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Iron Man’s Hulkbuster exoskeleton is one of the most teased goodies in Avengers: Age of Ultron, and it’s even more impressive in the movie. For its latest episode, Super-Fan Builds turned the oversized suit of armor into a cute high chair.
Tim Baker and his prop team made the chair for comic book nerd Natasha and her 1-year-old daughter Amelia. Natasha is a hardworking single mom with two daughters, so her friend Brandon Hillock nominated her to receive a one-of-a-kind gift from the show. Skip to 5:40 to see the finished high chair.
“Kooogh!” Amelia’s Iron Man impression is the best.
I have always been captivated by the 1985 movie Mask. It is based on the true story of a boy named Roy Lee “Rocky” Dennis who had a disfiguring facial deformity called craniodiaphyseal dysplasia, also known as lionitis.
The Academy Award-winning film centers around the relationship between Rocky (Eric Stoltz) and his single mother Rusty (Cher), and what it’s like to be a young teen with a birth defect.
When you’re a child born with a birth defect, whether it’s severe like Rocky’s or not, there are three things you learn early in life.:
I know this because I have a condition called microtia. I was born without my right ear, and my right jaw was underdeveloped.
Dealing With the Physical Issues
In the movie Mask, Rocky seems to enjoy going to the hospital. The medical staff are kind, the doctor knows his special handshake, and everyone tries to make his necessary check-ups as cheerful as possible.
I had similar experiences. From the time I was five until I was nine years old, I underwent several surgeries.
On the morning of one of my surgeries, I remember a kind orderly who was assigned to wheel me, swallowed up in my big hospital bed, to the operating room.
While my mom stood with tears in her eyes, waving to me as the elevator doors closed, the orderly immediately started chatting away. On the ride, he said silly things to make me laugh so I wouldn’t be scared. It worked, and I arrived at the operating room smiling.
Staying Strong Mentally
Given his disfiguring condition, it’s no surprise that Rocky was the butt of jokes, was pointed at, and was confused for someone with a learning disability. He could not hide his face, and had to live with whatever reaction people had towards him.
Although my condition wasn’t nearly as bad as Rocky’s, I still had a smile that was significantly crooked, and I was deaf on my right side — two things I couldn’t hide the way I could by growing my hair long enough to cover my missing ear.
When the school kids bitterly poked fun at me I would come home and sob to my mother. Like Rusty, my mom sympathized but wasn’t going to let me feel sorry for myself. She told me to buck-up because I needed to learn that life wasn’t always easy.
More often though, I found that the other children were just plain curious.
When I would go to school with a bandage on my head, looking like a casualty of war, the kids were eager to know what was going on.
To appease their curiosity, I would lift my bandage and show them my under-construction ear. It usually garnered one of two responses. From the girls I would hear, “Ew” or “Gross”. But from the boys I would get a resounding, “Neat!”
Love Makes a Difference
As a mother myself now, I realize that telling me to be strong must have been hard for my mom, but she was in it with me.
Like Cher’s character, Rusty, life was tough for my mom. She was single and poor when I was young. We often had to take long bus rides across town to get to my many appointments. Then sometimes she would be forced to leave me alone at the hospital so that she could go to work. Harder still, she couldn’t take away the pain I would endure.
I specifically recall that every time I was admitted to the hospital, I was given a shot first thing. At those times, my mom and the nurse would instruct me to look away and sing a song while I was being injected.
Do you know what song you remember when you’re under pressure? “Jingle Bells”.
When it came time to be stuck with a needle, my mom would always sing the Christmas song with me.
Rocky’s mom was also with him every step of the way. Rusty relieved his headaches when he was in pain, listened when he was given bad news by the doctor, and watched helplessly as others stared at him.
How Things Are Now
Today, I have a reconstructed ear and a straightened jaw, but I am still deaf on my right side. Though my ear doesn’t look completely normal it’s hard to notice anything is different, unless I wear my hair up.
Neither of my children had birth defects, but I’ll admit to holding my breath when I was having their ultrasounds done.
Not long ago, I had a mother notice my ear and ask me about my condition. Her young toddler also had microtia, and I was happy to talk to her about my experience.
When I bent down to show her son my reconstructed ear, the little boy came over and looked at it curiously. Then he gently pressed his bad ear to my bad ear. It was like an Eskimo kiss for people born without ears!
I am grateful for all of the work that was done to repair my birth defect, and for my mom who helped me get through it.
I’m also grateful for wonderful biopics like Mask that give us a glimpse into other people’s lives, both the good and the bad, and serve to inspire us. Cher and Stoltz were nominated for Golden Globes and, along with other notable actors including Sam Elliot and Laura Dern, made the film a memorable one.
Thankfully, my condition was never life-threatening like Rocky’s. It was challenging along the way, but that only served to make me stronger. For that reason, I will always consider my birth defect a gift.
To read more insightful blogs about movies and life sign up at mysisterlovesmovies.com, or visit me on Facebook or Twitter.
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We’re getting too old for this ****.
Action heroes can’t be saving the day 24/7, or can they? It might not be a life-threatening situation, but maybe the quiche is in DANGER of being overcooked. Perhaps your dinner party is being held HOSTAGE by one late arrival. Maybe the evening conversation had been HIJACKED by some selfish jerk.
Cracked brings you this video about action heroes in their off-hours, when they’re not saving the world. But still sort of saving the day.
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With celebrities like Kim Kardashian touting the benefits of waist training, the practice has become very popular recently. But does regular use of “waist training” corsets actually help change the shape of a woman’s waist? Even more important, is this practice even healthy?
Thinking of giving waist training a try? As with any new fitness trend, it is always important to get all of the facts before you jump in. Here are some of the things you should know.
1. At best, the results are only temporary.
Experts agree that waist training corsets will not alter the shape of the waist in the long-term. Many waist training proponents claim that waist trainers induce sweating when worn during a workout. However, while corsets may help the waist look smaller when worn under clothing, they can’t cause your body to lose or redistribute fat. Once you take the corset off, your waist will go back to normal.
2. Waist trainers could actually decrease your core strength.
Many new moms are turning to waist trainers to help tighten up their stomachs after giving birth. While a corset may help to provide support to any loose skin, it can’t actually help to tighten your abs, and it won’t make your uterus shrink any faster than normal. A corset can help to support the core muscles, but some experts say that too much of the extra support could actually weaken your core muscles. The support from the corset restricts some of the use of the core muscles; if those muscles aren’t stimulated, they will lose the strength and tone they once had.
3. It could affect your ability to work out correctly.
Some proponents of waist training also suggest wearing a corset while exercising. They claim that it helps promote sweating and loss of water weight. Not only is a corset unlikely to help you lose water weight while exercising, it can also affect your ability to work out at full capacity. You need to take full, deep breaths when you work out, and wearing a corset could affect your ability to do so because the lungs can’t fully expand. Corsets can also restrict certain movements, making it difficult to perform certain moves correctly. These factors combined could affect the effectiveness of your workout. If you’re headed to the gym, it’s probably best to leave the corset at home-ultimately, a good workout will help you trim your waist more than a waist-training corset will.
4. It could cause health problems.
Perhaps the most important factor to consider when deciding whether or not to try waist training is the possible health risks. It’s one thing to try the latest fitness craze and get no results, but it’s quite another to have it cause physical damage to your body. As the corset is holding your waistline in, it’s also putting pressure on your internal organs. Among the potential health hazards of waist training are acid reflux, rib damage, and bruising. Corsets can also restrict blood flow back to the heart, which could affect your blood pressure and cause dizziness or fainting.
Are all of these risks really worth it, especially when there is no clear medical evidence to support the claims of waist training advocates?
Through my years of studying complex physics and biochemistry, a simple equation remains embedded in my brain: calories in < calories out = weight loss (yes, really).
Disclaimer: I’ve never waist trained.
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Larry Ysunza met his partner Tim Love in 1980 and told his mother that very day that he had met the man he was going to marry. Thirty-five years later, Larry and Tim are among the plaintiffs in the marriage cases that the Supreme Court will hear today. They will be in the courtroom eagerly listening for clues from the justices about whether their long engagement will finally end in marriage vows.
“I never thought this would happen, and certainly not so fast!” That’s Larry expressing his surprise at how fast the country is moving towards the freedom to marry for same-sex couples.
I hear the same sentiment — that marriage equality nationwide was once unimaginable — from so many people. And I feel it myself, every day. When I was a closeted junior high school kid on rural Long Island in the late 1970s, marriage just wasn’t a possibility. I couldn’t imagine coming out to anyone, much less a future in which I could live openly and with dignity. How surprised I would have been back then to know that there would be a man in my future that I could marry, with my family in attendance.
Even putting aside how the marriage cases come out (and we can never count on a win, although I’m hopeful), there has been a striking transformation of the country’s attitude towards our marriages. That trend has snowballed since 2013, when the Supreme Court struck down the core of the Defense of Marriage Act in the ACLU’s United States v. Windsor case.
In short, America is recognizing the common humanity of gay people.
We’ve gone from 13 marriage states at the end of June 2013, to 37 today. Twenty of those new marriage states came just in the last year. On the cultural side, polls show 61 percent support for marriage equality nationwide, America’s biggest businesses are supporting us before the Supreme Court, and even Republican presidential primary candidates are wrestling with whether to attend our weddings or embrace their LGBT children.
That’s progress at a rate that genuinely makes my head spin. And it’s becoming hard to remember how difficult the struggle was just a few years ago. America today is in a very different place from 2004, when voters in 13 states amended their state constitutions to exclude us from marriage; from the summer of 2006, when we lost marriage cases in New York, Washington, and Nebraska; from 2008, when we lost Prop 8 at the polls, which took marriage away from us in California; and even from early 2011, when the U.S. Department of Justice was still defending the constitutionality of DOMA.
I know I felt different about our prospects for success back then. I was confident in our legal arguments but also thought that the cultural change was happening slowly. I didn’t see the acceleration coming. The tsunami of new marriage cases filed all across the country in the wake ofWindsor took me by surprise, as did the even more astounding pile of lower court decisions ruling our way again and again. Something profound has changed about how the country sees gay people.
That change comes from the cultural power of marriage. A central part of homophobia is the assumption that gay people don’t have relationships the same way that straight people do. That our relationships are all about sex rather than about love, that we’re interested in kids as pedophiles rather than as parents, and that any relationships we do have are short, furtive, and shameful.
Marriage in America means the opposite of those anti-gay stereotypes. Marriage is about love, about having kids, about a very public celebration of two people’s commitment to each other.
A primary driver of the cultural change around gay people is the country’s growing realization that we’re not so different from straight folks. Relationships play the same role in our lives as in theirs. And many of us are living the commitment at the core of marriage and are harmed when the law treats us as legal strangers. In short, America is recognizing the common humanity of gay people.
And today before the Supreme Court, we will be making the same argument: That the common humanity of gay people is the core reason that excluding us from marriage violates the Constitution. We are similarly situated to heterosexuals with regard to the purposes of marriage, and the Constitution’s guarantees of liberty and equality apply to us as well. Once the country and the courts appreciate our core similarity, the legal arguments in these cases just aren’t very difficult. The inequality becomes quite stark and unjustifiable.
It’s taken many years to get to this point, both in the courts and in the culture. Though we’ve gotten here more quickly than I expected, we have also waited a long time to stand with equal dignity in America. We have lost friends and partners, had children and grandchildren, loved and lost all without the legal protections that so many count on. It’s about time — for Tim and Larry, for my junior high school self, and for millions of other lesbian, gay, and bisexual people all across the country that we be recognized in our full humanity.
I’m optimistic that our wait is about to be over, but regardless of how the court rules, this is a wonderful time and place to be.
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I ran up the stairs screaming in the way that only a 5 year old with a dart bouncing in the middle of her forehead can scream. I was searching for my mother. Who else would you seek in such circumstances? I was not about to allow my brother to remove the dart. I was 5 and my brother was 16. I would like to blame him entirely for my injury, but it was probably unwise to be running in front of the dartboard while he was throwing darts. On the other hand, being 5, my head was well beneath the dartboard, which suggests he was either horrible at darts or trying to kill me. My mother reacted with her usual loving concern.
“What in the hell have you done to yourself?” She yelled.
My mother was not good at with dealing with injuries. When one of her children got injured she was compelled to shout angry questions and accusations at us as if we had deliberately done this to ruin her life. She claims that these were organic responses out of fear, but when you’re bleeding in pain this is of no comfort. My sister was hit in the face with a softball once, and when she came running into the house with her nose bleeding like a garden hose my mother promptly took over.
“Get off of the kitchen floor, I just mopped! Oh my God stop bleeding all over the place! What is the matter with you?”
Presumably these were not real questions, but rather rhetorical in nature. It was my mother’s fear raging with love to deny anything bad could ever happen to us. Sometimes love is strangely costumed and unrecognizable.
I raced down the hall with the dart bouncing in my head and found my mother in the kitchen. Her face was awash in outrage at the sight of the dart in the middle of my forehead.
“How did this happen?” She snapped as she held my head in place and extracted the dart. It’s hard to know how to answer such a question so I opted for silence swallowing all of my pain physical and otherwise.
The dart apparently didn’t go deep enough to warrant a visit to the emergency room so my mother just dotted the wound with iodine making me look as if I was mocking Indian culture with a sad representation of a bindi.
“Go lie down and keep still,” she commanded kissing me and hugging me tighter than necessary. I was being given my mother’s version of a time out to keep me from procuring anymore irritating injuries.
Injuries abound in large families and we were an extended family with cousins coming and going. Cousin was a loosely defined word for a relationship that did not require genetics to presume kin. I was the youngest of four children with a large expanse of years between myself and my older siblings. It’s amazing that any of us survived.
Some injuries were accidents born of sheer dumb luck, others were a shocking commentary on decision making that suggested IQs fell well beneath the national average, and some were acts of torture that children inflict upon one another for entertainment, power, and boredom. Toughness was a badge of honor. So we hardened ourselves and rarely complained and carried our toughness into adulthood.
In our family there seemed to be no room for fragility or hurt. We were taught to swallow our tears, silence our pain, and rise above our injuries; perhaps because there were just so many that the shear volume would have taken too much time and interfered with the daily struggles of life. I’m quite sure my single over worked mother did not consciously construct a plan to make her children hard. It was merely an accident of her own history of pain and muscle memory that she stumbled upon this way of parenting.
In college I dislocated my shoulder. I was going through a fast food drive through and as I reached into the back seat to grab my purse to pay, my overly flexible shoulder popped out of its socket. The pain shot through my body like electricity.
The person at the window told me to put my car in park while he called 911. I insisted on driving myself to the urgent care a few miles away. My arm seemed stuck to my body as my body worked to keep my shoulder in its socket. I didn’t want an ambulance to come so I drove myself to Urgent Care struggling to avoid passing out from the muscles contracting like a giant heart beat thudding in anger. When I arrived at Urgent Care, they asked me who had brought me and I had to explain that I drove myself. My self-reliance was larger than my pain or ability reason.
Intolerance to injury had become a family tradition. I passed it down to my children like some families pass down a favorite recipe or a song or piece of jewelry.
When I had my own children I did not yell when they were injured. Instead every time they fell or injured themselves I would pick them up and say, “You’re alright, you’re ok.” I didn’t yell, but I gently commanded them not to hurt.
As they grew a little older I noticed that no matter how hard my older son Jackson fell or how badly he got hurt, he would always say, “I’m ok, Mommy, I’m ok.”
One day on a bike ride with Jackson, he skidded down a concrete embankment and split his knee open. I kneeled down next to him as he practically smiled to let me know that it wasn’t serious.
“I’m ok, I’m ok, Mommy. It’s just the skin.” It was a familiar mantra, a promise spoken through a tightened jaw and short hot breaths.
I sat beside him and saw the flesh of his brown knee opened like a flower bursting with blood and white fatty tissue. He didn’t cry. Not a tear. He repeated his promise. “I’m ok, I’m ok.”
“Jackson, are you sure you can get home?”
“I can do it. It’s not that bad.”
We cycled slowly as blood ran down his leg soaking his socks; anxiety crept into my extremities causing my fingers to tingle. A young family moved towards us with their two young children, Jackson got off his bike quickly and turned away from them.
“What are you doing, sweetie? Are you ok?”
“I just didn’t want to scare the little kids because all of the blood.”
I sucked in the air and inhaled the moment filled with particles of aching love and overwhelming fragility. We biked another mile before Jackson stopped and started crying and vomiting. He couldn’t make it the last quarter mile home. I called a friend to come and get us.
I held my son while he cried softly into my chest. I could not hold him tight enough or love him hard enough in that moment. I wanted him to feel safe to hurt and to hurt without shame or apology.
The absence of flesh did not allow for stitches. The urgent care doctor gave me instructions on caring for his wound. As nurses flooded my son’s wound with water and an antibacterial to prevent infection, he clenched his jaw and looked at me. “Don’t worry, Mommy. I’m ok.” His stoicism was too stern and big for his small frame.
I stepped into the hall in search of air and a place to ballast myself. The hall became dark and I started to shrink. I leaned against the wall to keep from passing out. It was not the wound on his knee that took my breath away.
I spent Jackson’s younger years picking him up and telling him that he was ok. My words crawled up inside of him and found their way into his being; they became his truth even when it belied reality. When he is hurt or weak or sick he tells me that he’s ok. He has decided this is his job. I didn’t know now how to fix this thing.
Years have passed since our bike ride and I see that this toughness I have passed on to my son is part burden, part gift. To be independent and not to desperately need is good. To deny yourself the comfort of others comes at a price to yourself and those who love you. Like my mother I selfishly wanted my children to never hurt to protect my own heart never realizing that they had a right to their own pain and their job was not to deny it for my own comfort. I don’t know how it is that the biggest, deepest, wild love I have for my children can be so messy and complicated but humans are like that at least this human is like that.
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