Presents, a Life with a Plan. My name is Karen Anastasia Placek, I am the author of this Google Blog. This is the story of my journey, a quest to understanding more than myself. The title of this blog, "The Secret of the Universe is Choice!; know decision" will be the next global slogan. Placed on T-shirts, Jackets, Sweatshirts, it really doesn't matter, 'cause a picture with my slogan is worth more than a thousand words, it's worth??.......Know Conversation!!!
Horses in California, Inc. is a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing equestrian-related arts, events, and physical wellness to the San Francisco Bay Area. Horses in California, Inc. operates the James S. Brady Therapeutic Riding Program and hosts the annual Polo in the Park charity event.
In the early 1980’s, San Francisco residents Hugh and Melba Meakin had a dream of starting an organization that would expose people in their community to the glorious psychological and physical benefits of horseback riding, horse-related arts and equestrian sports. Indeed, they created the non-profit organization Horses in California, Inc. in 1984 and started off the year by hosting a world-class show jumping and grand prix event called “The San Francisco Show Jumping Grand Prix and Equestrian Festival”. This was a three-day event held at the Marin Headlands. In 1985, Horses in California, Inc. moved its venue to the San Francisco Golden Gate Park Polo Fields and showcased polo matches as well as other horse-inspired festivities.
In 1981, the physical and psychophysical benefits of horseback riding gained national attention when James S. Brady, Press Secretary to President Ronald Reagan, was shot in the head during a failed assassination attempt on the President and used horseback riding as a means of physical therapy during his recovery. Hugh and Melba Meakin met with Brady at this time and were given the honor of using his name for a riding program that the Meakins were opening to provide therapy alternatives to disabled children. Thus, the James S. Brady Therapeutic Riding Program for special children was founded, and has since helped over 200 youths find wellness and happiness through horsemanship and horseback riding lessons.
Today, Horses in California, Inc. is continuing to help disadvantaged and disabled children as well as bring awareness of horses, horse-related arts and equestrian sports to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Mission
The James S. Brady Therapeutic Riding Program for children with special needs is the main beneficiary of Horses in California, Inc., a non-profit organization.
The "Brady Program" helps disabled and disadvantaged youths in the San Francisco Bay Area by offering horseman ship and horseback riding lessons as a physical or social therapy alternative.
Under the direction of personnel who have been certified and insured by the Equine Associated Growth and Learning Association, our program has helped over 200 mentally or physically challenged children. Our students suffer from autism, cerebral palsy, muscle weakness, sight and hearing impairment, learning disabilities, or social disorders. Each student participates in a specially designed program that is individually suited to his or her needs. Children learn anatomy, grooming, and riding and begin to develop friendships with the horses and other riders. We use specially trained therapy horses at weekly lessons in Bercut Field Golden Gate Park San Francisco.
The "Brady Program" has received a Certificate of Recognition from the California Legislature Assembly and Award of Honor from the City and County of San Francisco.
"…I used to bring children with disabilities to your program…I always enjoyed those visits! You, your daughters, and all the volunteers were wonderful! The children truly enjoyed themselves and a lot of healing took place...Just want you to know how much I appreciate all you and your staff do for the children and adults."
Assembly Woman Fiona Ma, Speaker pro Tempore presenting Certificates of Recognition to the Meakin Family at Polo in the Park 2012. (From Left to Right: Hugh Meakin, Assembly Woman Fiona Ma, Sarah Meakin, Melba Meakin, Sharon Haynes Meakin and Philip Meakin.) View the certificate here.
BUY OFFICIAL EVENT MERCHANDISE!
Shirts, caps, cups and lots more! Every purchase helps to support the James S. Brady Therapeutic Riding Program. Lots of great gift ideas for the horse-lover in your life. Shop Online for Official Polo in the Park Merchandise!
THE JAMES S. BRADY THERAPEUTIC RIDING PROGRAM
Polo in the Park is the primary fundraiser to cover operating costs of the James S. Brady Therapeutic Riding Program, which provides horseback-riding and horsemanship lessons as a physical or psychological therapy alternative to children with autism, cerebral palsy, muscle weakness, sight and hearing impairment and learning disabilities in the Bay Area. By performing special therapeutic exercises on horseback, these children are able to strengthen muscle tone, improve balance, build hand-eye coordination, boost confidence and simply enjoy being a kid! Read more about the Brady Program.
THE PROGRAM
The James S. Brady Therapeutic Riding Program has helped over 200 mentally and physically challenged children, under the direction of personnel certified and insured by the Equine Associated Growth and Learning Association. Each student takes part in a specially-designed program individually tailored to his or her needs. Children learn anatomy, grooming, horsemanship, and riding. Over time, they develop strong relationships with the horses and other riders. The “Brady Program” uses specially-trained Norwegian Fjord therapy horses at weekly lessons in Golden Gate Park’s Bercut Equitation Field.
THE BENEFITS OF HORSES
The incredible efficacy of equine therapy becomes evident when you witness a child experiencing the joy of horses for the very first time. A child who could not do the things that you or I may take for granted – walking, running, playing, or sitting up straight – gets on a horses and suddenly has the ability to move with coordination and look down on the world from above! Students develop a love and respect for animals, better self-confidence, improved social skills and a general sense of normalcy. Caring for an animal allows children to take on challenges they may otherwise had never dreamed possible.
AWARDS AND RECOGNITION
Recognized by the Equine Associated Growth and Learning Association
Certification of Recognition from the California Legislative Assembly
Award and Honor from the City and County of San Francisco
For more information about the James S. Brady Therapeutic Riding Program, please click here.
“A day of Polo in the Park means a year of riding for the kids!”
For information on becoming a sponsor, please download ourSponsorship Packet.
You have the power to help a child in need! Since its inception, the James S. Brady Therapeutic Riding Program has provided horseback-riding and horsemanship lessons as a physical or psychological therapy alternative to children with autism, cerebral palsy, muscle weakness, sight and hearing impairment and learning disabilities. But there are still many more in need. We are not funded by the government. We rely solely on charitable donations to keep the James S. Brady Therapeutic Riding Program in operation throughout the year. With high hopes to expand the program in the future, we need your help!
Sponsorship has its rewards! Enjoy the many benefits of sponsoring Polo in the Park while helping local kids through the James S. Brady Therapeutic Riding Program. Benefits include: advertisement space in event programs, linked ads from our website, signage rights at the event, tickets and reserved seating at Polo in the Park, and more! A complete list of packages and benefits can be found on our Sponsorship Benefitspage.
In bright to Port that portal of thought be neat the tunnel in the tremble of scotch,
block ice with a chisel lot to grasp that barrel of pickle,
in the briny wash of face to taught is the blanket News to Paper to Spot,
on the idea of the formal treat is trick form in varied national storm,
rain that is no wind shield rather the blistering of the castle of the mind in that torn.
Ripping out the back of the full in thus the bladder is the sink on the corn,
a stomach matter in the cramping of flown to the deathly shallows of slain,
shall the bright touch a clock on the acre of range in trade for the barbed of the fence on a lay,
does the Cow of the gate trample the church or is the respective bull find,
gather prospective is inspection of heard to wrangle the doctor of ole Mother Earth,
slight in difference yet Vast are the scores ask in the wrist it's an Ankle or hand,
that slap on the Rump of the movement of sheep is a Flock or the pound buffalo sounds.
There on the Plains of the Most Hello of A Mountain the shark in the see is Mankind on the bleep,
talkers that scramble the channel of mind with 'This' 'That' even on 'Timed' for return,
quick in the sand is the swamp of apt Land shall the torn be of grates And not of the sand,
blocks of the muddy think is an arm that shoulders the breakage on stay on the Farm.
Alas! the quote is in the Big Sky formal with 5th dimensional Vote,
quest to the long ago on the post find it to dill on James Blunt is a toast,
cheers to the reason Wisdom from tot reading a Sixth pen & running From shot,
James Blunt is a curtain that blinks to his crotch With nothing on sum kind of lots,
but even in clamber the length of a trait Muster is I calling out that found Shade,
in that birth to the sail of words on His site Aye find the teaser it's been in & about.
Old fellow, how would you render that field of wheat?---JOSEPH CONRAD
Time is very interesting. Our lives are made of time. Nobody knows what time is. You go in one direction and you gain time. You go in the other direction and you lose time. Airplanes now fly so fast that time stands still. A Plane can fly as fast as the earth revolves past the sun. A baby born in a plane flying in the right direction could theoretically live its whole life of many years without living through one day. It would have a long birthday. Its whole life would be its birthday. Suppose the plane should fly faster. The baby would be minus an old man. There is one place in the United States, and there time is different in every direction. The time belt follows the Snake River. The river makes an ox-bow bend. From within the ox-bow you shoot a long-range rifle north, east, south, or west. The bullet will land almost an hour before it was fired. The ox-bow is completely surrounded by another time belt. Time is all anyone has in the world. It is fluid. Nobody has ever found a good way of measuring it.
The “Motorloaf” comes from a turn-of-the-century English recipe that has been passed down for four generations. This bread was traditionally used as a picnic item to be taken with you when you go “motoring” in your car, and was aptly named the“Motorloaf”. The specialty semi-sweet dark bread contains raisins and walnuts, and is delicious when paired with savory or sweet tea sandwich fillings. In Reality & As The Story Lens:
Tally Ho
We thought we'd lost the motorloaf forever. Then we checked the phone book.
I am haunted by the Red Crane. And by Square One. And by the lingering memory of napolitas and hunky waiters at Pozole. If you live in this town long enough, eventually you, too, will be haunted by the ghosts of restaurants passed. One day you'll be walking around whistling a happy tune, reliving the memory of fresh-baked biscuits at the Meetinghouse, and the next you'll be cursing the gods of exorbitant real estate when you pass by and see there's nothing left but a shuttered building.
And then, every once in a while, something happens to restore your faith in this cruel, fickle foodie town. So it was that I was thumbing through the phone book looking for western attire (do you really want to know?) and stumbled on a listing for the Waters Upton Tea Room, which was the name of a fantabulous tearoom that occupied the spot across from Kaiser Hospital throughout the '80s. My mind raced across the years to lazy afternoons spent sipping Yorkshire Gold and nibbling on sherry trifle and the famous "motorloaf," and to the bitter tears I shed when it covered its windows and a Walgreens sprouted up on that corner. Could it possibly be the same place? If it was a misprint, I wasn't sure I could bear the disappointment. But then, nothing ventured, nothing gained, so with trepidation I set out to investigate.
Wonder of wonder. Joy of joys. Turns out it was a misprint, but only in name. The Meakin family – Hugh, his wife Melba, and son Philip – indeed reopened its tearoom (in 1995, no less) in a smaller, far less conspicuous locale in the Outer Richmond (bring your binoculars to find the sign). Its name is Tal-Y-Tara (Gallic for "By the Kings"; 6439 California, 751-9275), and it doubles as an English equestrian/ polo shoppe, replete with crops and mallets and an array of those smart little riding hats. Wade through the saddles to the back, however, and you'll be greeted by the sight of small benches and flowery love seats, tea canisters and china cups, a sunny patio with umbrella-ed tables, the smell of warm scones, and – yes, indeedy – that famous motorloaf.
Tucking myself into a sunlit spot in the back yard with a steeping pot of tea, I slowly savored the sight of this tidy bread loaf, served exactly as I remember it: a hollowed-out rectangle stuffed neatly with a variety of traditional English tea sandwiches – cream cheese and cucumber, watercress and turkey or ham, egg salad and capers, and cheese and chutney – all made on the same bread and all delicious in their own right.
The motorloaf recipe is a turn-of-the-century relic, salvaged from Melba's great-aunt, that hearkens to the early days of the automobile. Made with wheat flour, molasses, walnuts, and buttermilk, it is a solid, flat-bottomed bread designed for travel – a sort of edible carrying case – that ladies of the day could pack for an afternoon of motoring.
"Melba's Great-Aunt Laura collected ladies' magazines and periodicals," explains Hugh. "She used to cut out recipes and file them away, and in an old issue of McCall's, under the heading, 'The Tea Room I Did Not Have,' we found the motorloaf."
The family adopted the recipe as its own, and along with English trifle, it became the Waters Upton signature dish. Moist, ever-so-slightly sweet, and packed with the nostalgia of a bygone San Francisco, the motorloaf – and my rediscovery of Tal-Y-Tara – might just carry me through several more years of restaurant heartbreak.
True Story is an American magazine published by True Renditions, LLC. It was the first of the confessions magazines genre, having launched in 1919. It carried the subtitle Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction.
With a circulation of 300,000 by 1923, the trend-setting publication remained a huge success through the 1920s and was a key title in Bernarr Macfadden's publishing empire of Physical Culture, True Detective, True Romances, Dream World, True Ghost Stories,Photoplay and the tabloid New York Graphic. It sprang from Physical Culture, stemming from the many letters written the magazine by women about their experiences.[1] By 1929, the circulation of True Story was nearly two million.[2][3]
True Story offered anecdotal experiences, and the articles it presented, rewritten by staffers, were purportedly true. However, by the mid-1920s, many stories were professional submissions from fiction writers or were staff-written by Macfadden's stable of writers, including Fulton Oursler and Lyon Mearson. The language was kept relentlessly simple; Mcfadden would test language on the elevator operator, and reject whatever he could not understand.[1] Articles were illustrated with photographs of posed models, breaking away from the idealistic illustration common in magazines.[4]
The magazine's approach and its audience were detailed by Jackie Hatton:
Sensing a widespread interest in the changing social/sexual codes of modern America, Macfadden put out a new magazine filled with first-hand accounts of social problems such as pre-marital sex, illegitimacy, adultery, unemployment, social relations, and crime (alongside ever-so slightly risque movie-stills of each story's most dramatic moments---the kiss, the temptation, the horrible realization). The magazine personalized issues that were hotly debated in Jazz Age America (dancing, drinking, partying, petting) and offered a unique working-class perspective on issues that were not necessarily unique to the working class. Sensational, emotional, and controversial, True Storydisseminated tales of sex, sin and redemption that seemingly revealed the ubiquity of modern sexual and social "irregularity." Most educated observers hated the magazine, figuring that it depicted the worst aspect of the "revolution in manners and morals" that occurred in the 1920s. But workaday America loved the new confessional magazine.[2]
The formula has been characterized as "sin-suffer-repent": the heroine violates standards of behavior, suffers as a consequence, learns her lesson and resolves to live in light of it, unembittered by her pain.[5]
Advertisers were at first reluctant to buy ads, even as the circulation grew, but by 1928, many major companies placed ads, which copied the style of "short words and shorter sentences" and also imitated the sensational style.[6] "Because I Confessed. . . I found the Way To Happiness" titled an Eagle Brand Condensed Sweetened Milk ad for a cookbook; the title character confessed to a married friend that a man would never propose to her because he wanted a good girl, who could cook, and received the advertised cookbook as a loan, using it to win him.[7] "Some Wives Do It, But I Wouldn't Dare" advertised Wheatena; the narrator would never dare send her husband off without a good breakfast.[8]
During the Great Depression, the emphasis lay on feminine behavior, maternity, marriage, and stoic endurance.[9] Women who dedicated themselves to work were unable to marry or maintain a happy marriage; women who remained independent could not conceive or suffered miscarriages and stillbirths.[10]
With the outbreak of World War II, the stories began to feature war work favorably.[11] However, it continued the sexual themes, such as having war workers be seduced, have affairs with married men, or engage in many casual affairs; the Magazine Bureau objected to this, as hindering recruitment, and argued that war workers should not be shown as more prone to dalliance than other women, and the magazine removed such themes from stories dealing with war workers.[12] The ambitious career woman still appeared; women, however, who worked from patriotic motives were able to maintain their marriages and bear children.[13] During post-war reconversion, the emphasis changed to marriage and motherhood.[14]
In the 1950s, themes changed again, now employing more stories involving teenage girls reflecting on their "lot in life" and the outcomes of their poor life choices. Many of the "True Story of the Month" featured girls who had married young, and had married wrongly. These tales included hostile in-laws, brutal living conditions and feelings of hopelessness and reached resolution when the person telling the story accepted her situation and promised to accept her position in life for the sake of her family. The magazine spoke out loudly on the issue of abortion (it was against it), birth control (against it because it led to situations in which girls could be taken advantage of) and the duties of raising children with profound developmental issues.
Advice columns, a regular feature, were written by True Story "authority" "Helen Willman." Marital advice, under the title "The Marriage Desk," was given by "Dr. Lena Levine, M.D." The columns glossed over issues of physical abuse toward women by the men that they had chosen as their boyfriends and husbands. The physical abuse was often rationalized as the letter writers' fault for not understanding their boyfriend/husbands needs. In one notable 1956 response to a "letter from a reader" who asked why her husband beat her when he came home from work, the magazines response from "Helen Willman" advised the writer that she needed to understand that "your husband works hard," and when he returned from work he "doesn't want or need her burdening her husband with her needs," but that she should better serve her husband and keep the children quiet so he can relax. "Try not to complain," wrote Willman.
The 1950s also brought about double page color photographs posed in dramatic fashions, which played to the leading titles given the works.
Goods advertised in True Story in the 1950s were relied heavily on inexpensive beauty treatments (shampoos, toothpaste, and creams, feminine hygiene products) and inexpensive kitchen remodeling projects and appliances. The backs of the magazines were heavily filled with "penny ads" for correspondence courses in nursing, dog grooming, hotel management and holiday card sales.
Production value wise, the magazine relied single and triple column layouts, printed upon folios of inexpensive papers that alternated between heavy newsprint and low weight, low luster paper used for color print sections. Stories often started in the second section of the magazine, usually with dramatic photographs, and then readers had to flip to the rear of the magazine to complete the articles. Articles were tagged as "True Story of the Month", "Award Winning Story" and "Special Double Article" headers. It should be noted, however, that "who" or what gave the award to the story was never disclosed.
From 1919 to 1926, John Brennan Willian edited True Story. Jordan Rapp was the editor from 1926 to 1942, serving under Editor-in-Chief Henry Lieferant.
Macfadden's consumer division merged with Sterling's Magazines in 1991; Dorchester Media acquired Sterling/Macfadden in 2004. True Renditions, LLC, acquired True Storyand additional confession magazines from Dorchester Media on March 9, 2012.
True Story was the basis for a radio series, The True Story Court of Human Relations, produced by an advertising agency to promote the magazine. The program was directed by radio historian Erik Barnouw and broadcast live on NBC beginning in 1935 and continuing through the 1930s.
The UK edition of True Story duplicated the American magazine but also added British material. It was first published by Hutchinson's in 1922. The Argus Press became the publisher in 1949.
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THE PROGRAM
THE BENEFITS OF HORSES
AWARDS AND RECOGNITION
