Imagination Starts Here!

Color me inspired. Folks who paint with their mouths like Jack Reich (left) wow me.

For further wowing and to read a bit about Jack please check out Jack's website.. appropriately the site is titled Imagination Starts Here.

WOW: 30 Years of Letters to 2,500 Students

Dan Stroup, a humble teacher at Heritage Christian School in Indiana, spends a portion of every evening in his living room, quietly writing birthday letters by hand to every student he has had in class these last 30 years. He mails handwritten birthday letters to students in 60 cities, 36 states and six countries.

The man amazes me. Catch his story in this video and pass this amazing testimony along to inspire your friends.

Meatball Wars

In this picture taken on Sunday Chef Matthew Mitnitsky of Concord, NH celebrates after his meatball weighed in at 225.5 pounds and broke the world record for the largest meatball. The competition was set off in August when someone in Mexico set the record with a 109 pound meatball and was advanced by Talk Show host Jimmy Kimmel in Los Angeles with a 198.6 pound meatball. Chef Mitnitsky said he got involved "to bring the meatball back to the East Coast because that's where it originated."

I do suspect the record might be a bit of a PR stunt for Nonni's Italian Eatery 

Lookin Out My Backdoor

NY Times Machine

Rose pointed us all to this webiste that allows you to view editions of the New York Times going all the way back to Septemeber 18, 1851. Note the price of the paper then - one cent.. things have changed a bit since then.. but those New Yorkers still have their act together :)

Which do you think is more amazing - that they still had the original papers or that ability to zoom in on scanned articles?

Wilma Rudolph

According to the Wiki.. Wilma Glodean Rudolph (1940-1994) was an American athlete, and in the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, Italy, she became the first American woman to win three gold medals in track and field during a single Olympic Games, despite running on a sprained ankle. A track and field champion, she elevated women's track to a major presence in the United States.

I found this to be so amazing:

At the age of 4 it was discovered that she had polio. In 1947 her mother took her to Nashville's Meharry Medical College, a hospital for blacks 50 miles from their home, twice a week. Because of the expense and difficulty of obtaining professional medical care, Wilma's mother usually treated her ailing child at home. Rudolph remembered that during her youth, "my mother used to have all these home remedies she would make herself, and I lived on them". Many nights her mother, tired after a long day's work, would sit on Wilma's bed and massage her daughter's leg well into the evening hours. Blanche Rudolph kept telling her polio-stricken daughter she would one day walk without braces.

In 1952, 12-year old Wilma Rudolph finally achieved her dream of shedding her handicap and becoming like other children. Wilma's older sister was on a basketball team, and Wilma vowed to follow in her footsteps. While in high school Wilma was on the basketball team, when she was spotted by Tennessee State track and field coach Edward S. Temple. Being discovered by Temple was a major break for a young athlete. The day he saw the tenth grader Wilma Rudolph for the first time, he knew he had found a natural athlete.

Wilma and her mother are women of inspiration.. people who would not give up despite what doctors told them.. women who held onto their dreams and worked diligently to see them come to pass. They represent the best of humanity.

Wing-Walking Wedding