Category: Information & Education

Though my last name is pronounced the same with a similar spelling, I have no familial relation to the infamous midnight rider Paul Revere. Shame really, for I’d love to have capitalized on that. Paul Revere's been in the news of late as Alaska’s former governor, Sarah Palin, was recently quoted as saying that his April 1775 ride was actually to “warn the British.” Silly girl, everyone knows he was warning the patriots that “The British are coming!” Of course Democrats and journalists have been having a field day with this blunder, but I offer you the following information. A 2000 study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that the majority of seniors at the nation’s very best colleges could not identify words from the Gettysburg Address…

The cover story on a New Jersey daily newspaper highlighted the growing number of tent cities popping up all over the state. For those of you who don’t know, they’re a grouping of families and individuals who cannot afford adequate housing – gathered in open fields and wooded areas calling the inside of a tent home. Some of the insensitive bores I work with read the article and their immediate response was, “They’re lucky, they don’t have to pay taxes.” Lucky? Are you kidding me? How do you figure that spending your days living in tent cities with no clean running water or heat lucky? “Insensitive bores” might actually be too tame for them. A new term has been coined for the increasing number of homeless Americans across this country…

Though politics can be a dangerous subject to talk about in mixed company, you’ll never hear me deny that I just don’t like the governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie. In short, he’s pompous, arrogant and uses the same bullying practices found on playgrounds across the country to scare people into doing what he wants. That’s not true leadership no matter how you try and spin it. He continues to tell residents how we should share in the sacrifices this state needs to make in order to become more fiscally responsible, and truthfully, many residents are already struggling just to get by. Perhaps you could understand his continued plea for New Jersey residents to tighten their own belts and bare some of the burden if he were doing the same,…

Many would characterize Thomas Alva Edison as an ingenious inventor – holding 1,093 U.S. patents for such creations as the phonograph and most notably the electric light bulb. The life of an inventor is riddled with disappointments - sometimes requiring dozens, even hundreds of failed attempts before finally attaining success. But Edison refused to let failure define his life’s work. So instead he lived under the simple belief that anything was achievable with a little persistence and a lot of elbow grease. He once joked, “I never failed once. It just happened to be a 2,000-step process”. Obviously Edison was a card carrying member of the “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” club. But his life’s practices and optomisitc attitude are far from easy to apply in…