Helping to fill all the stockings: this letter came from Princeton Human Services.

In the spirit of the upcoming holiday season Princeton Human Services would like to solicit your help in making a child’s Christmas a little bit brighter.

For the past fifteen years, municipal employees have made hundreds of Princeton children’s holiday wishes come true, by providing at least one gift.

With these hard economic times, we understand everyone has had trouble. That is why this year more than previous years your generosity is needed. Hundreds of applications have been distributed throughout Princeton. Children up to age 12 will be filling out a holiday wish list which will include two (2) gifts they would like for the Holidays, which are not to exceed $60 dollars.

If you are interested in becoming a donor, please call the Princeton Human Services department at (609) 688-2055 between the hours of 9:00 am to 4:30 pm or email Elisa Neira at eneira@princetonnj.gov by November 15, 2013.

Thank you for considering our request and we hope to hear from you soon.

Sincerely,

Elisa Neira, MSW
Executive Director

Anna Quindlen: Humanizing Healthcare

Faith and Social Justice, Healthcare, , , ,

anna quindlen

Anna Quindlen made a speech to healthcare professionals about how doctors should treat patients and their families. Her 83-year-old father had recently died from burns over 40 percent of his body. She praised his caregivers.

As you would imagine, her words are potent. “They put a human face, a series of human faces, on my father’s care.” Her speech is online at HumanizingMedicine.org, and read it now because it will be taken off the web in December.

In her comments on medicine Quindlen talks about journalism. Newspapers used to be faceless dispensers of information, and readers “had their back fences to chew over their tragedies, their disappointments, and their dreams.”  Now newspapers use social media to facilitate those discussions.

She likens the power relationships inherent in medicine with the power that journalists have. When interviewed, you have every good reason to wonder whether I will get your story right — or wrong.  But doctors have power over our very lives.

And so she makes the case for empowered patients, patients and family members who are armed with knowledge, who want to be treated as individuals. “People want the press to see them . . . as a person. They want the doctors and nurses to see them as something more than files. . . We are part of a society that has suddenly discovered that it has no human face and that is terrified and repelled by that fact. ”

I learned of Quindlen’s speech from  another of my favorite writers. 

Jim Ayala, a resident of Manila in the Philippines, gave up a McKinsey career to help his home country. He spokr at the Carl Fields Center on Saturday, November 16. Oops we missed that one! But his name is linked to an article in the Princeton Alumni Weekly. He is Class of ’84.

Moral Mondays on Friday: Reverend William Barber, a civil rights leader and president of the North Carolina NAACP, will speak on Moral Mondays, a grassroots movement against conservative politics, at 6 p.m. Friday, Nov. 15, in McCosh Hall, Room 50.

Buttons Help Quilts Tell Stories

Around Town, Dance and the other arts, , ,

Large 1 3/8 inch Bakelite carved Turtle $55 Left a turtle carved of Bakelite. These are online references for quilting talks

Every Button Has a Story: Buttons Help Quilts Tell Stories
Barbara Figge Fox and Jane Albanowski
New Jersey State Button Society
for Turtle Creek Quilters Quild
November 17, 2013

National Button Society: membership @$35 includes handbook and five journals per year.

New Jersey State Button Society:
Membership @$10 includes newsletters. Semiannual shows, open to the public, at the Union Fire Company building on Route 29 in Titusville on May 9, 2015 and September 12, 2015. 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., program at 1:30 p.m. Admission $2.

Central Jersey Buttoniers, lunches on third Mondays, in member’s homes. Contact Sonia Force, 908-782-5716 or SOJON@comcast.net

Button Country website with many useful links
How to mount buttons: http://www.buttonsintime.com/howto.htm
How to classify different materials.

Ways to identify different materials

Basics of Button Collecting: Pam Vasilow

Button Button: Identification and price guide, Peggy Osborne (print book)

Field Guide to Buttons and Antique Glass http://www.grandmothersbuttons.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/gran_fieldguide_web2011.pdf

Contacts for info about membership:
President: Sara Mulford, 205 Lafayette Drive, Logan Township, NJ 08085-1426
 slmulford@verizon.net; 856-275-6945
Northern, NJ: Gloria Chazin 908-889-8970
Ocean & Monmouth County:
Lil Buirkle 732-793-4555
Hunterdon & Mercer County:
Carol Meszaros 609-737-3555
DUES: Send $10 check made out to the New Jersey State Button Society c/o Ann Wilson, Treasurer, Box 92, Maplewood, NJ 07040

Charles Dickens on buttons:

“There is surely something charming in seeing the smallest things done so thoroughly, as if to remind the careless, that whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well. . . It is wonderful, is it not? that on that small pivot turns the fortune of such multitudes of men, women, and children, in so many parts of the world; that such industry, and so many fine faculties, should be brought out and exercised by so small a thing as the Button.” Household Matters . 1852

Chris Kuenne speaks Monday, November 18 at the Princeton Tech meetup . The topic: the Growth Playbook: 5 Cornerstones to Live By. Highly recommended… Kuenne’s latest venture: Rosemark Capital.

Two headlines for the same medical report:

The Associated Press headline: New medical guidelines urge wider use of cholesterol drugs

The New York Times headline: Experts Reshape Treatment Guide for Cholesterol; Change in Statins’ Use; 2 groups see no need to drop to a specific level of LDL.

Marilynn Marchionne, the AP writer, starts out by saying that the edict calls for “twice as many Americans — one-third of all adults — to consider taking cholesterol-lowering statin drugs.” In other words, more use of drugs. In the fourth paragraph, she quotes a doctor saying the emphasis is to treat more appropriately.

Gina Kolata, the Princeton-based New York Times science writer, opens with a blander statement about the new guidelines. In her fourth paragraph, she quotes a doctor saying, “now one in four Americans over 40 will be saying, ‘Should I be taking this anymore?’ ”

The AP seems to emphasize MORE use of the drug, Kolata in the New York Times, by quoting the doctor on the front page “above the fold” seems to emphasize LESS use of the drug.

Why does this matter? Will the NYT reader welcome news of fewer drugs? Is it that the Associated Press reader (and the reader of Yahoo and other websites) will want to take more drugs?

It all goes back to what my father told me, all the time. “Nothing is ever completely true or ever completely false.”

And I’m just glad I’m not a health reporter.

JohnSymonsNotQuiteStillLifeThis great photo, entitled “Not Quite Still,” by my U.S. 1 cohort John Symons, makes me want to revist Grounds for Sculpture. It is in a photography exhibit juried by Michael Mancuso, photographer extraordinaire, with whom I used to work at the Trenton TImes (when it was the Trenton Times, not the re-jiggered “Times of Trenton.) Mancuso is still there. The exhibit at Mercer County Community College opens with a reception on November 20.