Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant is really delightful and I urge you all to read it!
(via karkadann)
Reblogs of inspiring things. And, uh, cute and funny stuff as well?
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Stunning Green Landscapes
Green landscapes captured by Polish photographers Marek Kiedrowski and Krzysztof Browko. All these gorgeous photos were taken in Toscana, Italy and in Moravia, a historical region of the Czech Republic.
(via gentlemandeerlord)
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Josephine Baker, later known as ‘Bronze Venus’, ‘Black Pearl’ and ‘Créole Goddess’ was born in America in 1906 and later moved to France to become a singer, dancer, and actress. She was the first African-American woman to star in a major motion picture, and became famous worldwide.
Though she grew up as a maid in wealthy white households she eventually became an exotic dancer in France, famously appearing in next to no clothing, and became a French citizen in 1937.
Ernest Hemingway referred to Baker as ‘the most sensational woman anyone ever saw’ and she received approximately 1500 marriage proposals in her life time. She became a muse for Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Christian Dior. She had a variety of exotic pets including a cheetah named Chiquita, a chimpanzee named Ethel, a pig named Albert, a snake named Kiki, a goat, a parrot, parakeets, fish, three cats, and seven dogs.
When WWII broke out, Baker became a volunteer spy for France, and assisted the French Resistance by smuggling messages written in invisible ink on sheet music. She made great efforts to aid those in danger of enemy attack, sent Christmas presents to French soldiers, and smuggled information she gathered in Spain back to France by pinning notes containing the information on the inside of her underwear. She was awarded the Medal of Resistance with Rosette and later named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.
Baker also aided many civil rights movements by refusing to perform to segregated audiences and storming out of a club in Manhattan with actress Grace Kelly after she was refused service. She worked with the NAACP and spoke at a Washington march alongside Martin Luther King Jr. as the only official female speaker. Baker was actually asked by Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow to take his place as leader of the American Civil Rights Movement, but Baker declined on the grounds her twelve adopted children ‘were too young to lose their mother’.
Baker died in 1975, four days after her final show, attended by such names as Mick Jagger, Shirley Bassey, and Liza Minnelli.
Oh and she was queer and had a relationship with Frida Kahlo. All around badass.
I’d like a movie about her life too, please.
Also in favor of a movie about this lady. Holy cow, was she awesome.
(via summonerskies)
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Golden armband with Herakles knot
Armband inlaid with garnets, emeralds and enamels. The herakles knot was thought to cure wounds and evert evil. This made the knot a very popular piece of jewellery.
Hellenistic
3rd - 2nd century BC
Source: The Metropolitan Museum
(via dduane)
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Think Progress’s article on women in film: The Number Of Women In Top-Grossing Movies Hits Five-Year Low. What Are Women For In Hollywood?
Women are eye-candy, particularly if they’re young. 31.6 percent of the 4,475 characters with speaking parts who appeared in the 100 highest-grossing movies in 2012 who appeared in “sexualized attire.” 56.6 percent of characters aged 13-20 appeared on-screen in such clothing, as did 39.9 percent of characters aged 21 to 39, and that number fell to 16.4 percent for characters aged 40-64. It’s no surprise that Hollywood has a particularly distasteful attitude towards middle-aged women—as Vulture revealed in a startling analysis, leading men tend to get older, but their female love interests stay in a similar age range, shutting middle-aged actresses out of a huge range of parts where they’d be paired against men their own ages. But it is actually remarkable that teenaged characters are actually portrayed more sexually than characters aged 21-39, who might be expected to have more sex and sexual autonomy.
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