Long lines, crowded planes. Fasten your seat belts, the summer travel season has begun. To help keep the skies as friendly as possible, we asked travel writers Sandra Gustafson and Pat O'Connor to offer some ethics advice for would-be passengers. We provided the scenarios; they offered the tips on proper conduct.
She appears on the screen. The hormones take over, and you can't avert your gaze. You stare. Something you see feeds a hunger inside, and you devour this vision, even as you know you are making a fool of yourself. For hours, even days after, you can't shake the feeling. Then, some photographer catches her in real life, without the perfect lighting, without the make up and carefully set tresses, etc. Okay, she's still cute, but hardly the vision of loveliness you thought you first saw. You feel cheated, made a fool of, and you wonder how she managed to capture your attention in the first place.
For professional writers (and those who aspire to be), their language of publication is their best tool. I'm not a Luddite when it comes the development of language. The point is, English is my very favorite ministry tool, and I am passionate about keeping it in usable shape. For example, we can accept the use of "twofer" as a rarely used colloquial term. Such playful terms do have a place along side the usual "Net-speak."
In a recently published piece, Linda Taylor addresses a favorite hate of mine, group learning. First, let's establish that a great many things we learn can and should be done in a peer group setting. That is generally limited to non-intellectual learning, such as sports, vocational training, etc. It is the worst possible setting for individual advancement intellectually.
There are a number of areas where, if someone heard me speak about this or that topic out of context, they might think me to be a Luddite rather than the gadget-loving fellow that I am. One of those areas is the PowerPoint presentation, an infernal invention by my estimation – a view I will explain, if you will just follow my presentation points.
When I was younger, it was the Dungeons and Dragons crowd which ran some small risk of becoming entangled in the fantasy worlds they created, to the point they could lose their grip on reality. At the peak of its popularity, I was in the military in Europe. My wife was a serious hobby seamstress at the time, and a neighbor in the military housing area begged her to make him a complicated full wizard costume to add some reality to his gaming. She declined because he came across entirely too brain-fried. Testimony from others who knew this fellow indicated he had some difficulty keeping his obsession under control, to the point it affected the performance of his military duties. He was over 30, so it was no mere youthful diversion, and his wife complained often of his neglect of family, too.