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Resilient Eckstein talks about life since his Series MVP
There's nothing about David Eckstein that would make you look twice at him. His appearance could best be summed up by Charles S. Dutton's memorable line in Rudy. "You're 5-foot nothin', 100 and nothin', and you have barely a speck of athletic ability." While Eckstein certainly can relate to the first two, the third description couldn't be further from the truth. It's been Eckstein's athletic ability that has made the 5-foot-7, 165-pound shortstop a two-time All-Star, two-time World Series champion and the current World Series MVP. Yet as he rolls up to the campus of USC to speak at the ROTC Commissioning Ceremony, he has to introduce himself to the parking attendant who has no idea who he is and asks him to repeat his name twice. It's nothing new for Eckstein, who has had to re-introduce himself to people over and over again throughout his career.
Joining This Club Is Thing Of The Past
TAMPA - Sandra Shackelford likes to dig for information. A prodigious find that took nearly two years to unearth gave her the proof she needed to join a Tampa group for women related to America's early settlers. Her great-grandfather nine times removed landed her a spot in the Edmund Sheffield Chapter, Colonial Dames XVII Century, founded in 1960. Shackelford is the group's 23rd president. A homemaker and grandmother of eight who lives on Davis Islands, Shackelford was interested in the Dames because many friends belonged. But the amateur genealogist wasn't sure she had ancestors back far enough to become a member. Through records at John F. Germany Public Library and with the help of a land records specialist, she discovered her ancestor was a Virginia landowner.
Scholarship plan wins House approval
LANSING --All college-bound Michigan students--and their financially hard-pressed parents--will have a shot at $4,000 state scholarships under legislation that won all-but-final approval on Thursday. The program is the brainchild of Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who first proposed it in her State of the State address in January. She argued that it's an excellent way to encourage more Michigan students to earn university degrees or complete some form of advanced training. While passing the bill on a 90-12 vote, the House changed its name to Michigan's Promise Grant, a takeoff on the anonymously-funded Kalamazoo Promise program that will help pay for college for graduates of the Kalamazoo Public Schools. "This is the first step to opening up higher education funding to every pupil in the state," said House Speaker Craig DeRoche, R-Novi.
Special-needs scholarship idea terrific
The most important education reform bill proposed here in decades, one that would give scholarships to special-needs children, has been introduced by state Sen. Eric Johnson of Savannah, the Senate's President Pro Tem — a position second in power to the lieutenant governor. Watch for the defenders of the status quo, the more-money it's-not-our-fault crowd that resists anything that doesn't boil down to more revenues and less accountability, to rise up in an effort to smite down this reform-minded heretic and his mold-shattering legislation. Truth is, in the world of education reform, Johnson's Georgia Special Needs Scholarship Act is not revolutionary. It is, in fact, downright mainstream. Florida does it, and has for six years. The number of students with disabilities whose parents opt for the scholarship that allows them to buy education services from any private school has grown from 970 to 17,300.
A Warhol show explores Germany's Master Race philosophy.
"Our starting point is not the individual, and we do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, or clothe the naked. ... Our objectives are entirely different: We must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world." -- Josef Goebbels at a Nazi Party rally in 1938 Even before Adolf Hitler and his Nazis launched their genocidal campaign across Europe, doctors became white-coated killers and nurses served as accomplices in the murder of about 200,000 German children and adults, all in the name of creating a superior strain of humanity. How could members of the healing professions do so much harm to so many people? "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race," an exhibition from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, shows how Nazi politicians and doctors embraced a science called eugenics that held out the biological promise of improving the human race by encouraging people with desirable genetic traits to reproduce repeatedly.
Machines can't save our world / Kim family's story shows limitations of new technology
On Dec. 6, some Internet news sites recorded a million page views for updates within two hours of the discovery of the body of 35 year-old James Kim in an icy creek in western Oregon -- two days after rescuers reached his wife, Kati, and their daughters beside the station wagon that got stuck in snow. Certainly there is keen suspense in all such searches and special empathy for young and attractive families at risk. But there was also a compelling question lurking behind our fascination by the Kims' plight. Just how good are our dazzling new tools at protecting or saving Us from It, the wilderness -- a word whose connotation of pristine nature is instantly superseded by images of desolation when anyone is endangered there? I am sure I was not the only person poring over reviews of this Christmas' gadget gift possibilities in the same newspapers in which I read that James Kim was an influential San Francisco technology editor who specialized in small gadgets -- and about the breathtaking array of large-scale gadgets deployed to look for him.
Nigeria: Adeleke Bags NB Scholarship
Timilehin Adeleke, a JSS2 pupil of Olivebranch College, Ibadan, is today a toast, not only among his peers in Oyo State, but generally in the gathering of who's who in the education policy formulation in the state. Having emerged the overall winner of a nationwide educational contest organized in October this year by Nigerian Breweries Plc, and in the process bagged the Breweries full Scholarship, life has ceased to be the same again for this 11-year-old lad. .
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