Archive for February 2011
Audrey Silk: Now in Brooklyn, Homegrown Tobacco: Local, Rebellious and Tax Free
By Manny Fernandez
“The cigarettes Audrey Silk used to smoke — Parliament Lights — are made at a factory in Richmond, Va. The cigarettes she smokes these days are made and grown in Brooklyn, at her house.
Ms. Silk’s backyard is home to raspberry and rose bushes, geraniums, impatiens and 100 tobacco plants in gardening buckets near her wooden deck. Inside her house, around the corner from Flatbush Avenue, in Marine Park, she has to be careful stepping into her basement — one wrong move could ruin her cigarettes. Dozens of tobacco leaves hang there, drying on wires she has strung across the room, where they turn a crisp light brown as they age above a stack of her old Springsteen records.
She talks about cartons and packs in relation to crops and seeds. Planted in 2009, her first crop— 25 plants of Golden Seal Special Burley tobacco — produced nine cartons of cigarettes. Ms. Silk would have spent more than $1,000 had she bought nine cartons in parts of New York City. Instead, she spent $240, mostly for the trays, the buckets and plant food.”
Ziona Chana: Man has 39 wives & 94 kids.
Reuters
“The more, the merrier is certainly true for Ziona Chana, a 66-year-old
man in India’s remote northeast who has 39 wives, 94 children and 33 grandchildren — and wouldn’t mind having more.
They all live in a four-story building with 100 rooms in a mountainous village in Mizoram state, sharing borders with Myanmar and Bangladesh, media reports said.
‘I once married 10 women in one year,’ he was quoted as saying.
His wives share a dormitory near Ziona’s private bedroom and locals said he likes to have seven or eight of them by his side at all times.
The sons and their wives, and all their children, live in different rooms in the same building, but share a common kitchen.”
I love people.
I, like a lot of people, read quite a bit of news online. The stories that I find the most interesting, and that tend to linger with me, are about people. Not famous* people, but instead quasi-regular people whose stories intrigue me. This blog will simply be a place to store some of these articles.
*I will, occasionally, post an article about someone that some might consider famous, but probably rarely and definitely not anyone who is in the headlines regularly.
Priscilla Pomerantz: Little girl is allergic to cold
“Nine-year-old Priscilla Pomerantz can’t play in the snow, eat ice cream or walk her dog during the winter. She can’t get cold at all, because she suffers from an allergy called cold urticaria. For Priscilla, air temperatures below 70 degrees — or even eating chilly foods — trigger an allergic reaction of hives, swelling and difficulty breathing. Left untreated, the cold could literally kill her.
‘I do worry about it. It’s something that we worry about everyday,’ Craig Pomerantz, her father, told TODAY.
Priscilla was diagnosed two years ago, after she broke out in hives while swimming. At
first her mother thought she must be allergic to sunscreen. But after weeks of testing,
doctors determined the problem was cold — using an ice cube as a tester.”
Tetsuro Ahiko: The last Japanese man remaining in Kazakhstan: A Kafkian tale of the plight of a Japanese POW in the Soviet Union
By Richard Orange and Ikuru Kuwajima, photos by Ikuru Kuwajima
“Tetsuro Ahiko has his eyes closed now. The vodka has begun to affect him, and he rocks a little towards the battered cassette player from where the music―a shrill chorus of young girls’ voices―is coming. He starts to sing along under his breath: ‘Shoulder to shoulder, I walk to school with my brother, thanks to the soldiers… thanks to the soldiers that died for the nation, for the dear nation.’ As the last voices die away, the room, in a cramped Soviet flat in a crumbling block in a impoverised town in the middle of the icy, windswept steppes of Kazakhstan, comes back into focus. ‘I forgot Japanese,’ he says. ‘But I didn’t forget the songs that I listened to in my childhood.’
This cassette of World War II military songs, long since forgotten as part of a shameful past back in Japan, is one of the handful of tokens he keeps of a life that was snatched away from him one day in 1948, when, instead of repatriating him from his military school on Sakhalin Island, Soviet troops put Mr Ahiko on a train to the Gulag work camps. More than 60 years later, Mr Ahiko is still here.”
Maria Altmann dies at 94; won fight for return of Klimt portrait seized by Nazis
“Maria Altmann, who escaped Nazi-occupied Vienna as a newlywed and returned to wage a triumphant fight to recover Gustav Klimt‘s iconic gold portrait of her remarkable aunt, has died. She was 94.
Altmann died Monday at her Cheviot Hills home after a long illness, said family friend E. Randol Schoenberg.
Altmann was an 82-year-old grandmother living in Cheviot Hills in 1998 when she enlisted Schoenberg, an attorney who was the son of a friend, to investigate the Nazi theft of her Jewish family’s Klimt collection. The collection included Klimt’s famous ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer,’ hanging in the Austrian National Gallery.
The seemingly unwinnable battle took Altmann and Schoenberg to the U.S. Supreme Court — which ruled that the case could go forward. An Austrian mediation panel ultimately awarded Altmann and four other heirs the five Klimt paintings in January 2006.”
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