Bouncing baby boy...

Not long ago, I put up a post of some treats I made for a co-worker's baby shower. She wasn't due until September, but the little guy had other plans and announced himself on Sunday. In honor of my co-worker and her new baby boy, I've decided to make this post all about children. 

The Times-Standard in Eureka, Calif., had a story a little while back on a local woman who won the Dreyer's Slow Churned Neighborhood Salute contest. On a whim Lori Arias entered the essay contest, on why her community needed a little positivity, writing about how a local mill's closing had put her husband and about 200 others out of work. She had to go back to work to support the family, and a local day care took in her children. When she found out she won the ice cream block party, she threw the shindig at the day care center as a way to say thank you. 

Max Jones, a 12 year-old from Orlando, Fla., may be catching the next wave of journalism ahead of everyone else. Sick of all the bad news, Jones turned his closet in to an Internet good news TV studio and began writing stories and chasing down leads to broadcast online. According to Google News, his site has 5,000 hits a day, and he has a staff of unpaid interns across the country who work with him to produce stories. Jones was very active in the freeing of the two journalists from North Korea, and upon her return, received a phone call from Ling herself. 

Despite my brother and the Greek Olympic baseball team's mock war with Rick Reilly over his comments on their Greekness or lack thereof, I usually enjoy reading Reilly's column. He's not a ranter, and he can be relied on to shine a light on people who do good things away from the camera lights. In this case, he highlights a group of children who need to stay away from lights of any kind. 

Camp Sundown, a place for children with xeroderma pigmentosum (XP) in Craryville, N.Y., recently had a night under little light at Yankee Stadium. Kids with XP cannot be exposed to even fluorescent lights; exposure to UV light causes cancerous tumors. Reilly wrote a wonderful article for ESPN the Mag about all the children live with and the precautions they had to take just to be able to play with the big-leaguers at 3 a.m.

An athletically inclined TV superhero inspired another child across the Atlantic. The Sun, an English paper, tells of Harley, a four year-old quadruple amputee who lost all his arms and legs after contracting meningitis. Harley is a huge fan of Lazytown, a UK children's show, and The Sun arranged for Sportacus, aka Icelander Magnus Scheving, to fly to Manchester to spend an hour playing with the boy. Scheving was accompanied by representatives of an Icelandic firm that produces prosthetic limbs. The company has offered the family a free pair of hi-tech "sprinting feet" for Harley. 

(Photo courtesy of the Times-Standard)

An Affair to Remember...

The 1957 picture starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr centered on a chance meeting. Two engaged people fall in love with someone other than their intended and agree to meet up again in six months. The rest of the movie is about all the things that happen to them in those ensuing six months and culminates in another chance meeting. 

None of my stories today are epic romances like this movie, but both do hinge on random meetings. The New York Daily News followed up on a story I posted a while ago regarding the ill teen who gave Brett Gardner a Project Sunshine bracelet on the morning before he hit the first inside-the-park home run, and she got the heart transplant she needed. I think both of them benefited from the luck and hope that bracelet symbolized.

Britain's Daily Mirror ran (hee hee) a story on Jeffrey Balogun, whose sprinting talent was discovered one morning several years ago when he ran for a bus. The budding sprinter had wanted to break into sprinting on the national scene but didn't know how. His dash for the bus, which he ironically missed, caught the attention of a girl who ran for a club headed by a man with connections to Great Britain's track governing body. Balogun now has his eye on the 2012 Olympics.

(Photo credit: Photobucket.com)

Wacky and Wonderful...

A few days ago I was extolling the virtues of the mysterious force on the Interweb that seemed to make themes appear whenever I went looking for happy news. That was not the first time I've marveled at this phenomenon on my blog.

Today is not one of those days. But they're all pretty cool.

I know it's June and Opening Day was ages ago, but I just stumbled onto this video on ESPN.com that shows Charlie Brown throwing out the first pitch at a Pirates game. While Charlie's struggles lay with kicking a football, the metaphor is apt for the Pirates, whose struggles often lay in both pitching and hitting. My old boss two schools ago was a huge Pirates fan, so I was kept up-to-date on baseball's buccaneers all summer regardless of whether I cared, but now I will admit to not having a clue how they are faring this season. Everyone loves Charlie Brown, so maybe some of his universal appreciation will rub off on the Pirates.

When I clicked on the following story, I thought it was the Metro paper that is ubiquitous to T stops all over Boston.  One of my roommates was actually featured in a "man on the street" survey months ago. But this link turned out to be to a Metro newspaper from the UK, and it had a story on a man who suffered a stroke six years ago, becoming an art genius after ensuing surgical treatment. The man says he couldn't draw so much as a stick figure before his stroke, and now he's, in his words, "Michelangelo." 

The Toronto Star had a neat story on May 31 about a class project , and the link to the story was "Boy writes to Heaven, receives response." That just begs to be clicked on. Turns out as part of a class project, the Canadian equivalent of fifth-graders were directed to write letters to God and tie them to helium balloons before releasing them. Bailey Pinto's letter landed in the yard of a lawyer a few towns away who was so touched by the contents, he wrote back in a "Yes, Bailey, there is a God" theme. 

(Photo credit: Metro.co.uk)

Angels in the Outfield...

They must put something in the water up here in Boston. Hatred for the Yankees is practically viral here. I'm not even from New England, and somehow it sucked me in during college. I have since regained my level head (after graduating and moving back down south), but now I'm back up here, and I just have to shake my head at the potency of "us vs. them" mentality. 

Regardless about how you feel about the pin stripes, this story from MLB.com (and the follow up in Newsday) is amazing. Yankee Brett Gardner made what, at the start, was probably a routine community service visit to a local hospital. While there, he met a special little girl who had been waiting 107 days for a heart transplant. She gave him a Project Sunshine bracelet and told him if he held onto it, he would hit a home run. Gardner is no power-hitter, but he is apparently very speedy. In his next game, he hit a looping shot to the warning track and flew around the bases for an inside-the-park home run. He went 0-for-4 in his next game but found out afterwards the little girl had received her new heart that day and was doing better. 

England's Daily Mail reported on a woman who turned her grief at the loss of her husband into a 'round-the-world trek to raise money for prostate cancer. After losing her second husband to the cancer, Rosie Swale-Pope ran 20,000 over five years on a continuous solo trip around the world. I'm still trying to decide if this was foolish or inspirational, but her story is quite amazing.

My last article for today is from NJ.com, and it highlights a bat boy. Ty Godfrey is 13 years old and collects bats and shags flies with the Monmouth University baseball team. That all sounds normal, but he was diagnosed with a brain tumor at 7 1/2. He has gone through chemo, radiation and rehab to learn to walk again. He's also on growth hormones, but he goes out every chance he gets to the ballpark. The little boy and the team really seem to have bonded. 

(Photo credit: Star-Ledger)

Oldies but goodies...

Today is my 50th post. I can't actually believe I've been doing this for 50 days already. And while I don't think 50 is anywhere near old, it is a milestone, which is why it tickles me that the stories I found for today all have ties to the elderly who have reached milestones of their own. So please, no hate mail from the over-50 crowd. : ) 

The 60th anniversary of the day the Soviets lifted their blockade on West Berlin was May 12, 2009, and NPR.org reported on the 100,000 Berlin citizens who turned out to honor the 120 Allied pilots who made daily food and supply drops to the starved people of West Berlin. On Tuesday, American pilot Gail Halvorsen flew a WWII-era cargo plane that dropped chocolate-covered raisins to mark the anniversary. He was known as the "Lollipop Bomber" after he shared two sticks of gum with starving German children and returned to bring more candy from his own rations after that. He inspired other Allied pilots to do the same and the result was "Operation Little Vittles." How cute is that?

The "Canton Citizen" out of Massachusetts had a local feature on a family who surprised their matriarch, for lack of a better word, with a home makeover. Maggie Koelsch, mother of eight, grandmother of 15 and great-grandmother of one, went to California to visit one of her daughters, and 14 enterprising East Coast members of her family completely updated her house. The 83 year-old woman raised her children on her own after separating from her husband, and she is determined to stay in her own home now. Her family wanted to be there for her since she's always been there for them.

This last one from cnn.com is a little quirky. My brother used to be an athletic trainer at the minor league level of professional baseball for the Baltimore Orioles. I'm not sure he's familiar with a pitching prospect named Josh Faiola, but the young man is making news lately for his life off the field. And for once, in the world of athletes, it's for something good. Minor-leaguers are often hosted by local families since they don't get paid much. Faiola's proposed host family didn't actually have a room for him at their house, but they run an assisted living facility nearby and decided to put him up there. He's the new darling of the residents, even inspiring some non-sports fans to pick up baseball. Faiola has a terrific attitude about it too, understanding the value of having so many "grandparents" around to care about him and how he does. 

(Photo credit: NPR.org)

Seven down, 155 to go...

One of my friends who is a huge Red Sox fan insists spring starts when pitchers and catchers report for spring training. That same person gets very upset when I tell him I don't pay attention to baseball until after the All-Star break. I just do not have the wherewithal to keep 162 games and their stats, trends and implications in my head for seven months. 

But I do have to say, the Arizona Diamondbacks are a team worth following. I have no concept of how they are doing or are projected to do this year. Not only is it way before the All-Star break, they are also a National League team, which makes them out of my loop. But a chance encounter with a down-on-her-luck fan gave the GM the wonderful idea of spreading the wealth beyond his ultra-rich players.

One more sign it's spring...I found yet another story on amphibian migration. You know, this is one of those things that you never notice until someone points it out to you then it's all you can see. This time the BBC has a brief story on a British bucket brigade taking to the back lanes to ferry a specific species of frog across the road to mating grounds. Kermit would be proud.

In a similar vein, I came across a story in the Boston Examiner that featured a retired veterinarian who provides free animal care in Tacoma, Wash. The number of patients she can see is limited, but the service is a relief to many of the area residents who are struggling and might otherwise have to give up their pets.

Opening Day optimism...

We all know what everyone says about spring; it's a time for renewal, rebirth, making a fresh start, etc. And I guess people wouldn't say it if it didn't have in it some basis of truth. There's just something about emerging from (what was for me, a brutal) winter and seeing flowers and hearing birds again. It just makes you happier to know pretty things and longer days and vacation are coming. 

That optimism is probably my favorite part of spring. And quite honestly, nothing and no one is more optimistic in spring than Cubs fans. It's been 101 years since they won a World Series and something like 64 years since they've even played for it, but there is still enough faith left in and around the organization to let an ESPN.com columnist write an article about the hopes of those lovable losers in Wrigley Field. 

I will be the very first to admit this is a very thin segue, but Nebraska, home to one of the most fun events in sports - the College World Series, has been named the fiscally happiest state in the nation by Mainstreet.com, as reported by ABC News. The index accounted for all the usual financial measures in coming up with the list. The Cornhusker state headlined a group of Midwest states that landed at the top of the list. 

Moving to the rest of the world for a second, I don't think there is a situation that has called more for continued optimism than the conflict between Israel and Palestine. So much has happened to both sides that it makes it hard for anyone to make any headway. But a simple Gazan doctor has been nominated for the Nobel peace prize - a man who has lost three daughters to Israeli missiles and who continues to work for peace between the two peoples. That this man can endure what he has and still not lose hope is inspiring. (ynetnews.com)

Finally, Yahoo! is reporting on a dog who was lost overboard while his Aussie owners sailed through rough waters. He swam five nautical miles to an island where he lived for four months, Survivor-style, until park rangers discovered him. The family is overjoyed to have him back and he seems to have readjusted to being a house pet again just fine. 

Butterflies seem to be the ultimate symbol of the renewal  associated with spring. I took the photo above at a butterfly garden this weekend - I thought it tagged along nicely with the post from last week about the migration of butterflies through Taiwan...