OK. First things first. Yesterday, August 17th, was a significant day in my family. My cousin Meggie Pie had a baby boy at eight pounds and change. His name is Andrew Howard Stein.
My little baby brother got himself engaged yesterday, and it was about time. In spite of the fact that he and Hillary have already made tentative wedding plans, he actually managed to surprise her! Yay you guys.
I continue to be bewitched by the New York documentary. The other night, I was very tired and kept dozing off. I kept worrying that I would miss the bit about the Triangle fire, which I’d read about in my Story of America cards when I was little. I was always fascinated by it but didn’t remember the particulars. I may never have really known the particulars. Well, I thought I’d have to go back and see if I’d missed it but it turns out they dedicated about half an hour to the incident. It was pretty unbelievable. As much as it’s in the news and everyone is arguing about its authority right now (with which I agree, by the way), I’m going to link to the Wikipedia article. In the documentary, voiceover actors read through accounts of the incident, written by people who were there. People standing in Washington Square Park were confused by the flames, and then they saw giant bundles of cloth being thrown out of the windows. Only they hit the ground with a different kind of force than bundles of cloth — it turns out they were the bodies of the girls who worked there who would rather fall to their deaths than be eaten by the flames. The women and girls who worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory were locked in from the outside by the owners so that union organizers couldn’t sneak in and observe the horrible working conditions. The building was thus rendered extremely hazardous — even though the building had fire exits built in, they were obviously useless if locked from the outside.
I also saw The Magdalen Sisters, which is another offering of a view into the horrible ways women were treated on another continent, in another time. Again, a link to the Wikipedia article on Magdalen Asylums. The film is based on a documentary that seemed to have been made in the late 1990s about the Magdalen Asylums in Ireland. The documentary interviews different women who were forced into the prison-like asylums and the movie is pretty specifically based on their stories. At first, the Magdalen Asylums were meant to help women who had worked as prostitutes, but later on (and in particular the 1940s-1960s), a woman’s (or in many cases, girl’s) family might force her to go to an asylum if she’d been raped or in some cases, if she was just pretty or flirty. It’s pretty awful. I highly recommend watching it. Both the movie and the documentary are on DVD.
On a completely unrelated topic, Hendrik Hertzberg said, as usual, the most fabulous stuff in The New Yorker this week. A highlight:
Virtually all those who voted against Lieberman, and many, probably most, of those who voted for him, oppose the Iraq war, as does a solid majority—sixty per cent, according to a CNN poll released last Wednesday—of the American public. But they oppose it because, among other reasons, they believe that it has harmed, not helped, that larger struggle. At the end of the week, after British authorities foiled what was evidently a large-scale plot to destroy transatlantic airliners and murder thousands of passengers, President Bush called the plot “a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom.” But the war in Iraq is wholly irrelevant to the means chosen by the London terrorists, and the means that thwarted them—dogged police work, lawful surveillance, international coöperation—are precisely those which have been gratuitously starved or stymied on account of the material, political, and human resources that have been, and continue to be, wasted in Iraq. Why not change the game to one that relies less on gambling and bluff and more on wisdom, planning, and (in every sense) intelligence? — The New Yorker, 8/21/06
On a much lighter note, I have finally used my brand-new, bright-red Cuisinart. I made melon soup. I have also discovered that Trader Joe’s has THE VERY BEST PUMPKIN SEEDS EVER. Other than ones you bake yourself, of course. But who has pumpkins to carve up just for seeds right now?
