did you know ?????

• Muscles are the “engine” that your body uses to propel itself  they turn energy into motion.
• It would be impossible for you to do anything without your muscles. Absolutely everything that you conceive of with your brain is expressed as muscular motion. The only ways for you to express an idea are with the muscles of your larynx, mouth and tongue (spoken words), with the muscles of your fingers (written words or “talking with your hands”) or with the skeletal muscles (body language, dancing, running, building or fighting, to name a few).

­Because muscles are so crucial to any animal, they are incredibly sophisticated. They are efficient at turning fuel into motion, they are long-lasting, they are self-healing and they are able to grow stronger with practice. They do everything from allowing you to walk to keeping your blood flowing.

 

Olive trees typically live to be 1000 yrs old. Purportedly, the oldest living olive tree alive is between 6,000 and 6,800 yrs old.

 

The Grapes of Wrath was banned in several states when it came out. When Steinbeck was preparing to write the novel, he famously wrote, “I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the Great Depression and its effects]. I’ve done my damnedest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags.”Not surprising, Grapes of Wrath gathered a huge following among the working class due to Steinbeck’s sympathy to the workers’ movement and his open prose style.But many Americans were disgusted by how Steinbeck described the poor and accused him of exaggerating the conditions to make a political point; however he argued that this was actually a diluted narrative reflecting the harsh truth of what was actually being witnessed by families in these communities at the time. In fact he had done the opposite, purposely underplaying the conditions that he knew were far worse than the novel describes because he felt that exact descriptions would have gotten in the way of his story.

 

You’re probably not as great as people say you are, and yet you’re not as bad as you think you are.

 

The Art Institute of Chicago holds the largest collection of Impressionist paintings outside the Louvre in Paris.