
From New York: “Gene Fleming was well known in Hastings. An eccentric inventor, he lived on a sprawling, unusual estate — a Navy ammunition depot he and his wife had renovated just outside . In September 1988, Fleming visited his brother-in-law‘s farm and noticed a new goose — it didn’t have feet and was struggling to get around. Fleming was enamored with the strangely deformed creature. Once home, Fleming strapped Rock ’n’ Roll to a skateboard. The goose toppled off. So he went out and bought a pair of size-zero patent-leather baby sneakers from a local shoe shop, filled them with rubber padding, and fitted them over the goose’s stumps. The transformation was immediate: The goose could walk. On October 10, 1988, the Hastings Tribune published an article, called “Goose Steps in Style,” chronicling Andy’s unlikely journey. Later that week, the Associated Press picked it up. Within weeks, Andy’s presence was requested in malls, schools, and nursing homes across the state.”
How the color blue came to be associated with the Virgin Mary

From The Paris Review: “Blue is a color with long-standing mystical associations. Perhaps this is because blue is the color of the sky, something we can always see but never reach, or perhaps it’s because, as chemist Heinz Berke points out, early humans had no access to blue because blue is not what you call an earth color … You don’t find it in the soil. Blue was elusive, and this made it valuable. The earliest stable blue was made from lapis lazuli, the mining of which began in Afghanistan around six thousand years ago. For millennia, blue has been a sacred and costly hue, more valuable even than gold. And in the Christian world, the most valuable color was reserved for the most elevated of virgins. Enter Marian blue. Marian blue became the official color of Jesus’s mother in the early fifth century. Painters typically depicted Mary in a red gown or wrapped in a pink mantle. But slowly, blue began to replace red as the color of choice.”
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