Shamhat and Siduri Essay - 584 Words

Shamhat was the priestess of Ishtar, the great goddess of love and war. She was hired by Gilgamesh to tame Enkidu as Enkidu was not civilized in any way and had come to be Gilgameshs soul brother and companion. Shamhat was a hierodule and was asked to seduce Enkidu and use her charming ways to make a man out of Enkidu, the animal like. Shamhat, being a hierodule, is a woman dedicated to Priesthood and God. Hence, she would only deal with the godly. She was allocated the task of making Enkidu aware of the human nature and lifestyle, which was different from the animal world that he was coming from. Shamhat had tactically and implicitly understood the path that she would have to take towards the betterment of Enkidu. She revealed to him†¦show more content†¦Gilgamesh was devastated by Enkidus death. The immense grief and excruciating pain and also fear for death, that it caused to him had made him eager to seek immortality. Gilgamesh met Siduri in a very delicate state of mind . He had just witnessed the death of his soul brother and only friend. Life had brought him to a stage where he could gain some humanity and get rid of his selfish, arrogant attitude. He met Siduri by coincidence. Siduri came as a gift, which made him familiar with the simple ways of leading life. Her small words meant a lot that taught a lot about life. Gilgamesh was an arrogant ruler with no humanly feelings of love and compassion. Having lost Enkidu, his only friend, had stirred mixed feeling in his soul. On the one hand he felt grieved about Enkidus death but on the other hand he was going against the rule of nature. The fear for death made him feel that he was strong and powerful. So he would not want to die ever. And so he set out in search of Utnapishtim. Siduri tried to put light on him important aspects of life in that human life is ordained by God and that humans do not have a control over their own lives. She says to himquot; Remember always, mighty king, that Gods decree d the fates of all many years ago. They alone are to be eternal, while we frail humans die as you yourself must someday too.quot; (Gilgamesh, tablet 10, column 3, lines88-91, p.51) She explainsShow MoreRelatedThe Poem Epic Of Gilgamesh 891 Words   |  4 Pagesoccasions evidence their equality and sometimes superiority to man. Take Shamhat for instance, she was a beautiful temple priestess, who was used to seduce the beast Enkidu, with her beauty and charm. So Gilgamesh replied: Go set a trap; take back with you a fine lover, Shamhat, the sacred temple priestess who might let him see what charm and force a woman has. (The Epic of Gilgamesh I p. 7) Gilgamesh summoned Shamhat to seduce the beast Enkidu knowing that if she showeredEnkidu with her loinsRead More The Role of Women in The Epic of Gilgamesh Essay799 Words   |  4 Pagesboundaries are set by the harlot Shamhat, Ishtar, Siduri, the tavern keeper, Ninsun and Utanapishtims wife. By giving women this role of wisdom and boundary enforcement, The Epic of Gilgamesh reflects how Mesopotamian society actually valued women. The harlot, Shamhat, serves to establish the boundary between animals and humans. Enkidu, a creature on the border between animal and man is selected by the gods to balance out Gilgameshs power. Gilgamesh summons Shamhat to civilize Enkidu after a hunterRead MoreAnalysis Of The Epic Of Gilgamesh 979 Words   |  4 Pagesis Shamhat. Shamhat is a prostitute of the temple of Ishtar. Even though she is only briefly in the epic she has a lot of influence on Enkidu. Enkidu was created in the image of Aruru to combat Gilgamesh’s arrogance. We first find him in the wilderness setting free animals that have been trapped by a hunter. The hunter eventually finds Enkidu at a watering place. He plots to tame Enkidu by venturing to Uruk and requesting Gilgamesh for aid. After speaking to Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh sends Shamhat toRead MoreThe Epic of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk2127 Words   |  8 Pagesthreat to the family unit and the community as they are the destroyers of peace and stability i n the society. However, this notion is reversed in the epic where the prostitute, Shamhat, is depicted as a wise woman who civilises Enkidu. In the epic, Shamhat act as the transmitter of civilisation. In order to civilise him, Shamhat has to tame his animalistic side. Hence, she has sexual intercourse with Enkidu. After the intercourse, when Enkidu saw the animals, â€Å"the wild beasts of the steppe shunned†Read MoreFemale Figures : The Epic Of Gilgamesh1863 Words   |  8 Pagescivilize: female figures instill into male figures new mentality and fresh understanding of their present lives; they also use their physical beauty to introduce heroes to sophisticated aspects of society, such as food, music, and fertility. While Siduri brings Gilgamesh back to life from his despondence after his severe grievance over his loss of Enkidu, Shamhat’s beauty and sophisticated sexualilty transformed Enkidu from his wilderness. Even though female figures employ different ways in orderRead MoreThe Epic Of Gilgamesh : The Struggle For Women1183 Words   |  5 Pagesregardless of a variety of changes in rulers, religions, and time periods. The Epic of Gilgamesh might lead one to consider the roles of women small and insignificant compared to the man s role. In fact, throughout the epic tale, three women; Shamhat, Ishtar, and Siduri, were able to create and maintain a civilized Mesopotamian society using the uniqueness of their bodies, minds, and spirits. Even though Shamat does not have a large role in The Epic of Gilgamesh, she does shape how the story begins. ShamatRead MoreComparing The Epic Of Gilgamesh2123 Words   |  9 Pagesreality, the world could not possibly go round if it wasn t for the women and the minor, but crucial roles they play. Although the women in the Epic of Gilgamesh had minor roles, their roles were definitely important. The women, who are Aruru, Shamhat, Ninsun, Siduri, Ishtar, and the wife of Utnapishtim, represents not only great wisdom and power, but also temptation, which the men try no to fall victim to, and ruin. Just like the men in this epic, the women also have powers, of which the men were awareRead MoreThe Role Of Women In The Epic Of Gilgamesh1189 Words   |  5 Pagesimportant characters in this story. Without their wisdom and guidance, Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s journey would have ended a lot sooner, and Gilgamesh would have still rampaged in Uruk, never bringing peace to those who were be low him. Aruru, Shamhat, Ninsun, Ishtar, Siduri, and Utanapishtim’s wife all contribute to Gilgamesh’s journey, and in the end, provide Gilgamesh with the necessary tools in order to transform his character. These women in The Epic of Gilgamesh are essential to the plot, and provideRead MoreComparing Gilgamesh And Candid1225 Words   |  5 PagesEnkidu a man formed from clay and the saliva of Aruru, Goddess of creation. Enkidu was initially made to rid Gilgamesh of his arrogance and restore the city. He was raised by wild animals and very ignorant of human society until he was introduced to Shamhat, a sacred prostitute who humanized Enkidu. Shamhate also introduced Enkidu into civilization. Upon meeting the first time Gilgamesh Enkidu were far from smitten, they were destined to fight. So, that is what they did. It was not until after the fightRead MoreThe Epic Of Gilgamesh Essay991 Words   |  4 Pagesguarded by two scorpion like creature that had no intentions of permitting Gilgamesh to pass through the tunnel that lead to the other side, but his passion persuaded them to. After traveling for hours in the darkness he emerges and proceeds to meet Siduri, the tavern keeper, who tells him that his desire for immorality is futile, but seeing how determined he was to reach Utnapishtim, the only immortal man. He then advances to Urshanabi, the ferryman, who takes Gilgamesh to Utnapishtim, but not after

Invictus Essay - 699 Words

Analysis of Invictus Poetries are the many ways that people can express their feeling and emotion. They are the manifest of everything that the authors contribute into. In Poetry, whether its sadness or happiness, they are the nature of the authors soul and body. In the poem Invictus meaning unconquerable in Latin, the author William Ernest Henley wrote this poem in a life and death situation. Henley wrote this poem during his time in the hospital, being treated of tuberculosis as well as having his foot amputated. The poem describes the unwavering and unconquerable soul that one possesses during the time of death. When facing death, one needs courage and a stone hard soul in order to guide them through the remaining time of their life.†¦show more content†¦Looms but the Horror of the shade† This two line justifies the path that is beyond wrath and tears which clearly describes hell itself. This path which many people have crossed did not waver nor frighten the narrato r’s soul at all. â€Å"And yet the menace of the years, Finds, and shall find, me unafraid†. The narrator did not fear death at all instead he describes it as merely a place where he belongs after life. And yet again, he describes his undefeated and unconquerable soul that he cannot be perished merely with the sight of death itself. In the last stanza â€Å"It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll.† This describes the unconcern of the narrow and difficulty needs to pass the gate of hell. No matter how sinful the person have been stated in the book of sins, your unconquerable souls will guide you through and that’s why you made it and you’re standing here today. â€Å"I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.† In these two lines describes the fate that is in your own hand and nobody else. As long as you are in control and acquire the unconquerable soul that truly identifies a brave man who c an make it through everything. No matter what obstacles and challenges the narrator faces, he overcomes the situation with his unwavering spirit. As long as you are in control of your fate the result of it will come out to your liking. Each life of each man can choose the way hisShow MoreRelatedThe Movie Invictus 1158 Words   |  5 PagesInvictus: â€Å"Is it Hollywood or is it History?† No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background or his religion. People learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite. I have viewed the Invictus film and thoroughly researched Nelson Mandela and the people he encountered during his term in office and even during his prison time. Mandela has been one of the greatestRead More`` Invictus `` By William Earnest Henley1361 Words   |  6 Pages â€Å"I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.† These wise words come from the poem â€Å"Invictus† by William Earnest Henley. Basically, this means that you control your fate, and that things don’t happen by chance, they happen because of the choices you make. You control where you go in life and how you treat others. In the film Invictus, Nelson Mandela joins forces with the South Africa rugby team in order to unite their nation, which was still racially divided due to apartheid. This inspiringRead MoreInvictus - Path Goal Theory Essay2451 Words   |  10 Pagesâ€Å"Invictus† – Individual paper â€Å"Invictus†, is a powerful movie representing what Nelson Mandela taking the office as the first black president of South Africa and set to accomplish great things. Nelson Mandela was the founder and lead of the African National Congress and spent 27 years in prison on charges for sabotage against the white military and government to end apartheid. The movie starts with his release from prison on February 11, 1990 greeted by the blackRead MoreNelson Mandela And The Game That Made A Nation2093 Words   |  9 PagesZain Ahmed Mahoney English 9-9 7 January 2015 Introductory Information Title- Invictus: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation Author- John Carlin Genre- Non-Fiction, History Historical Context- Published on November 18, 2009. More of a modern book taking place in the late 1900’s. The book is also made into a movie starring Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman. Invictus is a poem that Nelson Mandela recites and is written by William Ernest Benley. Protagonist- Nelson Mandela is the protagonistRead MoreLeadership: Let Your Individuality Shine Essay557 Words   |  3 PagesConfidence is a very important factor in our lives; even more so, it’s extremely important for a successful leader. My father once said to me â€Å"whatever you say, say it with conviction, and if you do so- people will believe.† throughout the movie Invictus, Nelson Mandela never said a single thing without passion and conviction. This along with the way he carried himself- standing tall, never afraid to look another man in the eye- caused nelson Mandela to radiate confidence. This confidence in himselfRead MoreLeadership in Invictus1722 Words   |  7 PagesThe story of Invictus is based upon the life of Nelson Mandela during the time he held his Presidency of South Africa. Specifically, the movie focuses on his ideas of managing the Springboks and how the opportunity of using the country’s Rugby team unfolds as a way to bring the coun try together. Since The World Cup is being held in South Africa during the first year of his term, he sees The World Cup as an attempt to bring the whites and blacks together by finding pride in their home team’s victoryRead MoreInvictus And Antigone844 Words   |  4 Pagespoem,12b â€Å"Invictus†,12d tells the story of a man faced with many difficult challenges but always showed perseverance. *While the other poem, â€Å"If We Must Die†,12d by Claude McKay, 12d references the civil rights movement and repeats throughout that if one dies they should die honorably for a cause they support. Both poems are similar to the play Antigone, which retells the myth of a young woman in Ancient Greece, faced with challenging man’s law to uphold God’s law. The poem, â€Å"Invictus†,12d by WilliamRead MoreTheme Of The Poem Invictus765 Words   |  4 Pageswhen he was a child however he lived with the disease until he was 53. During surgery, he wrote h is most recognized poem â€Å"Invictus† which means unconquerable. In Henley’s poem â€Å"Invictus†, Henley faced death and wrote his poem to convey perseverance and inner strength of the human being, to not lose hope and to develop courage in hard moments of life. In the poem ‘’Invictus’’ the use of metaphors, strong and descriptive language is used in order to emphasize the theme, that is to never lose hopeRead MoreInvictus Movie Analysis2408 Words   |  10 PagesMovie Analysis Invictus The movie I watched and will review in the following paragraphs is ‘Invictus.’ I took this opportunity to watch this movie and analyze the leadership style of Nelson Mandela along with two others in this film. This report is categorized by a brief review of the motion picture including descriptions of events which I found relevant to the topic and leadership style of three individuals from the movie. The leadership style is done using Kouzes and Posner and also some ofRead MoreTimothy Mcveigh s Invictus 1666 Words   |  7 PagesTimothy McVeigh was quoted the famous poem, Invictus, saying â€Å"I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul†. McVeigh believed in many things; one being that government was planning to strip it’s citizens of their rights. As McVeigh hatred for the government grew so did the outcome of his actions. After the Waco Siege massacre, which involved the accidental burning of an isolated compound that took the lives of seve nty-six members of a religious cult in Texas, McVeigh wrath against the

Holistic Health Assessment

Question: Write about theHolistic Health Assessment. Answer: State when a temperature measurement is considered not within normal range, and what are the indicators from the case study that Tony may have a temperature above normal range? Tonys skin is warm to touch. This is one of the indicators that he could be having a body temperature above the normal range. Besides, Tonys vital signs show that he has a temperature of 37.9C. This s above normal rage since a person with normal body temperature has a temperature of 37C (Sund-Levander, Grodzinsky, 2013). However, this can vary due to several factors that the body might be subjected to such as environment, food intake, and diseases among others. In healthy individuals, the average daily temperature can vary with 0.5C. The daily variations that are notable in normal individuals are within the range of 0.25 to 0.5C (Sund-Levander, Grodzinsky, 2013). This is because the body has mechanisms to adapt to the changes in the environment and make corrections in the body temperature. However, changes in sleep cycles can affect the adaptive correction of the body, and the circadian temperature rhythm can change as well. Define systolic and diastolic blood pressure measurement, and what are the indicators from the case study that Tony may have a blood pressure above normal range? Systolic blood pressure is the measure of the pressure in the blood vessels when the heart beats. On the other hand, diastolic blood pressure is the measure of the pressure in the blood vessels when the heart rests between beats. Tonys lifestyle puts him at risk of having heart diseases and in this, he could be having blood pressure above normal range. He watches television all day, eats food that increase his cholesterol. Levels, and drinks a lot of coffee that is a stimulant. Even the vital signs indicate that he has blood pressure above the normal range. Tony has a blood pressure of 145/78 mmHg. Therefore, his blood pressure is above the normal range because the systolic pressure is more than the usual 120. A person that has normal blood pressure will have a measure of less than 120/80 mmHg ("Blood pressure", n.d.). On the other hand, with 140/90 mmHg or greater are considered to be having high blood pressure. Therefore, Tony has high blood pressure. Based on Tonys current lifestyle, what are the 2 modifiable risk factors? Using the resources provided on the vUWS site, discuss one intervention in the prevention of one of the modifiable risk factors? Tony does not cook and instead opts to eat takeaway foods that have lots of fat since they are usually deep-fried for more than three days in a week. As such, the foods lead to high cholesterol levels in Tonys blood. The high cholesterol levels can result in clogs in the arteries hence a reduction in the amount blood oxygen ("Heart attack risk factors", n.d.). The poor oxygen supply can lead a weak heart that will eventually be damaged and result in the death of Tony. The other risk factor that can lead to heart problems is the lack of physical activities that help in reducing the risks. However, Tony does not engage in physical activities and instead spend most of the time watching the television. The inactivity of Tony puts him at risk of developing coronary heart diseases because his body cannot regulate the use of insulin ("Department of Health | Cardiovascular disease", n.d.). However, Tony has the opportunity of preventing these risks by changing his lifestyle. For instance, he can engage in physical exercises such as long walking, running, joining a gym club and playing some games such as basketball. The activities will make sure that his idle time is utilized well while reducing risks of getting heart diseases as opposed to watching television all day. References Blood pressure. The Heart Foundation. Retrieved 29 April 2017, from https://heartfoundation.org.au/your-heart/know-your-risks/blood-pressure Department of Health | Cardiovascular disease. Health.gov.au. Retrieved 29 April 2017, from https://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/chronic-cardio#ris Heart attack risk factors. The Heart Foundation. Retrieved 29 April 2017, from https://heartfoundation.org.au/your-heart/know-your-risks/heart-attack-risk-factors Sund-Levander, M., Grodzinsky, E. (2013). Assessment of body temperature measurement options. British Journal Of Nursing, 22(15), 882-888. https://dx.doi.org/10.12968/bjon.2013.22.15.882

The Clinton Health Plan Essays - Rodham Family,

The Clinton Health Plan The health care situation in the United States is in dire need of a change. The United States spends more money on health care per individual than any other nation in the world (14%of its GNP in 1991), and that amount is quickly rising. Virtually everyone, from doctors to politicians, recognize the unwieldy situation of health care in America, and realize that something must be done. In order to attempt to correct the failures of the current health care situation, one must understand the problems that led to the deterioration of the health care system. Perhaps the main problem with health care today is that there are 37 million Americans without insurance, and another 20 million are underinsured Another large problem with the way health care is presently organized is - as Clinton helpfully points out - waste. Some common examples are: Paperwork: There are thousands of insurance companies in the US, and each one has many forms for doctors and patients to fill out. So much so, that doctors spend more time improving their handwriting than healing people. Greed and Profiteering: Some drug companies make over 10,000% profit on the drugs they manufacture. In 1991, the median income of doctors was $139,000 for general practitioners and $512,000 for specialists. Unneeded Surgery and Tests: Possibly 15 to 35% of certain types of operations and tests are unneeded. Malpractice Suits and "Defensive" Medicine: Doctors pay high premiums on malpractice insurance which causes them to charge more. The reason that these premiums are so high is because currently there are practically no limits to an amount that can be sued for pain and damages. Defensive medicine - procedures done to protect doctors from being sued - is costing this country greatly. Recognizing that waste is one of the greatest causes of the high prices in health care, Clinton has introduced a plan to revise the health care system by eliminating waste, and making sure that every single American can be covered by a health plan. Clinton's plan is based on three premises. First, that there is enough waste in the current health care system to cover the costs of his new plan. Second, that his plan will create competition within the insurance industry. Last, that his plan can put a cap on insurance prices. The core of Clinton's plan is to set up regional health alliances, which would buy insurance on behalf of thousands of consumers. A seven-member National Health Board will be set up to scrutinize the health alliances. The health alliances would be limited by the National Health Board by having price caps on the premiums, and by assuring that the health alliances will accept all applicants including those that are high-risk. Each health alliance will have three or four different options (HMO, fee for service, and combination plans) which the consumers could choose from. In the case of the employed, the insurance would be paid 80% by the employers and 20% by the employees. In the case of self- employed and non-employed, they would have to pay the full cost of the premiums by themselves, unless they qualify for government subsidies. The Clinton plan also will limit what types of operations are covered, and it puts restrictions on how long a person can stay in a hospital, nursing home, or rehabilitation center. It would also regulate the wages of specialists, and the prices of drugs. Overall, what Clinton's health care plan will do is put caps on insurance premiums thereby causing competition between insurers. It will also greatly reduce the waste by: reducing the paperwork enormously by having fewer insurance companies; removing unnecessary procedures by putting limits on the insurance. It will also decrease greed and profiteering by putting limits on doctor's salaries and on drug prices. The Clinton health care plan is not without its faults. One of the major problems is that it assumes that there is a tremendous amount of waste in the current system, but many people say that that is an over assumption. Another problem is that managed competition, (an attempt to create competition in the health-care market) might not work in the health care industry because everything is covered in premiums, and there is a third indirect party (insurance company), which does all the "buying and selling" of health services. Another problem, which is not a problem with the plan itself rather with getting it passed, is that there are many groups opposed to the Clinton plan. Many politicians do not like Clinton's plan

Activestats free essay sample

Summary of findings and preliminary conclusions: The problem I’m trying to solve is : Universities and colleges do not like to admit students who do not perform well. It is expensive and unpleasant for both the student and the school. Since I work in the Department of Education and I’m a trained statistician, my supervisor has asked that I assist the Head of the Admissions Department. I have been given the MIDWEST SCHOLASTIC DATA file to develop a detailed statistical plan that the Admissions Officer can use to determine which students are most successful at her university. We used a bar graph to see whether male or females have the higher GPA, and the data shows that females were more likely to have a high GPA also. Lastly, we use a histogram to show how residency can affect how high a person’s GPA was. The data shows that students living in the dorms were most likely to have a low GPA, whereas students living in houses had the highest GPAs. We will write a custom essay sample on Activestats or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page If we were to do this study again, we would like to add to our sample size to help distinguish the outliers and show greater correlation between the variables. Conclusions: From the information collected I have noticed several patterns concerning the GPA of students attending Midwest College. As age increases so does the students GPA, this could be due to the fact that older students tend to live in homes which means they have more privacy to study. In general, females tended to have higher GPAs then males. This may be because males may tend to party more in college than females. This tendency may diminish as testosterone levels in male decrease with age and may have something to do with the rising average GPA rates among older students.

The Sword in the Stone vs. The Once and Future King essays

The Sword in the Stone vs. The Once and Future King essays The 1963 Disney film, the Sword in the Stone (2) was the first Disney film to give sole directorial credit to anyone involved in the film process (3). In the case of this movie that credit went to Wolfgang Reitherman. The movie was adapted from T. H. Whites Once and Future King, (1) and was understandably a very large undertaking, necessitating the use of a sole director. The change of medium used to depict this story resulted in the changing of parts of the story. The restrictions and conventions of movie making, namely, time span, and target audience, had the largest part in shaping the direction the movie took with the adaptation of Whites classic. The work of the writer and director of the film in the changing of the medium will be examined in the first few scenes of the movie, where Wart meets Merlin for the first time. This will be compared against the depiction of the tale in Whites book, and the shaping forces of movie convention pointed out. In Disneys Sword and the Stone, Wart meets Merlin in the following way: Wart and Kay are spending part of their afternoon hunting deer in a clear, sunny field. Wart poises and steadies himself on the branch of an old dead tree, waiting quietly for Kay to release an arrow at a deer. As fate would have it the branch snaps, Wart falls onto Kay, and subsequently causes the arrow to shoot far off its original planned trajectory into the deep, dark regions of the woods. Kay vows to whoop Wart good, if you will, so Wart runs into the forest in search of the arrow, furthermore ignoring Kays remark about the multitude of wolves lurking there. A nasty wolf does, indeed, begin stalking the Wart, unbeknownst to him, but fails to ever be noticed or accomplish the task of eating the boy. Merlin, of course, is already aware that Wart is on his way to drop in, and busies himself drawing water from a well with a chain and bucket, a...

Questions for Case at the AQRs Momentum Funds (The Momentum Effect) Study

Questions for at the AQRs Momentum Funds (The Momentum Effect) - Case Study Example The existence and ability to implement the strategy despite up or down markets is implied due to the aspect of relative performance as a component of momentum. Authors such as Jegadeesh and Titman in their publication, present models of behavior with a basis on the idea that momentum profits result due to inherent biases in the way an investor interpret given information (7). Others however argue that momentum investors realized massive returns as mere compensation for risk. Generation of momentum returns can be as a result of rational and irrational reasons. Some of these reasons include momentum being a consequence of overreaction and under reaction to news pertaining to the market and failing to incorporate them in their transaction prices. This argument can be explained by examples such as positive announcements from companies resulting in price increases thus more buying of stocks (Jegadeesh & Titman, 10). With respect to the time series of returns, we can conclude that each stock’s past return is a future predictor meaning that stocks with high expected rates of return in adjacent time periods are expected to have high realized rates of returns in both periods. In the case of return reversals, such appear mostly in later years following the formation date where it is most likely that an investor will lose

Neo-classical Theories Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Neo-classical Theories - Essay Example Direct application of the social control theory would involve the prescription of a punishment as a threat to wrongful social behavior. Offenders like the drunk drivers would be most likely deterred from offending through application of a cover legal implication in the commitment of a crime. In the application of the social theory as a deterrence of drunk drivers, a severe punishment like a five-year imprisonment, without bailing on bond, would be demotivating towards drunk driving (Chui, 2003). Social theory of deterrence equally closely borrows from rational choice theory as a means of deterring a drunk driver from committing an offence. Human beings are rational individuals who can be motivated or demotivated by a punishment, therefore a formal arrest and imprisonment would send a message to those being punished and the potential offenders that the implication for action is constant. Social theory, in deterring an offender from committing an offence, stipulates that the punishment mode and procedure should be uniform and applicable to everyone who commits the offence that is being deterred (O’Malley,

Western Versus Non-western art Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Western Versus Non-western art - Essay Example They can be used to pass information from one generation to another. Different traditions have different pieces of artworks that identify their uniqueness. Traditional western civilization had developed in terms of art uniquely as art had developed in traditional Africa. This paper will compare and contrast two artworks that origination from the tradition of western civilization and traditional African culture. Artworks from western civilization tradition are among the most analyzed pieces of art because of their quality, style and depiction. It is important to point out that artworks from western civilization tradition were developed realistically with faithful depictions of beings and matter. This was done in both paintings and sculptures. It is also essential to note that it was the culture that invented ways of depicting three-dimensional objects in two-dimensional formats. In fact, it has been noted to be the unique style in all human cultures (Neer 31). The traditional western civilization that includes Greeks and Romans were known to develop artworks that were progressive in nature. Unlike, Egyptians from African traditions whose artwork did not change considerably in many years, traditional western civilization art changed and transformed as time progressed. As Camille Paglia states in her book, Sexual Personae Egyptians created a clear and perfect piece of art that was known as Apollonian form (Paglia). It later formed the basis of western civilization art. Egyptian art especially sculptures was meant for the preservation of the body after death. Artists used their memory and followed strict rules. Greek artists studied and imitated Egyptian work but developed new pieces unlike Egyptians who followed the traditional school of art (Paglia 17). In comparison to traditional African sculptures such as fang’s reliquary, sculptures from traditional western civilizat

Analysis Of Brave New World English Literature Essay

Analysis Of Brave New World English Literature Essay Imagine a futuristic society where natural birth is obsolete and children are decanted from test tubes. A society based on a prejudiced and strict caste system: where Alphas rule and Epsilons are purposely given alcohol during their gestation period to inhibit their growth and intelligence. Where sexual promiscuity is accepted and encouraged, while those who practice monogamy and have deeps feelings for only one individual are ostracized. As Lenina aptly summarizes, everybody belongs to every one else and no one belongs to themselves (Huxley, 121). This horrifying dystopia is the setting of Aldous Huxleys new age novel, Brave New World, where the main protagonists, Bernard Marx and John the Savage, defy social norm for a chance of freedom. Published in 1932, Huxleys novel satirizes issues not only present in the 30s but in todays modern society as well. Inequality among people and technologys hold on the masses are brought to light within the novel. However comical some sections seem to be at first, Huxleys original purpose was to draw light in how easy governments could control their the masses through psychological means while the public themselves are left ignorant or fully accept it just as in Brave New World. Although the people of this controlled society seem genuinely content with their lives, its due more to their ignorance and their soma than true happiness. Throughout the novel, Brave New World, the unifying idea that truth and happiness cannot coexists is prevalent; in order to achieve one, the other must be sacrificed. SCHOLARLY ARTICLE A critical look into the eyes of a critic can give in-depth analysis on a topic for which a reader might overlook. An article in Aldous Huxleys web site gives a very comprehensive investigation on Brave New World that breaks down and guesstimates the purpose of soma and its functionality. As the critic states, Huxley was writing a satirical piece of fiction, not scientific prophecy. Soma, viewed from scientific reality could be possible, but mostly have dangerous side effects and most unlikely to be approved by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration). It is something akin to drugs or alcohol, without the unfavorable side-effects. However, according to the article, taken in excess, soma acts as a respiratory depressant making more of an opiate than a sort of clinically valuable mood-brightener. It is what separates false happiness from the harsh realities the infantile people of Huxleys dystopia are not accustomed to. The basis of the government depicted in Brave New World is centered around control and manipulation, making soma a very useful tool in silencing rebellious thoughts by placating the minds of the public. On the other hand, those who do not find happiness are exiled into secluded islands where they cannot disrupt or infect the minds of others. This in itself gives proof that soma is not all effective to all populations, all the time. People like Bernard, though feels the instant gratification that soma brings, finds he cannot keep it as others could. The article gives a very insightful look into the mystery drug and debunks any misconception that could arise from lack of understanding within the novel. STYLE THEME The weapon of choice for the World Controllers is not nuclear bombs nor weaponry, but an artificial drug, soma. Instilling fear and intimidation could only go so far and may cause resentment and dangerous thoughts of rebellion in the oppressed. However, subconscious conditioning and mind-altering drugs could produce the same effects, without the dangerous thoughts. In addition to genetic engineering, the soma drug is perhaps the most powerful weapon the World Controllers have in their arsenal. With these two, any problems before Ford have been permanently eradicated from the minds of the everyday people. In the name of stability and happiness, as Mustapha Mond, one of Huxleys World Controllers states, the freedom of truth is sacrificed (Huxley, 225). Almost all of Huxleys characters, with the exception of the main protagonists Bernard and John, are content with having their soma, vicariously living through feelies, and living their mundane and ignorant lives never wanting more than what is given to them. Mond erroneously associates the lack of pain with genuine happiness. It seems only John the Savage understands that true joy is a result of knowing ones own self-worth and finding inner-satisfaction. John was filled with an intense, absorbing happiness after investing hard work into a clay sculpture he made with his own hands (Huxley, 134). He alone out of everyone else in civilized Britain could give testimony to feeling true happiness, and not the artificial one induced by the soma drug, because he is the only one who worked hard because he wanted to, and not because he was condit ioned to do so. POEM The concept of a futuristic dystopian society is popular through many works of prose. For example, Philena Pughs poem Fragments for the Gates of Times Square: the Fear of Neon, deals with a character who perceives himself to be the last of his kind. This mirrors Huxleys own character, John as well as drawing other parallels. Silence lies underneath the crackle and hum of the neon lights. The puddle near my feet glistens crimson reflecting the words Restaurant and Lounge. A tribute to our pick up/take out society. Above buildings crowd out the sky leaving a jailcell window  to see the stars through. My footsteps echo throughout the world and I realize that I am the last. My breathing grows labored- sending out a sharp, rasping sound to compete with the sputter-buzz conversation on the neon. My dim, twilight eyes srift shut and my final breath gurgles the dark phlegm of fear  in the back of my throat. With the hollow thump  of cranium meeting pavement, humanity is gone. And the neon lights burn brightly into eternity- crackling in time  to the winking stars. The narrator of Pughs poem and Huxleys John find themselves the last of their kind, with the narrator the last human, while John is the only one naturally conceived with civilized parents. They both find great tragedy in the world around them, feeling trapped and alone by what society becomes in their respective worlds. The two works of prose focuses on the struggle between man and the society he is a part of and their failure to adapt or to conform leads to their demise. Driven to madness by the horror of moral-less society around him, John cried out to God and covered his eyes with his hands (Huxley, 259), drawing parallelism, the narrator of the poem is met with the same fate with the hollow thump of cranium meeting pavement, humanity is gone(Pugh). The setting of both works is in a dystopia that puts an emphasis on the consumption of goods verses the freedom of nature. Juxtaposing Pughs society in which buildings crowd out the sky leaving a jailcell window to see the stars with t he buildings themselves are made as a tribute to [their] pick up/take out society, and Huxleys World-Controlled civilized society condition the masses to hate the country but at the same time, condition them to love country sports; one can see the similarities between the two dystopian societies. (Huxley, 23). These works built a society that ensures the consumption of goods and/or transportation and the technology that drives it.

Black House Chapter One

1 RIGHT HERE AND NOW, as an old friend used to say, we are in the fluid present, where clear-sightedness never guarantees perfect vision. Here: about two hundred feet, the height of a gliding eagle, above Wisconsin's far western edge, where the vagaries of the Mississippi River declare a natural border. Now: an early Friday morning in mid-July a few years into both a new century and a new millennium, their wayward courses so hidden that a blind man has a better chance of seeing what lies ahead than you or I. Right here and now, the hour is just past six A.M., and the sun stands low in the cloudless eastern sky, a fat, confident yellow-white ball advancing as ever for the first time toward the future and leaving in its wake the steadily accumulating past, which darkens as it recedes, making blind men of us all. Below, the early sun touches the river's wide, soft ripples with molten highlights. Sunlight glints from the tracks of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad running between the riverbank and the backs of the shabby two-story houses along County Road Oo, known as Nailhouse Row, the lowest point of the comfortable-looking little town extending uphill and eastward beneath us. At this moment in the Coulee Country, life seems to be holding its breath. The motionless air around us carries such remarkable purity and sweetness that you might imagine a man could smell a radish pulled out of the ground a mile away. Moving toward the sun, we glide away from the river and over the shining tracks, the backyards and roofs of Nailhouse Row, then a line of Harley-Davidson motorcycles tilted on their kickstands. These unprepossessing little houses were built, early in the century recently vanished, for the metal pourers, mold makers, and crate men employed by the Pederson Nail factory. On the grounds that working stiffs would be unlikely to complain about the flaws in their subsidized accommodations, they were constructed as cheaply as possible. (Pederson Nail, which had suffered multiple hemorrhages during the fifties, finally bled to death in 1963.) The waiting Harleys suggest that the factory hands have been replaced by a motorcycle gang. The uniformly ferocious appearance of the Harleys' owners, wild-haired, bushy-bearded, swag-bellied men sporting earrings, black leather jackets, and less than the full complement of teeth, would seem to support this assumption. Like most assumptions, this one emb odies an uneasy half-truth. The current residents of Nailhouse Row, whom suspicious locals dubbed the Thunder Five soon after they took over the houses along the river, cannot so easily be categorized. They have skilled jobs in the Kingsland Brewing Company, located just out of town to the south and one block east of the Mississippi. If we look to our right, we can see â€Å"the world's largest six-pack,† storage tanks painted over with gigantic Kingsland Old-Time Lager labels. The men who live on Nailhouse Row met one another on the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois, where all but one were undergraduates majoring in English or philosophy. (The exception was a resident in surgery at the UI-UC university hospital.) They get an ironic pleasure from being called the Thunder Five: the name strikes them as sweetly cartoonish. What they call themselves is â€Å"the Hegelian Scum.† These gentlemen form an interesting crew, and we will make their acquaintance later on. For now, we have time only to note the hand-painted posters taped to the fronts of several houses, two lamp poles, and a couple of abandoned buildings. The posters say: FISHERMAN, YOU BETTER PRAY TO YOUR STINKING GOD WE DON'T CATCH YOU FIRST! REMEMBER AMY! From Nailhouse Row, Chase Street runs steeply uphill between listing buildings with worn, unpainted facades the color of fog: the old Nelson Hotel, where a few impoverished residents lie sleeping, a blank-faced tavern, a tired shoe store displaying Red Wing workboots behind its filmy picture window, a few other dim buildings that bear no indication of their function and seem oddly dreamlike and vaporous. These structures have the air of failed resurrections, of having been rescued from the dark westward territory although they were still dead. In a way, that is precisely what happened to them. An ocher horizontal stripe, ten feet above the sidewalk on the facade of the Nelson Hotel and two feet from the rising ground on the opposed, ashen faces of the last two buildings, represents the high-water mark left behind by the flood of 1965, when the Mississippi rolled over its banks, drowned the railroad tracks and Nailhouse Row, and mounted nearly to the top of Chase Street. Where Chase rises above the flood line and levels out, it widens and undergoes a transformation into the main street of French Landing, the town beneath us. The Agincourt Theater, the Taproom Bar & Grille, the First Farmer State Bank, the Samuel Stutz Photography Studio (which does a steady business in graduation photos, wedding pictures, and children's portraits) and shops, not the ghostly relics of shops, line its blunt sidewalks: Benton's Rexall drugstore, Reliable Hardware, Saturday Night Video, Regal Clothing, Schmitt's Allsorts Emporium, stores selling electronic equipment, magazines and greeting cards, toys, and athletic clothing featuring the logos of the Brewers, the Twins, the Packers, the Vikings, and the University of Wisconsin. After a few blocks, the name of the street changes to Lyall Road, and the buildings separate and shrink into one-story wooden structures fronted with signs advertising insurance offices and travel agencies; after that, the street becomes a highway that glides eastward past a 7-Eleven, the Reinhold T. Grauerhammer VFW Hall, a big farm-implement dealership known locally as Goltz's, and into a landscape of flat, unbroken fields. If we rise another hundred feet into the immaculate air and scan what lies beneath and ahead, we see kettle moraines, coulees, blunted hills furry with pines, loam-rich valleys invisible from ground level until you have come upon them, meandering rivers, miles-long patchwork fields, and little towns one of them, Centralia, no more than a scattering of buildings around the intersection of two narrow highways, 35 and 93. Directly below us, French Landing looks as though it had been evacuated in the middle of the night. No one moves along the sidewalks or bends to insert a key into one of the locks of the shop fronts along Chase Street. The angled spaces before the shops are empty of the cars and pickup trucks that will begin to appear, first by ones and twos, then in a mannerly little stream, an hour or two later. No lights burn behind the windows in the commercial buildings or the unpretentious houses lining the surrounding streets. A block north of Chase on Sumner Street, four matching red-brick buildings of two stories each house, in west-east order, the French Landing Public Library; the offices of Patrick J. Skarda, M.D., the local general practitioner, and Bell & Holland, a two-man law firm now run by Garland Bell and Julius Holland, the sons of its founders; the Heartfield & Son Funeral Home, now owned by a vast, funereal empire centered in St. Louis; and the French Landing Post Office. Separated from these by a wide driveway into a good-sized parking lot at the rear, the building at the end of the block, where Sumner intersects with Third Street, is also of red brick and two stories high but longer than its immediate neighbors. Unpainted iron bars block the rear second-floor windows, and two of the four vehicles in the parking lot are patrol cars with light bars across their tops and the letters FLPD on their sides. The presence of police cars and barred windows seems incongruous in this rural fastness what sort of crime can happen here? Nothing serious, surely; surely nothing worse than a little shoplifting, drunken driving, and an occasional bar fight. As if in testimony to the peacefulness and regularity of small-town life, a red van with the words LA RIVIERE HERALD on its side panels drifts slowly down Third Street, pausing at nearly all of the mailbox stands for its driver to insert copies of the day's newspaper, wrapped in a blue plastic bag, into gray metal cylinders bearing the same words. When the van turns onto Sumner, where the buildings have mail slots instead of boxes, the route man simply throws the wrapped papers at the front doors. Blue parcels thwack against the doors of the police station, the funeral home, and the office buildings. The post office does not get a paper. What do you know, lights are burning behind the front downstairs windows of the police station. The door opens. A tall, dark-haired young man in a pale blue short-sleeved uniform shirt, a Sam Browne belt, and navy trousers steps outside. The wide belt and the gold badge on Bobby Dulac's chest gleam in the fresh sunlight, and everything he is wearing, including the 9mm pistol strapped to his hip, seems as newly made as Bobby Dulac himself. He watches the red van turn left onto Second Street, and frowns at the rolled newspaper. He nudges it with the tip of a black, highly polished shoe, bending over just far enough to suggest that he is trying to read the headlines through the plastic. Evidently this technique does not work all that well. Still frowning, Bobby tilts all the way over and picks up the newspaper with unexpected delicacy, the way a mother cat picks up a kitten in need of relocation. Holding it a little distance away from his body, he gives a quick glance up and down Sumner Street, about-faces smartly, and steps back into the station. We, who in our curiosity have been steadily descending toward the interesting spectacle presented by Officer Dulac, go inside behind him. A gray corridor leads past a blank door and a bulletin board with very little on it to two sets of metal stairs, one going down to a small locker room, shower stalls, and a firing range, the other upward to an interrogation room and two facing rows of cells, none presently occupied. Somewhere near, a radio talk show is playing at a level that seems too loud for a peaceful morning. Bobby Dulac opens the unmarked door and enters, with us on his shiny heels, the ready room he has just left. A rank of filing cabinets stands against the wall to our right, beside them a beat-up wooden table on which sit neat stacks of papers in folders and a transistor radio, the source of the discordant noise. From the nearby studio of KDCU-AM, Your Talk Voice in the Coulee Country, the entertainingly rabid George Rathbun has settled into Badger Barrage, his popular morning broadcast. Good old George sounds too loud for the occasion no matter how low you dial the volume; the guy is just flat-out noisy that's part of his appeal. Set in the middle of the wall directly opposite us is a closed door with a dark pebble-glass window on which has been painted DALE GILBERTSON, CHIEF OF POLICE. Dale will not be in for another half hour or so. Two metal desks sit at right angles to each other in the corner to our left, and from the one that faces us, Tom Lund, a fair-haired officer of roughly his partner's age but without his appearance of having been struck gleaming from the mint five minutes before, regards the bag tweezed between two fingers of Bobby Dulac's right hand. â€Å"All right,† Lund says. â€Å"Okay. The latest installment.† â€Å"You thought maybe the Thunder Five was paying us another social call? Here. I don't want to read the damn thing.† Not deigning to look at the newspaper, Bobby sends the new day's issue of the La Riviere Herald sailing in a flat, fast arc across ten feet of wooden floor with an athletic snap of his wrist, spins rightward, takes a long stride, and positions himself in front of the wooden table a moment before Tom Lund fields his throw. Bobby glares at the two names and various details scrawled on the long chalkboard hanging on the wall behind the table. He is not pleased, Bobby Dulac; he looks as though he might burst out of his uniform through the sheer force of his anger. Fat and happy in the KDCU studio, George Rathbun yells, â€Å"Caller, gimme a break, willya, and get your prescription fixed! Are we talking about the same game here? Caller â€Å" â€Å"Maybe Wendell got some sense and decided to lay off,† Tom Lund says. â€Å"Wendell,† Bobby says. Because Lund can see only the sleek, dark back of his head, the little sneering thing he does with his lip wastes motion, but he does it anyway. â€Å"Caller, let me ask you this one question, and in all sincerity, I want you to be honest with me. Did you actually see last night's game?† â€Å"I didn't know Wendell was a big buddy of yours,† Bobby says. â€Å"I didn't know you ever got as far south as La Riviere. Here I was thinking your idea of a big night out was a pitcher of beer and trying to break one hundred at the Arden Bowl-A-Drome, and now I find out you hang out with newspaper reporters in college towns. Probably get down and dirty with the Wisconsin Rat, too, that guy on KWLA. Do you pick up a lot of punk babes that way?† The caller says he missed the first inning on account of he had to pick up his kid after a special counseling session at Mount Hebron, but he sure saw everything after that. â€Å"Did I say Wendell Green was a friend of mine?† asks Tom Lund. Over Bobby's left shoulder he can see the first of the names on the chalkboard. His gaze helplessly focuses on it. â€Å"It's just, I met him after the Kinderling case, and the guy didn't seem so bad. Actually, I kind of liked him. Actually, I wound up feeling sorry for him. He wanted to do an interview with Hollywood, and Hollywood turned him down flat.† Well, naturally he saw the extra innings, the hapless caller says, that's how he knows Pokey Reese was safe. â€Å"And as for the Wisconsin Rat, I wouldn't know him if I saw him, and I think that so-called music he plays sounds like the worst bunch of crap I ever heard in my life. How did that scrawny pasty-face creep get a radio show in the first place? On the college station? What does that tell you about our wonderful UW?CLa Riviere, Bobby? What does it say about our whole society? Oh, I forgot, you like that shit.† â€Å"No, I like 311 and Korn, and you're so out of it you can't tell the difference between Jonathan Davis and Dee Dee Ramone, but forget about that, all right?† Slowly, Bobby Dulac turns around and smiles at his partner. â€Å"Stop stalling.† His smile is none too pleasant. â€Å"I'm stalling?† Tom Lund widens his eyes in a parody of wounded innocence. â€Å"Gee, was it me who fired the paper across the room? No, I guess not.† â€Å"If you never laid eyes on the Wisconsin Rat, how come you know what he looks like?† â€Å"Same way I know he has funny-colored hair and a pierced nose. Same way I know he wears a beat-to-shit black leather jacket day in, day out, rain or shine.† Bobby waited. â€Å"By the way he sounds. People's voices are full of information. A guy says, Looks like it'll turn out to be a nice day, he tells you his whole life story. Want to know something else about Rat Boy? He hasn't been to the dentist in six, seven years. His teeth look like shit.† From within KDCU's ugly cement-block structure next to the brewery on Peninsula Drive, via the radio Dale Gilbertson donated to the station house long before either Tom Lund or Bobby Dulac first put on their uniforms, comes good old dependable George Rathbun's patented bellow of genial outrage, a passionate, inclusive uproar that for a hundred miles around causes breakfasting farmers to smile across their tables at their wives and passing truckers to laugh out loud: â€Å"I swear, caller, and this goes for my last last caller, too, and every single one of you out there, I love you dearly, that is the honest truth, I love you like my momma loved her turnip patch, but sometimes you people DRIVE ME CRAZY! Oh, boy. Top of the eleventh inning, two outs! Six?Cseven, Reds! Men on second and third. Batter lines to short center field, Reese takes off from third, good throw to the plate, clean tag, clean tag. A BLIND MAN COULDA MADE THAT CALL!† â€Å"Hey, I thought it was a good tag, and I only heard it on the radio,† says Tom Lund. Both men are stalling, and they know it. â€Å"In fact,† shouts the hands-down most popular Talk Voice of the Coulee Country, â€Å"let me go out on a limb here, boys and girls, let me make the following recommendation, okay? Let's replace every umpire at Miller Park, hey, every umpire in the National League, with BLIND MEN! You know what, my friends? I guarantee a sixty to seventy percent improvement in the accuracy of their calls. GIVE THE JOB TO THOSE WHO CAN HANDLE IT THE BLIND!† Mirth suffuses Tom Lund's bland face. That George Rathbun, man, he's a hoot. Bobby says, â€Å"Come on, okay?† Grinning, Lund pulls the folded newspaper out of its wrapper and flattens it on his desk. His face hardens; without altering its shape, his grin turns stony. â€Å"Oh, no. Oh, hell.† â€Å"What?† Lund utters a shapeless groan and shakes his head. â€Å"Jesus. I don't even want to know.† Bobby rams his hands into his pockets, then pulls himself perfectly upright, jerks his right hand free, and clamps it over his eyes. â€Å"I'm a blind guy, all right? Make me an umpire I don't wanna be a cop anymore.† Lund says nothing. â€Å"It's a headline? Like a banner headline? How bad is it?† Bobby pulls his hand away from his eyes and holds it suspended in midair. â€Å"Well,† Lund tells him, â€Å"it looks like Wendell didn't get some sense, after all, and he sure as hell didn't decide to lay off. I can't believe I said I liked the dipshit.† â€Å"Wake up,† Bobby says. â€Å"Nobody ever told you law enforcement officers and journalists are on opposite sides of the fence?† Tom Lund's ample torso tilts over his desk. A thick lateral crease like a scar divides his forehead, and his stolid cheeks burn crimson. He aims a finger at Bobby Dulac. â€Å"This is one thing that really gets me about you, Bobby. How long have you been here? Five, six months? Dale hired me four years ago, and when him and Hollywood put the cuffs on Mr. Thornberg Kinderling, which was the biggest case in this county for maybe thirty years, I can't claim any credit, but at least I pulled my weight. I helped put some of the pieces together.† â€Å"One of the pieces,† Bobby says. â€Å"I reminded Dale about the girl bartender at the Taproom, and Dale told Hollywood, and Hollywood talked to the girl, and that was a big, big piece. It helped get him. So don't you talk to me that way.† Bobby Dulac assumes a look of completely hypothetical contrition. â€Å"Sorry, Tom. I guess I'm kind of wound up and beat to shit at the same time.† What he thinks is: So you got a couple years on me and you once gave Dale this crappy little bit of information, so what, I'm a better cop than you'll ever be. How heroic were you last night, anyhow? At 11:15 the previous night, Armand â€Å"Beezer† St. Pierre and his fellow travelers in the Thunder Five had roared up from Nailhouse Row to surge into the police station and demand of its three occupants, each of whom had worked an eighteen-hour shift, exact details of the progress they were making on the issue that most concerned them all. What the hell was going on here? What about the third one, huh, what about Irma Freneau? Had they found her yet? Did these clowns have anything, or were they still just blowing smoke? You need help? Beezer roared, Then deputize us, we'll give you all the goddamn help you need and then some. A giant named Mouse had strolled smirking up to Bobby Dulac and kept on strolling, jumbo belly to six-pack belly, until Bobby was backed up against a filing cabinet, whereupon the giant Mouse had mysteriously inquired, in a cloud of beer and marijuana, whether Bobby had ever dipped into the works of a gentleman named Jacques Derrida. When Bobby replied that he had never heard of the gentleman, Mouse said, â€Å"No shit, Sherlock,† and stepped aside to glare at the names on the chalkboard. Half an hour later, Beezer, Mouse, and their companions were sent away unsatisfied, undeputized, but pacified, and Dale Gilbertson said he had to go home and get some sleep, but Tom ought to remain, just in case. The regular night men had both found excuses not to come in. Bobby said he would stay, too, no problem, Chief, which is why we find these two men in the station so early in the morning. â€Å"Give it to me,† says Bobby Dulac. Lund picks up the paper, turns it around, and holds it out for Bobby to see: FISHERMAN STILL AT LARGE IN FRENCH LANDING AREA, reads the headline over an article that takes up three columns on the top left-hand side of the front page. The columns of type have been printed against a background of pale blue, and a black border separates them from the remainder of the page. Beneath the head, in smaller print, runs the line Identity of Psycho Killer Baffles Police. Underneath the subhead, a line in even smaller print attributes the article to Wendell Green, with the support of the editorial staff. â€Å"The Fisherman,† Bobby says. â€Å"Right from the start, your friend has his thumb up his butt. The Fisherman, the Fisherman, the Fisherman. If I all of a sudden turned into a fifty-foot ape and started stomping on buildings, would you call me King Kong?† Lund lowers the newspaper and smiles. â€Å"Okay,† Bobby allows, â€Å"bad example. Say I held up a couple banks. Would you call me John Dillinger?† â€Å"Well,† says Lund, smiling even more broadly, â€Å"they say Dillinger's tool was so humongous, they put it in a jar in the Smithsonian. So . . .† â€Å"Read me the first sentence,† Bobby says. Tom Lund looks down and reads: † ? ®As the police in French Landing fail to discover any leads to the identity of the fiendish double murderer and sex criminal this reporter has dubbed â€Å"the Fisherman,† the grim specters of fear, despair, and suspicion run increasingly rampant through the streets of that little town, and from there out into the farms and villages throughout French County, darkening by their touch every portion of the Coulee Country.' â€Å" â€Å"Just what we need,† Bobby says. â€Å"Jee-zus!† And in an instant has crossed the room and is leaning over Tom Lund's shoulder, reading the Herald's front page with his hand resting on the butt of his Glock, as if ready to drill a hole in the article right here and now. † ? ®Our traditions of trust and good neighborliness, our habit of extending warmth and generosity to all [writes Wendell Green, editorializing like crazy], are eroding daily under the corrosive onslaught of these dread emotions. Fear, despair, and suspicion are poisonous to the soul of communities large and small, for they turn neighbor against neighbor and make a mockery of civility. † ? ®Two children have been foully murdered and their remains partially consumed. Now a third child has disappeared. Eight-year-old Amy St. Pierre and seven-year-old Johnny Irkenham fell victim to the passions of a monster in human form. Neither will know the happiness of adolescence or the satisfactions of adulthood. Their grieving parents will never know the grandchildren they would have cherished. The parents of Amy and Johnny's playmates shelter their children within the safety of their own homes, as do parents whose children never knew the deceased. As a result, summer playgroups and other programs for young children have been canceled in virtually every township and municipality in French County. † ? ®With the disappearance of ten-year-old Irma Freneau seven days after the death of Amy St. Pierre and only three after that of Johnny Irkenham, public patience has grown dangerously thin. As this correspondent has already reported, Merlin Graasheimer, fifty-two, an unemployed farm laborer of no fixed abode, was set upon and beaten by an unidentified group of men in a Grainger side street late Tuesday evening. Another such episode occurred in the early hours of Thursday morning, when Elvar Praetorious, thirty-six, a Swedish tourist traveling alone, was assaulted by three men, again unidentified, while asleep in La Riviere's Leif Eriksson Park. Graasheimer and Praetorious required only routine medical attention, but future incidents of vigilantism will almost certainly end more seriously.' â€Å" Tom Lund looks down at the next paragraph, which describes the Freneau girl's abrupt disappearance from a Chase Street sidewalk, and pushes himself away from his desk. Bobby Dulac reads silently for a time, then says, â€Å"You gotta hear this shit, Tom. This is how he winds up: † ? ®When will the Fisherman strike again? † ? ®For he will strike again, my friends, make no mistake. † ? ®And when will French Landing's chief of police, Dale Gilbertson, do his duty and rescue the citizens of this county from the obscene savagery of the Fisherman and the understandable violence produced by his own inaction?' â€Å" Bobby Dulac stamps to the middle of the room. His color has heightened. He inhales, then exhales a magnificent quantity of oxygen. â€Å"How about the next time the Fisherman strikes,† Bobby says, â€Å"how about he goes right up Wendell Green's flabby rear end?† â€Å"I'm with you,† says Tom Lund. â€Å"Can you believe that shinola? ? ®Understandable violence'? He's telling people it's okay to mess with anyone who looks suspicious!† Bobby levels an index finger at Lund. â€Å"I personally am going to nail this guy. That is a promise. I'll bring him down, alive or dead.† In case Lund may have missed the point, he repeats, â€Å"Personally.† Wisely choosing not to speak the words that first come to his mind, Tom Lund nods his head. The finger is still pointing. He says, â€Å"If you want some help with that, maybe you should talk to Hollywood. Dale didn't have no luck, but could be you'd do better.† Bobby waves this notion away. â€Å"No need. Dale and me . . . and you, too, of course, we got it covered. But I personally am going to get this guy. That is a guarantee.† He pauses for a second. â€Å"Besides, Hollywood retired when he moved here, or did you forget?† â€Å"Hollywood's too young to retire,† Lund says. â€Å"Even in cop years, the guy is practically a baby. So you must be the next thing to a fetus.† And on their cackle of shared laughter, we float away and out of the ready room and back into the sky, where we glide one block farther north, to Queen Street. Moving a few blocks east we find, beneath us, a low, rambling structure branching out from a central hub that occupies, with its wide, rising breadth of lawn dotted here and there with tall oaks and maples, the whole of a block lined with bushy hedges in need of a good trim. Obviously an institution of some kind, the structure at first resembles a progressive elementary school in which the various wings represent classrooms without walls, the square central hub the dining room and administrative offices. When we drift downward, we hear George Rathbun's genial bellow rising toward us from several windows. The big glass front door swings open, and a trim woman in cat's-eye glasses comes out into the bright morning, holding a poster in one hand and a roll of tape in the other. She immediately turns around and, with quick, efficient gestures, fixes the poster to the door. Sunlight reflects from a smoky gemstone the size of a hazelnut on the third finger of her right hand. While she takes a moment to admire her work, we can peer over her crisp shoulder and see that the poster announces, in a cheerful burst of hand-drawn balloons, that TODAY IS STRAWBERRY FEST!!!; when the woman walks back inside, we take in the presence, in the portion of the entry visible just beneath the giddy poster, of two or three folded wheelchairs. Beyond the wheelchairs, the woman, whose chestnut hair has been pinned back into an architectural whorl, strides on her high-heeled pumps through a pleasant lobby with blond wooden chairs and matching tables strewn artfully with magazines, marches past a kind of unmanned guardpost or reception desk before a handsome fieldstone wall, and vanishes, with the trace of a skip, through a burnished door marked WILLIAM MAXTON, DIRECTOR. What kind of school is this? Why is it open for business, why is it putting on festivals, in the middle of July? We could call it a graduate school, for those who reside here have graduated from every stage of their existences but the last, which they live out, day after day, under the careless stewardship of Mr. William â€Å"Chipper† Maxton, Director. This is the Maxton Elder Care Facility, once in a more innocent time, and before the cosmetic renovations done in the mid-eighties known as the Maxton Nursing Home, which was owned and managed by its founder, Herbert Maxton, Chipper's father. Herbert was a decent if wishy-washy man who, it is safe to say, would be appalled by some of the things the sole fruit of his loins gets up to. Chipper never wanted to take over â€Å"the family playpen,† as he calls it, with its freight of â€Å"gummers,† â€Å"zombies,† â€Å"bed wetters,† and â€Å"droolies,† and after getting an accounting degree at UW?CLa Riviere (with hard-earned minors in promiscuity, gambling, and beer drinking), our boy accepted a positio n with the Madison, Wisconsin, office of the Internal Revenue Service, largely for the purpose of learning how to steal from the government undetected. Five years with the IRS taught him much that was useful, but when his subsequent career as a freelancer failed to match his ambitions, he yielded to his father's increasingly frail entreaties and threw in his lot with the undead and the droolies. With a certain grim relish, Chipper acknowledged that despite a woeful shortage of glamour, his father's business would at least provide him with the opportunity to steal from the clients and the government alike. Let us flow in through the big glass doors, cross the handsome lobby (noting, as we do so, the mingled odors of air freshener and ammonia that pervade even the public areas of all such institutions), pass through the door bearing Chipper's name, and find out what that well-arranged young woman is doing here so early. Beyond Chipper's door lies a windowless cubicle equipped with a desk, a coatrack, and a small bookshelf crowded with computer printouts, pamphlets, and flyers. A door stands open beside the desk. Through the opening, we see a much larger office, paneled in the same burnished wood as the director's door and containing leather chairs, a glass-topped coffee table, and an oatmeal-colored sofa. At its far end looms a vast desk untidily heaped with papers and so deeply polished it seems nearly to glow. Our young woman, whose name is Rebecca Vilas, sits perched on the edge of this desk, her legs crossed in a particularly architectural fashion. One knee folds over the other, and the calves form two nicely molded, roughly parallel lines running down to the triangular tips of the black high-heeled pumps, one of which points to four o'clock and the other to six. Rebecca Vilas, we gather, has arranged herself to be seen, has struck a pose intended to be appreciated, though certainly not by us. Behind the cat's-eye glasses, her eyes look skeptical and amused, but we cannot see what has aroused these emotions. We assume that she is Chipper's secretary, and this assumption, too, expresses only half of the truth: as the ease and irony of her attitude imply, Ms. Vilas's duties have long extended beyond the purely secretarial. (We might speculate about the source of that nice ring she is wearing; as long as our minds are in the gutter, we will be right on the money.) We float through the open door, follow the direction of Rebecca's increasingly impatient gaze, and find ourselves staring at the sturdy, khaki-clad rump of her kneeling employer, who has thrust his head and shoulders into a good-sized safe, in which we glimpse stacks of record books and a number of manila envelopes apparently stuffed with currency. A few bills flop out of these envelopes as Chipper pulls them from the safe. â€Å"You did the sign, the poster thing?† he asks without turning around. â€Å"Aye, aye,† says Rebecca Vilas. â€Å"And a splendid day it is we shall be havin' for the great occasion, too, as is only roight and proper.† Her Irish accent is surprisingly good, if a bit generic. She has never been anywhere more exotic than Atlantic City, where Chipper used his frequent-flier miles to escort her for five enchanted days two years before. She learned the accent from old movies. â€Å"I hate Strawberry Fest,† Chipper says, dredging the last of the envelopes from the safe. â€Å"The zombies' wives and children mill around all afternoon, cranking them up so we have to sedate them into comas just to get some peace. And if you want to know the truth, I hate balloons.† He dumps the money onto the carpet and begins to sort the bills into stacks of various denominations. â€Å"Only Oi was wonderin', in me simple country manner,† says Rebecca, â€Å"why Oi should be requested to appear at the crack o' dawn on the grand day.† â€Å"Know what else I hate? The whole music thing. Singing zombies and that stupid deejay. Symphonic Stan with his big-band records, whoo boy, talk about thrills.† â€Å"I assume,† Rebecca says, dropping the stage-Irish accent, â€Å"you want me to do something with that money before the action begins.† â€Å"Time for another journey to Miller.† An account under a fictitious name in the State Provident Bank in Miller, forty miles away, receives regular deposits of cash skimmed from patients' funds intended to pay for extra goods and services. Chipper turns around on his knees with his hands full of money and looks up at Rebecca. He sinks back down to his heels and lets his hands fall into his lap. â€Å"Boy, do you have great legs. Legs like that, you ought to be famous.† â€Å"I thought you'd never notice,† Rebecca says. Chipper Maxton is forty-two years old. He has good teeth, all his hair, a wide, sincere face, and narrow brown eyes that always look a little damp. He also has two kids, Trey, nine, and Ashley, seven and recently diagnosed with ADD, a matter Chipper figures is going to cost him maybe two thousand a year in pills alone. And of course he has a wife, his life's partner, Marion, thirty-nine years of age, five foot five, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 190 pounds. In addition to these blessings, as of last night Chipper owes his bookie $13,000, the result of an unwise investment in the Brewers game George Rathbun is still bellowing about. He has noticed, oh, yes he has, Chipper has noticed Ms. Vilas's splendidly cantilevered legs. â€Å"Before you go over there,† he says, â€Å"I was thinking we could kind of stretch out on the sofa and fool around.† â€Å"Ah,† Rebecca says. â€Å"Fool around how, exactly?† â€Å"Gobble, gobble, gobble,† Chipper says, grinning like a satyr. â€Å"You romantic devil, you,† says Rebecca, a remark that utterly escapes her employer. Chipper thinks he actually is being romantic. She slides elegantly down from her perch, and Chipper pushes himself inelegantly upright and closes the safe door with his foot. Eyes shining damply, he takes a couple of thuggish, strutting strides across the carpet, wraps one arm around Rebecca Vilas's slender waist and with the other slides the fat manila envelopes onto the desk. He is yanking at his belt even before he begins to pull Rebecca toward the sofa. â€Å"So can I see him?† says clever Rebecca, who understands exactly how to turn her lover's brains to porridge . . . . . . and before Chipper obliges her, we do the sensible thing and float out into the lobby, which is still empty. A corridor to the left of the reception desk takes us to two large, blond, glass-inset doors marked DAISY and BLUEBELL, the names of the wings to which they give entrance. Far down the gray length of Bluebell, a man in baggy coveralls dribbles ash from his cigarette onto the tiles over which he is dragging, with exquisite slowness, a filthy mop. We move into Daisy. The functional parts of Maxton's are a great deal less attractive than the public areas. Numbered doors line both sides of the corridor. Hand-lettered cards in plastic holders beneath the numerals give the names of the residents. Four doors along, a desk at which a burly male attendant in an unclean white uniform sits dozing upright faces the entrances to the men's and women's bathrooms at Maxton's, only the most expensive rooms, those on the other side of the lobby, in Asphodel, provide anything but a sink. Dirty mop-swirls harden and dry all up and down the tiled floor, which stretches out before us to improbable length. Here, too, the walls and air seem the same shade of gray. If we look closely at the edges of the hallway, at the juncture of the walls and the ceiling, we see spiderwebs, old stains, accumulations of grime. Pine-Sol, ammonia, urine, and worse scent the atmosphere. As an elderly lady in Bluebell wing likes to say, when you live with a bunch of people who are old an d incontinent, you never get far from the smell of caca. The rooms themselves vary according to the conditions and capacities of their inhabitants. Since nearly everyone is asleep, we can glance into a few of these quarters. Here in D10, a single room two doors past the dozing aide, old Alice Weathers lies (snoring gently, dreaming of dancing in perfect partnership with Fred Astaire across a white marble floor) surrounded by so much of her former life that she must navigate past the chairs and end tables to maneuver from the door to her bed. Alice still possesses even more of her wits than she does her old furniture, and she cleans her room herself, immaculately. Next door in D12, two old farmers named Thorvaldson and Jesperson, who have not spoken to each other in years, sleep, separated by a thin curtain, in a bright clutter of family photographs and grandchildren's drawings. Farther down the hallway, D18 presents a spectacle completely opposite to the clean, crowded jumble of D10, just as its inhabitant, a man known as Charles Burnside, could be considered the polar opposite of Alice Weathers. In D18, there are no end tables, hutches, overstuffed chairs, gilded mirrors, lamps, woven rugs, or velvet curtains: this barren room contains only a metal bed, a plastic chair, and a chest of drawers. No photographs of children and grandchildren stand atop the chest, and no crayon drawings of blocky houses and stick figures decorate the walls. Mr. Burnside has no interest in housekeeping, and a thin layer of dust covers the floor, the windowsill, and the chest's bare top. D18 is bereft of history, empty of personality; it seems as brutal and soulless as a prison cell. A powerful smell of excrement contaminates the air. For all the entertainment offered by Chipper Maxton and all the charm of Alice Weathers, it is Charles Burnside, â€Å"Burny,† we have most come to see.

Traveling is a way of exploring the different parts of the world

Traveling is a way of exploring the different parts of the world and enjoying it at the same time. I believe that everyone desires to travel in order to unwind and savor the fruit of their labor.One of the greatest and best places to visit with during vacation is Mexican Riviera. It has extraordinary and superb spots with accommodating people that tourists will surely not forget. Long before, I always heard about Mexican Riviera Cruise and it really attracted my attention.I am hoping then that if ever opportunity knocks on my door to travel with Mexican Riviera Cruise, I will immediately grab it without any second thought. Fortunately, the hope I have to travel with Mexican Riviera Cruise came to pass this summer.   My Mexican Riviera Cruise took me to beautiful sceneries, but it was Acapulco that really impressed me. For me, Acapulco is the most beautiful place in the world.Thesis Statement:This paper intent to discuss why I consider Acapulco the most beautiful place in the world and know about why tourists are attracted to visit this placeI. Discussion:Our first stopped was in Acapulco. The initial word that was on my mind when I first stepped in Acapulco was â€Å"wow†! Acapulco is the most beautiful place in the world. The place is totally amazing.I can say that this place is the best Mexican Riviera resort because it has its indescribable sceneries that no matter how many trendier resorts have came out yet Acapulco continually maintains its competitive natural beauty.Acapulco also has its latest and trendier resort hotels that continuously growing. It also has water sports that will surely be enjoyed by tourists. I also visited the La Quebrada as its main attraction to tourists. Acapulco is a city and seaport in Guerrero State, Mexico. It is about 185 miles south- southwest of Mexico City.Much of Acapulco is perched on high, rocky cliffs overlooking scenic coves and beaches of Acapulco Bay, an inlet of the Pacific Ocean. The city is an internation ally famous seaside resort with luxurious hotels and glittering nightclubs. It is also a shipping point for coffee, sugar, cotton, and hides.Tourists are also attracted by the warm climate, beautiful beaches, water sports, and casinos which the nation’s main source of income. Many tourists come and go in Acapulco. For them it is like their sanctuary whenever they needed to relax and unwind.In conclusion, Acapulco is the most beautiful place because of its magnificent beaches that are so clean and blue and resorts that are incomparable. Basically, the place has nice beaches and attractive spots that everyone would love.It also provides water sports like scuba diving and snorkeling and have plenty of boutiques, shops and restaurants where tourists can visit.

Patricide Essays - Fatherhood, Homicide, Family, Patricide

Patricide Essays - Fatherhood, Homicide, Family, Patricide Patricide In the time of the Romans, the punishment for patricide was to be sewn up in a sack that had a monkey, snake, rooster, and dog inside, and then to be thrown in a river. Each of the animals in the bag had some specific meaning to them, and being sewn up in a sack and tossed into the river also had a specific function to the murderer. Thus this punishment became the proper way to punish the guilty. In the Roman era, patricide had become a major problem, so it was decided that for whomever held a title in Rome, there would be a meeting to discuss how to get rid of the problem and punish appropriately. The title holders decided that the best way to punish the young men, and to stop them from thinking of committing the sin, was to make them die, as well as make them feel everything their father had, and to regret their crime. This decision then became the chosen consequence for the crime of patricide. The significance of the animals was to torture the perpetrator in a particular way for his crime. The importance of the snake was that the snake was evil, dating back to the Garden of Eden, where it posed as the Devil and deceived Eve. While the victim was alive, the snake would be there to remind him of the ultimate sin-the deception of one?s own father. The rooster is primarily known for his crowing, and thus his crows would remind the sinner of his guilt, so that he couldn?t escape from what he did. The dog?s function in the sack would be to howl, not only to be deafening and frightening, but also to evoke the wrath of the gods upon him. The monkey represents torture, because it is capable of mimicking human actions. It would mimic the son?s behavior and re-enact the murder of the son?s All four of these animals perform at least one role in torturing the boy, and so that he would be forced to think about what he had done to his father. The purpose of the sack was to increase tenfold the agony which his father suffered, and also to make him regret his decision to kill his father. With each passing moment, the torment would get progressively worse, so that the boy would get a taste of the Hell that was to be his afterlife, as punishment for committing patricide. The sack represented a way in which to make the boy suffer much more, and quickly before he drowned. The son was thrown into the river so that he could feel the way his father?s panic when he killed him. The water would serve to scare the son in the way his father felt when he realized that his own son had turned on him. The sewn sack would prevent the son?s escape so he would realize there would be no turning back from his actions. These different elements of punishment combined to make the murderer truly suffer each aspect of the crime through the torture. The closed sack with animal reminders of different aspects of the murder would serve as a deterrent to living observers. This ritual is a fitting punishment for the crime.

The night of Halloween Essays

The night of Halloween Essays The night of Halloween Essay The night of Halloween Essay The Night Before Halloween It was the night before Halloween we were all getting ready for the schools annual halloween party, which iVe been going to since I could go. My friends and I are going to be vampires. When my friends get here we are going to walk to the school. I should tell you before i go that there is this house on my street which is believed to be Haunted. I have heard from some of the teacher that three kids went in there and never came out. . lncoming call. Meet me at the old farm house, the night before Halloween. At 12:00 exactly. you are the one then you know where it is. Dont tell anyone. Bring your closes friends, but dont tell your Mother, or else. Im watching you. End of Call.. Two Days till Halloween. My Friends are here. I told my mother that we are going to the school for the Halloween party but really we are going to The old farm house to see what that person whats with us. The Phone call he gave me was so creepy I Just didnt k now how to respond with that. I have been thinking about telling the police but he said dont tell anyone not even your mother or else. I was thinking about the or else part wondering what it meant. Llke would he hurt my mother or me or my friends. Im not sure, but what i am sure of is that he gives me the creeps. Have you heard the saying Dont want to meet them in a dark alley. Well thats exactly what i am doing pretty much. Its scary to think of but i got to do what I got to do. THE DAY BEFORE HALLOWEEN. TONIGHT I HAVE to goto THE FARM HOUSE TO MEET THE PHONE CALLING GUY, TO SEE WHAT HE WANTS. IM SO scared to meet him and see what he wants. 10:00, I have two hours till i have to meet him. :50. My friends are here we are ready to go. i am shaking well we are walking to the house. My friends are right by my side. As we head towards the house i see a light go on and i feel like turning back. we have to go in. as we walk in we hear someone say Say goodbye girls, To your life. hahahahah. We had left the door open. When we walked in i could ghastly she a figure right in front of us, there wasnt Just one there was thr ee men in the room. I was about to yell run but didnt because I knew they would hurt us. So, I didnt. Hello. What did you want with us? WHAT DO I WANT WITH YOU. NOTHING. BUT THERE IS SOMEONE WHO DOES. SHOW YOUR SELF. HEY, GIRLS. THE VOCIE SOUNDED FAMILIAR, BUT JUST COULD NOT PUT A FINGER ON IT. DO YOU recognize ME. Im Mr. White.. You guys nave been very bad students, and i dont plan on telling your parents and fixing this. Im not fixing this problem Im ending it. I am not sure what he, but i know it is not good, he never treated us very good either. Put them in the room. the room what is that? To be continue

Total Quality Management (TQM) Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Total Quality Management (TQM) - Research Paper Example What makes total quality management peculiar is the fact that brings on board the inputs of not just a limited component of the organization but the collective efforts of all stakeholders towards the success of the organization. Total quality management also tries to make the customer the central focus and attention for quality delivery. This means that the target for ensuring success is to ensure that the customer receives quality of service. Industry Adoption of TQM Today, it is said that the adoption of total quality management by industries is no longer a luxury but a responsibility (Ferreira & Otley, 2003). The reason for this is in the numerous benefits that the adoption of total quality management comes with. Though the benefits will be discussed into detail in subsequent sections, it can be said that the need for industries to adopt total quality management is mainly in the structure of their organizations. First, it can be asserted that for any given industry, there is the p rivileged of having a multi-structural organogram in place. An organogram may best be described as an organizational structure, which for industries is made up of several input stakeholders. All of these input stakeholders who may include shareholders, board of directors, management, employees and suppliers all have a responsibility of ensuring that the industry achieves its goals. Because of the divergent nature of the structure and because of the fact that total quality management deals with different stakeholders playing their roles, it becomes easier for industries to adopt total quality management. The other point is that there is the customer factor, where various industries have customers, whom they are expected to serve their interests. For this reason, it becomes necessary to adopt total quality management and use it to serve the purpose of the customer. Benefits of TQM Considering the face of change that is being associated with total quality management, the best benefit t hat can be assigned to total quality management is the fact that it helps in the creation of competitive advantage for various companies. Competitive advantage becomes necessary when virtually every other company is doing the same thing and performing at the same level (Ezzamel, 2004). For example when all competitors are charging the same service price, it becomes necessary to have a fighting force that would ensure that customers choose your company over others, though the prices may be the same. Today, there is much evidence to the fact that customer prefer customer satisfaction to cost salvaging. To this end, when total quality management is implemented to bring about customer satisfaction, it serves as a competitive advantage for the organization to win the hearts of customers. What is more, adopting total quality management ensures a coherent organizational atmosphere. This is because it puts every member of the working force at post and enshrines that each person plays his or her role judiciously (Rank, 2012). Hurdles to Quality Improvements The implementation of total quality management has often been faced with several hurdles and challenges, among which includes the fact that there has often been apathy and lack of cooperation from the entire workforce. The reason why this has

All mentioned in the details Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

All mentioned in the details - Research Paper Example Thesis statement: The after-effects of the ongoing uprising in Egypt prove that the best possible way to restore peace in this region is to introduce federal form of government in Egypt. Egyptian Revolution: The Egyptian Revolution proves that non-democratic rulers cannot survive in the modern world because dictatorship is an outdated political form. In the modern world, the dictators cannot suppress the people by implementing strict laws and regulations. For instance, Hosni Mubarak’s rule in Egypt crushed the positive initiatives undertaken by the former president, Anwar Sadat. One can see that Anwar Sadat undertook the responsibility to create co-operation with neighboring nations, especially with Israel. He was aware of the fact that co-operation can help Egypt to move towards development. But he totally ignored the growth of political Islam in Egypt. On the other side, Hosni Mubarak utilized his influence on the Egyptian military to implement non-democratic ideas. For inst ance, Mubarak made use of the Central Security Forces to suppress those who protested against him. Brownlee (2012) states that, â€Å"Under the aegis of antiterrorism, Mubarak consolidated his rule and blocked alternative movements from gaining control of government† (p.43). ... Instead, he considered the religious fundamentalists as an imminent threat to his regime. Darraj (2007) states that, â€Å"The problem for Mubarak of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism continued to intensify, as fundamentalists called for an Islamic government run by Islamic law† (p.66). During Mubarak’s regime, the governance was under the security chiefs because Mubarak did not give much importance to his ministers. This negative attitude towards ministers, transformed Mubarak to an autocrat. He did not try to solve the problems faced by the people. Instead, he extended his influence on the bureaucratic backbone of Egypt. This helped him to get re-elected more than twice as the president of Egypt. On the other side, the emergency laws implemented by Mubarak limited the individual freedom of the Egyptian citizens. The national political framework became a tool for corruption. Gradually, the people accepted corruption as an easy way to solve the bureaucratic problems. T his helped most of the bureaucrats to enjoy their supremacy in the national politics. On the other side, the people were facing illiteracy and poverty. One can see that poverty is the grass root level reason behind almost all evils in a society. In Egypt, during Mubarak’s rule, illiteracy eventually led to unemployment. Besides, population explosion was another problem in Egypt. The Mubarak government was so interested to implement the Emergency Law because the president feared that the former president’s (say, Anwar Sadat’s) fate may follow him. Currivan (2011) makes clear that, â€Å"After vicious assaults by Mubarak loyalists, the army refused to fire on its own citizens and sided with the people against Mubarak, who eventually stood down on 11 February† (p.178).

Tourism Destination Marketing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3250 words

Tourism Destination Marketing - Essay Example The strategic direction identification process consists of assessment of the present status of the destination with respect to complete analysis of the prevailing conditions in the market. On the basis of the analysis, a future strategic marketing direction of the tourism destination will be formulated. After the formation of the strategic direction, a strategy of integrated marketing communication will be proposed for future development of the tourism destination. The mature tourism island destination that has been chosen for the study in concern is that of the Canary Islands which are located in Spain. The Canary Islands are integrated totally into the European Union and the level of safety and quality comply with the standards of Europe. Ei Hierro, La Palma, La Gomera, Tenerife, Gran Canara, Fuerteventura and Lanzarote are among the Canary Islands. The islands are located in the region that has the greatest level of biodiversity in the world. The islands are characterised with lar ge variety of landscapes, lava flows, and beaches of several kinds, impressive cliffs, fertile valleys and various other aspects (Islas Canarias, 2011). 2.0 Audit of the Current Status of Canary Islands This is an important section of the research paper that will deal with the current status of the Canary Islands in terms of market position in the whole economy. The analysis will be taken up with reference to the market analysis, internal analysis, competition that it faces and structure and role of the Canary Islands. During recent times, the Canaries have applied a number of strategies for achieving sustainable development with regards to the islands’ environmental factors. 2.1 Market Analysis of the Canary Islands Market analysis of the Canary Islands will be presented in this part on the basis of the prevalence of the demand in these islands. The best possible way of analysing the market of the Canary Islands would be to review the number of arrivals there with the help o f previous records. The tourists’ arrivals will represent the prevalence of demand in the region during previous years. Considering the number of tourists’ arrival in the Canary Islands, it can be mentioned that not only the number of visitors were high but the distribution of these visitors throughout the year was even as well. In other words, the demand was distributed homogeneously over the year. The inbound tourism market of the Canary Islands is diverse, with tourists arriving mostly from Germany and the United Kingdom. Thus, the target market for Canary Islands is highly concentrated in the European countries. Data of the year 2002 reveal that 90% of the tourists’ arrival had occurred from the European countries. According to the views of the holiday makers, the most important reason for choosing the Canaries as a holiday destination is due to its weather, scenic beauty, beaches and peace in the atmosphere (Garin-Munoz, 2004). 2.2 Internal Analysis of the Canary Islands The internal analysis of the C

Shawshank Redemption Essay Example for Free

Shawshank Redemption Essay Analysis of The Shawshank Redemption While there often appears to be just a story line in a movie, many different techniques are used to give a deeper meaning to the scenario. This is evident in the movie, The Shawshank Redemption. The story begins when Andy Dufresne, a young vice president of a prestigious Portland, Maine bank, is wrongfully convicted of killing his wife and her lover. He is then sent to jail where he learns lessons about life through his friends and becomes part of a corrupt scheme to launder money. After nineteen years Andy tunnels out of the prison into freedom. While it appears simple on the surface, through the use of many techniques such as title, colors, symmetry, names, numbers, symbols, irony, bible references, and others, The Shawshank Redemption gains a deeper meaning. The title, The Shawshank Redemption, initially has a saving appeal to it. Websters Dictionary defines redeem as †¦to free from what distresses or harm (Webster 968). There is the initial sense of salvation for whatever Shawshank might be. However, this sense changes when it is discovered that Shawshank is a state prison in Maine. With this knowledge the title is an oxymoron. How is it that a prison can provide redemption? The title gains its full meaning at the end of the movie. Andy Dufresne is redeemed through his experience at the prison. He learns about life there, while teaching others. He is redeemed through his second chance at life after his escape from the prison. In this sense he takes the Websters meaning of redeem, to extricate from or help to overcome something detrimental (Webster 968). A movie is controlled by ideas and techniques that are engulfed in almost every aspect of the film. In The Shawshank Redemption, there are three main ideas and techniques that carry the film, being walls, lighting, and water. Both literal and figurative walls trap Andy. In the beginning, he is trapped by the figurative wall of losing his cheating wife. When he goes to prison, the prison walls trap him. Within Andys cell, the names of the previous inmates are carved into the walls. This acts as a reminder to Andy of his incarceration. It also gives him the idea of tunneling out, when he tries to carve his own name into the wall. The walls of the old library are cracked and worn. This is similar to the mental state of many of the prisoners, especially Brooks. Originally the prisoners hate the walls. Then they get used to them. Eventually they come to depend on the walls. Their lives in the prison become cracked and worn. At times these walls do provide strength. For example, Andy leans against the wall as he is talking about his dreams for Mexico. These walls give him the strength to go through with his plan to escape. Lighting plays an integral part to the deeper meaning of the movie by setting the atmosphere. There is extensive use of shadows, fadeouts, and partial sunlight to represent the cloudy mental and moral state of many of the characters. Shadows cover the majority of characters throughout the film. This is created by the fact that when the sun shines, it does so only on one side of a character, usually their back. This alludes to the thought that these people have the truth about them, yet are unable to truly see it. A good portion of the movie occurs in the dark. Lights out at the prison is an extremely dark time when the characters are left with only their own thoughts. The nighttime death of Tommy Williams alludes to the desire to stay away from the truth. Hadley walks into the light after he commits the murder to show that he partially realizes the wrongdoing he has just committed. However, at the end of the movie there are no shadows. As Red walks along the beach to Andy everything is seen as it really is. This is so figuratively and literally. Water provides the sense of purification. Andy escapes from Shawshank by crawling through a 500-yard sewage pipe. At the end of the pipe he falls into a river that is overflowing with the rain. The river and rain act as purification not only physically, but mentally and spiritually. Andy is now truly free. Andy Dufresne, who crawled through a river of **** and came out clean on the other side (Glotzer). This act of water has redeemed him. The ocean at the end of the movie also acts as a purification symbol. Andys life by the ocean redeems him for the wrongdoings that he is forced to endure. When all three of these ideas are put together, they create a connected current throughout the movie that shows the deeper meaning in its full light. Although things may seem to happen at random, such as the choice of a name or the o ccurrence of a similar situation, these things have deeper meaning behind them. Names of characters and places can reveal things about them that nothing else can. For example the name Tommy Williams appears to be just a common, wholesome name. Yet, when you look at the individual meaning of each name it comes to mean a protector that is trying to struggle between good and evil. This meaning is an accurate description of Tommys character. Symmetry plays an important role in the deeper meaning of a story. Similar things happen throughout the story that when seen upon completion shows a contrast. An example of this from the movie is freedom. In the beginning and in the end Andy is free. However, his states of freedom are very different. In the beginning Andy is involved in an unfaithful marriage. This imprisons him. Yet, at the end, Andy is completely free and capable of fulfilling his dreams. All of these seemingly minor things, when put together, aide the creation of the deeper meaning of the movie. The use of particular colours within a scene, give that scene a deeper meaning. This technique is used throughout The Shawshank Redemption. The colour red plays an integral part to the movie. In the beginning scene, as the story of Andys trial is being told, Andys wife is seen in a red dress while embraced by her lover. The red dress symbolizes the vitality of her life and the passion of her sins. The first real sense of bright color within the prison occurs when the prisoners do labour outside of the prison. They wear pants that are blue with a red stripe running down the leg. This shows the conflict between gluttonous desire for freedom and the reality that their lives are confined to behind the prison walls. The cigarette package that the Warden has before Tommys death is red and white. The red and the white together represent Tommys desire to tell the truth and the anger of Norton for trying to hide it. Warden Norton is wearing a red tie when he kills himself. This time the colour red signifies Nortons pride. He refuses to allow anyone else to control his fate. The stamp that approves Reds parole is used with red ink. The red reinforces the idea of Reds new lease on life. Red hitches a ride to Buxton in an old red pickup truck. The truck brings him one step closer to fulfilling Andys dream of a new life for him and Red. The Trailways bus that Red takes to Texas has red detail on the side. This reinforces the trucks meaning. Andys boat is red and blue. This symbolizes the pride that Andy has for taking fate into his own hands and being redeemed for his false punishment. The rest of the movie consists of darker, blander colors. While in the prison mostly everything is gray or a dark shade of blue, from the uniforms to the building itself. This creates a dark atmosphere and a sense of hopelessness. It also attempts to take away from the individuality of the characters by molding them into a uniform group. However, when blue appears in the ocean at the end of the movie, it is bright and vibrant. For this circumstance, blue means a fresh start at life. During all three of Reds parole hearings, the five members are white. On one hand, this shows the injustice that Red is put through. On the other hand, the white can symbolize goodness, and the moral correctness that the parole board is supposed to represent and judge. White also appears in the end of the movie as Red walks across the white sand. In this situation it means justice, as in the justice that is served to Andy. There is green moss on the prison walls. This symbolizes Andys envy towards those who are free. After Red is released from prison, he works at the Foodway, where he wears a green smock. He is envious of the fact that although he is no longer in prison, he is still not completely free. Red also buys a compass with green directional letters to help him find the correct field. This shows that although he is going in the right direction to freedom, he is not quite there. Andy hides the tin box under a black volcanic rock. The black rock, like Andy to the other prisoners, is out of place in its bland surroundings. While black typically represents evil, this black represents the goodness of Andy. In the first scenes of Andy at Shawshank prison, Warden Norton informs the new prisoners of his rules. The first rule that he states is, no blasphemy (Glotzer). This proves to be ironic as Norton himself blasphemies everything he comes into contact with. He uses his position of power to corrupt the prison system in order to benefit himself. Norton uses Andy to launder money that has been earned though shady deals. Norton is responsible for the deaths or the cover-ups of several of his inmates, such as Tommy Williams and Bogs Diamond. In the first meeting between the warden and the new prisoners, Norton also adds his dedication to discipline and the bible. He believes in ruling with a hard hand. The guards are allowed to beat the prisoners if they feel that it is necessary. Norton is also for the use of solitary confinement to punish his prisoners. He places Andy in the hole for two months after Andy calls him obtuse (Glotzer) for not helping Andy fight for a retrial, and then mentioning the laundering business. Norton proclaims that he believes in the bible yet he does not live by its ways. He gives each inmate their own bible in hopes that they too will be able to allow God to lead their way. There are several bible references made throughout the movie. The Warden quotes Mark 13:35, Watch, therefore; you do not know when the lord of the house is coming (Glotzer), to Andy during the cell toss-up. Using this quote allows Norton to appear powerful in his position as warden, yet also let Andy know that the purpose is to size Andy up. Andy retaliates back with John 8:12, Jesus spoke to them again, saying, I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life (Glotzer). Andy realizes that Norton is corrupt. He is challenging the warden by saying that the step to a moral life would be not following Norton. Norton ends this meeting by saying Salvation lies within (Glotzer). This is true for Andy. It is his inner strength and desire, to right the injustice that has occurred to him, that allows him to escape from Shawshank and get his life back. There is a cross-stitch, made by his wife, of the phrase, His judgment cometh and that Right Soon†¦(Glotzer) covering the safe on the wall of Warden Nortons office. This is ironic due to the fact that the wrongdoings that are hid in that safe come out to punish Norton when Andy escapes. Norton is the one who receives punishment for the crimes he commits. This fact is only reinforced when Norton discovers Andys bible in the safe. On the inside of the cover Andy writes, Dear Warden, you were right. Salvation lay within. Andy Dufresne (Glotzer). As Norton opens the bible to the book of Exodus it is revealed that the bible had held Andys rock hammer. The book of Exodus lends itself to Andys own freeing of himself and the truth as Moses freed himself and the slaves. Minor items within a movie can have extra symbolic meanings. For example chess and rocks serve as a symbol of Andys meticulous and refined nature. This meaning is evident in the quote from Red, Old Andy loved geology. I imagine it appealed to his meticulous nature (Glotzer). Chess and his rock collecting gave Andy a sense of how his life used to be. This also happened through music. This chance at freedom is the reason Andy decided to play Mozarts Duettino: SullAria over the loudspeakers. It was as if a beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest moments everyman at Shawshank felt free (Glotzer). Music symbolizes freedom and hope for Andy. He gives a harmonica to Red as a parole rejection present to show that Red needs to keep the hope alive, and music can do that. Andys posters symbolize the hiding of the truth. On the surface the posters appear to be just pretty girls that no one would question. However, they cover a tunnel that Andy digs that allows him to escape. Another symbol that could go by easily unnoticed is the picture of the R. M. S. Queen Mary on the lid of the tin box. The RMS Queen Mary was launched on September 26, 1934 to symbolize the end of the worldwide depression. The ship has lasted through a world war and set the standard for liners. This ship in many ways is like Andy. His escape from Shawshank symbolizes the end to the long and unjust battle that he was forced to fight. He is also the beacon that Red looks to for an example of how to truly live. Another important symbol to the movie is the Mexican town of Zihautenejo. Zihautenejo is an old fisherman town on the coast of the Pacific Ocean. It is known for its beautiful beaches and peace (Zihautenejo 1). The town symbolizes the life that Andy not only dreams of having but deserves. There he will be able to live a quiet life full of simple pleasures that were kept from him. There he can be completely free. The movie The Shawshank Redemption uses many different techniques to convey a deeper meaning than the surface story. Upon closer analysis the viewer can see that tiny items such as colors, names, symbols, references, and others, can greatly contribute to full effect of the story. Through these techniques, the viewer is able to see the true character of Andy Dufresne and the entire situation that he goes through. Form this the viewer receives a greater appreciation for the hardship that occurs throughout the movie. A deeper meaning is understood and therefore more can be taken from it.