ken atchity door to door: November 2023

Funny Notes

Creativity Passive Aggressive

We’re fairly certain one of the biggest disputes between people who live together is dirty dishes. Leaving a note is the ultimate passive-aggressive move, but honestly, if you’re able to add a little bit of creativity to it, then maybe it’s not so bad?

Reddit.com/asardoni

We’d like to assume this note came after multiple times the recipient of the note was asked to start doing the dishes more often. A last resort, if you will.

It’s a SPOON SPOON!

This one feels supremely justified and quite a creative solution. Nobody wants all kinds of different hands touching the object that’s going into their mouth.

Reddit.com/Sinc3rIT

We think it’s a great idea and applaud whoever thought of it. But also, we can’t let go of the fact that they seriously missed the opportunity to say SPOON SPOON!

Sorry Not Sorry

The old adage "what goes around comes around" seems to have played out in a recent employment situation. The employer in question appeared to lack empathy when their employee required time off for personal reasons. In response, the employee delivered a scathing and sarcastic "apology," suggesting that their need for time off was not taken seriously by their employer.

Imgur.com/jBSQM0N

While this may seem harsh, it's possible that the employer's lack of understanding was equally unforgivable. Perhaps this situation will serve as a lesson to the employer, reminding them to treat their employees with compassion and respect, especially in difficult circumstances. In the end, it's crucial for companies to prioritize the well-being of their staff, recognizing that happy employees make for a productive and successful workplace.

A Real Funny Guy

To be honest, we are not sure if this practical joke is some type of revenge thing or rather a gag between friends or family members. What we do know is, that momentary feeling when you see a piece of paper on your windshield and your heart drops into your stomach is not fun, to say the least.

Twitter/@saved_a_click

I guess we’ll never know what the receiver did to deserve this prank, but we imagine it probably did the trick. And we will also never know how the receiver reacted to the fake ticket. What we do know is that they took a photo of it and posted it on social media. So they didn't ignore it, that's for sure.

Touching Reindeers

Whoever wrote this original note wasn’t politely asking their co-workers not to touch their mug. As far as they’re concerned, it’s a given that no one touches the reindeer mug! After all, the reindeer mug is sacred. It was forged in the mines of Lapland and is only ever drunk out of by Santa Claus himself and this employee.

Reddit.com/Pistolfist

Clearly, this assumption is just begging for the mug to be touched — and touched it was. Luckily for the guy who wrote the note, it seems that it was only touched, nothing more. But maybe that makes it worse? You'll have to ask him. And hopefully, coffee time isn't too awkward.

A Well Deserved Goodbye

The passive-aggressiveness is just oozing from every angle of this letter. There is nothing apologetic about this note, and from the sounds of it, rightfully so. It's just downright direct, takes no prisoners and gets down to brass tacks - just the way we like it (as innocent bystanders, that is).

Reddit.com/Leviathin

By reading this letter and a few others on this list, it is safe to say that we think it’s time employers wake up and start treating their employees like human beings. The better the work conditions, the less likely employers will be to receive resignation letters like this one, calling them out on their BS.

#LOL

Fear not what is before you; for those that care are behind you.

Photo by © Woburn safari park

Happy Thanksgiving

Things that make you go hmmmmmm...

Letter from actor Cary Grant to Moe Howard of the Three Stooges.

Oldest Infant Burial Found In The Netherlands

Dutch archaeologists, have discovered a 6,000 year old Stone Age burial, of a mother cradling a baby in her arm.

It was found in Nieuwegein, and is the oldest infant burial, ever found in the Netherlands.

They also discovered four other skeletons.

One of them was the skeleton of a young woman of 20-30 years of age.

At first they didnt realise there was an infant with the young woman.

It was the woman's right arm bent at an angle, that suggested there was something in her arms.

Archaeologists then discovered small bone fragments, pieces of a clavicle, skull and jawbone complete with milk teeth.

The teeth were so small, they deduced these remains belonged to a newborn.
The archaeological team hope to determine through DNA analysis, that the skeletons are that of a mother and her child.

#LOL

Master of his Craft - Raffaelle Monti

A Photographer’s Parents Wave Farewell

Deanna Dikeman’s portrait series doubles as a family album, compressing nearly three decades of her parents’ adieux into a deft and affecting chronology.Photographs by Deanna Dikeman

Deanna Dikeman’s parents sold her childhood home, in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1990, when they were in their early seventies. They moved to a bright-red ranch house in the same town, which they filled with all their old furniture. Dikeman, a photographer then in her thirties, spent many visits documenting the idyll of their retirement. Her father, once a traffic manager at a grain-processing corporation, tended to tomato plants in the backyard. Her mother fried chicken and baked rhubarb pie, storing fresh vegetables in the freezer to last them through the cold. Every Memorial Day, they stuffed the trunk of their blue Buick with flowers and drove to the local cemetery to decorate graves.

At the end of their daughter’s visits, like countless other mothers and fathers in the suburbs, Dikeman’s parents would stand outside the house to send her off while she got in her car and drove away. One day in 1991, she thought to photograph them in this pose, moved by a mounting awareness that the peaceful years would not last forever. Dikeman’s mother wore indigo shorts and a bright pink blouse that morning; her father, in beige slacks, lingered behind her on the lawn, in the ragged shade of a maple tree. The image shows their arms rising together in a farewell wave. For more than twenty years, during every departure thereafter, Dikeman photographed her parents at the same moment, rolling down her car window and aiming her lens toward their home. Dikeman’s mother was known to scold her daughter for her incessant photography. “Oh, Deanna, put that thing away,” she’d say. Both parents followed her outdoors anyway.

In “Leaving and Waving,” a portrait series that doubles as a family album, Dikeman compresses nearly three decades of these adieux into a deft and affecting chronology. (In 2009, she published a portion of the series as a book titled “27 Good-byes.”) Each image reiterates the quiet loyalty of her parents’ tradition. They recede into the warm glow of the garage on rainy evenings and laugh under the eaves in better weather. In summer, they blow kisses from the driveway. In winter, they wear scarves and stand behind snowbanks. Inevitably, they age. A few of Dikeman’s portraits, cropped to include the interior of the departing car, convey the parallel progress of her own life. The hand that clutches her camera lens, sometimes visible in the side mirrors, eventually sheds its wedding band. Early photographs show the matted fur of an old dog’s ears and the blurred face of her baby son. In later shots, the boy is grown and behind the wheel, backing down the driveway as Dikeman photographs her elderly parents from the passenger seat.

Dikeman’s father died first, late in 2009, having appeared in the series for the last time that August. In his final image, he rests one hand on the grip of a quad cane and waves with the other, bracing himself between a car bumper and his wife’s side. “No more pictures, Deanna,” Dikeman’s mother told her after his death, a few weeks later. But it was a mild protest. Dikeman photographed her outside the house, sometimes accompanied by relatives, until 2017, when her mother relocated to a retirement facility. She kept waving for the camera as old age crimped her fingers. Later that year, she died in her sleep.

Most of the images in “Leaving and Waving” are offhand snapshots, captured in the brief moments of a car’s retreat. Only the final shot, of an empty driveway, allowed Dikeman more time. After her mother’s funeral, she set up a tripod on the street and shot fifty frames while her sister waited at a nearby Starbucks. Last spring, her son left her own home, in Columbia, Missouri, to drive east for his first job out of college. They loaded up his car with belongings, and, as it idled in the driveway, he looked at his mother and asked, “Aren’t you going to take a picture?” Dikeman, a bit surprised, rushed inside to retrieve her camera and, for the first time, accept a fresh role in an old ritual.

via The New Yorker

Highway uses lasers to combat driver fatigue on highways in Eastern China

Love Story

Monumental cemetery in Milan, Italy. The tomb is by Riccardo Piter, he is Giorgio Moroni, industrialist, she is his wife Ilka Scarneo, operetta actress. True meaning of Forever Together.

Amazing Photos

Margaret Bourke-White, a photographer for LIFE magazine, prepares to take a photo from one of the eagles on the 61st floor of the Chrysler Building in New York City in . 1934

Credit: sebcolorisation on Instagram

historycolored.com

#history #usa #nyc

This $2 Purchase Turned Out To Be “The Holy Grail Of Photography.”

When collector Randy Guijarro bought some old photos back in 2010, one in particular stood out to him: a black-and-white picture of people playing croquet in the country side.

He had no idea, however, just how significant that photo was. Americana expert Kagin’s Inc. recently confirmed that the people featured in the photo are none other than legendary outlaw Billy the Kid and his gang of Regulators.

This is only the second known photo of Billy the Kid, and the first ever featuring the Regulators. In 2011, a photo from 1880 featuring Billy the Kid sold for $2.3 million at an auction. Guijarro’s photo, which dates back to 1878, is expected to fetch $5 million! Jeff Aiello, the executive director of a new Billy the Kid documentary called “Billy the Kid – New Evidence,” told Dale Yurong of ABC 30 that tehis photograph is “the rarest photograph in the world.” And here’s the best part: th price Guijarro paid for this historic photo? Two dollars…talk about a great investment!

via Dusty Old Things

Cajun Mom Jokes!

Interesting Fact

Did you know that contrary to popular belief, the "human remains" in Pompeii are not petrified bodies, rather, they're made out of plaster that's been poured into the molds that the decayed bodies left in the volcanic ash?

Brilliant Short film L'ALTRA PAR by Steve Cutts [via Nina Reznick]

I used to think we can’t have too much communication, but I have to admit that’s no longer the case. Between the cell phone we carry like physical appendages, and the televisions that hover in the background of our lives spouting the most dramatic bad news that comes across the net, we are drowning in communication. How does a writer find a way to communicate the unique thoughts, feeling, and vision that may be inside? How do we writers maintain the motivating belief that what’s inside us individually is important or even relevant? That is the most important challenge we writers face. And now that AI has asserted its ever-presence, how we face that challenge has never been more crucial to how we as humans continue to evolve. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this. Hurrah to the filmmakers!

The Egyptian film "L'ALTRA PAR", which lasted only 2 minutes, won the award for best short film at the Venice Film Festival. The director is 20 years old. The film describes how people get caught up in technology and forget about the best things in life, human coexistence with love and brotherhood. @steve_cutts

Yoga Gives Back

Written by Kayoko Mitsumatsu

From Posture To Power: Microcredit Changes Lives On Both Sides of the Ocean

We can talk about making change. But affecting real change in the world comes from impacting the lives of individuals. It comes from empowering people to be independent and able to make a living on their own while at the same time being fully integrated in our interdependent global community. Sometimes it takes something that seems to be radical to make this change, but these shifts can be deceptively small. They can be even as small (or as large) as the cost of a Los Angeles Yoga class.

How could this be? In the practice of microcredit, lending seemingly small amounts of money to small-scale entrepreneurs allows them to succeed and change their circumstances. This is the fundamental basis of microcredit’s transformative power; it’s a revolutionary concept in finance. This practice shifts the emphasis from financial transactions being focused only about large loans and large scale businesses, which are out of reach of many one-person operations, institutions and organizations – to lending practices that actually make a positive difference in a person’s life. Microcredit practices based on social justice and empowerment operate through a combination of small-scale loans based on trust and community support, with structured repayment plans and programs that encourage savings. In these situations, people actually have the opportunity to solidify long-term change in their lives.

Dr. Muhammad Yunus and the Yoga Gives Back Team: Joel Bender, Leslie Hendry, Dr. Muhammad Yunus and Kayoko Mitsumatsu (left-right)

In 2006, economist Dr. Muhammad Yunus and the institution he founded, the Grameen Bank, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This award was in recognition of their revolutionary efforts to create this micro-credit model, support sustainable economic practices, and provide an alternative to what were exploitive norms. When a person is caught in a cycle of poverty, they may become trapped in the system, particularly since large banking institutions have historically ignored people without assets or credit histories, who are just starting out and who may not have already proven themselves. Most banks prefer to lend large sums of money that represent a greater profit margin and are set up only for large loans in order to make a profit themselves. And even making it more challenging, people at the bottom of the economic scale worldwide have had to rely on moneylenders charging usurious terms and interest rates to obtain funds to plant the next crop, buy inventory of new equipment, or upgrade a business in any way. Institutions such as the Grameen Bank and their affiliates are offering another approach. It’s one that has significantly impacted millions of people.

As Dr. Yunus described in an exclusive interview with Yoga Gives Back in May, 2009, “We started in 1976, and today within Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, eight million people borrow micro loans, ninety-seven percent of them women.” This represents an enormous potential for change and empowerment that just did not exist on a large scale in this form prior to 1976.

There is a social cycle in economics, and Dr. Yunus explained this: “Poverty is not inside the person. Poverty is forced from outside. Poor people are as capable [a] human being as anybody else. They have the same power and energy, same potential. But they are denied such facilities. They cannot express themselves. Money is one of the most important items missing in their lives. You need a dollar to catch a dollar. You cannot catch a dollar with an empty hand. So, that first dollar, nobody has given to her. So she remains dependent on someone else. She has to be hired, to slave; she has to work to make food available on the table. What we have done, we have put that first dollar into her hands as a banking proposition. Conventional banks never come to the poor people. They go to rich people to make more money. The person who does not have a dollar – she cannot get it. So we did it. We did it in a way that is affordable to her. Because we do not insist on collateral. There is no collateral.”

While that may seem like a radical concept, the Grameen Bank has proven that their success is much more than ideological. Dr Yunus cited statistics for us, “The repayment rate is almost 100%, without collateral or anything. This is the strength of microcredit which is now spread all over the world. There are by now at least 150 million borrowers in the world today. Bu it is still very small comparing to the need. We need more microcredit organizations in the world so that more people can be reached.”

Yoga Gives Back is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization begun in LA, with the goal to provide a way for Western Yoga practitioners to give back to India, the birthplace of Yoga, which has given us so much. We’re heeding Dr. Yunus’ call to reach more people through expanded opportunities for and awareness of microcredit and have targeted India and Indian families, women, and would-be entrepreneurs, who would be otherwise stuck in the cycle of poverty that Dr. Yunus described. Yoga Gives Back supports microfinancing operations in India, through the Grameen Foundation, headquartered in Washington, DC. Donations go directly to Grameen Koota, Bangalore, South India and our YGB awareness campaign focuses on the real stories of how poor women are changing their lives with small loans from Grameen Koota.

Ms. Vinatha M Reddy

Grameen Koota was started by visionary teacher and philanthropist, Ms. Vinatha M Reddy (pictured, above) in 1999, who learned about Nobel Peace Recipient Dr Muhammad Yunus’ microfinancing and immediately began exploring ways of replicating his work in her hometown. In 2000, she started providing small microcredit loans, averaging $25.00 a month, to fifty local women. Today, Grameen Koota’s work is reaching out to over 280,000 women in Bangalore, Mysore and many areas of Karnataka state, in South India, making real impact on these women’s lives as well as on the local economy.

Yoga Gives Back

The Los Angeles-based Yoga Gives Back has a worldwide reach and began out of the inspiration and dedication of my Yoga mentor Joel Bender and me. Our group has suddenly started growing almost daily and our mission is shared by a quickly expanding and loving Yoga community.

When I was growing up in Japan, which is a very middle-class society, I had never experienced or seen any real poverty, especially growing up in Tokyo in 1960s and 1970s, when Japan's post-war economic miracle was taking place. Then, I had a chance to live in Brazil in the late 1970s for two years, where as a teenager, I saw the divide between poverty and wealth, the reality of the real slums, kids on the streets begging every time you stopped the car at the traffic light, all very much like India. Social injustice hit me hard.

Once I started Yoga practice and feeling my life being so enriched by it , I felt a need to use my resources to help others. I was producing a documentary on Social Entrepreneurship and learned about microfinancing. I shared this information with Joel [featured in the teacher profile in this month’s issue of LA YOGA] who had been looking for the way he could give back to India since his first visit there – so we teamed up.

When I think about the growth of Yoga Gives Back thus far, I give a lot of credit to the entrepreneurship and volunteer spirit of Americans, willing to embrace and support a new grass roots campaign like ours.

Kayoko Mitsumatsu, co-founder of Yoga Gives Back, is a documentary filmmaker whose films deal with social justice issues, including First They Killed My Father a memoir of a Cambodia’s Killing Fields’ survivor.

A Life Changing Story of Microcredit: Jayashree

Jayashree

Jayashree lives in the suburbs of Bangalore and is married and the mother of two children. We visited her at her humble dirt floor one room home for the first time in 2007. We were touched by her warm smile and most generous hospitality, serving us hot tea and cookies.

Jayashree was born into a very poor family in Bangalore. When she was a child, her family’s financial situation became so severe that she had to drop out of school and work at a garment factory. She toiled throughout her childhood and after she got married at fifteen, her meager earnings had to support her ailing in-laws. She had two children. Her husband’s rickshaw business was not enough to pay her sons’ education or secure food for the family.

In 2007, Jayashree learned from her neighbors about Grameen Koota’s microcredit program and applied for her first loan. She was granted a first loan of 7,000 rupees ($175), and immediately bought her husband’s auto rickshaw. Owning their own rickshaw business increased their income significantly.

Jayashree was able to pay back her entire loan in one year and became eligible for her second loan in 2008. Having proven her diligence, her second loan amount doubled to 15,000 rupees ($375). This time, she bought a sewing machine and started stitching bags. The family’s earnings have now tripled and she is earning 150 rupees ($3.75) a day. In addition, she opened a small shop next to her house to sell her products which is earning her an additional 100 rupees ($2.50) a day.

She is sending her elder son to a medical school. Her son dreams of becoming a doctor and thanks his mother’s business for providing his education, their own home and daily food.

To participate in a Yoga practice where the proceeds support Yoga Gives Back and directly impact the transformation of not only your own life, but that of someone in India, start your Thanksgiving week at Yogaglo, Sunday, November 22, 10:00 A.M. - 12 noon. Some of the teachers include John Sahakian, Felicia Tomasko, Alexandra Aiken and Ally Hamilton; more to be announced. Yogaglo.com; yogagivesback.com.

For more information on Yoga Gives Back or to host a Yoga Gives Back class at your own studio or location, visit: yogagivesback.org or contact yogagivesback@earthlink.net.