Why I hold the academic racket in contempt. Here’s a recent classroom performance by Assistant Professor Bill Shanahan, PhD, of Fort Hays State University, Kansas, USA:
The university’s website describes him thus:
Ph.D. – Speech Communication (Rhetoric); University of Texas at Austin 1996… Persuasion and semantics are two classes “Bill” Shanahan loves to teach.
I just wonder if he wouldn’t be even better suited for an administrative position, like Vice Chancellor.
Ned and I are the proud human companions of a 18-month old adolescent canine. When it comes to our dog Sammy, Ned and I avoid the word “ownership”, since it is not yet clear who owns whom. In many ways, Sammy takes after our dear friend Ivan, who, as many of you may have recalled, is highly intelligent in a slightly unorthodox way. As you can imagine, Sammy’s playfulness and his eccentricity have been our constant source of amusement and joy, as well as exasperation. I have to admit that Ned copes much better than I do. Every time when I lose my cool, Ned will ask me to go and visit the “Mother Goose and Grimm Comics Page“. He says that the cartoonist Mike Peters really knows his canines and felines well. He will help me see the humorous side of living with pets.
Grimmy, Ralph and their friends have an opinion on almost everything – from blind dating, table manner and toilet routine to religion, popular culture and political correctness. These are what Grimmy says about the Beijing Olympics:
If mobile phones had been commonplace in 1975, we would never have had the Rocky Horror Picture show.
Image from BBC - Russia pays respect to Solzhenitsyn
These tears are tears of gratitude more than of grief. Although I’m not inclined to shed shallow tears over the deaths of public figures whom I’ve never met, for the past two days since the death of Alexandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn I have recurrently become overwhelmed – but more by gratitude than by grief, and more by joy than by sorrow. The gratitude and joy are over the completion of a rare exemplar of a well lived, heroic life of towering stature, from whose heroism I have personally benefited in ways I cannot presently confide to my readers.
But as Solzhenitsyn’s life and character were inseparable from those of his country, the story of his life AND of his country during the 20th century stand as reproaches to that of China, to this day. How so? Here’s how:
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