All Our Dreams Can Come True

Outgoing postcard US-3869982 to Mexico shows a film frame from the 2009 Disney Movie "The Princess and the Frog."

Re-telling a classic tale with a modern twist, this animated movie sets stage in New Orleans, featuring a beautiful and hard-working waitress named Tiana, and Prince Naveen who is transformed into a frog by a voodoo magician and desperately wants to be human again. Sealed with a fateful kiss, they are on a hilarious journey to break the spell and pursue their dreams through the mystical bayous of Louisiana.

Just like Walt Disney once said: "All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them."

Designer of the Las Vegas Welcome Sign Passed Away

Betty Willis,  an American graphic designer and a Las Vegas native best known for having designed the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign,  died at the age of 91 at her home in Overton, Nevada on April 19, 2015

Betty was the daughter of Stephen R, Whitehead, the first assessor of Clark County, Nevada. She went to an art school at Los Angeles in 1942, and returned to Las Vegas for she first job at the courthouse. She designed the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign in 1959 when she worked for the Western Neon sign company. She considered the sign "my gift to the city," and never trademarked the sign, which made many derived arts possible and thrived.

Postcard US-2995494 to Belarus shows the iconic sign among the various landmarks in Las Vegas. It has become one of the most photographed signs in the world. The word “fabulous” reflects what Betty always used to describe Las Vegas: "We really thought Las Vegas was a fabulous place." The sign was added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 1, 2009.

Sand Island Lighthouse, Alabama

Postcard US-1987845 to Minnesota, USA shows the Sand Island Lighthouse located at the southernmost point of the state of Alabama, 3 miles or 5 kilometers offshore near Dauphin Island, at the mouth of Mobile Bay, Alabama. The 131-foot or 40-meter tall Italianate style lighthouse opened in 1838 to replace an earlier lighthouse destroyed by Confederate John W. Glenn on February 23, 1863 during the Civil War. Due to erosion and hurricane damages, it is on the Lighthouse Digest Doomsday List as one of the most endangered lighthouses in the country.

The lighthouse is one of the five Gulf Coast lighthouses featured on postage stamps and a stamped postcard book with pre-printed 28-cent postage issued by USPS in 2009.

Earlier on today, the 86th Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., Selma, a historical film based on the Selma to Montgomery, Alabama voting rights marches led by James Bevel, Hosea Williams, Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis in 1965, was nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Song for the 87th Oscar Awards. However, as Selma's director Ava DuVernay was not recognized for her powerful work directing the film, it reinforced the perception that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, made up of predominately white, older men, is still falling behind in recognizing diversity. Today’s nominations see absence of black actors/filmmakers and female filmmakers nominated for directing or screenplay. The controversy becomes evident as the Twitter hashtag #OscarSoWhite is trending right now.

Fort Jefferson Lighthouse

Outgoing postcard US-3133041 to Belarus shows the Fort Jefferson Lighthouse on Garden Key in the Dry Tortugas, Florida. Erected in 1876, Fort Jefferson Lighthouse, also known as Garden Key Lighthouse, helped warn sea traffic away from the dangerous shoals and reefs that surround the Florida Keys until it was deactivated in 1921. Today the  three-story hexagonal lighthouse made of boilerplate iron is part of Dry Tortugas National Park established in 1992. The lighthouse is one of the five Gulf Coast lighthouses featured on postage stamps and a stamped postcard book with pre-printed 28-cent postage issued by USPS in 2009.

Sunset Over Sabang Bay, Indonesia

Postcard US-2293197 to Michigan shows a beautiful sunset view over Sabang Bay in Aceh Province, Indonesia. It was one of those postcards I bought when I was volunteering in Banda Aceh, Indonesia in 2005. A similar card was featured in this blog last year for the International Day for Disaster Reduction, which was designated as October 13 by the UN General Assembly in 2009, replacing the International Day for Natural Disaster Reduction that was part of the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction in the 1990s. The theme for 2014 is "Resilience is for Life."

Best known for snorkeling and diving, Sabang Bay is located on the north side of Pulau Weh, an island north of Banda Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra. On the sidebar of the postcard, Rubiah Island, Ulee-Lheu Beach, Lhok Seudu Beach, and Lhok Nga Beach are shown from top to bottom.

Love is a Force of Nature

I got this Brokeback Mountain movie promotional card during its Ft. Lauderdale International Film Festival premiere at Cinema Paradiso in 2005. The movie told a powerful story of two young men, a ranch hand and a rodeo cowboy, who sheepherded in the Wyoming mountains in the summer of 1963 and formed a life-long bond with love and conflicts.

Sixteen years ago today on October 6, 1998, Matthew Shepard, a student at the University of Wyoming, was beaten, tortured and left to die near Laramie, Wyoming. He was targeted and attacked by two men because he was gay. His death from severe head injuries six days later brought national and international attention to hate crime legislation. However, it wasn't until October 2009 that the United States Congress passed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. President Barack Obama signed the "Matthew Shepard Act" into law on October 28, 2009.

Today on October 6, 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review those cases where state laws banning same-sex marriage were overturned by federal appeals courts, which resulted immediate recognition of same-sex marriage in Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin. Wyoming could see same-sex marriages recognized by the end of this year as it was covered by the same circuit appeals courts as Utah and Oklahoma. Five additional states: North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia, Colorado, and Kansas, are also covered.

The card was sent in to obtain a first-day-of-issue postmark on a Harvey Milk Forever Stamp on July 21, 2014, along with other first-day-of-issue postmark and digital color postmarks. It took two months for the fulfilled order to be returned on September 23, 2014.

In Memory of Chinese Linguist Ji Xianlin

Professor Ji Xianlin (季羡林), born August 6, 1911, was a Chinese Indologist, linguist, paleographer, historian, and writer. He passed away in Beijing five years ago on July 11, 2009.

The postcard shows the campus of Peking University where Professor Ji founded the Department of Eastern Languages soon after his return from oversea in 1946. He became dean of the department and held a long career as one of greatest scholars in China in the field of Eastern studies, specialized in ancient Indian languages and culture. In 1978, Prof. Ji became vice president of Peking University and director of the Chinese Academy of Science's Research Institute on South Asia.

Coincidentally, another Chinese scholar was lost in the same day. Philosopher Ren Jiyu (任继愈), born April 15, 1916, was a scholar in religious studies and historian, and the Honorary Director of the National Library of China. He passed away in Beijing on July 11, 2009 at the age of 93.

In September 2004, Professor Ji Xianlin and Ren Jiyu, along with three other prominent scholars, jointly issued the 2004 Cultural Declaration at the 2004 Cultural Summit Forum in Beijing, The Declaration emphasizes the necessity of coexistence of a diverse-culture, and promotes equal rights for cultural exchanges, under the background of accelerating globalization.

A Harvey Milk Stamp for Harvey Milk Day

Today is Harvey Milk Day, which is celebrated each year on May 22 in memory of Harvey Milk, a  California politician and LGBT rights activist who was born on May 22, 1930 and assassinated on November 27, 1978. The day was established by the California legislature and signed into law by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2009, as a day of special significance for public schools in California.

At the White House today, USPS is unveiling a new forever stamp featuring a photography of Harvey Milk, who became the fifth openly LGBT candidate in the U.S. and the first to be elected to public office in California when he won a seat on San Francisco's Board of Supervisors in January 1978. President Obama commemorated Harvey Milk in 2009 by posthumously awarding him the Medal of Freedom.

Harvey Milk stood outside his Castro Street Camera Store in San Francisco in 1977

Postcard US-2276102 to France shows a view of San Francisco where Harvey Milk called home since he moved from New York City in 1972.

Dolomiti, Italy

Postcard IT-255128 from Italy shows the Dolomite mountain ranges in northeastern Italy. According to Wikipedia, those mountain ranges "form a part of Southern Limestone Alps and extend from the River Adige in the west to the Piave Valley (Pieve di Cadore) in the east. The northern and southern borders are defined by the Puster Valley and the Sugana Valley (Val Sugana). The Dolomites are nearly equally shared between the provinces of Belluno, South Tyrol and Trentino." They are home to many regional parks. In 2009, the Dolomites were recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Little Free Library

Postcard US-2545772 from Virginia, USA shows a Little Free Library that the sender set up in front of her house. A Little Free Library is a “take a book, return a book” gathering place where neighbors share their favorite literature and stories. In its most basic form, a Little Free Library is a box full of books where anyone may stop by and pick up a book (or two) and bring back another book to share.

It started in 2009 when Todd Bol of Hudson, Wisconsin, built a model of a one room schoolhouse as a tribute to his mother, a former school teacher who loved reading. He filled it with books and put it on a post in his front yard. It now grows into a network of more than 10,000 registered Little Free Libraries in the world.

The concept of Little Free Library is unique as real people are sharing their favorite books in their community with a carefully curated collection, and the Library itself is a piece of neighborhood art.

You can find a Little Free Library near you on a map, and learn how Little Free Libraries work in 2 minuets.

International Day for Disaster Reduction

The United Nations General Assembly designated the 1990s as the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction on December 22, 1989. As part of its proclamation, it also designated the second Wednesday of October as the International Day for Natural Disaster Reduction. The objective was to promote the awareness in order to decrease the loss of life, property destruction and social and economic disruption caused by natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, landslides, volcanic eruptions, droughts, locust infestations, and other disasters of natural origin.

In 2009, the United Nations General Assembly decided to designate October 13 as the official date and changed the name to the International Day for Disaster Reduction. The 2013 Theme is Living with Disability and Disasters.

Postcard US-2217252 to Portugal shows a postcard I bought in Banda Aceh, Sumatra, Indonesia when I was there to volunteer for tsunami relief effort in February, 2005.

Image Schématique du Soleil

Schematic Image of the Sun and its Environment

This postcard from my space related collection shows the schematic image of the Sun and its environment. It provides a blue print showing the wide range of phenomena studied by the various experiments on board the spacecraft Ulysses.

Ulysses, decommissioned on June 30, 2009, was a joint robotic space probe to study the Sun by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). The launch of Ulysses was delayed until October 6, 1990 aboard Discovery (mission STS-41) due to the loss of its initially assigned carrier Challenger. It studied the Sun at all latitudes, breaking the limitation that the Sun had been only observed from low solar latitudes due to the Earth's orbit confined on the ecliptic plane. The mission was managed by JPL.

I Love Lucy

I Love Lucy

Postcard US-2325230 received today shows one of 20 stamps released by USPS in 2009, featuring 1950's hit television shows. The retro-style stamps, featuring black-and-white images from the shows "Dragnet," "The Ed Sullivan Show," "The Honeymooners," "I Love Lucy," "Lassie," "The Lone Ranger," "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Perry Mason", were designed by Carl Herrman, an artist from Las Vegas, Nevada.

On the postcard, it shows Lucy and Ethel worked in a chocolate factory. They lost their battle with a chocolate assembly line as the machine was going too fast.