1.- Jose Guadalupe Posada was born on February 2nd, 1852, in Aguascalientes in Mexico.

His older brother, Cirilo, was a school teacher, and Posada studied reading, writing, and drawing with him. In 1871, Posada started to work as a political cartoonist for El Jicote, a local newspaper. But one of his cartoons offended a local politician, and the newspaper closed down.

2.- Posada moved to Leon. There he married Maria de Jesus Vela in 1875.

He opened a printing and commercial illustration shop with a friend from Aguascalientes. The two concentrated on advertising work and printed posters.

The shop was successful, but in 1888 there serious floods that destroyed the property. As a result, Posada stopped working in Leon and moved to Mexico City, where he designed book covers and worked on illustrations.

3.- He is best known for his calaveras - sketches of skeleton figures, which satirized high society personalities at the time of Porfirio Diaz. Posada's work influenced the artist Jose Clemente Orozco, who admired it greatly. Posada's work is very well-known now, but he died in proverty on January 20th, 1913, when was 60 years old.

My grandmother was born not long after the Great Depression. She was one of five children. She had two older brothers (one of them died of polio when my grandmother was only seven) and two younger sisters. Her father had a small bakery at the end of Grainger Street, where he made and sold bread and pound cake.

My grandmother worked in the bakery on Saturday when she was young. She liked cooking and could make a great pounnd cake by the time she was twelve. She left school when she was fourteen, and got a job in a factory, but it was hard work (eight o'clock in the morning until six o'clock at night, and only one Saturday off a month) so she left the factory after six months and enrolled in a night school. She learned typing and shorthand, and got ajob as a secretary in a college on the other side of town. There she met my grandfather. He taught geography there. They married the following June and went to Canada on their honeymoon. They stayed in a place called Chippawa, hired two bicycles and rode all over the surrounding area. My grandmother remembera they had very little money,, ate sandwiches and drank root beer every day for lunch, visited Niagara Falls, and took lots of photographs. It was the only time my grandmother ever traveled abroad, but she never forgot it.

Dr. Percy Spencer, a self-taught engieer, didn't invent the microwave on purpose. He invented it by accident in 1946! One day he was in his laboratory testing a new vacuum tube called a megatron. Dr. Spencer, who had a sweet tooth, had a peanut chocolate bar in his jacket pocket. In

the middle of the experiment, the candy bar suddenly melted. Dr. Spencer was intrigued. Abandoning the orignal megatron experiment, he sent his assistant out to buy another candy bar, so he bought some popcorn. He put some of the popcorn kernels near the megatron tube and watched in amazwent as the popcorn sputtered, cracked, and popped all over his lab! The next morning he invited a colleague to watch as he experiment wth an egg. Almost immediately the egg began to tremble and shake. The colleague moved closer to look. This was a mistake. The egg exploded and he got hot egg tolk all over his face!

After that, seriousnexperimentation began and pretty soon Spencer's microwave became the basis of a multi-million dollar industry.