The Peanut Butter Falcon

"A young boy with Down syndrome runs away to fulfill his dream of becoming a professional wrestler" (via).



Zack Gottsagen is an actor, recipient of 2018 Quincy Jones Exceptional Advocacy Award and the first person with Down syndrome to be fully included in the Palm Beach County School district (via).

In the movie, Zak escapes his residential nursing home to follow his dream of training under his professional wrestling idol. Along the way, Zak encounters Tyler, “a small-time outlaw on the run”. The pair work their way through a series of obstacles while convincing Eleanor, the nursing home employee tasked with bringing Zak back, to join the adventure.

“The Peanut Butter Falcon,” written and directed by Michael Schwartz and Tyler Nilson, was created for Gottsagen. Schwartz and Nilson met Gottsagen at a disability acting camp. Gottsagen challenged the filmmakers to create a role for a character with Down syndrome since initially, they said they didn’t see any films that starred people like Gottsagen. (shortened version, via)

Auction

Mr Newman is 82. He has lived through several regimes. He graduated from university and became an expert in his field. With is wife he raised three children...



Commercial for "Diakonie", a charity helping the elderly in Czech Republic.
Nominated for the Young Director Award, Cannes Lions 2011
Winner, Best International Idea, Golden Stiletto Awards 2011
Winner, Most successful campaign, Zihadlo Marketing Awards 2011 (via)

Find Your Greatness

In 2012, Nike launched the "Find Your Greatness" campaign showing "everyday athletes around the world training, playing and competing" (via).



One of the many messages:
"If we think greatness is supposed to look a certain way, act a certain way and play a certain way, we certainly need to rethink some things."



This is really beautiful.

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image via

My Mayor

Just when I thought I couldn't be a bigger fan of the Mayor of Milan, Beppe Sala posted this photograph on Facebook pointing out that Pride will be starting tomorrow and that Milan is a city of human rights and duties (via).



photograph of Beppe Sala via

Only in England

Tony Ray-Jones (1941-1972) was an English photographer, or rather, "a social anthropologist with a camera". He photographed English rituals of Eton boarding school, beauty contests, pop festivals, the street, and the seaside (via).

Intrigued by the eccentricities of English social customs, Tony Ray-Jones spent the latter half of the 1960s travelling across England, photographing what he saw as a disappearing way of life.
Science Media Museum

"My aim is to communicate something of the spirit and the mentality of the English, their habits and their way of life, the ironies that exist in the way they do things, partly through their traditions and partly through the nature of their environment and their mentality. For me there is something very special about the English 'way of life' and I wish to record it from my particular point of view before it becomes Americanised and disappears."
Tony Ray-Jones




"In his photographs, the recent English past does indeed seem like another country, but one that, for all the strangeness he captures, remains oddly familiar."
Martin Parr




- photographs via and via and via and via and via and via
- more photographs: LINK

"We play for a nation that doesn't even know our names." Women Playing Football

The first Women's World Cup was held in Italy in 1970, a decade that was characterised by several countries lifting their ban on women's football and establishing new teams across Europe and North America (via). Currently, the eight edition of FIFA Women's World Cup is being hosted in France (via). Generally speaking, it surely does not get the media coverage the FIFA (Mens') World Cup gets but in Britain, it is attracting a bigger audience than cricket (via).



Before 1921, women's football flourished in England with about 150 women's teams whose matches "pulled bigger crowds than most men's games". Then women were banned from playing football on pitches with spectator facilities, i.e. professional stadiums, since the sport was "quite unsuitable for females". This ban was lifted in 1971 (via), the same year women's football "hit the big time" in Mexico, "a success because the organisers did not assume it would be a commercial or sporting failure. It was sold and promoted as football tournament, one that just happened to feature women" (via).

Women's participation in football also provides a good example of the mutual ripple effect that can exist between a sport's level of television coverage and its increasing uptake in the community. Since the 2011 World Cup, media coverage of international women's football fixtures has steadily gained traction – not least on the back of the French team's commendable performances, which have subsequently pulled in higher audiences. Alongside these television and sports performances, the number of female members of football clubs has soared since the 2010-2011 season (+90%).
Conseil Supérieur de l'Audiovisuel, 2017:10

Here is a strong message of female empowerment (Germany's Women's World Cup advert):



photograph (French team, 1979, photo credit: AFP/CARL FOURIE) via 

Quoting Eli Wallach

"This country has a complex about age. It's unbelievable. If you're over thirty, you've had it in this country."
Eli Wallach



image of Eli Wallach (1915-2014) via

Quoting Lee Van Cleef

In an interview, Lee Van Cleef was asked about the "intercultural communication conditions" in Italy, if everybody involved in making the film "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly" was speaking English.



"No. Not then. Everybody speaks English now, for the most part. For your somewhat better films, your major actors do speak English now, mostly; unless they're in there doin' somebody a favor and won't speak anything but their own tongue, which I think they're making a mistake, there. And in some of your cheapies now, they won't. But in the old days - well, I say the old days, it was fourteen, fifteen years ago and ` before that - everybody would be speaking in their own tongue. Leone couldn't speak English to begin with. He speaks it very well now, but in the first picture he could hardly speak it at all, and we had an interpreter on both of the pictures I did for him. There was one scene in For a Few Dollars More that I was in where there were five languages spoken: Greek, Italian, German, Spanish, and a Cockney Englishman that I couldn't understand any better than I could understand the Greek! But I got along in it, because I knew what everybody was supposed to be saying in English by my script. So, when they'd stop speakin', then I would say something. Also, I began to pick up some of the Italian and Spanish which was prevalent over there."
Lee Van Cleef

"Did any of your fellow actors ever express or hint at any resentments towards you, as an American on a European set; as if to suggest you had taken the job away from a more deserving local" I asked.

"No, I never felt it. I think that the people in the know, they understand that as well as an art, it's an international business and a money game. Because it's international, you have people with different nationalities in damn near every film today. Even American ' producers will go over to Europe to get money to pre-sell a picture. As a consequence, to get this money, they may sometimes have to take actors and technicians from the countries they're negotiating with - or I'm sure : in a lot of cases, they want to take them, because there's a lot of fine people abroad. So, if you're going to make a film anywhere, and you're going to want money from Italy, money from Spain, from Mexico, from Canada, then they will own a film for their particular areas, or however you negotiate it - there's no two alike - and you've got people from all over the world in one fllm.
But we got along fine. No problem at all. You'd be surprised how many over there do speak English now, cause the actors have had to learn. It wasn't that way before. I'd usually pal around with somebody who commanded both English as well as the tongues of anybody there around me. The stunt man I had over there for quite some time spoke English very well, and both Spanish and Italian. My wife speaks a little bit of Spanish, too, and I speak enough Italian now to make myself understood."
Lee Van Cleef

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image of Lee Van Cleef (1925-1989) via

Quoting Clint Eastwood

"I'm interested in the fact that the less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice."
Clint Eastwood



image via

Hysterical, Emotional, Exaggerating: Women, Bias and Undertreatment of Pain

"There is now a well-established body of literature documenting the pervasive inadequate treatment of pain in this country. There have also been allegations, and some data, supporting the notion that women are more likely than men to be undertreated or inappropriately diagnosed and treated for their pain."
Hoffmann & Tarzian (2001:13)



Value systems of a culture have an impact on pain perception from the very beginning. Children are socialised how to react to pain, i.e., boys are often discouraged from expressing pain. And when they are adults, they show the same communication patterns. In a study, male pain research participants reported that they "felt an obligation to display stoicism in response to pain". Impression management also seems to play a role since men report less pain in front of a female researcher than a male researcher. Men and women also show differences in how they report their pain to health-care providers. Interestingly, although women are better at describing their pain sensations, they receive less pain medication.

Miaskowski reported on several studies that identified such differences in response and treatment. Faherty and Grier studied the administration of pain medication after abdominal surgery and found that, controlling for patient weight, physicians prescribed less pain medication for women aged 55 or older than for men in the same age group, and that nurses gave less pain medication to women aged 25 to 54.
Calderone found that male patients undergoing a coronary artery bypass graft received narcotics more often than female patients, although the female patients received sedative agents more often, suggesting that female patients were more often perceived as anxious rather than in pain. Another study, examining post-operative pain in children, found that significantly more codeine was given to boys than girls and that girls were more likely to be given acetaminophen.'
Miaskowski further reported on two more recent studies. In a 1994 study of 1,308 outpatients with metastatic cancer, Cleeland and colleagues found that ofthe 42 percent who were not adequately treated for their pain, women were significandy more likely than men to be undertreated (an odds ratio of 1:5). In another study of 366 AIDS patients, Breitbart and colleagues found that women were significantly more likely than men to receive inadequate analgesic therapy. (...)
A recent prospective study of patients with chest pain found that women were less likely than men to be admitted to the hospital. Of those hospitalized, women were just as likely to receive a stress test as men, but of those not hospitalized, women were less likely to have received a stress test at a one month follow-up appointment. The authors attributed the differences in treatment to the "Yentl Syndrome," i.e., women are more likely to be treated less aggressively in their initial encounters with the health-care system until they "prove that they are as sick as male patients." Once they are perceived to be as ill as similarly situated males, they are likely to be treated similarly. (...)

Hoffmann and Tarzian (2001) come to the conclusion that women are taken less seriously when they report pain and seek help. One likely explanation for the gender-specific difference in treatment is the health-care provider's attitude ... and bias. According to several studies, women are also perceived as being able to tolerate more pain than men, as having a "natural capacity to endure pain".

McCaffery and Ferrell explained this seeming contradiction by speculating that while society attributes strength and bravery to men, these characteristics are displayed by an unwillingness to complain or express discomfort rather than by an actual tolerance of discomfort.

Health-care providers tend to doubt the pain experience of women. A great many women feel that their doctor did not take their pain seriously and expected them to put up with it. The image of the hysterical and emotional woman may also be one reason why female chronic pain patients are more likely to be diagnosed with histrionic disorder.

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- Hoffmann, D. E. and Tarzian, A. J. (2001). The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain. Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 29, 13-27.
- photographs by Sepp Werkmeister via