Where can an uninsured artist go in New York City to get affordable health care? Brooklyn’s Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center has announced an initiative called the Artist Access program that allows artists to exchange patient services for health care credits. The Artist Access program, which launched in May, allows artists, through performances or interactive programs for patients, to exchange their art for health care credits. These credits are accrued in the artist’s personal account, 40 credits for each hour of work, and can be used in lieu of dollars to cover sliding scale fees in Woodhull’s HHC Options program. So, for example, an artist who performs one hour every week for patients at Woodhull will accrue credits worth $160 in a month’s time. Credits can then be used as needed toward fees incurred at Woodhull for health care services. The hospital’s Creative Arts Department reviews proposals for art programs to determine if they are appropriate for hospitalized patients and matches programs with departments such as the Pediatric, Geriatric, or Rehabilitation Units. The hospital has expressed an initial preference for performance programs, but an artist brought in to test Artist Access is currently teaching drawing in the Pediatric Unit in exchange for treatment. Mural projects for the many walls and stairwells in the hospital buildings could also be considered. At this point, Woodhull is the only hospital in New York City that has initiated a trade program such as Artist Access. But all of the city’s public hospitals offer the sliding scale program called HHC Options, along with financial counseling to help patients determine what insurance coverage may be available to them. Uninsured patients who are ineligible for Medicaid, Medicare, or one of the New York State insurance programs (such as Family Health Plus) can be enrolled in HHC Options, which establishes a fee scale based on income. It ranges from $15-$60 per visit. Residents of the five New York City boroughs who earn an annual income up to 400% of the federal poverty level—about $36,000 to $37,000 for an individual—are eligible.
http://www.nyfa.org/level3.asp?id=377&fid=6&sid=17

Legal educators, law students and politicians gathered in Washington in April to discuss filling that gap by creating a congressional clerkship program. The idea is that young lawyers would spend a year researching and drafting laws before moving on to other legal endeavors. The idea isn't exactly new. Stanford University Law School Law Dean Larry Kramer floated the concept among his fellow deans in 2005, and legislation to create the clerkships has twice cleared the House of Representatives only to die in the Senate. The Daniel Webster Congressional Clerkship Act of 2011, a bill introduced in April by U.S. Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) and co-sponsored by U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), would create a pilot program with 12 clerks. The Committee on Rules and Administration of the Senate and the House Committee on House Administration would select clerks from a centralized pool. Each chamber would get six clerks, to be divided between the parties. http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202493152192&src=EMC-Email&et=editorial&bu=National%20Law%20Journal&pt=NLJ.com-%20Daily%20Headlines&cn=20110506nlj&kw=Educators%3A%20Congress%20needs%20law%20clerks&slreturn=1&hbxlogin=1

Steampunk is a sub-genre of science fiction, alternate history, and speculative fiction that came into prominence during the 1980s and early 1990s. Specifically, steampunk involves an era or world where steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century and often Victorian era Britain—that incorporates prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy. Works of steampunk often feature anachronistic technology or futuristic innovations as Victorians may have envisioned them; in other words, based on a Victorian perspective on fashion, culture, architectural style, art, etc. This technology may include such fictional machines as those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne or real technologies like the computer but developed earlier in an alternate history. Other examples of steampunk contain alternate history-style presentations of "the path not taken" for such technology as dirigibles, analog computers, or such digital mechanical computers as Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace's Analytical engine. Steampunk is often associated with cyberpunk. They have considerable influence on each other and share a similar fan base, but steampunk developed as a separate movement. Apart from time period and level of technology, the main difference is that steampunk settings tend to be less dystopian. Various modern utilitarian objects have been modded by individual artisans into a pseudo-Victorian mechanical "steampunk" style, and a number of visual and musical artists have been described as steampunk. See pictures and read more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk

I have received a gift of magazines covering the years 1949-1954 with prices ranging from 5 cents to 15 cents. There are stories, recipes, patterns and many ads depicting glamorous tiny-waisted women wearing dresses, jewelry and high heels while doing domestic tasks. A recipe adapted from the October 1949 issue of Household is below. (More recipes will follow.)
Baked Onions and Carrots
6 large onions, sliced
6 medium carrots, sliced
salt, pepper, butter
1 c. milk
buttered bread crumbs
Alternate onions and carrots in greased casserole. Season each layer with salt and pepper. Dot with butter, pour milk over, and cover with buttered crumbs. Bake at 350 degrees 1 hour or until tender.

Free Comic Book Day is an annual promotional effort by the North American comic book industry to help bring new readers into independent comic book stores. Retailer Joe Field of Flying Colors Comics in Concord, CA brainstormed the event in his "Big Picture" column in the August 2001 issue of Comics & Games Retailer magazine. Free Comic Book Day started in 2002 and is coordinated by the industry's single large distributor, Diamond Comic Distributors. Free Comic Book Day is scheduled on the first Saturday of May. It has often been tied to the release of a major theatrical film adaptation of a well known superhero property, in order to take advantage of the film's heavy promotion and related press about the comic book medium. On Free Comic Book Day, participating comic book store retailers give away specially printed copies of free comic books, and some offer cheaper back issues and other items to anyone who visits their establishments. Retailers do not receive the issues for free; they pay 12-50 cents per copy for the comics they give away during the event. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Comic_Book_Day

Rendville, population 36 by the latest census count, is the smallest village in Ohio, but one with a rich legacy in the civil-rights and labor movements. The quiet of Rendville’s block-long downtown in the hills of southeastern Perry County is broken only by the whistle of the coal trains that still travel alongside Rt. 13.
With a population of about 1,000 people at its height during the boom years of the 1880s, Rendville was home to black miners who lived and worked alongside white immigrant miners who were newly arrived from central and eastern Europe. The town was named for William P. Rend, a Chicago industrialist who operated a coal mine here and paid black and white miners the same wages. The town was filled with saloons and gambling, and stores and churches. It hosted a big Emancipation Day celebration every year to commemorate President Abraham Lincoln’s ending of slavery in the South. Rendville is among the former coal-mining communities in Perry, Athens, Hocking and Morgan counties known collectively as the Little Cities of Black Diamonds. http://www.cfra.org/ruralmonitor/2011/05/04/ohio%E2%80%99s-smallest-town-rendville-was-ahead-its-time-racial-equality-fostering-

New York Times review Spring for Music, the new festival of North American symphony and chamber orchestras at Carnegie Hall, started on a relatively subdued note on May 6 with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, but caught fire on May 7 with the Toledo Symphony. The Toledo Symphony stormed Carnegie, with 1,400 Ohio citizens in tow (in an audience of more than 2,000), and its program, dwelling on the plight of the individual in an oppressive society, proved a masterstroke. It opened with Shostakovich’s slightly eccentric Symphony No. 6, written in 1939, after a serious strain in the composer’s relations with the Soviet regime.
Stefan Sanderling — the orchestra’s principal conductor, who described a personal relationship with the work in the program notes — conducted a brilliant performance. The orchestra may not always have shown the overall sheen of its more famous neighbors in Ohio, and the performance was not flawless, with an occasional false entrance or loose attack. But the playing pondered deeply or surged with energy, as appropriate to the moment, and on this occasion the orchestra fully measured up to high Carnegie standards. “Every Good Boy Deserves Favor” — the Tom Stoppard playlet with music by André Previn, directed by Cornel Gabara — filled out the program in high style. Mr. Stoppard toys with levels of reality, delusion and deception. The three main characters are either father, antagonist and son, or simply different manifestations of a single person, and the conceit includes an orchestra, real and imagined. Mr. Stoppard does not bring Shostakovich directly into the picture, but Mr. Previn does, with uncanny takeoffs on the master’s music woven into more generic writing. The orchestra had less to do here than in the symphony, but it did it equally well, right down to silent miming when the music existed only in a character’s head. In all, the evening was a genuine coup for the orchestra and its gifted conductor. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/09/arts/music/orpheus-and-toledo-symphony-at-carnegie-hall-review.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=%22toledo%20symphony%22&st=cse

Old West End Festival Toledo, Ohio June 4 & 5, 2011
Festival and Race Information at www.toledooldwestend.com and http://www.toledosymphony.com/news/news/Stampede.html