Apple #2: Hairdressers and Tolstoy

HAIRDRESSERS


Today I got my hair cut. I asked the woman who cut my hair how many haircuts she gives in a week. She said it varies a lot from week to week, but she's available every 45 minutes, and she works about 40 hours a week. That works out to 5 to 10 people per day. That means she cuts anywhere from 1,300 to 2,600 heads of hair in a year.

• In 1999, there were 784,000 hairdressers and cosmetologists in the US

• 90.8% of them were women

• Other jobs in which over 90% of the employees were female include

• dental hygenists (99%)

• secretaries, stenographers, and typists (98%)

• child care workers (96%)

• licensed practical nurses (95%)

• speech therapists (93%)

• On average, hairdressers, stylists, and cosmetologists earned $18,960 in 2002

• The same year, barbers earned $19,550

• Some salons offer paid vacation and benefits, but most hairdressers are self-employed

TOLSTOY
Today at work, people started talking about Russian novelists like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Tolstoy happens to be my favorite author of all time. Here's some information about him:

• His most famous novels include War and Peace and Anna Karenina

• Tolstoy did not consider War and Peace to be a novel. It's actually written as an attempt to explain why people go to war and kill each other.

• He was born in 1828 and died in 1910, less than a decade before the Russian revolution, which he warned the Tsar would happen.

• His mother died when he was two, and he had no recollection of her. His father died when he was nine. He was raised by an aunt and by his eldest sister.

• He served in the Crimean War in his late 20's. Afterwards, his brother died of tuberculosis.

• At age 34, he married an 18 year-old. This marriage is often described as one of the unhappiest in literary history. He had sex with a lot of his serfs. In the meantime, his wife bore him 13 children, 7 of whom survived.

• In the early 1900's, he wrote a novel called Resurrection, which described a man's realization that he was responsible for a woman's downfall to prostitution after he had sex with her when she was young, and then worked to have her released from Siberia where she had been sent as punishment. The Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated Tolstoy after this novel was published.

• Born into the Russian nobility, he inherited a great deal of land. He came to believe that this was an inequity he should rectify, and often gave out large sums of money to beggars. Four years before he died, he gave away all his possessions to his serfs. After his family objected, he let them have the land. He also relinquished all copyrights to his works.

Sources:
US Statistical Abstract
Occupational Outlook Handbook http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos169.htm
Wikipedia, Tolsoy entry
About Leo Tolstoy, by Jared Lyman at BYU http://www.ltolstoy.com/timeline/index.html