For some he was a visionary who foresaw the potential of human spaceflight, but for others he was little more than an arms merchant who developed brutal weapons of mass destruction. In reality, he seems to have been something of both.

Today, I was on the train with three high school students, one of whom told a joke that the other two didn’t get.  This was not because it was a terrible joke (though it was).  They didn’t get the joke because they didn’t know who Neil Armstrong was.   I could have screamed.

For extra fun, I was reading Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Space Chronicles at the time.  (Awesome book, by the way!)  Talk about an education crisis. 

Not sure how this ranks in relation to my classmate at a top tier law school who hadn’t heard of John Adams or René Descartes…  (True story!)

Emergency wisdom tooth extraction: Friday.

Moot court oral arguments: Sunday.

This is going to be an awesome weekend.

the-seed-of-europe:

Eugene Jacques Bullard (9 October 1894 – 12 October 1961) was one of the only two black military pilots in World War I and warded the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor. Born in Columbus, Georgia, he traveled to Paris and decided to stay at the outbreak of the war in 1914, enlisting for service with the French Foreign Legion. It was at Verdun in 1916 that he was wounded while flying with the Lafayette Flying Corps and awarded the Croix de Guerre for his service. When the US entered the war, it convened a medical board to enlist Americans serving with the Lafayette. Though Bullard passed his medical examination, he was denied enlistment because blacks were barred from flying US planes. 

Bullard was discharged from the French Air Force for fighting with an officer, but continued to fight in the French infantry until the Armistice. After the end of the war, Bullard remained in Paris working at nightclubs, and eventually opened his own, befriending many American celebrities that congregated in Paris, such as Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes and Louis Armstrong. During WWII, Bullard, fluent in German, served the French by spying on Germans who frequented his club. However, after the invasion of France, Bullard fled with his family first to the south of France, where he fought with the Resistance on Orléans and was seriously wounded in the spine, then Spain and eventually returned to the US in 1940.

Bullard never fully recovered from his injury, and what’s more, in the US he was faced with the fact that the fame and respect he enjoyed in France was not to follow him back to his homeland. He earned a living through various odd jobs - as a perfume salesman, a security guard and an interpreter for Louis Armstrong - but his health problems serious restricted his activities. In 1949, Bullard participated and was beaten in the Peekskill Riots at a benefit concert for the Civil Rights Congress. By the 1950s, few people knew anything of who Bullard was in his own home country despite the famous friendships he had once enjoyed and his 15 French medals. He was made a chevaliér of the Legion of Honor in 1959, but died in poverty and obscurity in New York in 1961 of stomach cancer. He was buried with military honors by French officers in the French War Veterans’ section of Flushing Cemetery in the Queens, NY.

(Source.)

J. M. W. Turner, The Harbor of Dieppe

J. M. W. Turner, Cologne: The Arrival of a Packet Boat: Evening

I got a new camera and also went a little overboard reorganizing my books.  For the first time in my life, I have more room for books than I have books.  Might have lost my head for a moment there, right up until I remembered that all categorization is arbitrary and I should just put books wherever I would be able to find them. 

It is interesting to note that I officially have more than a shelf-full of Diana Wynne Jones books.  Life goal achieved.