Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
Is it a redundancy to place “our” before the “collective”? Or, inasmuch as “our” can mean 2 or more individuals together, whereas “collective” might imply a more expansive spectrum of diffuse aggregation, that the second word “adds” something to the first? Do we even have such a thing, and what can it mean in this day and age […]
Change is an inevitability in life. Most people, if confronted with it, freely admit that they do not “like” changes. Being static; doing things routinely; living by force of habit; having a “routine” — these provide a sense of comfort. Change, of course, can be a good thing — whether of forced alteration for the good of an individual or circumstance, or voluntarily because a necessary modification was identified, […]
There are “highway robberies”, “train robberies” (distinguishable from THE great train robbery, which has become a historical feature of mythical proportions) and “bank robberies” (is there a single one that overshadows all others, or are they better identified by the characters who perpetrated them, like “Bonnie and Clyde”, Ma Barker, John Dillinger or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, etc.?); […]
What is it about terms that possess those subtle distinctions that evoke emotions that can be differentiated between “objective” and “subjective”, or distant versus close, impersonal as opposed to affectionate? Advertisers, of course, play upon such words, and pollsters apply research results as to the emotional input received by throwing in certain words, terms, concepts and voice inflections as opposed to others. […]
It is a necessary doorway (or so we are told) in order to attain sound psychological health; that, within the raging furnace of subsumed consciousness, of passions suppressed and grievances left unstated but yet seething beneath the subterranean caverns of unspecified aggregations of cumulative powder kegs confined by bloated egos, there remains a need for the fissure to emit the toxicities of life. Or not. The content of such emissions, of course, can never be challenged; it is only the context which should be questioned, in this age where subjectivity rules, the personal pronoun delegates, […]
The funniest line in literature comes from Carl Sandburg’s “Potato Face Blind Man” stories, where he describes the reason for the wooden mug: “There is a hole in the bottom of it. The hole is as big as the bottom. The nickel goes in and comes out again. It is for the very poor people who wish to give me a nickel and yet get the nickel back.” Satire has often been overly-discussed, and attempting to explain why a particular scene, line or story is amusing, is somewhat like trying to explain to a Martian why Bradbury’s chronicles fascinated […]
The origin denotes an unsavory history of imperialistic exploitation and deserved degeneration of culturally unseen and unforetold consequences; of an encounter between foreign soils bridged by greed, necessity and inevitable destinies, but where the conqueror reaped more than what it sought. In the opium dens which followed and the devastation of addictions ensuing, the phantoms derived from the processing of a plant which otherwise concealed the deadliness of its essence, beautiful in its floral toxicity amidst the sweet aroma that diffusely pervaded an unsuspecting population — dreams, indeed, of unreachable heights and great expectations otherwise squandered. […]