February 8 in History

via Alexis:

It’s February 8th. Today marks the 45th anniversary of the Orangeburg Massacre, the first incident on a U.S. college campus in which unarmed student protesters were killed. South Carolina highway patrol men opened fire on a group of students protesting the segregation of a local bowling alley, killing three and injuring 27 others.

One of the students shot that night was my father, Joe Lambright.

This incident pre-dated the Kent State Massacre of 1970, but got little to no media coverage. It has since been incorporated into the curriculum in SC, which is a big step, but there’s still some work needing to be done. This is American history. More Americans need to know about it.

She’s right; nobody talks about this and more people should know it happened. Here’s more info.

We’ve come a long way as a country with segregation. But, even though it’s not always explicit or across racial lines anymore, it still exists. Stand up to it, America.

Canadian makes very cool map of United States

This map uses dirt from every state, and it’s made by an 85-year-old retired ad agency art director. His favorite soils came from Colorado (“quite reddish”), Maine (“pale and sandy”), and Mississippi and Alabama (“deeply colored with iron oxide”). The soils have varying degrees of acidity, and each is a slightly different color.

Read more about the map and Les Gregor’s process. If you like it, you can purchase one! Personally, I love how gritty and ‘American’ it feels (yes, including the irony of the artist’s home country) and would LOVE to own one…

Register to Vote Before the November Elections

Via usagov:

There’s still time to register to vote before the November elections. Find state registration deadlines, eligibility and more.

Deadlines are rapidly approaching and are a bit different in each state, so don’t wait to register. It’s your civic responsibility to vote even if you don’t like the candidates or you have a lot of work on voting day or the lines are too long. Every vote counts. If you’re not registered, take that step TODAY.

I, in the past, thought about getting a Mohawk myself. But my team keeps on discouraging me. And now that [Bobak Ferdowski]’s received marriage proposals and thousands of new Twitter followers, I think I’m going to go back to my team and see if it makes sense.

President Barack Obama, in a call with NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover team.

Of all the promises, this is not one I need to see follow-through on (hilarious as it would be). Good thing we’ve seen other clear results. This November, I’ll vote Obama whether he has a Mohawk or not.

I’m not a huge fireworks person, though I do enjoy shared experiences with people in my community. So, on July 4th, I found myself happily on the roof enjoying a beer and the white noise of people on surrounding rooftops combined with the randomly distributed boom of fireworks in 5 different directions. Best of all, I was treated to a heat lightning storm and had one of those I-love-where-I-live moments.

This video is what grew out of it on a lazy, unplanned Friday night.

The farm bill was passed with the Healthy Food Financing Initiative!

April 27, 2012 – New York, NY – Yesterday with wide bipartisan support, the Senate Agriculture Committee passed the Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act of 2012 (also known as the Farm Bill), which for the first time will officially establish a national Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI) at the United States Department of Agriculture with $125 million. The inclusion of HFFI is a significant win for community leaders from across the country seeking to bring healthy food and jobs to their communities. PolicyLink and its partners, The Reinvestment Fund, and The Food Trust, along with local, state and national healthy food advocates, have been working for many years to expand fresh food access in underserved areas throughout the U.S.

This is very exciting legislation! Read the full press release here. You can also check out the full contents of the Farm Bill here. It helps better protect farmers against disproportionate risk, consolidates and streamlines existing programs, improves accountability and program integrity with checks on how tax dollars are being used and public benefits being accessed, and will grow America’s agricultural economy. And, it reduces debt.

Thumbs up, government!

Happy Tax Day! If you’re #ProudToPay, tweet it.

Learn why people are #ProudToPay taxes today, and share some of your own reasons! At the end of the day, we should feel very lucky to live in a country where taxes support the public good and many freedoms that we take for granted, even if we do grumble while money leaves our bank accounts.

Tax Day is also (perhaps ironically?) the day that we are most supportive of eachother and our communities. People are making contributions to the public good, the working poor receive a little extra help, and some post offices even stay open late (moreso than before Christmas!). Warm fuzzies, am I right?

[Editor’s Note: Read Lauren’s awesome offshoot blog post! Great thoughts.]

The blog least helpful shared this gem today. There’s so much ridiculousness to point out here, so instead, I’ll share what I learned through amazon research of Justin “justin G”. He has written 6 other reviews that definitely are in his voice (though a little more ‘normal’), purchased items including breaking glass sound effects, A World History of Photography, and a Weller SP23LK 25-Watt Soldering Iron, has an Interest of F-U, and looks like this:
Pop-upView Separately

The blog least helpful shared this gem today. There’s so much ridiculousness to point out here, so instead, I’ll share what I learned through amazon research of Justin “justin G”.

He has written 6 other reviews that definitely are in his voice (though a little more ‘normal’), purchased items including breaking glass sound effects, A World History of Photography, and a Weller SP23LK 25-Watt Soldering Iron, has an Interest of F-U, and looks like this:

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