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Wednesday, February 20, 2019

College voices resonating.
Again.
When do we start impacting society? college-ageds ask.

Now, the answer.

The Swarthmore chapter of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) backed a boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) resolution that would have the college divest itself of all financial interests that benefit the state of Israel.

The resolution, presented to Swarthmore’s Student Government Organization (SGO,) Kat Capossela Vice-President, was hotly contested by the Swarthmore Students for Israel (SSFI).

The issue was a source of lots of anger and recriminations, reflective of the purity of conviction symptomatic of impassioned twenty-year olds.
Kat, as an influential officer of the Swarthmore Student Government, maintained a professional distance from both camps. She took a lot of abuse and admitted that the period before the vote was personally trying, putting into question her run at the Presidency of the rganization.

In the event, the SGO voted down the resolution by a margin of 20-7 on Feb. 10.

And its impact on the reportage of newsworthy events?

The Swarthmore vote was the lead story in the Nation section of the Jewish Journal, the largest U.S. Jewish weekly outside New York City and one of the most widely read Jewish newspapers in the world.  The award-winning paper reaches over 150,000 individuals in print each week and over 500,000 unique users each month online.

If the coverage interests you, use this link:

https://apc01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fjewishjournal.com%2Fnews%2Fnation%2F293939%2Fbds-resolution-fails-at-swarthmore%2F&data=02%7C01%7C%7C3c0b6cfba84549dfc3ef08d696362f7e%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636861556793854279&sdata=rpupheThuC7eTOvZcGO7oMb35mQBTcSE0G0Y285gCKU%3D&reserved=0

Web Meister Responds: We applaud her professionalism and urge Kat to continue her commitment to the Swarthmore SGO, taking such events as intense learning experiences.

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Tagging Today
Wednesday, February 20, 2019

My 314th consecutive posting, committed to 5,000.

Time is 12.01am.
On Wednesday, Boston’s temperature will reach a high of 32* with a feels-like temperature of 27*.with mixed clouds.

Dinner is Roasted Boneless Leg of Lamb.

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Tick Tock photo
314 posts to date.
Today we’re at the 6.28% mark of my commitment,
the commitment a different way of marking the passage of time.

5,000 posts will take 13.69 years, taking me to a new phase of my life.
Will see thirteen “Winter-Spring Shoulder Season Calendar, Feb 14 to April 7.”

This shoulder calendar features a panoply of weather conditions, from stormy winter to lovely spring, the latter somewhat rare.

The most important takeaway this shoulder calendar is to avoid delusional expectations.
Accept that rarely will we see a mild day.
If we get one, hoorah!
But, basically, accept that for a while yet we will be dressing for wintry weather.

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Question of the Day
Who was Karl Lagerfeld?

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Elephant jokes to tell at a bar:
What did the elephant say to a naked man?

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Love your notes.
Contact me at existentialautotrip@hotmail.com

This from Sally in reference to yesterday’s posting on renaming Presidents’ Day.
Her comment:

Dear Dom,

With regards to a single day to honor all presidents defusing the meaning of the day, you are quite right.  We used to celebrate (no school, closed banks, etc.) - Lincoln on his birthday, February 12 - and Washington on his birthday, February 22.  Then the government thought to mix the two together when they decided to make most of the federally-recognized holidays fall on the Monday closest to the actual date of interest.  When was that?  Some time in the 1970s?  I disremember ...

Most of our presidents get forgotten. Many have little legacy.  Speaking of John Tyler, our 10th president, he worked very hard to leave some kind of legacy, presidential or otherwise.  Phillip and I made friends with his grandson some years ago - yes, his GRANDSON, who is still hale and hearty today at age 89.  That's an interesting story in itself (his existence, that is, more than our meeting of him).  John Tyler was born in 1790 and died in 1862.  He married twice, his first wife bearing him eight children and his second wife bearing him seven children.  The youngest of those fifteen Tyler children was born in 1853.  He grew up to follow in his father's footsteps, also marrying two women, who bore him a total of thirteen children, the last of whom, Harrison Tyler, was born in 1928.  Harrison was only six when his father died.

When we met him and his wife, they were living at Sherwood Forest, the family plantation on the James River that John Tyler had purchased in the 1840s, which he gleefully dubbed Sherwood Forest because some of his political enemies thought to insult him by calling him Robin Hood, from some disagreement over legislature or policy.  The Tylers still opened the house to visitors, part-museum, part-residence, raised horses, and ran a tree farm.  Harrison discovered in the mid-1990s that the property next to his, which he had purchased to expand his tree farm, was the site of Fort Pocahontas, an earthen fort constructed by US Colored Troops in 1864.  He reserved the fort site and restored it to its 1864 configuration, complete with officers' quarters, soldiers' barracks, etc.  In the interest of raising awareness of the fort's existence, he found a local group of Civil War reenactors, who helped him plan living history events there.

We found the Tylers to be deeply interested in everyone who attended these events, and they are the epitome of the hospitality and grace for which the South is famous. Truly, presidential stock.

Sally

Web Meister Responds: A really nice letter, Sally. I feel close to the events. We thank you.

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Answer to Question of the Day
Who was Karl Lagerfeld?
Karl Otto Lagerfeld (10 September 1933 – 19 February 2019) was a German creative director, artist, photographer and caricaturist who lived in Paris.
He was known as the creative director of the French luxury fashion house Chanel (from 1983 until his death), as well as creative director of the Italian fur and leather goods fashion house Fendi and his own eponymous fashion label.
Over the decades, he collaborated on a variety of fashion and art-related projects.

Lagerfeld was born on 10 September 1933 in Hamburg, Germany and was the son of businessman Otto Lagerfeld (1881–1967) and his wife Elizabeth Bahlmann (1897–1978).
His father owned a company that produced and imported evaporated milk, while his maternal grandfather Karl Bahlmann was a local politician for the Catholic Centre Party.

His family belonged to the Old Catholic Church.
When she met his father, Lagerfeld's mother was a lingerie saleswoman from Berlin.
His parents were married in 1930.

His family was mainly shielded from the deprivations of World War II due to his father's business interests in Germany through the firm Glücksklee-Milch GmbH.
His father was in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake.

After attending a private school, Lagerfeld finished his secondary school at the Lycée Montaigne in Paris, where he majored in drawing and history.

He was very active and busy designing clothes under a large variety of circumstances.
He achieved international fame in the 1980s.

At the time, he was maintaining a design contract with Japanese firm Isetan to create collections for both men and women through 30 licenses, had a lingerie line in the U.S. produced by Eve Stillmann, was designing shoes for Charles Jourdan and sweaters for Ballantyne, and worked with Trevira as a fashion adviser.

In the 1980s Lagerfeld integrated the interlocked "CC" monograph of Coco Chanel into a style pattern for the House of Chanel.

In 2002, Karl Lagerfeld asked Renzo Rosso, the founder of Diesel, to collaborate with him on a special denim collection for the Lagerfeld Gallery.
The collection, Lagerfeld Gallery by Diesel, was co-designed by Lagerfeld and then developed by Diesel's creative team, under the supervision of Rosso.
It consisted of five pieces that were presented during the designer's catwalk shows during Paris Fashion Week and then sold in highly limited editions at the Lagerfeld Galleries in Paris and Monaco and at the Diesel Denim Galleries in New York and Tokyo.
During the first week of sales in New York, more than 90% of the trousers were sold out, even though prices ranged from $240 to $1,840.
In a statement after the show in Paris, Rosso said: "I am honored to have met this fashion icon of our time. Karl represents creativity, tradition and challenge, and the fact that he thought of Diesel for this collaboration is a great gift and acknowledgement of our reputation as the prêt-à-porter of casual wear."

In the 21st century Lagerfeld was too busy to list all of his activities here.
But it might be fun to list some of his controversies.

In 1993, he caused U.S. Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour to walk out of his Milan Fashion Week runway show, when he employed strippers and adult-film star Moana Pozzi to model his black-and-white collection for Fendi.

There was much controversy from Lagerfeld's use of a verse from the Qur'an in his spring 1994 couture collection for Chanel, despite apologies from the designer and the fashion house.
The controversy erupted after the 1994 couture show in Paris, when the Indonesian Muslim Scholars Council in Jakarta called for a boycott of Chanel and threatened to file formal protests with the government of Mr. Lagerfeld's homeland, Germany.
The designer apologized, explaining that he had taken the design from a book about the Taj Mahal, thinking the words came from a love poem.

Lagerfeld was the target of a pieing by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in 2001 at a fashion premiere at Lincoln Center in New York City.
However, the tofu pies hurled by animal rights activists in protest against his use of fur within his collections went astray, instead hitting Calvin Klein.
A PETA spokesperson described the hit on Klein as "friendly fire," calling Klein, who doesn't use fur, "a great friend to the animals" and Lagerfeld a "designer dinosaur," who continues to use fur in his collections.

Lagerfeld was a supporter of the use of fur in fashion.
He himself did not wear fur and hardly ate meat.
In a BBC interview in 2009, he claimed that hunters "make a living having learnt nothing else than hunting, killing those beasts who would kill us if they could" and maintained: "In a meat-eating world, wearing leather for shoes and clothes and even handbags, the discussion of fur is childish."
Spokespersons for PETA called Lagerfeld "a fashion dinosaur who is as out of step as his furs are out of style." and "particularly delusional with his kill-or-be-killed mentality.
When was the last time a person's life was threatened by a mink or rabbit?"

In 2010, PETA cites Lagerfeld, who used fake fur in his 2010 Chanel collection, on its website as saying: "It's the triumph of fake fur… because fake fur changed so much and became so great now that you can hardly see a difference."

Lagerfeld in 2009 joined critics of supermodel Heidi Klum.
After German designer Wolfgang Joop called Klum, who had posed naked on the cover of the German edition of GQ magazine, as being "no runway model.
“She is simply too heavy and has too big a bust," Lagerfeld retorted that neither he nor Claudia Schiffer knew Klum as she has never worked in Paris and is insignificant in the world of high fashion, being "more bling bling and glamorous than current fashion."

Lagerfeld created an international furor on 9 February 2012, when he called the singer Adele "a little too fat."
This caused instant fury throughout the United Kingdom, and Lagerfeld responded with a statement of apology.
Adele hit back by saying she is like the majority of women, and she is very proud of that fact.

Lagerfeld later caused another controversy, on 31 July 2012, when he criticized Pippa Middleton, sister of Kate Middleton, for her looks.
The comment was made when Lagerfeld was praising Kate Middleton, for her "romantic beauty" before adding: "I don't like the sister's face. She should only show her back."

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Good Morning on this Wednesday, the 20th day of February.
We talked about college students’ activities impacting our society.
And today being a very cold day with a bit of a warmup coming on Thursday.
We heard from the elephants again
and received a particularly excellent letter from Sally Chetwynd.
And we talked about Karl Lagerfeld.

And now? Now gotta go.

Che vuoi? Le pocketbook?

See you soon.

Love

Dom