After my previous post I received a comment disagreeing with my premise of total absence of good-looking people at the Civil War reenactment events. Well, there may have been one good-looking gentleman at the reenactment but I don’t concern myself with looking at other guys. I will revise my statement to say “rarely you will find a good-looking person at one of these”.

To support my thesis I am posting additional pictures of the Civil War Reenactment in Olathe from one of the previous years. Pay special attention to the one and only “cubic” boy. I wonder how long this boy would have survived in real war conditions.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Some of you might have noticed that I mostly retired from writing about restaurants, not that it was a large part of this blog anyway. There are many food blogs out there, ranging from awesome to annoying (no links here), and even more reviews posted on a variety of special sites, so I have no interest in being just another one. However, sometimes I find something new, exciting and not beaten to death by everyone with a smartphone and a greasy finger, something that I feel needs to be shared. A while ago I wrote about my favorite hot dog dealer vendor Clay’s Curbside Grill and today’s post is about the Indios Carbonsitos – a Mexican food truck roaming the neighborhoods in Kansas City, KS and the only one I know of (could be wrong) to be registered on the Kansas side.

I first learned about Indios from a comment on one of the Fat City posts and tracked down their twitter and facebook pages. From there on, it was a just a matter of time before I got my hands on and in one of their tortas ahogadas.

Sometime ago I was arguing on twitter about the number of women in the medical profession in the USSR. While I knew I was right (because I am always right), my opponent ridiculed my anecdotal references, like a number of female doctors I visited in my childhood, or a number of female students in my Dad’s medical school photo-album. I thought maybe a scientific-looking study would be more convincing.

Soviet Women in the Work Force and Professions
WILLIAM M. MANDEL Highgate Road Social Science Research Station, Inc.(Berkeley, California)

Women had been 10% of doctors and dentists in 1913. They rose to 77% in 1950 (Tsentral’noe Statisticheskoe Upravlenie, 1969a: 103), but then declined to 72% in 1969, when they were also down to 55% among medical students, pointing to an equalized sex ratio in medicine a generation hence.

Although remuneration in the Soviet professions shows nothing remotely like the spread in the United States between the teacher at the bottom of the heap, the engineer somewhat better off, and the doctor way out in front, there is a differential there as well. The Soviet government, always economically pinched, has raised wages and salaries in a[264] manner to attract people into fields which would not otherwise be entered by enough candidates to meet the need. Engineering is the best enumerated. Law is the lowest paid of the professions in the Soviet Union, and in it women are precisely the same proportion (one-third) as in engineering,the highest paid. Women had been 5% of the lawyers in 1926. At present there are 2,500 women judges. So women are majorities in the two professions in the middle of the payscale –  medicine and teaching   minorities in the two at the extremes-engineering and law. However, the 1971-1975 Five-Year Plan provides sharp salary increases for the two professions of medicine and teaching. Those seeking signs of discrimination no matter what are faced with the fact that, in numbers as distinct from percentages, there are more women engineers than physicians, and more physicians than librarians. The 775,000 women engineers in the USSR (1969) is almost equal to the total number of engineers in the United States (870,000), of whom only 1% are women.

On this International Women’s Day I am posting some photos of the Soviet women at work and at play. Wishing the best to all my female readers, even those who thought they can prove me wrong.

On December 11, 1944 the Life Magazine published an article: Teen-Age Girls – They Live In A Wonderful Wold Of Their Own.

There is a time in life of every American girl when the most important thing in the world is to be one of the crowd of the other girls and to act an speak and dress exactly as they do. This is the teen age.

Some 6,000,000 U.S. teen-age girls live in a world of their own – a lovely, gay, enthusiastic, funny and blissful society almost untouched by the war. It is a world of sweaters and skirts and bobby sox and loafers, if hair worn long, of eye-glass rims painted red with nail polish, of high-school boys not yet gone to war. It is a world still devoted to parents who are pals even if they use telephone too much. It is a world of Vergil’s Aeneid, second-year French and plane geometry, of class plays, field hockey, “moron” jokes and put-on accent. It is a world of slumber parties and the Hit Parade, of peanut butter and popcorn and the endless collecting of menus and match covers and little stuffed animals.

Yes, maybe some things have changed – no one wears shetland sweaters; many teenage girls today haven’t seen a corded phone or read Virgil; “moron” jokes are considered not politically correct and no one paints eyeglasses with nail polish. But now, that I have a bona fide teenage girl in my house, I could replicate most of these photos today.