Equation
- Written by: Jesse Rucilez
- Category: Fiction
The great machine approached the dead planet with reverence, descending to the edge of its ionosphere. There it hovered with infinite patience. Searching. Recording temperatures, atmospheric conditions, radiation levels, and orbital speed. Scanning for any and all signs of life or sentience.
Just as it had been programmed to do.
OUR students and children
- Written by: Deborah Baron
- Category: Education
Like many retired folk, I have a part time job to supplement my pension. I was delighted to find a job for 3 hours a day, M-F, that wasn’t retail and didn’t mean working with food or on weekends. I work in a school, in a classroom. Full disclosure: I am not a credentialed teacher, just a mom/grandma with a big heart and lots of ideas who loves children enough to help out in a school. I say that because I am going to tell you what I am seeing in the school, what is going in the classroom. I see a lot of frustration and sadness; the teachers, the aides, the parents and the children. It’s not all bad and I really enjoy the children and the majority of them are happy, energetic kids. I live in a rural community, there is a field of cows across the street and a pasture with lambs right next to the playground. The town is small and the neighbors know each other well, some of the student’s grandparents attended this school. Some of the staff attended this school as children. Sounds like a scene out of a Rockwell painting doesn’t it?
So you still don’t believe Putin affected our election
- Written by: Jose Rosa
- Category: Politics
“In all of this, in any of this, there’s been no evidence that there’s been any collusion between the Trump campaign and President Trump and Russia. Let’s just make that really clear. There’s no evidence of collusion.”
Read more: So you still don’t believe Putin affected our election
Hands-On Learning Through STEM Lesson Plans and Tools
- Written by: Joyce Wilson
- Category: Education
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) is an integrative, interdisciplinary “hands-on” approach to teaching. Its objective is to teach science, technology, engineering, and mathematics as a cohesive, coherent learning dynamic rooted in real-world experiences and applications.
Read more: Hands-On Learning Through STEM Lesson Plans and Tools
Culture Shock: Moving from Journalism to Public Relations
When I began my career as a business journalist, I was blessed to have the guidance of tough editors who equipped me with what would eventually develop into a fine-tuned bullshit detector. Many years later, when I switched over to “the dark side,” meaning public relations, my bullshit detector almost immediately went on the fritz, burned out by an overload of fluff speak.
But let’s go back to my early days as a reporter. Perhaps the first lesson my editors taught me was to sniff out misleading information on press releases. For instance, one particular press release noted that a certain company had grown “100%” in the past year. Innocently, I thought that this was a great news peg and went to my editor with the release. He sat me down and explained why this was not necessarily important news. “100% could simply mean that the staff grew from two people to four. It could mean that the company had one office and now has two. Call the contact person back and ask exactly how it was that the company grew.” He was right. There was no story.
Read more: Culture Shock: Moving from Journalism to Public Relations
The body of Christ --Amen
- Written by: Bent Lorentzen
- Category: Religion
This is John Shapiro, Pennsylvania's State Attorney General, delivering the findings by the PA Supreme Court Grand Jury, of the systematic sex abuses of children, and coverups, by Roman Catholic pedophile priests and bishops...
Word for word (am leaving out some of the most graphic details) : "Despite raping a child, having her child... stand on a bed in a rectory, pose naked as Christ on the cross for the priests. They took photos of the victim, adding them to a collection, which they produced and shared on church grounds... told alter boys not to wear any clothes under their cassocks because God didn't want any clothes on their skin when they served mass .."
DON’T MISS THE MOVIE: “VICTORIA AND ABDUL”
- Written by: Curtis W. Long
- Category: Culture
Judi Dench and Ali Fazal harmonize superbly well in this cinematic correction of an almost obliterated, salient fact in the life of a racially and culturally –open, earthy queen whom sphincter-clenched historians have attempted to keep in a time-antiseptic closet. They have failed miserably.
An artist’s life
Although Jacquelynn Kresman was born in Lorain, Ohio, she came west with her parents when very young and has always thought of herself as a ‘native’ of beautiful San Diego, California. The family built a home in the Point Loma neighborhood, just blocks away from some of the area’s most beautiful shoreline. She reminisces; “back then a young kid could wander alone and I took advantage of that freedom and spent almost all of my time at the beach”. Living just a few blocks from the beach as an only child, it was her playground and her best friend. She made it her mission to capture on canvas every inch of the captivating coast of her adopted state. Kresman, as she signs her work, has canvassed that seashore. Her artistic vision went naturally to the sea-conscious environment from which she developed.
To Kim Stanley Robinson on The Drowning of New York
- Written by: Donald Wesling
- Category: Fiction
Science-Fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson was my student at University of California, San Diego, in the late-70s and early-80s, both in an undergraduate class and as a doctoral candidate: I directed his dissertation on character systems in novelist Philip K. Dick, which he published with University Microfilms as a hardcover book a few years after his doctoral degree. Since his time at UCSD we've been in touch as correspondents and also friends, so when he comes back to the campus once or twice a year for conferences or meetings with students, we have breakfast at the La Valencia Hotel. When he was a student he went by Kim, but about the time he published his Mars Trilogy in the 90s he became Stan. There's another more recent trilogy on climate change, beginning with Forty Degrees of Frost (where one character teaches geology at UCSD), but the most recent novel is New York 2140 (Tor publications, 2017), a projection over a hundred years into the future of the current trends of sea-level rise. My letter to Stan, last summer, is my attempt to describe back to him where the novel admirably succeeds in its aims both artistic and political. Maybe because his writing is so intricate in style and so forcefully political, no director has yet optioned one of his novels for film. However, for me the New York novel is a major achievement, worthy of a grand epic film: urgent conflict, compelling characters, and panoramic visuals of the greatest of all cities in terrible distress.
Read more: To Kim Stanley Robinson on The Drowning of New York
