Category Archives: What to Read

The Golden Oldies in Baton Rouge Louisiana

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The trip to Baton Rouge,Louisiana was actually a good ride, my dad and I took Grey hound from Elizabeth City, NC to Baton Rouge,Louisiana. The bus ride was a great. It could have gone straight through to Baton Rouge, even though it was a round-trip ticket, and it was a round-trip to get there it took us two days to reach Baton Rouge. I got leg cramps from sleeping on the bus in an upright position for two hours. The bus driver did give us breaks to stretch. They should have reclining seats for the passengers and provide a pillow and a blanket too.

Lucky the Greyhound bus has outlets, so I plugged in my iPod and charge my cell phone. I was listening to my music and playing Angry Bird to pass the time.

The bus ride took us to Norfolk and Richmond Va, which is up north. It should have gone south that’s where Baton Rouge is located, but it looks like it was the procedure to change buses and pick up annoying people on the bus.

The laptop would be great idea on the bus, but where would you put it? On your lap? The heat of the laptop from the bottom will burn or heat up something on your lap. The buses should have trays for the computers.

To have a safe trip, when the bus driver collects your ticket tell the bus driver to drive safe to your next destination. The bus driver will drive carefully and come home in one piece.

It was a good ride. We passed through many counties of North Carolina. We were in one county and out within 30 to 45 minutes. Not much to see when the bus zips to one county to another. Counties such as Charlotte,NC that’s where they filmed “The Hunger Games,” pretty soon they will film the next one here too. I rather take the train down to Charlotte. It would be quicker.

Sometime when we have breaks in between, the best way to avoid cramps on the bus is to stretch your legs, not in the bus, outside. Don’t go outside to shop for souvenirs, you will be late for the bus. Stay in the station. The station would have a souvenir shop. If you missed the bus, then you will catch a later bus and no one wants to be late in their destination.

Your luggage should have your name on it and bright color duck tapes on the handles. It is easier to identify your luggage, in case it gets lost. We don’t want strangers to wear our underwear. I lost my Spiderman underwear.

The cemetery in New Orleans

It’s creepy to see the sun rise in New Orleans over the great mass of cemeteries, lucky no ghost rode on the bus only weird people the Grey hound picked up the along to their destination.

We found the Holiday Inn express. Did you know that there’s an adult store nearby, which was odd? So I went there and got what I needed. I got a male vibrator for me. My dad is old he doesn’t need one. I did it in the bathroom when he was asleep. It was good.

My dad and I attended the Golden Oldies and the class of 1962 and beyond alumni from LSU. He was the class of 1959 not much people from the class of 1959 only a few people but many people came from 1962,  1950s, 1940s, 1930 and 1920s. There was one person who was close to hundred, 98 and this person still look good. It must have been the vibrator. She purchased next door at the adult store.

As you may know LSU is a big and beautiful campus. Very architectural design for this region ofLouisiana, the Fraternities and sorority’s houses were in the style of big houses of the plantation. More like the south and it resembles of the houses in the movie “Gone With The Wind.”

They have dormitories too, in one  particular case called Pleasant Hall even though it’s been renovated for office’s spaces now, its’ haunted by a boy and girl from the 1960s. The girl shot her boyfriend and then later. On the third floor, she killed herself. She shot herself because she was jealous that her boyfriend found another girl. Doors would be slamming when no one was there. Apparitions would appear in the corridors in the building. It’s haunted for real. I was there for the campus tour, and I felt something. I felt cold in the building the rest of my group did not feel anything.

During the graduating ceremonies, the Golden Oldies alumni got recognized  and so did one of the oldest living graduates, she was close to 98 years and still living. She had a walker and vibrator to make her look young.

When we were coming home, people sill cannot behave on the bus. There was family with two small kids, and she had a lot of luggage to put on the bus.  When the bus driver looked at the luggage and saw the huge amount of luggage’s and the bus was almost packed with patrons on board. The bus driver could not pack the family luggage, so the bus diver put in storage for the next day. The parent was pissed that their luggage would not fit underneath the bus. She cursed at the driver, and the driver does not like the language she was using, so the bus driver kicked the family out of the bus for they could stay for the next available bus to come. Yes, more seats available, well there was one seat available. My dad took that seat, for me no seats were available. I could sit on his lap, but I am in my forty years old, I might break his legs. So the bus driver lends me her car seat pillow and sat near the entrance of the bus. Best seats in the bus! Well, my balls were hurting with the vibration of the bus, and I did not have to use the vibrator it was in the bag in the overhead compartment. It was a 45-minute drive to the next destination, once the people got off  I went to the bathroom and pee and sat next to my dad and was relived.

The Bully Project and Smart Project

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Everyone get’s bullied at school even I was bullied too, and what do bullies learned, either; they might be a better leader  or work as a car mechanic,  I think not, but they would have trouble in a relationship and marriage. Look at the high risk of divorce rates these days.

Bullies will never learn, they will stay like bullies until they get arrested, and then they found out the hard way: “Why was I arrested?” He was bullying the other person for no apparently reason. Even though this bully was a teenager, he has no cognitive of thinking of what’s right and wrong – just poking and abusing, and possible killing his victim. 20 years later this bully would apologize to the victim’s parents, isn’t it too late.  Why let the bully out of prison or rehab? Have they seen movies on Lifetime Network, we let the bullies out, and they go back and get revenge, sounds like a movie of the week?  Where’s the justice?

Over l3 million American kids will be bullied this year, making it the most common form of violence experienced by young people in the nation. The new documentary film BULLY, directed by Sundance and Emmy-award winning filmmaker Lee Hirsch, brings human scale to this startling statistic, offering an intimate, unflinching look at how bullying has touched five kids and their families.

BULLY is a beautifully cinematic, character-driven documentary. At its heart are those with huge stakes in this issue whose stories each represent a different facet ofAmerica’s bullying crisis. Filmed over the course of the 2009/2010 school year, BULLY opens a window onto the pained and often endangered lives of bullied kids, revealing a problem that transcends geographic, racial, ethnic and economic borders. It documents the responses of teachers and administrators to aggressive behaviors that defy “kids will be kids” clichés, and it captures a growing movement among parents and youths to change how bullying is handled in schools, in communities and in society as a whole.

The movie follows five people, Alex, 12; Kelby 16; Ja’Meya, 14; David and Tina Long and Kirk and Laura Smalley. There stories are powerful, raw and true. The language may not be suitable to teenagers but they hear it at school anyway. Where else could they learn?

I think teachers should be more responsible for their students in class, like parents are more responsible for their child.

Giving the movie no rating, is a good thing, students, parents, teachers and administration of the education board should see what the parents goes through to protect their child. It’s a nightmare for the parents. The administrations are happy because they get a good salary and they don’t care about the students. The only thing they care is how to raise reading and math scores? The teachers are trying to educate their students, but evidently fights break out during the school year and that cause distraction and suspension of  good students and bad students. Are these students learning anything? Especially, repeat students who go to detention every day. Do they learn anything or do they get it, why there are in detention? It’s a vacation for the students. Doesn’t make any sense.

Why the students are complaining to the teachers of too much homework?  How can students learn if they don’t do their homework? Writing stupid answers on the test paper does not count as a grade, it’s a creative answer, but it’s an idiot’s answer to a smart question. Does that count as being smart? They have to read their assignments and memorize important facts. If they think, they don’t need the course out there in the real world? Then how can they solve a complex word problem? We use word problems every day.

If the students can solve complex relationship problems between boyfriend and girlfriend why can’t they solve a complex math problem?  Or any complex subject.  Stay in school and learn something.  Nothing is given to the student by hand or by spoon. They have to learn to earn a grade. Use their critical thinking in a good way, by researching the materials, the library is a great source not the internet.

Oh by the way, The Bully Project opens tonight nationwide check your listings.

Depression is there a placebo?

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On Sunday, CBS’ “60 Minutes” broadcast what it called an “explosive” report on “new scientific research” that has found that antidepressants are no more effective than placebos at treating mild and moderate depression.

Explosive? Well, yes, “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl reported, that the 17 million Americans with depression are spending an estimated $11.3 billion annually on drugs that research says don’t work for most of the people using them. (Antidepressants have been found to help people with severe depression.)

But new? Hardly. Studies linking the placebo effect to antidepressants have been around for more than a decade.

In fact, the main medical expert featured in the “60 Minutes” story, psychologist Irving Kirsch, who is assistant director of the Placebo Studies Program at theHarvardMedicalSchool, published his first major paper on this topic in 1998.  That one caused a medical uproar at the time, as did a second paper Kirsch co-authored in 2002. That’s the paper he talks about in the “60 Minutes” story — the one in which he looked at unpublished as well as published studies from the pharmaceutical industry. (As Kirsch points out to Stahl, drug companies frequently decline to publish their unfavorable findings. He had to request those studies from the Food and Drug Administration.)

Since then other researchers have come to similar conclusions. Indeed, many scientists researching depression have now discarded the entire rationale behind antidepressants — the theory that depression is caused by some kind of brain chemical imbalance, especially low levels of the hormone serotonin. In the “60 Minutes” broadcast, one of these researchers, psychiatrist Dr. Walter Brown ofBrownUniversity, referred to the serotonin theory as “a gross over implication.”

It’s not as though the antidepressant/placebo story hasn’t received press coverage in the past. Newsweek ran a cover story in 2010 called “The Depressing News About Antidepressants,” shortly after a major meta-analysis (a study that looks at the best evidence from many smaller studies) found that any benefit of antidepressants over placebo pills was “minimal or nonexistent.” Time magazine ran its own major piece on the topic a few months later.

And there have been many other articles in the media as well, including a thorough venting of the subject in a 2008 Men’s Health article by Minnesota-based freelance writer Paul Scott.

Then there is the widely reviewed book that Kirsch himself wrote on the topic (“The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth”) in 2010.

All this history made me wonder why Stahl seemed so astonished during her interview with Kirsch. She seemed to be unaware of the decade-long controversy surrounding antidepressants. At one point she says to Kirsch, “But people are getting better taking antidepressants. I know them. We all know them.”

“Yes,” replies Kirsch. “People get better when they take the drug. But it’s not the chemical ingredients of the drug that is making them better. It’s largely the placebo effect.”

Still, better late than never, I guess. Having the topic featured on “60 Minutes” will certainly bring it to the attention of many, many more people. The show also does a service by talking about the two treatments for mild and moderate depression that some research has shown to be effective: exercise and talk therapy.

How to Fold a Map on your Phone

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Many people may have some navigation device either on their car or on the phone. But do people use it? Maybe if it is local, they don’t use, because we know how to get there, and we know the place very well because we lived in the same place over 40 years.

But when we go to the next state across the border, we still might get lost, and it would be nice to use either Google maps on the cell phone, and if we have Onstar put that on. It would be still embarrassed to ask someone for directions, even though that person knows the area have lived almost a century and still know the place. Or people with a foreign accent, they may be hard to understand, and we still don’t understand. Then we go to someone who can speak English, a little kid. We rather speak to an adult not to a kid.

Just use the map on the phone, strangers can help, but they are strangers whom we don’t know and that person can fall of it’s rocker at the last sentence, and we could be lost again. Just use Google maps on the phone, and you will get to you destination. Why get lost again?

Writing Papers for Classes

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How many times you have said this “Whew, I have done it” you have finished all your papers for your classes at the end of the semester in the fall at your university. If you were smart enough, you can do your papers ahead of time and turn it on time. Why turned it in early? What happens if you have an idea that pops into your head, and you already turned it in and wanted to add something originally, and the paper you turned early missed a few points? That’s not a good idea.

Well, you probably noticed I haven’t blogged enough on my blog only a few interesting blogs I have posted. I have been working on my Master degree in library science through ECU (EastCarolinaUniversity) [I hope I pass my classes] and sometimes professors online they give you many reading materials to read either online materials or books – which is a lot.

I have taken two courses online, which is the minimum. We can only take two classes online. Fall or Spring is the best time to take two courses or more. It depends on your online advisor of what you can do and lots of time management for a student in a college and university.

Summer time, I would take one course because it’s the summer time, and we need to go to the beach and have fun. And since we are taking one class remember the due date of the assignments, never turned it the assignment late – points can be taken off even if it is late. Don’t procrastinate and write a paper overnight.  Do it ahead of time and proofread it. In case an idea pops into your head it can be added.

Sometime it’s nice to break in between the courses. If you finished one of them early before the due date and the second one too before the due date, take a break. Sleep early and get a good night sleep. Then turn in the assignment on time, if you need to add something in the paper, and then do it. Do it quickly! And the next one too! You get ideas in your head. But how do we document ideas – I am having a Seinfeld moment.  Check your grammar and use the APA format and proper citation when writing any type of paper. Professors are somewhat picky of how we write papers. When writing papers we must write objective – this is no time to use humor in papers – only in blogs. Use an outline or a proposal outline when writing papers.

Did you know when writers write a book they have to submit a proposal paper to the literal agent and if the agent like it, then the author would write it? Make an outline and write the paper or book.