Here is a wonderful amazing book to put on your reading list: "The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind" by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer.   This young man built and electric windmill by simply studying pictures in a textbook - amazing!   

As characterized by Dave Callanan:  "Discarded motor parts, PVC pipe, and an old bicycle wheel may be junk to most people, but in the inspired hands of William Kamkwamba, they are instruments of opportunity. Growing up amid famine and poverty in rural Malawi, wind was one of the few abundant resources available, and the inventive fourteen-year-old saw its energy as a way to power his dreams. "With a windmill, we'd finally release ourselves from the troubles of darkness and hunger," he realized. "A windmill meant more than just power, it was freedom." Despite the biting jeers of village skeptics, young William devoted himself to borrowed textbooks and salvage yards in pursuit of a device that could produce an "electric wind." The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is an inspiring story of an indomitable will that refused to bend to doubt or circumstance. When the world seemed to be against him, William Kamkwamba set out to change it."

I was also incredibly inspired and charmed by Mr. Kamkwamba on a recent appearance on "The Daily Show" - definitely worth watching. 

Today would have been Marie Antoinette's 254th birthday.   Here is a interesting piece about her (and her fashion legacy) from the New York Time's wonderful blog, The Moment:

Women's Fashion

Queen, Please | Remembering Marie-Antoinette

Caroline Weber is the author of “Queen of Fashion: What Marie-Antoinette Wore to the Revolution.”

In Paris last month, Karl Lagerfeld presented his latest Chanel ready-to-wear collection in a massive, specially constructed barn, complete with hay-strewn floors and wooden eaves wound with floral garlands. To some viewers, the haute hoedown may have registered as a celebration of natural materials like hemp, raffia, and linen, all lynchpins of the designer’s looks for Spring 2010. Others in the audience may have focused on the show’s revival of that classic French erotic arrangement, the ménage à trois, as models Lara Stone and Freja Beha Erichsen frolicked lustily in the hay with Lagerfeld’s male muse of the moment, Baptiste Giabiconi. Neither of these interpretations, though, rules out the most plausible theory of all: that the spectacle was really an early birthday party for Marie-Antoinette — the queen of rusticated, risqué fashions, born today in 1755.

An Austrian archduchess by birth and a French queen by marriage, Marie-Antoinette was an improbable pioneer of shabby chic. At Versailles — the court she moved to when she wed the future King Louis XVI at age 14 — etiquette demanded that its sovereigns’ very appearance evoke their transcendental power. To this end, the Bourbons dressed with such jaw-dropping elegance and ostentation that awestruck commoners could only conclude, to modify a phrase from today’s celebrity rags: “Royals — they’re not just like us!” Having grown up with no such strict codes governing her clothing choices, Marie-Antoinette was neither trained nor inclined to treat these choices as matters of state. Yet that’s exactly what her slightest fashion gaffes became. During her earliest days in France, for example, she refused to don the special, fainting-spell-inducing corset that only the highest-ranked princesses were entitled (read: required) to wear. Flying as it did in the face of Gallic tradition, this decision strained Franco-Austrian diplomatic relations almost to the breaking point. As the Viennese ambassador to Versailles reported in alarm: “Her Majesty’s refusal of the corset [has set] all of France complaining.”

Yet to Marie-Antoinette, homesick for the relative casualness and comfort of Austrian life, provoking her subjects’ ire was a small price to pay for sartorial freedom. This she achieved by establishing, at a neoclassical villa called the Petit Trianon, a private, faux-bucolic retreat where she and her visitors gamboled about in costumes that were, to contemporary eyes, almost shocking in their informality. Working with her favorite stylist, Rose Bertin, the queen devised a daily uniform that consisted, for women, of a plain, unstructured white muslin or linen chemise gown, accessorized with such homespun touches as a simple ribbon or a saucy little apron tied around the waist, and a silk posy or a straw hat perched jauntily on loose, unpowdered hair. Absent from this pretty, peasant-girl look was every component of traditional court apparel: vast hoopskirts, constrictive corset, and sweeping train; heavy, ornately embroidered silks, bejeweled and bespangled with an inch of their lives; masses of gems piled on to gild an already-twenty-four-karat fleur-de-lys. By jettisoning such cumbersome, tradition-bound garb in favor of a new style that emphasized cleanness of line, enhanced freedom of movement, and valued humble textiles and trimmings over rare, costly ones, the queen revolutionized 18th-century dress — and paved the way for the later innovations of such figures as, well, Coco Chanel.

But in a land where even a missing corset spelled scandal, Marie-Antoinette was woefully ahead of her time. In 1783, a portrait (above) showing her in her signature white gown and straw hat sparked a backlash that would only end on the guillotine ten years later. Critics raged against her for having posed “in the gown and apron of a country wench,” “[in] a chamber-maid’s dust-cloth,” and “in her underwear.” Inspired by the latter charge, underground pornographers began spinning yarns about the sordid antics the queen’s free-and-easy outfits enabled. So the chemise dress, which looks so modest by today’s standards, came to signify brazen promiscuity. It also came to mean anti-Frenchness, as other commentators, noting that muslin and linen were foreign imports, accused the queen of willfully destroying the nation’s silk industry. The down-home hat was also seen as a heinous affront to local custom: only a barbaric Austrian, it was said, would “cover herself with straw” when she could have — and should have — worn a crown.

Monies raised will go toward The City of Joy, a safe house and leadership community under construction in Bukavu, DRC. A joint effort between V-Day (the global movement to stop violence against women and girls) and UNICEF, the City of Joy has been designed to make the women living there feel secure, calm, and empowered. To foster a feeling of community, the grounds will mimic the setting of a typical Congolese village, including a cluster of structures where women will live and sleep, an orchard, an area for livestock, and many places to gather. Residents will be referred by hospitals and NGOs throughout the region, allowing for a diverse group of 100 women survivors to be served for periods of 4-6 months. Women will have access to programming in group therapy, storytelling, dance, theater, self-defense, sexuality education (covering HIV/AIDS and family planning), gardening, public speaking, leadership and advocacy, human rights, ecology, and horticulture. When women transition out of the City of Joy, V-Day will provide them with support as they return to serve and lead their communities.

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.   All of us likely has someone in our lives who has been touched by breast cancer.  I lost a beautiful aunt to breast cancer when I was 11, which started my history with the disease.   Happily with advances in detection and treatment, the prognosis for women with breast cancer is much better than it used to be.  Indeed, one of my best friends just had a mastectomy but  because of the kind of breast cancer she had, the surgery, and the detection, does not have to even undergo chemo or radiation.   What a blessing.  

For more information about National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, please visit here.   And everyone should  take wonderful care of their breasts, including making sure you feel your boobies, and researching treatment and prevention options from progressive practioners like Dr. Christiane Northrup.

Today is the second day of autumn - yay.   Love the crisper weather, the clothes, the changing of the leaves.  Here is a perfect quote that sums up my feelings:

"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower."
— Albert Camus