How to Make Flamingo Vultures Get excited for Halloween making flamingo vultures for your lawn! What do you think of this creepy DIY Halloween decor idea? Turn pink lawn flamingos into vultures using some spray paint and a white boa around the neck. The buzzards are an unexpected surprise to any of your outdoor decorations for […]
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All women are a little crazy and can you blame us? We’re dealing with kids that don’t listen, husbands that don’t hear, equality in the workplace, and bodies that are hormonal amusement parks.
a. over-stressed
b. over-tired
c. under-appreciated
d. all of the above
Today with a better understanding of mental health and psychology, a person with erratic or uncharacteristic behaviors might be diagnosed as bipolar or depressed. But decades ago they were considered downright crazy.
Meet these five fascinating women in history that were deemed insane and see what you really think.
Who was she? Zelda Fitzgerald was the wife of famous American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald who once coined her as the “first American flapper.” Born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1900 as Zelda Sayer, Zelda was vibrant, exciting and the epitome of a 1920s flapper girl. Her life and marriage, however, were rocky and heavily laden with alcoholism. It is known that Fitzgerald used Zelda’s own writing, her journal, and her stories to make up key elements in his own works. There is no F. Scott Fitzgerald without Zelda.
By the late 1920s, Zelda started to show signs of serious disturbance. In a letter to Dr. Slocum Fitzgerald suggests that his wife Zelda was schizophrenic.
What was really going on? (1)Heavy alcohol abuse: Both Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were known to consume heavy amounts of toxic industrial alcohol during prohibition. (2) Infidelity: In 1927, Scott had a public affair with Lois Moran, a young actress whom he based his character Rosemary on in “Tender is the Night.” There were many affairs before and after Moran. (3) A tempestuous social life: Scott and Zelda were the “It” couple in the public eye, attending parties at eccentric hours.
Some historians suggest that Zelda likely experienced depression, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Zelda was ultimately committed to Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina where she died in a facility fire eight years after her husband’s death.
Find out more: Watch ‘Z: the Beginning of Everything’ on Amazon or read this Huffington Post article,
Who was she? Sylvia Plath was an American poet and author of the novel The Bell Jar which was closely based on her struggle with mental illness. She is the first person to win a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.
What was really going on? Severe depression and insomnia-plagued Plath for years and led her to attempt suicide several times. On February 11, 1963, a year after her husband Ted Hughes left her for another woman, and at the age of 30 and with small children, Sylvia Plath stuck her head in the oven, turned on the gas, and died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Find out more: Read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar to get a closer look into her madness or watch the movie Sylvia.
Who was she? First lady and wife of President Abraham Lincoln. Mary Todd Lincoln was a smart, outgoing woman from a wealthy background. Her Lexington, Kentucky family disapproved of her match to Abraham Lincoln because he had little formal education and came from a poor background. On April 14, 1865, Mary Todd Lincoln was sitting next to her husband at Ford’s Theater when he was shot by John Wilkes Booth.
What was really going on? Mary Todd Lincoln never recovered from her husband’s assassination and she sank into a deep depression. Six years later her youngest son Thomas died and her only surviving son Robert took her to court on charges of insanity. The court sided with Robert and committed Mary to an insane asylum near Chicago. Although she was released several months later, the public now saw here as a crazy woman.
Find out more: You can read more about Mary Todd Lincoln here or watch the acclaimed movie Lincoln.
Who was she? A French teenage girl with tremendous valor who dressed as a male and helped lead the French army to benchmark victories during the Hundred Years’ War. Joan claimed that at the age of 13 she saw visions of angels and saints who told her to drive out the English. History reports that Joan was a woman with “courage in her heart and voices in her head.”
What was really going on? Modern scholars explain the voices and visions by asserting that Joan of Arc possibly had schizophrenia, epilepsy, or a neurological disorder that triggered hallucinations. The strangest theory of all predicts that Joan contracted bovine tuberculosis from drinking unpasteurized milk as a kid. Because a woman who sees angles is crazy.
Find out more: Watch the Smithsonian Channel’s documentary on Joan of Arc or read Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.
Who was she? Rosemary Kennedy was the third of Joseph and Rose Kennedy’s nine children and President John F. Kennedy’s sister. Rosemary was born with a mental impairment in a time when having a child with special needs was considered shameful. Rosemary was the Kennedy that no one talked about.
What was really going on? At 18, Rosemary was functioning at a 4th-grade level. She would run away in the middle of the night and be found in bars. When she was 23, Rosemary’s father scheduled her for a lobotomy without telling his wife. Slicing into her brain left Rosemary unable to walk or talk. She lived the last 60 years of her life in an institution where her father never visited again.
Find out more: Read this Marie Claire article (you’ll be shocked at her traumatic birth!), watch the upcoming movie Letters from Rosemary with Emma Stone, or watch the PBS documentary The Lobotomist.
We all have our Britney Spears moments. If Britney can come out on top after a shaved head, partying without panties, and attacking paparazzi with an umbrella, then maybe it’s not so crazy to have a breakdown or two. Besides, history is even more full of men who are off their rocker. But that’s another story for another time.
Image sources: Featured image: Unsplash.com, (1) Zelda Fitzgerald: Wikimedia Commons public domain, (2) Sylvia Plath: Wikimedia Commons public domain, (3) Mary Todd Lincoln: By not listed – Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (neg. no. LC USZ 62 15325), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=970791, (4) Joan of Arc: Wikimedia Commons public domain.
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If you watch TLC’s “The Little Couple,” then you probably admired the house Dr. Jen Arnold and her husband Bill Klein built in 2010. I know I have! They just put it on the market in Texas and moved to Florida. Although they left Houston ahead of Hurricane Harvey, they were in St. Petersburg in time to evacuate for Irma.
“I have a history, and it’s getting a little weird about hurricanes following me. My family calls me a hurricane magnet,” Arnold said on Instagram. “But I have been followed by hurricanes in Orlando, Miami, Pittsburgh, Houston, and now St. Petersburg.” Thankfully, the family and both houses are okay.
Bill Klein and Jen Arnold are just like your average couple — except for the fact that they’re both under 4 feet tall! He stands at 4 feet and has a rare variation of a skeletal dysplasia called Spondyloepiphyseal Dysplasia (or SED) and has had more than 20 surgeries.
She stands at just 3 foot 2 has a similar, and also rare type of dwarfism called Spondyloepiphyseal Dysplasia Type Strudwick, has had more than 30 surgeries – and yet this too is not what makes this couple unique.
“The Little Couple” follows them as they embark on all the ups and downs of life together with their adopted children Will and Zoey.
Exceptional quality custom built home w/ quarters, situated on a quiet corner lot centrally located by the Medical Center & Downtown! Open floorplan w/vaulted ceilings in the family room & beautiful kitchen, 1st floor master suite, media room, study, wine grotto & mud room!
This home has multiple balconies & porches in addition to the resort style pool/spa area w/water features, outdoor kitchen & fire pit. Quarters w/kitchen, separate first floor exercise room w/shower & 3 car garage.
In an interview with Glamour, they talked about all the fans who had tracked down the house in Houston, sometimes knocking on the door to introduce themselves.
“We’ve had people come to the door or tear pages out of books and write full-length notes and stick them in our mailbox. I actually almost gave one lady a heart attack because I went to get the mail, and she was on my doorstep. I opened up the door while she was right there writing her note, and she fell over and all that stuff.”
The couple moved with their two children for Arnold’s new job at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg. The new house sits on a canal in the Snell Isle neighborhood.
I imagine they’ll be redesigning a lot of things in this house to make it as accessible as the last one was, and redecorating to better fit their style. You can see more photos of it on Realtor.
For more information, check the listing held by Lisa Segal Kornhauser (photo credits: John Daughterty Realtors; DCL; DJ Arizpe; TLC). The new season of The Little Couple premiered on Sept. 19th. Are you watching? 
*NOTE: I’m having issues with the comments, so they’re closed. *
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The 1986 movie The Money Pit was a comedy of house errors, showing just about everything that could possibly go wrong with a fixer upper. Tom Hanks and Shelley Long played a young couple that bought a house that seemed too good to be true but — spoiler alert! — it wasn’t.
They filmed the exterior shots at a Long Island mansion known as Northway, which imitated life by falling into a serious state of disrepair itself for a while after the movie was made. In The Money Pit, Walter and Anna bought this place for $200,000, but it’s for sale again and priced a bit higher than that, ha. At least it’s already been fixed up for you — take a look!
“A quarter-mile gated drive introduces Northway, a grand estate lovingly and meticulously restored, featuring elaborate moldings and ebony wood floors.”
Hard to imagine what a young couple like Walter and Anna in The Money Pit would do with such a big, formal house. You could lose each other in a place like this!
The current owners say art imitated life for them when they bought the house in 2002, telling the NYT, “We didn’t realize how bad it was. The house was falling apart when you went from room to room.”
“A crew of 30 spent a year and a half gutting the house, taking down ceilings, ripping out the cast-iron radiators, redoing the plumbing, heating and electrical systems, installing a cedar roof that cures to gray, not brown, and restoring the home to the splendor of Long Island’s Gilded Age.”
Want it? They’re asking $5.9m, which seems like a good deal considering it was on the market in 2014 for $12.5. You may recall I told you about it a few years ago when it was first listed. From what I can tell, they took it off the market for a while and are now trying again with a different agent.
For more information, check the Sotheby’s listing. You can learn more about the movie in my original post, which includes the model of the house they used for some of the stunts!
*NOTE: I’m having issues with the comments right now, which is why they’re closed.*
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UTV plowing deep snow How much snow can a UTV push? Let's see if it can plow 8" of heavy wet snow on long runs over a gravel drive...
