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Ukraine is one of the largest countries of Eastern Europe.
Ukraine occupies an area of 603,700 square kilometres. Its territory stretches for 893 kilometres from north to south and for 1,316 kilometres from east to west.
It has state borders with Russia, Belarus and Moldova. It also borders on Poland, Czehia, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. In the south it is washed by the Black and the Azov Seas.
The major part of Ukraine is flat and only 5 % of it is mountainous. The two mountainous areas in Ukraine are the Carpathians and the Crimean Mountains.
The geographical position of Ukraine is very favourable because the country lies on the crossroads of the ways from Asia to Europe.
Ukraine has deposits of iron, manganese, coal, natural gas, oil and other mineral resources. The main branches of industry are: coal and ore mining, iron and steel engineering, machine and ship building.
Besides, Ukraine has always been an agrarian country. Traditionally crop-growing and cattle-breeding are being developed.
Geographical Position of Ukraine
Ukraine is situated in the south-east of Europe.
The territory of Ukraine is 603,700 square kilometres. The territory of Ukraine is mostly flat. There are the Carpathian Mountains in the west and the Crimean Mountains in the south, but they are not high.
It borders on Russia, Belarus, Moldova, Czehia, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania.
The main rivers are the Dnieper, the Dniester, the Bug, the Donets and others. The Dnieper is one of the longest European rivers and one of the main sources of hydroelectric power in the country.
The coasts of the Azov Sea and the Black Sea are good for ports. We have quite a lot of big sea ports, for example, Odesa, Kherson, Mykolaiv, Izmail, Mariupol and Kerch.
The geographical position of Ukraine is very favourable because the country lies on the crossroads of the ways from Asia to Europe. Since the times of Kyivan Rus Ukrainian roads have been used for trade contacts.
Due to favourable climatic conditions, Ukraine is traditionally an agricultural country. Wheat, maize and other corns, vegetables, all kinds of fruit are grown here.
The country is rich in natural resources, such as iron ore, coal, non-ferrous metals, oil, gas. It has developed a varied industry, concentrated mostly in and around big cities, such as Kyiv, Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, Kharkiv, Lviv, Mykolaiv and others.
Ukraine produces planes and ships, lorries and buses, electronic equipment and agricultural machines, TV and radio-sets and other goods.
Climate of Ukraine
Ukraine occupies the territory that is situated in the eastern part of Europe.
There are the Carpathian Mountains in the west and the Crimean Mountains in the south. Ukrainian territory is washed by the Azov Sea and the Black Sea. These factors influence the climate of Ukraine. It is mostly moderately continental.
But the Crimea differs greatly from the other parts of the territory. The climate there is subtropical. One can see the difference even in the average summer and winter temperatures. The average summer temperature is 21-22 degrees above zero, but it is usually 23-26 °С in the Crimea. The winter temperature in the Crimea is about 3 degrees above zero as the Crimean Mountains stop cold winds from the north.
The Carpathian Mountains differ from the rest of the Ukrainian territory in the amount of rains. The highest rainfall is noticed in this part. Summer is usually dry and hot in Ukraine, but in the Carpathians there often occur showers and thunderstorms. Sometimes storms bring hail, which is very unfavourable for agriculture.
Winter is usually mild, without severe frosts. Sleet is quite usual for Ukrainian cities and towns in winter. Still winter snow cover is typical for the climate of Ukraine except the southern part.
Fogs are not frequent in this country, but they may happen in autumn or spring.
Due to its favourable climatic conditions, such as winter snow cover, enough amount of rains and hot days during the summer, Ukraine is traditionally an agricultural country. It grows wheat, maize and other corns, vegetables and nearly all kinds of fruit.
Animals and Plants in Ukraine
Ukraine has mostly coniferous and deciduous trees. Such as pine, oak, fir, beech and birch. The wealth of the forest includes not only timber, but also berries, mushrooms and medical herbs.
The wildlife of Ukraine is different. It has hundreds of species of animals and birds. They are: wolf, fox, badger, deer, elk, hamster, field mouse and so on. The birds are: the sparrow, titmouse, grouse, owl.
Some fur animals, such as mink, silver-black fox, musk-rat, brought into Ukraine have aclimatized well.
In the rivers and lakes there are perch, bream, pike and carp. The Forest-Steppe zone contains the oak, elm, black poplar, willow, ash and pine. The animals include squirrels, foxes, hares and roes.
It also should be said that the animal life of the Carpathians is unique. Here you can find deer, brown bears, wild cats and pigs, black squirrels. Bird life includes golden eagles and black woodpeckers.. The plants of this region are also different and beautiful. It is well worth visiting. Especially in spring.
An Outstanding Event in Ukrainian History
There are such events in the life of every country that are kept through the passing centuries. Ukraine has a long history which reflects different stages of its historical development, numerous periods of its prosperity and decay.
For a long period our country lived under the rule of Poland, Lithuania and Russia. Ukraine formed part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics under the name of Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from 1922 to 1991.
On the 16th of July 1990 the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian republic adopted "The Declaration of the State Sovereignty of Ukraine".
Then on the 24th of August 1991 the Supreme Soviet adopted the "Act of the Independence of Ukraine". It was a document of a great historical importance. This document proclaimed the formation of the independent Ukrainian state. From the moment of adoption of this act only the laws of Ukraine remained in action. This historical decision was approved by the all-Ukrainian referendum which was held on the 1st of December 1991. The Ukrainian people confirmed their wish to live in the sovereign and independent country.
Thus a new period in the history of Ukraine started. It was the third attempt to achieve independence.
The first one was made by Bohdan Khmelnytsky in 1648 — 1654. The second one may be considered the proclamation of the Ukrainian People's Republic in 1917—1919.
An Episode from the History of Ukraine
I'd like to tell you about one of the episodes from the history of Ukraine.
During the war of independence of the Ukrainians in 1648-1654 the leaders of the war realized, that without the military help of Russia the complete victory over Poland is impossible. That's why in 1648 Bohdan Khmelnytsky appealed to Russia with the request to admit Ukraine as apart of Russia. The tsar's government started to give some military and economic help to Ukraine. In 1654 Khmelnytsky came to Pereyaslav, where he met Russian embassy headed by boyarin Buturlin. General Rada was convoked in the city square. All layers of the population participated in it. Khmelnytsky in his speech at Rada explained the necessity of the union of Ukraine and Russia. All the participants of Rada vowed fidelity to Russia. Buturlin handed to Khmelnytsky the tsar's order about the consent to admit Ukraine.
Political and judicial status of Ukraine was determined by the terms of the treaty — so called March articles. Khmelnytsky vowed fidelity in the cathedral. The population vowed in their towns and villages.
Economical, political and cultural relationships promoted the union. This union weakened the political role of Rech Pospolita, and defeated the plans of Vatican to catholicize Ukraine.
It assisted the further development of Ukrainian people.
Ukrainian Places of Interest
Ukraine is a country with the glorious past.
It is rich in historical monuments and different places of interest.
Kyiv is the capital of Ukraine and one of the oldest cities in the eastern Europe. It has already celebrated its 1500-th anniversary. That's why it is not surprising that a lot of interesting monuments are situated there, for example, the well-known to all Slavonic world St. Sophia's Cathedral and Kyivo-Pecherska Lavra. It is breathtaking to wander along the streets of the old town, to feel the breath of history.
But Ukrainian places of interest are situated not only in Kyiv. Near the small town of Kanev the monument to the Ukrainian national genius Taras Shevchenko is situated. The museum, where the books, drawings and manuscripts of Shevchenko are kept, is situated in the village not far from Kanev. Even the house, where he was born, is preserved. It is very interesting to look at it.
One may come to Poltava and visit the museum of the famous Poltava battle, the field where Peter the Great defeated the Swedes.
One may also go to Zaporizhia, to the island of Khortytsia, where the Ukrainian Cossacks organization was born.
One can go to Odesa and walk along the boulevards, where Pushkin walked a long time ago, and one can touch the trees, which Pushkin touched.
It is also possible to visit the last house of Chekhov (now the museum in Yalta), where Chekhov lived, and where he wrote his last works, and where he died.
One may visit the famous symbol of the Crimea — the castle "Swallow's Nest" or the residence of Russian tsars in Livadia.
It is possible to go through Gogol places in the Poltava region and see Dickanka, Sorochintsy.
One can continue this list, because there is also Western Ukraine with the Carpathians and their legends, feudals lords' castles and cathedrals, with their unique culture and nature.
There are a lot of places to see in Ukraine and to be proud of. And I am glad to live in such a country, with all those beautiful monuments.
Health Service in Ukraine
In Ukraine medical help is available in hospitals, polyclinics, and also in medical centres in such places as factories and schools.
Health service is based on local therapeutists as they are the first who diagnose. Some certain district is appointed to a polyclinic and this district is divided into several areas. Each area is appointed to a certain therapeutist. All the people who live in that area visit their appointed doctor. Average number of people, visiting their doctor every day, is 20-25, but when there is an epidemic of cold, this number is 50-60 people a day. There is some tendency which is nowadays widely discussed, that a person him- or herself can choose the doctor he or she wants to visit. A person can call his local therapeutist so that the doctor will come and see his patient. A therapeutist examines a patient, assigns some treatment, prescribes some medicines and gives a medical certificate.
In a hospital there is also a therapeutic department, where pneumonia, bronchitis or asthma are treated. There also exists a wide network of ambulance service in Ukraine. It was founded in Kharkiv in 1905.
Nowadays there are a lot of fee-paying clinics where one can get any kind of medical help. Many of them are specialized: dentist offices, optician centres, etc.
There also exist some medical associations in Ukraine, such as Ukrainian Diabetes Association. About 1 million people in Ukraine suffer from this disease. There people can get medical help or medicines free of charge.
Relations between Ukraine and English-Speaking Countries
There is no denying the fact that not so long ago Ukraine had very weak connections with other countries in the world. But at present the situation has changed for the better. As now Ukraine is a sovereign state, it establishes new relations with the countries throughout the world.
Ukraine is one of the members of the United Nations Organization and participates in the work of many international organizations. We have wide relations with Canada, the USA and Great Britain in policy, economics and culture. Foreign Embassies of these countries work in Kyiv.
We have some joint political projects with the United States of America and Canada. A lot of joint ventures have appeared in Ukraine recently. Such big plants of ours as Cherkasy joint-stock company "Azot", Gorlovka chemical plant "Stirol", Kharkiv aircraft plant sell their products at the international market.
Scientific cooperation is also very important. We have joint projects for space exploration with the USA and Canada.
Cooperation in culture, education and sport is very important, too. We exchange students and teachers with these countries. The Ukrainian orchestras, pop and opera singers, ballet dancers are warmly received abroad.
A lot of tourists from English-speaking countries visit Ukraine every year.
It's very important to mention that many people, who are Ukrainians by origin, live in Canada. So we have particular relations with this country. Canada was the first among the western states that recognized the state independence of Ukraine. Many of the Ukrainians, living now in Canada and other English-speaking countries, don't lose connections with Ukraine. A lot of public organizations, educational establishments, religious organizations make considerable contribution to the development of our culture, literature and art.
Foreign Affairs of Ukraine
Ukraine has different relations with many countries of the world. We have wide relations with Canada, the USA, Great Britain and other countries. Recently a great number of various joint ventures and economic, cultural and political projects have appeared in Ukraine. Our specialists in different scientific fields improve their qualification abroad.
We also have programmes of students' and schoolchildren's exchange. English, Canadian and American children visit Ukrainian families, go to Ukrainian schools, while Ukrainian children stay at their host families abroad. These exchange programmes help us to understand each other better, to study culture and traditions of other countries. A lot of Ukrainians have emigrated to Great Britain. That's why in 1947 the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain was founded. This association has some Help Funds that sponsor different important actions. The association gives help to the Ukrainian students who study in British Universities. The same associations and societies exist in many other countries.
From year to year the number of spheres of our relations with the countries abroad grow. Every year a lot of tourists visit Ukraine, while the Ukrainians go to the countries abroad. We hope that our relations with other countries will go on growing.


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Sunflower stud earrings 3 in salvage brass, about 5/8 inch diameter. This earring features a sunflower covering the face. Sterling silver posts and butterfly clasp.
The earring is dome shaped, hammered over a form to achieve the shape, and they catch the light.
Please note, these are handmade and will vary.

subset: commoncrawl


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With issue four the UK version of Jurassic Park was evolving. In the midst of all the hype surrounding the film, Dark Horse International's monthly was proving a hit. As such, changes were afoot over the next few issues to bring it more in line with the company's other comics, and to ensure it would be around for a long time to come after proving itself with its initial editions.
The front page doesn't reuse one of the American covers, instead recolouring a panel from the strip inside (and I love the font they've used). The reason was simple. Despite #3's checklist stating this would be the final chapter of the adaptation it's being split in two, so the original cover was being kept in reserve for the following month. This split made way for Xenozoic Tales, the first back up strip which I'll get to later. This was a familiar concept across British action adventure comics (in everything from Transformers to The Punisher) but Jurassic would go even further as you'll see in #6.
Check out this month's comics checklist and you might get an idea of what's to come, but for now we'll concentrate on the issue at hand, which begins with a competition for The Making of Jurassic Park. I actually bought this book at the time and it was a heavy tome, full of details on the making of the film and stands up today as one of the very best of its kind for any movie. You'll also see an advert for Manga Mania, which fed off the new craze to hit these shores. Ultimately it'd also be a very important title for Jurassic Park fans. But that's a story for another time.
Our freshly chopped final chapter is still a lengthy 16 pages so regular readers wouldn't have felt short changed, at least with the page count. Unfortunately, the actual strip itself is another thing. Yes, this is the first time in the comic's young life when I've been left disappointed.
Last month the Tyrannosaurus rex attack was brilliantly handled with plenty of building tension and atmosphere so I was looking forward to seeing how the final act would begin. The opening is great, with Mrs Rex towering above Dr. Alan Grant and Lex, both trying to keep completely still.
It's all going so well until those final couple of panels. The sequence in the tree with Tim trapped in the Explorer has been completely excised! So it plummets to the ground instead and then he's just unbelievably pulled out and off they go. Alan even has a map at hand to make their trip back to the Visitor's Centre quicker, which is a rather cheeky shortcut. In previous issues scenes had been moved about, moments edited, others added to, all in order to properly adapt the film to the comic page and I've been really positive about it. But all throughout this issue huge swathes of story are just missing or reduced to a shadow of their former selves.
Case in point is the fatal encounter between Denis Nedry and the Dilophosaurus. The movie scene included plenty of misdirection and humour, putting the audience at ease before the shock, and that wouldn't have been easy to translate here but they could have tried. Instead this very famous scene only gets two pages. It's a very basic sequence now; the dinosaur may as well be a lion. Denis gets attacked as soon as he steps out of the vehicle, he jumps back in and we actually see the Dilophosaurus jump in after him (ruining the final moments of the original) and… well, that's it.
This truncating happens to basically every major moment, whether it's the nighttime meeting with the Brachiosaurs, rescuing Dr. Ian Malcolm after the T-rex attack, even the electric fence scene (as you'll see below) and Robert Muldoon's stalking of a Velociraptor. Each are reduced to fit on a page or two and basically follow a set pattern of only showing the first and last moments of the scene and erasing everything else, including almost all the humour.
"Think they'll have that on the tour?"Dr. Ian Malcolm
Right back at the beginning of this adaptation I stated how I didn't usually like comic versions of films and this was the reason why. But up to this point Jurassic Park had been the exception to the rule, with a proper restructuring of the film to suit the format and it was working a treat as a comic in its own right. Maybe if they'd had five chapters instead of four (in the original US comic) it would've worked out differently, but then again maybe the pacing could've been plotted out better by writer Walter Simonson and story editor Jim Salicrup. Yes, having all the dino action in the final chapter would, in theory, make for a big climax but there's just too much of it to fit in.
The result is a clichéd comics adaptation where it feels more like a way for people to reminisce about the movie they saw in the cinema months previous, rather than working as a good comic book. If I sound overly critical it's only because the team had been doing such an amazing job so far, even adding in extra dialogue from either the original novel or earlier drafts of the script. So it's more disappointment than simple negativity.
Don't get me wrong, there are still things to enjoy here. It's all on a lovely high quality gloss paper stock this month, some of the best lines from the film are still intact and the art in the first eight or so pages is top notch. However, in the second half even legendary artists Gil Kane's pencils and George Perez's inks start to feel a little rushed and Tom Smith's colours feel unfinished and flat, leading me to believe they were working very close to the deadline of getting the original US series out in time for the movie.
The chapter is cut off with a superb cliffhanger though. The view of a Velociraptor's feet as it chases Dr. Ellie Sattler is just as unnerving as it was in the film. It's a shame then the terrifying Velociraptors, when viewed in full, are reduced to looking like miniature T-rexes. Below is this final scene with its positives and negatives, alongside that fence scene with the dramatic resuscitation of Tim also taken out.
I also noticed Ray didn't volunteer to go to the maintenance shed as he did in the original story, where he met his grisly end. Instead Muldoon and Ellie head off while Ray looks on silently. This means he's still alive, a big departure from the film. It'll be interesting to see how that effects the rest of the story next month.
With 16 pages to the main strip I assume there'll be roughly 12 or 13 next month unless the final chapter was given a few more pages in the original American Topps Comics publication. Either way there's a lot of the film left to cover in half a chapter. The kids and Alan are still out in the park which means their return, the kitchen scenes, the chaos of the Velociraptors in the Visitor's Centre and the climax are all to come.
I'll still hold out hope things can be turned around because so far it feels like spending 90 minutes being completely engrossed in a film only for its ending to let you down. Which of course is not what happened with Jurassic Park! For now, the sun sets on the adaptation as we move on to something else entirely.
In the early days of Marvel UK's Transformers its back up strips were in some way related to the robotic theme, such as Machine Man or Iron Man. It wasn't long before it instead became a way of bringing some of Marvel's other US characters to these shores for the first time, but Jurassic Park kept its strips dinosaur-themed, much to the delight of teenage me. The second back up would appear in my first issue (#6) but here readers were introduced to Mark Shultz's Xenozoic Tales.
Later adapted into a cartoon TV series called 'Cadillacs & Dinosaurs' it was an independent, alternative title Mark wrote and drew himself, running for 14 issues irregularly released between 1987 and 1996. Most of the strips were printed in black and white but Jurassic Park brought in artists to colour them exclusively for UK readers, this first one coloured by Ray Fehrenbach. This complete story was the first one written by Mark and what an introduction to something brand new this first page was.
Set in the 26th century, global warming has resulted in sea levels across the globe forcing humans to initially build underground. After 600 years they've reemerged to find their cities flooded, technology virtually non-existent and strangest of all the world is populated by dinosaurs once more. Anyone capable of mechanical work is seen as invaluable and this is where Jack Tenrec comes in, a car mechanic with a penchant for Cadillacs. Thanks to these skills he acts as an unofficial head of security and advisor to his tribe's leaders and lives on an outcrop (formerly high hills) not far across the water from An Archipelago of Stone, the home of the tribe and in reality the remains of New York City.
I love that first page, cleverly written from the point of view of a Pterodactyl. In the story a neighbouring tribe's ambassador, Hannah Dundee arrives at the City in the Sea and a team of poachers who had previously stolen from her Wassoon Tribe want her dead before they're found out. It's up to Jack and his men to stop them. All the way through this strip, knowing he's about to get in way over his head, Tenrec keeps telling his men to send someone called Hermes to help. Then, just as it seems he's doomed a surprise arrival bursts in. That's Hermes!
Well I certainly didn't expect that. Hermes the Allosaurus disposes of the villain, munching on his head and throwing him out the window, before Tenrec thanks him, revealing who this is. That doesn't mean he's a pet of course and the usually cool and collected Jack knows it.
It's brilliant stuff. Original, fun and surprising, introducing the main protagonists, the unique setting and the cast of regular and semi-regular guest characters, all in 12 pages while maintaining an interesting story and racking up tension is rather a phenomenal feat. No wonder Xenozoic Tales is so highly regarded even to this day. It may at first seem like a strange choice for Jurassic Park's back up but it works perfectly and as a teen I remember being engrossed with the slowly developing back story that would become more apparent in later issues. (Sadly, Hermes never reappeared.)
In between the two strips is this month's look into the making of the movie, covering the famous disaster that hit Hawaii and the relief efforts the producers helped coordinate, plus the building of sets and the end of principal photography. At the very end of the feature is the teeny tiny box with the date of the next issue including a little tease that things were afoot for the future of the comic.
Thankfully they didn't say "great news for all readers" or we'd have got the wrong idea. With these couple of pages, a long main strip and a back up it really does feel more like the kinds of UK comics we were accustomed to at the time. I may have enjoyed the extras more than the adaptation this month but I know from memory that what's to come from Jurassic Park made this one of my very favourite comics growing up. So stay tuned for some terrific stuff from Isla Nublar, as well as from the far future and soon the distant past too!
The fifth issue and the conclusion of the movie storyline will be stomping its way on to the blog on Tuesday 26th October 2021.


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Today's society exhibits a great deal of passivity. People, by and large, steer clear of extremes Nonetheless, the human body is designed to be self-regulating. Temperature is something for which the body adjusts itself. The body can adjust to the colder and hotter extremes of temperature. Saunas can be very beneficial to overall health and … Continue reading Rejuvenation: Hot and Cold
Month: April 2020
What is diet?
Diet: Medical: 1 : food and drink regularly provided or consumed. 2 : habitual nourishment. 3 : the kind and amount of food prescribed for a person or animal for a special reason. General: 1. the kinds of food that a person, animal, or community habitually eats. i. e."a vegetarian diet" 2. a special course … Continue reading What is diet?
Osteoarthritis: Integrity and Movement
Currently, the world is on high alert. Regular activities that were available are now non-existent. Meeting with friends, going to work, playing soccer / volleyball in the park: these and other activities are severely curtailed, if not altogether halted. Those with (hip) osteoarthritis are in a dire straight. Movement is key to maintaining a … Continue reading Osteoarthritis: Integrity and Movement
Let's Move
All of exercise is movement at the core. To live is to move. Movement is key to all processes in life. Nothing in the world stands still, waters, forests, weather patterns, ecosystems. Even the mountains are being built up and disintegrating – a constant and consistent cycle. The body is comprised of and exists … Continue reading Let's Move
Walking Pranayama: My Personal Practice
Walking is the oldest form of transportation known to nearly all terrestrial animals. For humankind, this mode of transportation was integral to dispersing around the globe. With the passage of time spiritual and religious groups began to incorporate conscious walking into their repertoires. Various breathing practices were also developed and sometimes incorporated with walking. This … Continue reading Walking Pranayama: My Personal Practice


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Ekiti State Governor Ayodele Fayose yesterday boasted that he would be part of the government at the centre in 2019 under an administration of original change.
Fayose also restated his support for his deputy, Prof. Olusola Kolapo, to become the next governor. He urged Ekiti women to support him to continue the good work he (Fayose) has started for the women.
The governor spoke yesterday at Olukayode Stadium, Ado Ekiti, during the celebration of the 2018 International Women Day with the theme "Press for Progress."
Fayose, who said Kolapo remained his choice, even though there would be primary election for all aspirants, promised to support whoever emerges as the candidate of his party for the forthcoming governorship election.
Fayose is empowering 15000 women with N20,000 each. He said if Kolapo became governor, he would not only
continue to empower women, but would support more women into elective and appointive positions.
"I will be president of Nigeria tomorrow. When it happens, you will remember I told you. Nigeria wants an original change. People are tired of the current All Progressives Congress (APC)- led government. Ekiti, represented by Fayose, would be part of the government at the centre in 2019.
"I was at the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and I told them, don't rig for me but create a level playing field. The 2019 election is very important and this is why INEC must be transparent. They said that Fayose used the army in 2014 governorship election and I tell them to produce evidence. We will make sure they don't have 10 wards in the coming election. We won't rig them because we don't have capacity to rig," the governor said.
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Shopping for cars can be a cumbersome process, especially if you are unsure about the model that you want to get your hands on. That being said, the 2021 Volkswagen Atlas Cross Sport and the 2021 Jeep Grand Cherokee are two of the many vehicles that have quickly risen in popularity and demand. Each of these terrific and versatile crossovers has a plethora of features to bring to the table. If you are in two minds about getting behind the steering wheels of any one of these SUVs, this model comparison might come incredibly handy to you.
2021 Volkswagen Atlas Cross Sport
2021 Jeep Grand Cherokee
|Base MSRP of $30,855
|Base MSRP of $34,970
|2.0-liter Turbo
|Engine Type
|3.6-liter V6
|8 speed shiftable automatic
|8 speed automatic
|258 lb.-ft.
|257 lb.-ft.
Most people prefer opting for a vehicle that comes at a lower price than the others on the market, and the 2021 Volkswagen Atlas Cross Sport is clearly the winner at that. Plus, even the base trim of the Atlas Cross Sport comes with a turbocharged engine, which the 2021 Jeep Grand Cherokee lacks. Thus, when it comes to performance, the 2021 VW Atlas Cross Sport steals the show.
Another thing to note is that the 2021 Grand Cherokee pales in comparison to the Atlas Cross Sport when it comes to cargo space. The Atlas Cross Sport has about 77.8 cu.-ft. whereas the Grand Cherokee, on the other hand, has 68.3 cu.-ft. Thus, if you are someone who does not travel light, the 2021 Volkswagen Atlas Cross Sport might just be the right choice for you.
Thus, without any further ado, schedule a test drive at Quirk Volkswagen located in Manchester, NH, and bring home the vehicle that suits you and your family's requirements!


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2-1 Discussion: Make Your Case
U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, in a memo to Fred F. Fielding, White House Counsel, dated dated October 3, 1983, wrote:
Setting a term of, say, 15 years would ensure that federal judges would not lose all touch with reality through decades of ivory tower existence. It would also provide a more regular and greater degree of turnover among the judges.
Take a position. Do you agree or disagree that federal judges should serve lifetime terms?
First, title your post either "Lifetime Appointments Are Acceptable" or "Term Limits Should Be Set."
Then, using the information gained in this module and the resources noted above, make your case. What are the pros and cons of lifetime appointments? Of term limits? Be sure to build your case with factual resources.
In your response to your peers, consider how well they justified their position, making use of available resources. Consider the following questions in your response posts:
- Did they support their position convincingly with appropriate resources?
- Which of their points make the most sense to you, even if you made a case for the opposing viewpoint?
Hemmens, C., Brody, D. C., & Spohn, C. (2020). Criminal courts: A contemporary perspective, 4e. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.White House Memorandum. (1983, October 3). Retrieved from https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1110&context=historical
To complete this assignment, review the document.
Your active participation in the discussions is essential to your overall success this term. Discussion questions will help you make meaningful connections between the course content and the larger concepts of the course. These discussions give you a chance to express your own thoughts, ask questions, and gain insight from your peers and instructor.
For each discussion, you must create one initial post and follow up with at least two response posts.
For your initial post, do the following:
- Write a post of 1 to 2 paragraphs.
- Consider content from other parts of the course where appropriate. Use proper citation methods for your discipline when referencing scholarly or popular sources.


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Fade to Black
Bill Gross ends an era.
Bill Gross ends an era.
Highly loss-averse managers were likely to record worse risk-adjusted performance, often leading to termination, a study has found.
The $10 billion fund's board has voted to return to a model featuring an internal CIO.
Sotheby's CEO has agreed to step down and Dow Chemical has added four directors to its board after yearlong battles with the activist investor.
The consultant and fund manager wants greater access to alternatives.


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Monday, August 30, 2004
All universities dread the Number One Party School ranking. This year's honoree, SUNY Albany, has been besieged by the media. Last year's - scandal-heavy University of Colorado - was so upset that it decided to name its new anti-alcohol program "We're Not Number One." The American Medical Association has demanded that The Princeton Review abolish the party school category, since it "fuels the false notion that alcohol is central to the college experience."
Walk with UD a little here as we move away from hysteria and toward a calmer understanding of this significant aspect of the contemporary American university.
Despite the efforts of films like Animal House, most Americans continue in a vague way to picture undergraduate colleges as quiet places set apart for serious reflection about the world. Yes, college students are thinking about their careers; yes, there's fucking and football about. But the distinctive, expensive, rigorous, and auspicious characteristic of the university, people figure, is its sober intellectuality. The university's distinction is that it offers extended, rationalized study of important things….
…like… gambling, surfing, scuba, spas, cartoons, and catering. These are a few of the subjects you can major in at respectable four-year colleges in the United States. "It's disgusting," a New York politician comments about the new casino degrees being offered by a number of colleges in party-school Albany's public university system: "I think it's inappropriate for the state to become a vehicle by which people are in increasing numbers addicted. To have that policy reinforced through a curriculum in a public university is reprehensible." A SUNY trustee agrees: "It saddens me that SUNY is involved in such a cynical and insidious process, one that fuels anti-social gambling pathologies while subordinating and suborning its basic institutional mission: education, not training."
These two are defending a model of the undergraduate college much like the one many other Americans vaguely picture, in which vocational training is put off until graduate school in order to establish for each student a foundation of scientific, ethical, and cultural knowledge; in which the curriculum's subject matter is, uh, you know… real deep, real valuable, real worth knowing, central to, um, our society and what we hold dear, and for sure about understanding the big bad world all around us too… I mean, it's hard to get precise here, but, well, some shit's trivial and some shit's real real important. Like what? Like say what's in the Constitution, what it means to be a democracy. That should be a requirement, a course like that! And, well, courses in how to cater parties, well, that's trivial! That shouldn't be in the undergraduate curriculum!
What UD's groping toward here is the suggestion that most human beings sense there's a distinction to be made in life between ideas and actions that are important, and ideas and actions that are trivial. But this sense is inchoate, and having a kid at a university and spending $30,000 a year to keep her there remains insufficient incentive for people to be less inchoate. These are matters for curriculum committees.
Yet some colleges have no curriculum at all - no requirements, no established courses, no course sequences. Others claim they have requirements, courses that touch on those real important things; but in reality they have distribution requirements - essentially a broad range of courses to choose from (many of them trivial) that will satisfy a particular requirement. Very few colleges have serious curricula requiring serious study of serious things.
UD's next point: Why should they? Why shouldn't a lot of American colleges be a bit more about drinking than about thinking?
America is an insanely rich and successful country. Thousands of American college students come from affluent homes and will themselves be affluent, college or not. They will go into the family business; they will inherit money; their well-connected parents will connect them up with something; they will marry wealthy people like themselves. All of this will likely happen, UD repeats, whether they go to college or not. Whether they go to a respectable college or not. Whether they fail to graduate from college or not.
Virtually all of these people will of course go to college, but many will go for social, not intellectual, reasons. They will go because everyone else they know is going, and they want to maintain contact with their world. Carolyn Bessette Kennedy's parents spent huge sums so that she could graduate from Boston University and become a saleswoman at Calvin Klein. Did they kick themselves for having wasted all that money on a college education for a saleswoman? No, because college, like psychotherapy and weekends abroad, is something they couldn't imagine their children not doing.
For a glimpse at this pretty wide swath of the American college population, look at an excerpt from Tom Wolfe's forthcoming novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28; due out in November):
From the moment he founded Dupont University 115 years ago, Charles Dupont, no kin of the du Ponts of Delaware and much more aesthetically inclined, had envisioned an actual grove of academe through which scholars young and old might take contemplative strolls.,,,
Dupont! [thinks a representative student] Science -- Nobel winners - whole stacks of them! . . . although he couldn't exactly remember any names. . . . Athletes -- giants! National basketball champions! Top five in football and lacrosse! . . . although he found it a bit dorky to go to games and cheer a lot. . . . Scholars - legendary! . . . even though they were sort of spectral geeks who floated around the edges of collegiate life. . . . Traditions -- the greatest! -- mischievous oddities passed from generation to generation of . . . the best people! A small cloud formed. . . . the rising number of academic geeks, book humpers, homosexuals, flute prodigies and other diversoids who were now being admitted . . . Nevertheless! There's their Dupont, which is just a diploma with Dupont written on it . . . and there's the real Dupont -- which is ours!…
About ten years ago a flood from a bathroom up above had ruined [his fraternity's] library's aged and promiscuous accumulation of books, and the once-elegant walnut shelves, which had the remains of fine Victorian moldings along all the edges, now held dead beer cans and pizza-delivery boxes for the most part. The library's one trove of mankind's accumulated knowledge at this moment in history was the TV set….
Everywhere you looked at this university there were people knocking "the frats" and the frat boys. . . . the Administration, which blamed them for the evils of alcohol, pot, Ecstasy . . . the dorks, GPA geeks, lesbos, homobos, bi-bos, S&Mbos, blackbos, Latinos, Indians, from India and the Reservation, and other whining diversoids, who blamed them for racism, sexism, classism, whatever the fuck that was, chauvinism, anti-Semitism, fringe-rightism, homophobia . . . The only value ingrained at this institution was a weepy tolerance for losers. . . .
For this mindless legacy student and many others, a great American university is like a fully loaded Jaguar driven twelve times a year to the post office by an elderly woman. There it sits purring away in the garage, its awesome intellectual power idle… See why so many serious American professors prefer to teach graduate students?… And the vast number of American colleges which are vocational schools in all but name don't bother with the intellectual machinery at all.
Why shouldn't a lot of American colleges be a bit more about piffle than about profundity? Many Americans spend hours of leisure every day entertaining themselves with iPods (distributed free to students at Duke), tv, film, video games, sports, long baths, social gatherings, and vacations; many foreigners spend hours and hours watching American-made entertainments. These pursuits represent billions of dollars in business, and many college graduates will devote their professional lives to them, writing scripts for tv shows, publicizing movies, developing golf courses. The Cartoon Network has established a "trendy corps of college students enlisted to market the network's 'Adult Swim' cartoons on campuses nationwide," reports The Miami Herald:
They come from 30 campuses to the network's Atlanta headquarters each August for some cartoon-marketing training before the start of their fall-semester classes. These students are culled for being business-savvy …Their job: Making cartoons cool for peers…
Now, three years after they started, "Adult Swim" cartoons are often ranked No. 1 in their basic cable time period - Saturdays through Thursdays, 11 p.m. - 5 a.m. EDT - among both adults aged 18-34 and men aged 18-24. Shows such as "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" - about a talking meatball, milkshake, and box of fries - regularly beat network late-night comedy shows in the ratings among young people.
Alcohol awareness? Hysteria over party school rankings? The Herald continues:
Cartoon Network executives say the college marketing program, mostly made up of sponsored drinking parties at hot college bars ... is creating buzz for the quirky…cartoons. … "It is soooo much fun," said Barrett Darnell, a 20-year-old Washington State University student who's starting his second year as an 'Adult Swim' marketer. Last year he threw viewing parties and got some cartoon T-shirts thrown from the stage at a campus Cypress Hill concert. This year's plans include a pub crawl and poster giveaways. 'We give out so much free stuff. Everyone loves it.'"
Stop thinking about campus drinking as it was in the innocent Animal House days - this is about serious marketing.
You can get all moralistic about this (Neil Postman wrote a book a few years ago called Amusing Ourselves to Death), or you can accept that America is the entertainment capital of the world and that people are going to act accordingly.
Saturday, August 28, 2004
A New Academic Year:
[Being a Series of Evocations of the University]
In October 1919, I went to Oxford at last… Oxford was overcrowded; the lodging-house keepers, some of whom nearly starved during the War, now had their rooms booked up terms ahead, and charged accordingly. … I solved the difficulty by pleading ill-health and getting permission from St John's College to live five miles out, on Boar's Hill - where John Masefield, who thought well of my poetry, had offered to rent us a cottage at the bottom of his garden.
We found the University remarkably quiet. The returned soldiers did not feel tempted to rag about, break windows, get drunk, or have tussles with the police and races with the Proctors' 'bulldogs', as in the old days. The boys straight from the public schools kept quiet too, having had war preached at them continually for four years, with orders to carry on loyally at home while their brothers served in the trenches, and make themselves worthy of such sacrifices. … G.N. Clarke, a history don at Oriel, who had got his degree at Oxford just before the War and meanwhile been an infantryman in France and a prisoner in Germany, told me: 'I can't make out my pupils at all. They are all "Yes, Sir," and "No, Sir". They seem positively to thirst for knowledge and scribble away in their note-books like lunatics. I can't remember a single instance of such stern endeavour in pre-War days.'
The elder dons, whom I had often seen during the War trembling in fear of an invasion, with the sacking and firing of the Oxford colleges and the rape of their families in the Woodstock and Banbury Roads, and who then regarded all soldiers, myself included, as their noble saviours, now recovered their pre-War self-possession and haughtiness.
Friday, August 27, 2004
University of Utah Concealed Guns Update [see UD, 5/21/04 and 6/1/04]
Michael Young, the incoming president of the University of Utah (his last job was dean of the law school at UD's hot university) comments on the controversy:
"Kids at 18, 19 and 20 are emotionally charged in a way that encouraging them to pack pistols is really not a great idea. I've been in academics a long time, and have enough personal experience to recite on that score just to suggest this isn't the world's best idea."
Young's interviewer comments: "That stance will likely take him to a showdown with the Legislature, which has long championed a law allowing people with permits to carry guns on the state-funded campus. The case is now in the courts."
Thursday, August 26, 2004
Even as SUNY Albany endures the derision of the world (see below), UD's own campus, George Washington University, basks in the radiance of having being named one of the 25 hottest colleges in the country (Category: Best for Political Junkies) by Kaplan/Newsweek.
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
College Saint-Aubin des Soirees
Everyone's talking about SUNY Albany, a perennial top-tenner among the nation's party schools, and, this year, Number One. Number One not only in "partying," but also in the category "students (almost) never study."
This sort of truth, so baldly stated, hurts a university. SUNY's angry administration has fired off a letter to students, parents, and alumni denying the whole thing, but UD has no doubt it's true. UD is sure that serious intellectual activity takes place at the margins of SUNY Albany; smack in the middle, though, people are fucking off.
The SUNY administrators' total denial, therefore, is the wrong response. No one believes them. Here are some better options:
1. Go with it brazenly. "Yes, we are a party school. Judging by our graduation rates and job placements, our students still do very well in the world, but we can't deny that they're drugging and drinking while they're here."
2. Keep going; you're on a roll. "This combination of hardy partying and worldly success is rather impressive in itself, isn't it? Our students are the sort of people who can hold their liquor; they are the sort of people who can stay up all night dancing and pass tests the next morning. This shows stamina and a kind of genius."
3. Go yet further. "And since when is joie de vivre a crime? Is it our fault that our students have a capacity for happiness?"
SUNY could go another way. It could say:
4. "Yes, it's true, and it's horrible and humiliating. Our university has evolved over the years from a pretty serious place to a travesty, a sham, a sodden joke. In consultation with our board of trustees, we have therefore determined, starting next year, to impose the Rule of Saint Benedict on every member of the SUNY Albany community. The daily university schedule throughout the academic year follows:
2:30 AM: Preparation for night office; oratorio and gradual psalms.
3:00 AM: Nocturns, including prayers for the dead.
5:00 AM: Silent reading.
6:00 AM: Matins (Lauds) at daybreak.
7:30 AM: Silent reading.
8:00 AM: Wash and change. Morrow mass.
9:45 AM: Work.
12:00 PM: Sung Mass (Sext).
2:45 PM: Work.
4:15 PM: Vespers.
5:30 PM: Change into night shoes.
6:00 PM: Collatio. [Note: This means "light meal." Do not confuse this, or any other term ("sext") on this schedule with words that may sound similar.]
6:15: Compline.
6:30: Bed.
[Being A Series of Evocations of the University]
"The 1954 Fall Term had begun. Again the marble neck of a homely Venus in the vestibule of Humanities Hall received the vermillion imprint, in applied lipstick, of a mimicked kiss. Again the Waindell Recorder discussed the Parking Problem. Again in the margins of library books earnest freshmen inscribed such helpful glosses as "Description of nature," or "Irony"; and in a pretty edition of Mallarme's poems an especially able scholiast had already underlined in violet ink the difficult word oiseaux and scrawled above it "birds." Again autumn gales plastered dead leaves against one side of the latticed gallery leading from Humanities to Frieze Hall. Again, on serene afternoons, huge, amber-brown Monarch butterflies flapped over asphalt and lawn as they lazily drifted south, their incompletely retracted black legs hanging rather low beneath their polka-dotted bodies."
UD does not stay up nights worrying about anti-Americanism abroad. Polly Toynbee, in The Guardian, wants me to grind my teeth about the "monster" the country has become in "a world that thinks America arrogant, less cultured, a worse place to live than their own countries." She notes that American Studies programs are shutting down in English universities, and suggests that this is because students there don't want to be associated with us.
For her part, UD is happy to see American Studies departments shut down, since she can think of many richer academic fields.
UD's concern in any case is not so much with international anti-Americanism as with encouraging a certain healthy anti-Americanism at home. UD's love of country is intense (this makes her bizarre among academics), but she thinks Americans should cultivate a contempt for what's contemptible here rather than get defensive about what foreign people think.
And along those lines -- UD finds Homeland Security's recent denial of a visa to Professor Tariq Ramadan pretty contemptible. A respected scholar of Islam and the West, whose latest book the conservative historian Daniel Pipes calls "a thoughtful and moderate analysis," Ramadan was about to come to Notre Dame for a three-year appointment when the government decided he was a terror risk.
Ramadan is no democrat - French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, debating Ramadan on tv last year, couldn't get him to condemn "lapidation" -- the stoning of adulterous women (though, somewhat confusingly, he did call for a "moratorium" on the practice). Ramadan thinks veiling women is a great idea. In 1993 he tried to censor a play that criticized certain features of Islam. He has written darkly about "French Jewish intellectuals" and their defense of Israel. But he is also (as his debate with Sarkozy suggests) eager to think about ways in which Islam may be assimilated into the modern West, and his scholarship appears respectable.
UD thinks it's much more important for American students to be exposed to people like Ramadan, with all of his anti-democratic tendencies, than for them to study their own popular culture. They need to know more about the serious rejection of Western-style modernity than about the often mindless embrace of it.
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
As you may recall (UD, 4/9/04), UD likes to monitor writing of all kinds - scholarly, journalistic, etc. She has taken for this entry's title a headline from today's CNN that she thinks in need of an editor.
"It's like announcing," UD's husband remarked when she asked him what he thought of the headline, "that SOME PEOPLE DIE, OTHERS LIVE."
If someone suddenly told you that all this time, all around you, while you lived your little life, some glaciers were shrinking while others endured, would you perk up and say Newsworthy...? What are the chances you'll read the article that accompanies this headline? A headline that competes for your attention with thousands of other headlines you'll see today, on television, online, in the newspaper, on billboards...
How to rewrite? Well, if you really just want to get the article read, no holds barred, you scare people:
Something like that. (Note also UD's elegant alliteration.) But if you're a serious journalist with an actually interesting or disturbing trend to report, then --
Something like that.
Monday, August 23, 2004
UD has an opinion piece coming out soon in the Chronicle of Higher Education. She doesn't yet know when it will appear (she's doing some last-minute editing of it at the moment), but will pass along the date as soon as the editors tell her.
Sunday, August 22, 2004
A ***New*** University Diaries Feature
UD has forgotten on which site she found it, but she recently printed out for herself someone's list of the elements characteristic of good blogs. Here's one of them:
"Personal. I tend to enjoy a blog with a bit of a personality. I want to 'get to know' to a certain degree the person behind the site."
UD has already blogged a bit about her setting - a small, hundred year old, self-governing town which is a Nuclear Free Zone and an arboretum, and which sits next door to Bethesda, Maryland, in Montgomery County. Snapshots From Home will try to make this sort of information a regular feature of University Diaries. Criteria for inclusion will be amusement and irrelevance.
So, for instance, here's a close-to-home couple of sentences UD read from the review of a book titled The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity in today's New York Times:
A numbing arsenal of facts and figures serves to show that it is social rank - and not suspiciously similar-sounding factors like income or education - that makes the crucial difference. There's the study of Oscar winners that found they live four years longer than their co-stars and fellow nominees, and the fact that with each mile along the subway line from downtown Washington to suburban Montgomery County, Md., life expectancy increases by a year and a half.
Saturday, August 21, 2004
REDNECK WOMAN DIARIES [see UD, 6/18/04; 6/22/04; 7/8/04]
Via Ralph Luker at History News Network, UD comes back from vacation to face her first test.
Is UD White Trash?
Are vous kidding?
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
UD has a little house in upstate New York, and she'll be there for the next week. She'll see Gilbert and Sullivan's "Patience" at the Glimmerglass Opera House, she'll lie outside at night to look at shooting stars, and she'll celebrate her birthday at the Bear Cafe in Woodstock.
Back to blogging soon.
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
…would certainly be the beginning of any university education, yes? In fact, UD, with help from Timothy Burke's [see Easily Distracted on UD's links] well-designed ideas about a new college, would argue that a real university or college needs to educate students toward two broad accomplishments:
1. A knowledge of the major documents and events of Western culture.
2. A decent respect for empiricism.
To know your world, and to know how to evaluate truth claims, would be an excellent foundation for any education that calls itself "higher," for any institution that calls itself a college or a university.
Yet how do we work our way back to these essentials from the quackery of the contemporary college curriculum? Burke's ideas are great, but he doesn't discuss how he'd go about tossing established trash -- he sidesteps the problem by imagining a brand new college.
UD, for her part, thinks we should pound the crap out of what's already there and make it go away. She proposes we begin, not with Creative Writing (see UD, 12/30/03), but with the far fouler Psychology.
Lately, a few sensible psychologists and psychoanalysts have tentatively suggested restricting therapy, and psychology curricula, to empirically tested theories and treatments. The head of the American Psychological Association -- whose degree is in education, whose 35-page cv appears on his Oprah-style website, who has a faculty appointment at an undistinguished university, and who looks forward to the day when we will all have to make "appointments for annual psychological checkups" -- has called this idea "insane."
The idea is certainly insane from the point of view of business (this man's other degree is an MBA).
But from the point of view of (as the article in today's New York Times Science Times section puts it) "credibility," of "re-establishing the field's respectability and repairing its image among insurers as a money-sink," a drop of respect for empirical method might be a mark of lucidity among psychologists, rather than a sign of dementia.
Tens of millions of people in this country are in therapy, and we know that "therapy" means jackshit. Therapy is anything. All things. As the piece in the NYT makes clear, therapists are people who receive payment for being, in a wild variety of ways, compassionate and intuitive and long-suffering with you, just like the friend or relative or religious advisor who does this stuff for free and who you're supposed to have in your life but for some reason don't.
Or maybe you do have such people in your life, but you don't listen to them because they don't hold certain degrees and you think holding those degrees means something. Or you think you have to pay money to get anywhere with yourself. Or you enjoy having someone pay a lot of attention to you on a regular basis.
"Psychology," as talking treatment, as practice and subject matter, has made little effort to make itself anything other than a welter of empathetic activities. Indeed it tends to be proudly anti-empirical. Psychologists don't mind admitting that, as one of them says in the Times piece, "we have very little knowledge." Most psychologists don't give a shit about reproducibility or results or anything like that. Yet we have given them, for fifty years or so, the run of the place. It's only recently that insurance companies and scientists and others have said You are empirically ungrounded and you are costing us a lot of money. If people want to keep hanging out with you, they can do it on their own dime. If universities want to teach psychology, they can come up with an actual recognizable field of study.
At the APA's last convention, when a more diplomatic version of the above was offered, the collective therapists became "raucous." "The split in the field is bigger than it ever has been," comments an observer. "The intensity of the acrimony, the distaste, has never been so high." One of the intuitivists puts their position this way: "The move to worship at the altar of these scientific treatments has been destructive to patients…" Empirical method is religious fanaticism.
Psychologists have begun defending their turf against empiricists and insurance companies with a fanaticism of their own. Here's the last paragraph of a recent communication to the troops from the head of the APA [UD's responses to this remarkable paragraph are in parentheses]:
"Less than 5% of the population have doctoral degrees. Hence, we are the educated elite of our time. [This is the sort of self-puffery you come out with when your profession is shrinking.] Our chosen field, psychology, is applicable to every aspect of human life. [Since psychology is everything, in other words, the business opportunities for the psychologist are vast.] As former APA President Patrick DeLeon has said, if we take care of society's most pressing needs, society will take care of us. [Venal enough for you?]"
Self-respecting universities who would like to get serious should, UD thinks, start with their psychology curriculum.
Monday, August 09, 2004
"It is important to preserve the mind's chastity... Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal courts into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a very barroom of the mind's inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied us - the very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts' shrine! Would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide? ... I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality."
Sunday, August 08, 2004
"One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality," wrote Orwell in "Why I Write." One of the most beautifully and strategically reticent of poets, Donald Justice, has died.
Poetry, he wrote in one of his poems, is "most beautiful in its erasures." Like Thom Gunn [see UD, 4/28/04], who admired him, Justice understood that classical restraint rather than romantic excess, calm rather than hysteria, courage rather than self-pity, precisely controlled language rather than sloppy feeling, made the best sort of art, the best sort of reassurance. "The poet," wrote another of his admirers, "sums up with dignity, with serene and contemplative courage a world which is simply not surging with Romantic connections."
Rather than produce the verbiage of the uneffacing narcissist in search of self-recognitions, Justice produced calm, concise, exactly observed, excitingly beautiful renditions of the truth of the world [UD quoted from his poem about suicide in an earlier post: 3/27/04]. He was particularly good, like Philip Larkin, at evoking a sense of emptiness:
It's snowing this afternoon and there are no flowers.
There is only this sound of falling, quiet and remote,
Like the memory of scales descending the white keys
Of a childhood piano - outside the window, palms!
And the heavy head of the cereus, inclining,
Soon to let down its white or yellow-white.
Now, only these poor snow-flowers in a heap,
Like the memory of a white dress cast down ...
So much has fallen.
And I, who have listened for a step
All afternoon, hear it now, but already falling away,
Already in memory. And the terrible scales descending
On the silent piano; the snow; and the absent flowers abounding.
Justice was a serious pianist, a man knowledgeable about music, and his lyrical intelligence informs the impeccable style and content of his poetry, all of which finds in art itself a complex saving balance. Justice recalls himself, a young piano student, attacking the keyboard with confidence,
Only to lose my place, or forget the key,
And almost doubt the very metronome
(Outside the traffic, the laborers going home),
And still to bear on across Chopin or Brahms,
Stupid and wild with love equally for the storms
Of C# minor and the calms of C.
Saturday, August 07, 2004
The same anti-elitist typesetting machine seems to have pounded out two recent opinion pieces in two different newspapers. Both respond to the Homeland Security Secretary's reported plan to quit his job because he needs a private sector salary to pay for his childrens' university educations.
The same headline (IF RIDGE CAN'T AFFORD...)leads to very similar screeds in the Bennington Banner and the Grand Forks Herald (the latter picks up the piece from the Philadelphia Daily News); the same mad-as-hell cliches blast "well-paid suit" Ridge for complaining that he (a privileged federal bureaucrat), is hurting, when "Joe Average" (as one of the opinion writers calls him), is "screwed." The country's gone "elitist," requiring college degrees for receptionists, and making college more and more expensive. Joe's credit cards are maxed out, the economy's slowing, and now he's got to pay for college...
Ignore the populist pandering, and these guys have a point. Ridge owns a house worth $873,000 (in Bethesda, UD's home town), and he has a lot of other sources of wealth. He's quite able to pay for college. He's using the college thing as an excuse to get out of his job.
Ridge thinks the college thing is a plausible excuse because he knows that we know that travel, tuition, and room and board are incredibly expensive. NPR recently interviewed two professors, each the author of a book on the matter (again, with remarkably similar titles, come to think of it: Going Broke By Degree: Why College Costs Too Much; and Tuition Rising: Why College Costs So Much), and they pointed out that the main reason it's so insanely expensive is that things calling themselves "colleges" and "universities" are actually very little about teaching and overwhelmingly about "dormitories, food, entertainment...intercollegiate athletics," and so forth --"Universities are not about teaching ... students; they're about other, [noninstructional] things." We need to "cut down on [the] vast administrative bureaucracy...administrative staffs have soared at universities."
All of this is one reason why Timothy Burke's proposal for a new sort of college stresses that
...the college would build no athletic facilities, health care facilities, dining facilities or anything similar, and would instead encourage students to buy these services just as they would (or would not) if they were not attending the college...the college would also not offer some of the administrative services available at traditional liberal arts colleges - no extensive counseling to students, or support for student groups, and so on. The college would take no official or administrative interest in the private lives of its students (or for that matter its faculty or administration)...
Burke proposes, in other words, that we think hard about what a college is really about, and focus sharply upon that... and UD has of course been saying much the same thing in University Diaries, though not so well as Burke...
Anyway, this sort of idea has rather a long way to go in the United States. So many colleges and universities here are sports facilities with a few classrooms. UD doesn't know how you go from being a sports facility to being a university.
Two recent articles about two such places - the University of North Carolina and the University of Georgia - point out that the coaching staff and players that dominate these institutions are dragging them down further every day, draining huge amounts of money [UNC Outprices Itself], forcing the administration to sell the place to the highest corporate bidder, and (in the case of Georgia) "embarrassing" the institution by being guilty of so many major NCAA infractions that they've now been given a whole new category: "repeat violator." A lot of sports programs at a lot of universities are well-established semi-criminal operations of this sort. UD doesn't think this is what John Henry Newman had in mind by "the idea of a university."
But see - and I'm just guessing here, based on their style and content - I doubt the two guys I quote at the start of this post want their kids to go to serious actual universities. If you said to them it'll cost one tenth the price but there won't be tvs, a football team, or a campus psychiatrist, they'd say huh? And you call yourself a university???
Friday, August 06, 2004
Hard numbers be damned: UD would like to share with you her anecdotal experience of Ivy League grads and legacies.
UD knows about five graduates per school (we're only talking about Harvard, Yale, and Princeton here), and, with one exception, all came from affluent homes, went to expensive prep schools, and had family connections to the college that admitted them.
All of this might have changed in the last twenty years or so - UD's friends are in their forties and fifties - but UD doubts the Ivy League has become much of a meritocracy.
The loaded non-meritocratic dice at these schools is one reason a number of observers are pissed with Harvard's recent practice of sending out flattering, please-apply-you're-so-smart letters to high school juniors all over the country. Almost none of these students has a chance in hell of admission, but the practice increases the number of applications the university receives, which makes it look absolutely terrific when it turns them all down. (The pressure put on elite schools to stop with the Early Admissions business is another effort to overcome the expensive naivete of American kids who go to the trouble of applying to schools without knowing all aspects of a very complex system.)
Americans have a right to ask those universities which are as much about the maintenance of an aristocracy as about intellectuality to be honest about this. If the universities were honest about this function, they wouldn't have to dance around the question of why dim and ethically challenged people on the order of the young Ted Kennedy continue to be admitted to their schools, taking the place of brilliant virtuous nobodies.
These schools would simply be able to explain that, as members of an established elite, people like Kennedys and Bushes will almost certainly - like it or not - assume positions of importance in the country, and therefore the country should give them the best education possible. That education is as much about important people meeting other important people on the same campus as it is about intellectuality.
And yes of course the legacy system is also - these schools should admit - about maintaining the institution's financial relationship with a wealthy high-profile family.
Yet to say all of this in populist America is, UD supposes, impossible. Instead, everyone must pretend legacies don't exist, or are exaggerated, or are really only extended to students who meet the institution's academic standards, etc., etc.
In a kind of ultimate absurdity, America's President - a poster boy for legacy admissions - has today come out against them.
Wednesday, August 04, 2004
('Since 2001, when [Louisiana] cracked down on unaccredited mail-order diploma mills, several distance-learning institutions jumped the border and set up shop with a Mississippi address. …Lacrosse, Columbus and American World universities …, all of which were once based in Louisiana, now have their headquarters between Picayune and Pascagoula. …Also unclear is how serious Mississippi is about overseeing the operations in the shadowy but lucrative niche of the education market…. The sudden eruption of diploma mills in Mississippi reprises Louisiana's experience, which in turn echoed what California had been through…By 2002, only seven such universities were left in Louisiana, five of which were denied a license by the state. The Mississippi exodus had begun. … "When we saw Lacrosse had relocated there we called [Mississippi officials], and there didn't seem to be a whole lot of concern," [said one Louisiana official]. … )
States may sing their songs of praise
With waving flags and hip-hoo-rays,
Let others boast of high degree:
They ain't seen diplomas like Mississippi's!
Go to Mississippi, land of the bogus,
Go to Mississippi, land of the rogues.
Other states shut down their mills,
But Mississippi's got land to till!
Go to Mississippi - the exodus has begun;
Go to Mississippi- fuck accreditation.
Call yourself the School of God,
Establish any sort of fraud:
This is the place you wanna be!
The fine old sod of Mississippi.
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Regular readers of UD will recall one of her earliest posts [UD, 11/30/03], on television and her avoidance of it. Television is a boring subject, but UD wants to begin today's post with it in order - among other things - to make a point about writing style.
Recall UD's post in praise of Jan Morris's essay on La Paz [UD, 3/26/04]. Here, the point was that Morris's precise and exuberant prose conveyed through style as much as content her excitement at the eccentric, life-packed spectacle of high Bolivian cities, her openness to all sorts of experiences, and so forth.
Morris was in spectacular control of her prose; it revealed exactly what she wanted it to reveal of the world and of Morris. A less skilled writer, like the New York Times "Personal Health" columnist, Jane Brody, often reveals aspects of her character she would probably prefer not to have been revealed.
Look, for instance, at the first few cliché-choked paragraphs of her piece in today's paper. Hell, start with her title - she probably didn't choose it, but nonetheless…
TV's TOLL ON YOUNG MINDS AND BODIES
Already the cliches are there - the silly melodramatic word ("toll"), and then a phrase that makes me think of old Wonder Bread commercials ("Helps build strong bodies twelve ways."). And here's the beginning of the essay, with my bitching about it [literary critics call what I'm about to do "reader response analysis" - that is, I'm sharing with you my actual responses as I read the text] in parentheses:
Television can be a wonderful learning tool. [Gevalt! One title and one sentence and I'm already puking cliches! "…wonderful learning tool"? Actually, no, tv cannot be a wonderful learning tool, and Brody knows this, so why does she feel she has to suck up to her readers by starting off with a lie? Her false and prim language has already got me started on my tendency to reread in a subversive way writing that seems to me, like this writing, intolerably smug and healthy-minded … I begin trying to read it as pornography… And ("…Young bodies…tool…") it's working!] Thirty-odd years ago, "Sesame Street," "The Electric Company and "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" helped my sons learn to read, count, socialize and cope with feelings. [Well, these are the usual suspects, and you wouldn't know from Brody's uncritical endorsement of them that none of these shows is in fact a particularly good way to learn anything beyond, as The Onion put it awhile ago in one of their greatest stories, "viewing skills". And there's the clump of clichés again - "socialize," "cope with feelings" - this is the crap you express when you've secretly been watching Oprah even though you want people to think you're too high-toned to do that. Or, again, is this simply condescension toward a readership you assume does nothing but watch tv and talk like this?] Nature programs on public television taught them an enormous respect for the world at large and the creatures within it. [Yeah, yeah, all you did was watch public tv… and I'm plotzing to beat the band with "respect for the world at large."] Not until the boys were old enough to understand how commercials tried to promote consumption were they allowed to watch sports programs on commercial television. [Same lame claim that they only watched public tv, plus the newsflash that commercials try to promote consumption.] With little tv, they were two lean, strong, athletic children [porno button flashing] who grew up in a home without junk food [boast, boast. Martha Stewart eats no junk food and watches only public tv, and look what happened to her], did not pester their parents to buy things they saw advertised [uh huh], never smoked or drank alcohol and knew more about wildlife than the leader of a trip to Kenya [twenty-four hour nature show watching will do that to you]. Unfortunately, our experience with television is rarely duplicated these days [We're special…better than other people…].
You get the idea. The way you write reveals way more than you think it does about you -- unless you're in control of your style.
There are a couple of things you can do if you want to get serious about writing well. One is to study with great concentration the prose of people who write much better than you do. The other is to practice your writing in a quiet and conducive sort of environment. Which is where the second part of today's post comes in.
A retired English professor each summer takes a small group of University of Michigan students to "an idiosyncratic - I think it's even fair to say eccentric - annual [retreat sponsored by] the university English department," writes a New York Times reporter, who goes on to describe a six-week outing to the New England mountains during which students read Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Frost, and other locals, discuss their work, write in a literary journal, and climb hills together. Sounds hippie dippie, but the curriculum is pure canon and hasn't changed in thirty years, and the founder and leader of this "artificially circumscribed community" is a serious teacher.
Part of the circumscribed nature of the community involves a lack of electronics - not only are there no televisions, but "students give up their cellphones…they leave their computers at home…they aren't allowed any recorded music." Which is indeed idiosyncratic in the context of today's universities, but is also exactly what colleges and universities were originally supposed to be - circumscribed, artificial environments within which one's distance from the noisy world allowed a temporary concentration upon complex and important matters. A few colleges - St. John's in Annapolis comes to mind - are still sort of like this, but most have bought the bullshit about how it's better to be part of the big nasty world than some airy-fairy ivory tower, etc.
The Michigan students seem happy with this eccentric outing - it seems to have improved their writing and their thinking. And this is not only, UD would like to suggest, because their minds have been calmed and cleared by their setting and their asceticism. They are also beginning to intuit that the greatest writers are often unapologetically eccentric, idiosyncratic people, themselves acquainted with solitude and silence. They do not give a rat's ass what anybody thinks of their eccentricity. They lack Jane Brody's anxious concern with what she takes to be the sensibilities of her readers. They are not self-righteous message-mongers; rather, they embody and express better and/or more substantial ways of being in the world, and they do it with such style that they inspire rather than irritate.
The path of indirection and embodiment is as much a model for great teachers as for great writers. But students cannot follow this indirection if they are as distracted as most of them are by the havoc that's been hauled onto their campus.
Monday, August 02, 2004
There's always another hoax about, and UD likes to keep you updated. This latest one's a sad and common type, a la Rigoberto Menchu -- an unscrupulous or naive person who has some connection to a culture of injustice fakes (in whole or in part) an account of an outrage. The motives are part narcissism, part greed, and part desire to draw attention to a horrible situation (the oppression of peasants; the enslavement of women).
This is a sad sort of hoax because when the work is revealed to be a cynical lie, the cause, which is all too real and needs all the attention it can get, suffers serious damage.
UD has already written about the hate crime hoax staged by Professor Kerri Dunn (see UD, 3/19/04), and the anti-semitism hoax more recently choreographed in the Paris metro (UD, 7/14/04); now she invites you to consider the best-selling book shown here, which details an honor killing in Jordan (rather than endure the shame of his Muslim daughter marrying a Christian, her father stabs her to death).
The author, who turns out to have many aliases and a criminal history, did not live in Jordan during the events she claims to have taken part in. She is also, it seems, one of those charismatic, borderline psychotic types (Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, etc.) so bafflingly attractive to hard-bitten realists like publishers and editors, who are always getting taken in by them and then publishing memoirs about how they were taken in...
Anyway. One of the advantages of being educated is that you've got a bit of preparation for things like literary hoaxes, because you're aware of their long history, their perennial attractiveness to certain sorts of people, and their routine characteristics. You might even get to the point where you can begin to spot hoaxes before other people do, merely through the style of someone's prose and the general presentation of their book. Being educated doesn't mean you're a paranoid cynical sort - a "master of suspicion" - but it should mean having sufficient dispassion, sufficient familiarity with a certain rhetorical tradition (in this case, the hoax), and sufficient sensitivity to prose style to sniff some of this stuff out on your own.
UD has boasted about teaching at an enviable place: a rich private university in one of the world's great cities. She goes to lunch at bistros next door to the State Department. She's done some consulting editorial work for the World Bank, which sits a block and a half from her office. Most of the significant sites of Washington are a pleasant stroll away from her desk.
All of that is a good deal less enviable today than it was yesterday. Today a code orange threat level was issued for the World Bank/IMF buildings. Terrorists seem to be preparing truck bombs.
So for the moment the glamour of UD's location is more about high-profile vulnerability than about halls-of-power excitement.
But, well, the business of vulnerability…. Washington, DC has for a number of years been a high-profile target, and everyone here knows it. A colleague of UD's knew early about the Pentagon attack, because she saw the building burning from her office window. After UD got back from a semester in France, she found it odd that all of the trash bins had been removed from the DC Metro, until she remembered that they'd been taken away as a security precaution. There are cameras everywhere. When UD donates blood at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, her car is stopped by lots of armed men at the entrance and seriously examined, with dogs and electronics.
In fact, for UD, the once-simple business of giving blood has become emblematic of our new lives. Admission to the NIH campus, and then to the Clinical Center where the blood labs are, and then the interview with the nurse -- it's all become a much more elaborate and nervous business.
Yet for UD - for most people here - it's all still background chatter. Undeniably there's been an atmospheric change, but even after UD understood that the White House (four blocks from her office) had possibly been a September 11 target, and even after she walked past the burn unit housing people who'd been hurt in the Pentagon attack (UD was in the Washington Hospital Center visiting her mother, who'd had surgery), UD remained calm. Denial? Who knows. Having a friend who routinely goes to Kurdistan and Peshawar perhaps helps UD put in perspective the business of vulnerability. In any case, UD will return to her desk at her university in early September, same as ever. Barring a new horror.
Sunday, August 01, 2004
....like America do,
Brits are selling B.A.'s just like me and you.
Oxford University; Cambridge too,
If you pay tuition, they'll pass you on through.
Yes, fellow Alliance for A's members, it's Janice again [for background, see UD posts beginning with 11/30/03], singing Roger Miller's great song in a slightly different key…I don't know about you, but if, like me, you've ever had a close encounter with a snooty British professor gassing on about the vulgar Yanks with their lack of academic standards, I think you'll find this article from The Observer gratifying.
Like us, British professors have figured out that universities need tuition to operate. They've also figured out that when you flunk a student or make his/her college life significantly unpleasant in other academic or social ways, you lose that tuition. Hence, a sensible university will both inflate grades and charge the highest tuition possible.
British universities, for instance, really soak foreigners: "At the top end of the range, foreign students can pay 30,000 pounds a year to study for a business degree - six times the income received from a UK undergraduate." And since, for a variety of reasons, foreign students may have more academic trouble than native-born, these universities must be ready to accept sometimes very bad work from them. At Swansea University, reports one researcher, "a blind eye was turned to practices ranging from direct plagiarism to lecturers doing their students' work for them, or simply passing work that had not been examined properly."
Swansea's recent closure of its chemistry, anthropology, and philosophy departments [Does Janice have her finger on the pulse of academic change, or does she not? Remember my communication of 5/18/04, in which I argued for the elimination of philosophy departments and their replacement by spa studies? Oh - and UD asks me to tell you to take a look back, in the larger context of this post, at the following posts as well: 6/22/04 and 7/6/04...] has some people speculating that "the decision has been made to boost the numbers of foreign students coming to study at the university's new management school on lucrative masters' degrees."
The happiest news for us on this side of the Atlantic who are working for all A's across the board for all American college students is that even at Oxford
staff believed they were expected to give good grades to American students studying in England for credits for their courses back home. This impression has been passed to the students themselves. Gilbert Cervelli, an American theology and history student who spent six months at Oxford this year for a credit towards his American Bachelor of Arts degree said he received all A grades. "For a majority of my time at Oxford, I wondered if I could write an absolute crap essay and still have my tutor tell me it was wonderful just because I was a huge investment."
Well, wonder no more, Gilbert. With the exception of a few highly technical majors ("Science graduates who cannot do what their certificate implies," a lecturer at Bournemouth points out, "are potentially dangerous."), it sounds as though the tuition-greased slide through school is just as smooth over there as it is over here.
Tata -


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I know a number of people have been looking forward to having the Book of Heroic Races Compendium in their hands as opposed to on a computer screen or on a tablet. Well that is available to you now. Over the weekend, I approved the print version and it is now available at DriveThruRPG/RPGNow. PrettyContinue reading "Pathfinder: Book of Heroic Races In Print"
Tag Archives: kobolds
Pathfinder: Release your Inner Kobold
Fight the Dark Side The brave and noble (er, I mean cowardly and underhanded) umbral kobold survives the Plane of Shadows through stealth and guile—and, with this race guide, so can you. This supplement provides an exciting look into the life of everyone's favorite miniscule draconic creature, along with full stats that are balanced toContinue reading "Pathfinder: Release your Inner Kobold"
Pathfinder: Those Pesky Kobolds
I hope you enjoyed our little April Fool's joke yesterday. Today, however, we are presenting you something with enough seriousness that it could have been an April Fool's release: kobold player characters. For all the kobold-lovers out there, myself included, we always wanted a kobold that was balanced against the Pathfinder Core Rulebook so weContinue reading "Pathfinder: Those Pesky Kobolds"
Shadowsfall Legends: The Gem That Caught Fire – Kurdag's Tale Now Available
When the umbral kobold owner of the Exploding Herb alchemy shop is questioned about a magical gem that he may or may not have enchanted, both danger and bombs fly. Will Kurdag find a mortal enemy among the Hookblades? Will the neighbor's wagon be smashed to splinters or explode into woodchips? The Gem That CaughtContinue reading "Shadowsfall Legends: The Gem That Caught Fire – Kurdag's Tale Now Available"
[PFRPG] Encounters and Maps: Cave of Kobolds released.
A complete combat encounter, Encounters and Maps: Cave of Kobolds is designed for a group of 4-5 players with an average level of 1, 3 or 5. Inside this balanced encounter, you will find: a full-color map (presented for a large printer and also cut to 8-1/2″ x 11″ / A4 paper) a printer-friendly, black-and-whiteContinue reading "[PFRPG] Encounters and Maps: Cave of Kobolds released."


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Red Chile Caramel & Piñon Layered Cake
Zinnia Bakery is located in Brent's Café at 3701-B Olsen Blvd. in Amarillo. Our phone number is (806) 398-2160. We bake all of the desserts and pastries for Brent's Café onsite as well as special orders for pick-up including cakes and cookies.
Zinnia Bakery bakes each item from scratch and customizes each recipe to meet our stringent taste and texture requirements. In addition, Zinnia Bakery is food allergy friendly and specializes in accommodating food sensitivities such as gluten, dairy, soy, and egg.
We bake all of the desserts and baked goods for Brent's Café in-house, including: cakes, cinnamon rolls, muffins, buttermilk biscuits, crisps, brownies, cheesecake, bread pudding, almond-oat bars, coffee cake, and lemon blueberry bundt cake. In addition, Zinnia Bakery bakes cakes, pies, cookies, tarts, and cupcakes for special orders such as birthdays, holidays, and celebrations. Please call (806) 398-2160 to order.


text: Grip Weakness What is grip weakness? Grip weakness is an ulnar nerve disorder that is typically caused by a trapped nerve in the elbow or wrist. What are the symptoms of grip weakness? Patients suffering from grip weakness typically report tingling, loss of sensation, elbow pain, aching in the funny bone, numbness in the fourth and fifth digits, and difficulty getting a firm grasp or grip on various objects. How do we treat grip weakness? When you come to our center, we start off by assessing the root cause of your condition, observing the way you hold your arms, grasp things, and twist your wrists, and search for any compensation patterns in other parts of your body. We then prescribe a series of strengthening exercises to build up the surrounding muscles in your hand, and stretch out the impacted area to increase flexibility and improve range of motion.


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