My Content: Hubs, Answers, and Forums
21Why Do I Have To Study Poetry?
It can be difficult to see why poetry is important, sometimes. It's 11:15 a.m., classes are dragging, we've just had an hour of geometry, and now we have to read about some dead white guy's frilly interest in floral arcades and green pastures? ...
13Famous First Sentences: The Great Gatsby
Some novels are itching to be made into movies. Â Tightly written and deceptively straightforward, The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald is one such masterpiece. Â I don't often use that last word -- masterpiece -- but Fitzgerald crafted a...
7Famous First Lines: Dr. Faustus
What would Christopher Marlowe have gone on to write, had he not been killed (at the age of 29) in Deptford in 1593? His work up until that point was gloriously and extravagantly experimental, unpolished in some places, wickedly world-wise in...
16Famous First Lines: The Canterbury Tales
April may have seemed the "cruellest month" to T. S. Eliot, but when you think about it, TSEliot is almost "toilets" backwards, so no wonder he had such a negative outlook. For the rest of Britain, and especially for the South (where the weather...
21Smells Good! Aromatherapy Does Not Need to Be New-Fangled, New Age, or Expensive
freefoto.com Ever lived near a bakery? Boy, does bread smell good as it comes out of the oven. Just the mere thought of the smell of freshly baked bread makes me smile; it is powerful stuff, indeed. Or have you ever lived near stables, an...
21Famous First Sentences: Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe was a prodigious writer, in the sense that he was able to describe events in wonderfully clear detail. His Moll Flanders is an extravagant exercise in financial machinations, as Moll contrives to buy her way through life with money and...
6Defying Logic: ABC Scheduling Hurts Series
The tightly written and cleverly edited new series, Defying Gravity, pulls no punches. Its characters make decisions that have painful consequences, and these consequences are not glossed over, they are examined as being the process whereby our...
31Stuff Made of Silver
I'm a bit of a magpie. I like shiny things, and I suspect I'm not alone -- the glint of silver has been hypnotizing people for millennia; more abundant and useful than gold, silver has been hoarded and admired by kings and paupers alike. As coin,...
29Famous First Sentences: Alice in Wonderland
A mathematician. A little girl. Puzzles, paradoxes, conundrums: Charles L. Dodgson (1832-1898), who published children's books under the pen name of Lewis Carroll, was a scholar who stammered, never married (although he seems to have had plenty of...
29Famous First Lines: Romeo and Juliet
Ask any freshman in college what her favorite Shakespeare play is and she will say Romeo and Juliet, because it will be the one she is most familiar with (though she may not necessarily have read it all the way through). This early Shakespeare...
27Famous First Lines: Macbeth
The Scottish Play, as Macbeth (c. 1605) is referred to by superstitious actors everywhere, is also Shakespeare's shortest, making it a favorite of schoolchildren everywhere. It was the first play I took part in (I won't say I was acting; I was ten)...
11Famous First Sentences: Sometimes A Great Notion
Ken Kesey is famous for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), and rightly so; however, I decided to choose Kesey's second, grimly lyrical novel for this series. Sometimes A Great Notion (1964) is literally a tour de force , as the Stamper family...
17Irish Rice
I was quite bemused when I received a request to write a hub about Irish Rice dishes, and even more surprised (and very impressed) when I started to research the topic and immediately found the wonderful Kathryn Vercillo, a fellow hubber, who had...
49Famous First Lines: Richard III
There is a great deal of twisted biography concerning the person of King Richard III of England (1452-1485), first written by the great diplomat and statesman Thomas More (1478-1535), that, in the manner of blatant pro-Tudor propaganda against the...
40America: The Two-Party System Does Not Work
The de facto two-party system in the United States leads to a debasement of the electoral process. Allowing the presidential race to be a choice between two men (yes, women have been excluded yet again) does not mean voters can concentrate on...
22Sterling Silver Hallmarks -- Tale of a Dog Tag
from the beautiful "A Small Collection of Antique Silver and Objects of vertu" -- an online guide at www.silvercollection.it The practice of stamping marks onto silver to indicate its quality and source dates back to the Middle Ages in England,...
35Famous First Sentences: One Hundred Years of Solitude
I hesitated before choosing a novel written in Spanish; however, since Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez not only endorsed Gregory Rabassa's fine translation of Cien años de soledad but said he liked it better in English, here's the first sentence of a...
25Famous First Sentences: The opening of Finnegans Wake
This starts off as one of the most beautiful opening sentences I've ever read; and, no matter what you might think of the novel itself (if any of you get all the way through, would you let me know how it ends?), this first sentence has a power of...
29Famous First Sentences: A Tale of Two Cities
The idea of the French Revolution at first captured the imagination of many English Romantic poets and thinkers. The idea of liberty, equality, and fraternity ("a brotherhood of man," as John Lennon would later put it) was fascinating to imagine....
63Famous First Sentences: Pride and Prejudice
One of the most famous opening sentences in Western Literature is the crisply arch first statement in Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice (1813): It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in...
42Why I'd like to Live at a Medieval Monastery
But let's set aside the fact that I'm female, not even Catholic, and it's the twenty-first century, and consider why a medieval (rather than a modern) European monastery would be an ideal location to live -- nowadays. And with or without the...
40The Funniest Joke: Baby Polar Bear
Bill Pugliano, Seattle Times There was a little itty bitty baby Polar Bear, who said to his mother one day, "Mom, am I really a Polar Bear?" His mother laughed and playfully nudged him along with her head. "Of course you're a Polar Bear, sweetie."...
22Confederate Jasmine
(Jack Scheper c 2003 floridata.com) I wish you could stand in my yard today (only going to be 85°) and enjoy the scent of the Confederate Jasmine that grows over, in among, and around anything that stands still long enough to be taken sweet captive...
33Pins and Needles in a Broken Arm
The two bones of the forearm -- that portion of the arm from elbow to wrist -- are the radius and the ulna. The radius is the inner bone, in line with the thumb, and the ulna is the outer bone. Fractures to these bones most commonly occur through...
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Test How Micro expressions Betray Our Emotions
I've been watching the new-ish Fox show Lie to Me with real interest: based on the findings of Dr. Paul Ekman (who trained as a clinical psychologist and worked until 2004 at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute), the TV show...
84There Is No Such Thing As Money
I received a letter yesterday from VeryLargeBank refusing to transfer a balance to a different Very-Large-Credit-Card account. The reason given perplexed me: "you cannot transfer to pay off another VeryLargeBank account." I hadn't realized that...
22Why is poetry important?
Remember the scene in the movie Contact when the Jodi Foster character is being swirled through space? The craft she is in pauses between wormholes and she stares at the vast and imponderable beauty of the cosmos. "Oh," she says, breathless,...
33Firefly and Dollhouse: A Disturbed Mind is Better Than None At All
In both Firefly and Dollhouse, series creator Joss Whedon has introduced the concept of a character dealing with significant brain trauma. In Firefly, the condition is confined to River Tam, the young ingenue who turns out to be programmed with...
32Tampon Ads to Make you Grimace
Couldn't you just dance with joy? Three absorbancies! Life suddenly becomes filled with flowers and cute bunnies. For those other times, read on. . . Noooooo! oh yeah, we tough arr anyone remember these? outa sight you wish really we rebels
50How To Justify Your Existence
How can I justify my existence? The simple answer is that I can't. I have no idea what would justify my being here and now. Now that I am here I can perhaps find reasons to justify my continuation -- but I can find many more that might well qualify...
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Why Poetry Analysis Matters: Carolyn Forche's The Colonel
I'm always impressed with the impact poetry can have on kids who are sure they won't like it, ever, and any particular poem you ask them to read in class least of all. I always enjoy seeing them dismiss their former reticence as irrelevant (which it...
130Five Famous Fictional Places I'd Love To Visit
Ever read about a location that you know doesn't exist, but that would be great to visit? I'd love a house like Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit . Or have you ever seen a place in a movie or on TV that you'd really love to see for real? I thought...
42Top Ten Reasons to Visit Northern Ireland
I've used some photos I found on the web that did not have clear ownership specified. If you think you find a photo and fear copyright is an issue, email me at teresamcgurk@gmail.com and I'll remove it IMMEDIATELY. Everyone I talk to in the...
64Who would best play you in the movie of your life?
We have become so attuned to the cinematic techniques used in relaying life experiences that we often quote lines from movies in significant or surprising situations, knowing that the people around us will instantly know the allusion and understand...
7Five Ways of Making Petrarch's Sonnets Come Alive
The complicated and mind-numbingly difficult process of translating poetry from one language to another is really impossible. For example, my mother once asked me to translate one of my poems for her, so she could read it. I was at a loss,...
40Why do women find men in uniform so attractive?
Why does the sight of a clean-cut man in a dress uniform look appealing? (I'm sure we can all agree that no one really likes to see a man in combat gear -- unless he's coming home safely, that is.) There is something about the presence of a...
28What does poetry add to our education? Wordsworth's sonnet Composed Upon Westminster Bridge
I enjoy asking students to define what poetry is, because each class comes up with a different definition, and each one is correct. It is the nebulous nature of poetry that most attracts me (well, that -- and the fact that it's shorter than a...
40Ten Reasons to Rent Out Your House and Live in a Camper
the view Ok, so it's not a great photo, but it's a great view of the river, and I didn't want to leave. I reluctantly put my house on the market when I realized I would not have enough income to pay the mortgage; of course, with the current economic...
19Sony Vaio = Good; Sony Repair Service = Not So Much
I was pretty excited when it became clear that Barack Obama had clinched the election -- so much so that my dog and I performed a celebratory dance on top of the bed, where I had been monitoring the voting results on my Sony Vaio laptop. Needless...
14Infinite Reboot Loop? Caught in a Windows Vista Update
Troubleshooting tips for Windows Vista? This one could save you days or even weeks of frustration, money, more frustration, a useless brand new computer, and maybe even a little sanity: Don't set your computer to download automatic updates. ...
8Poetry: "One Art" (Elizabeth Bishop)
Some poems stay with you and even hunt you down if you ever try to escape them, then punch you in the stomach when you read them, no matter how many times you've read them before. "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop is one such poem. The art of losing...
51Ways to make your English major more marketable to businesses
created by http://www.wordle.net/ One of the chief complaints of businesses these days is that the college graduates they hire can't write. Ouch. The larger implication of that statement is that the college graduates can't think, because good...
4How To Grow A Great Beard
I didn't expect it. Who does? They never told me about this when I was younger. But in the past couple of years, as I have ambled (sometimes gracefully, sometimes not) into my late forties and the joys of menopause, my chin has started to...
13Inexpensive, easy, and healthy breakfast recipes for college students.
Breakfast, I've learned the hard way, is the most important meal of the day. Skipping or skimping on breakfast leads to cravings mid-morning, which on the typical college campus usually can only be fed by vending machine snacks that contain too many...
