Jose Canseco's Juiced is even more relevant today than it was when it was published in 2005. Of course, its authorship is somewhat problematic. It is written by a self-admitted user, but even if a reader only believes part of Canseco's memoir it confirms the findings of the more recent Mitchell report that the use of steroids and human growth hormone was not simply accepted in baseball, but encouraged by the league's owners. Steroid use has come to seem like the 'right' thing to do, to baseball players like Canseco, because the coaches pressure them to become users and baseball fans clamor to see their favorite players bigger, faster, and stronger to justify the stratospheric salaries in the game. Former MVP and World Series star Canseco credits drugs with enabling him to put on enough muscle to play competitive baseball-to play against people who were using the same drugs. Canseco's most controversial claims are that Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro and Sammy Sosa were fellow users and would never have had the careers they had, without the use of

Mark Harris' 1956 novel Bang the Drum Slowly is a novel about the redemptive power of baseball, much like the movie "Field of Dreams" or "The Natural." The novel depicts a year in the career of the New York Mammoths, a now-nonexistent baseball team, and the relationship between the star southpaw pitcher, Henry Wiggen, and the lackluster catcher Bruce Pearson. Wiggen and Pearson have never got along particularly well, because Wiggen is irritated by Pearson's slow wit and even slower ball play. However, when the catcher learns he is dying, the formerly caustic pitcher finds unexpected reserves of compassion within his soul. Despite his usually cool and distant manner, Wiggen unexpectedly demands that Pearson be kept on the team and has it written into the pitcher's own contract, when he hears the catcher is in danger of being cut. The confidence his action gives Pearson invests new life in both Wiggen's

1. Othello is a very sympathetic character. He is tricked into thinking that his wife is having an affair with another man. Several other characters in the play, especially Iago, have such a grudge against Othello that they simply hate him and want to ruin his life. They don't care who gets hurt in the process and are motivated by nothing but sheer selfishness. Iago is also highly duplicitous, and Othello actually trusted him. The audience has to feel sorry for Othello because he is severely persecuted, tricked, and deceived. He seems like a decen

According to Aristotle pleasure is a good aspect of human existence. He qualifies that those who state that all pleasurable things or events are good are in err, just as those who say that all pleasure is bad. Pleasure for Aristotle is an aspect of human existence that guides action and can guide virtuous living. In Ethics Aristotle states that, "pleasure seems, more than anything else, to have an intimate connection with our nature" (Aristotle 318) Aristotle contends that pleasure seeking is natural human behavior and that some pleasures are greater than others, and oft compete with one another for attention. To Aristotle the moderate stand is the best, in that pleasure and pleasure seeking is natural and that any pleasure can be either good or bad, depending upon the context and the person, but that generally pleasure can only be defined as such when it meets the qualification of achieving good acts in a natural state. When Aristotle expresses the idea that the absolutes of expres

Stress is a known precursor of periodontal disease (Boyapati & Wang 2000; Wimmer, Janda, Wieselmann-Penker, Jaske, Polansky & Pertl 2002; Davis & Jenkins 1962). Whether due to the effects of stress on intermediary factors like hormonal changes that, in turn, affect oral health or to the direct effects of stress on disorders of the mouth and gums, psychology plays a considerable role in the prevention and treatment of disease. As early as the 1960s, research showed that interim factors like hormonal imbalance, diabetes, nutritional deficiencies, and blood dyscrasias all play a role in periodontal disease and that stress is a precursor to each of these factors too (Davis & Jenkins 1962). Stress causes the release of adrenaline, increased heart rate, increased respiration, and other physiological signals. Boyapati & Wang (2000) point out that especially when stress is sustained over long periods of time it can lead to disease and periodontal disease in particular. Wimmer et al (2002) desc

A cerebral vascular accident (CVA), or commonly known as a stroke, impact approximately 500,000 individuals in the United States each year. According to the Encyclopedia of Aging (Scherer, 1982), a stroke occurs with a neurologic deficit from a disruption of vascular function. This may be the result of a partial or total blockage of blood vessels to the brain by a hemorrhage or blood clot. In the U.S., 50 percent of those suffering their first stroke are 70 or older; most are males. The most at risk for a stroke are those individuals with transient or mild neurologic events, a cardiac disease that predisposes them to embolism, and asymptomatic with a carotid bruit that indicates a blockage. Those who have experienced transient ischemic attacks, or indications of cerebrovascular disease, also have a high risk for stroke. Strokes caused by an embolism occur suddenly. There usually is not a loss in consciousness, but an alteration in the state of consciousness. Some neurologic sympt

James E. Vance is considered to be one of the most important geographers of the 20th century in the United States. His wide interest in the ways in which the urban construction developed in time and space has given him a reputation of a subtle analyst of the geographic space with a historical approach. His main areas of interest included the evolution and structure of the urban systems, including transportation, the trade inside the cities, as well as the social process that in the end shape the evolution of the urban dwellings. It can be said that throughout his academic activity he tried to focus and discuss the process of evolution and transformation of city forms having in mind the elements that compose an urban environment. One of the most important works of Vance's academic thought deals with a thorough analysis of the Californian landscape. "California and the search for the ideal" tries to discuss the issue of the development of the Californian environment from

This section of the book Lolita depicts the nuptials between Humbert and Charlotte, and it allows the reader to get inside Humbert's head to discover – as if readers didn't already know – the real strategy behind this wedding. He is cunning, and ruthless in his ruse. But it's fascinating. At the outset it is worth reviewing briefly the style of Nabokov's work, because it creates a wonderland of mental images for the alert reader (and even for the reader who is perusing through or skimming through). Indeed, Humbert explains his actions with such narrative attention that the reader is taken on a journey of images that transcend mere male-female interaction and male longing for female attention. There is plenty of that. Enough of that in fact to make an adult male reader (who had at one time a crush on a girl far too young to be legal) become sensually aroused. Of course Humbert also mocks himself and has fun with his own alliteration and ironies, and th

Terrorism is one of the great threats to the Western world during the 21st century, with the most devastating event of its kind probably occurring during Sept. 11, 2001. Since this time, the United States government and its affiliated agencies have been very busy creating policies and laws that would discourage terrorists from ever perpetrating such a wholesale destructive crime again. Many citizens however have felt that some of these methods are misguided at least and unconstitutional at most. The government on the other had has been consistent in its assertion that no measure is too great or too controversial for the sake of the safety of the United States and the way of life advocated by the Constitution. However, not only general citizens, but also professionals and academics have held that the Government is focusing its efforts in an ineffective direction. Instead, according to these persons and entities, it is important to study the manifestation and grounds upon which ter

1. When discussing the concept of religious forgiveness, it is necessary to look at the two dimensions the concept has in every religion, i.e. human and divine. In the Catholic tradition, the forgiveness of God is received through repentance in conjunction with the Body of Christ. Sins are confessed individually in the presence of a priest, and absolution is obtained as a formal expression by the Church of the forgiveness of God. Through the sacrament of Baptism the sin inherited from Adam i¿½ also referred to as i¿½the original sini¿½ i¿½ is absolved. As far as the sins committed after baptism, a different sacrament is needed. This consists of three phases, namely penance, confession and reconciliation. In the case of Christian forgiveness, it is important to look at a particular aspect i.e. the holy power invested in the priests, more precisely its religious justification. According to the Christian tradition (John and Luke), it was in his human capacity that Christ forgave

Born in Houston in 1938, Kenny Rogers epitomizes American and especially American Country music. His family was poor, and Kenny was born at the tail-end of the Great Depression too. Kenny Rogers symbolizes the American Dream, being the first in his family to graduate from high school. Without any formal or scholastic musical training, Rogers went on to become one of the biggest country music stars in America and is arguably one of the most renowned American musicians of any genre. Yet country music has a special place in the gamut of American music, representing the heartland of the country. Like Kenny Rogers himself, country music speaks to the core of hard-working people that form the backbone of the nation. Even though Rogers' music and that of his contemporaries appeals mainly to working-class white Americans, Rogers has managed to transcend barriers of race and class by appealing to universal human emotions and experiences. For instance, love songs comprise a large proportion of

Although they are physically united in an erotic partnership, Tomas and Tereza possess very different attitudes about love and relationships. Their differing perspectives are summed up in the subtitle of Section 2 of Kundera's novel, "Body and Soul." Tereza wants to possess Tomas, body and soul, and Tomas wishes to yield neither completely to Tereza. In the second section, Tereza is first characterized in terms of her hunger; her rumbling stomach represents her insatiable physical craving for Tomas. "When we ignore the body we are more easily victimized by it" (39). Tereza has long been ignored by people in her life, by her parents, by friends. Tomas, in contrast, has a strong sense of identity in his artistic gifts, and views his past romantic difficulties with cool, almost clinical detachment. His memory of his failed marriage leaves little impact upon his current existence; he seems to regard it

'The Comeback Kid.' How many times have we heard this phrase, in modern politics and also in the world of sports? It is said that Americans love winners, but even more than winners, Americans adore people who have suffered adversity, lost, and then win again. This is exemplified in the narratives of The Natural by Bernard Malamud and Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella. However, while Malamud's novel is a complicated celebration of American individualism and cut-throat competition, as exemplified in the American mythology surrounding baseball, Kinsella takes the same themes of excellence and corruption in sports and uses them to celebrate the teamwork of baseball. At the beginning of The Natural, Roy Hobbs, the washed-up protagonist of Malamud's novel, is a squeaky-clean white bread boy from the Midwest who became involved in a scandal involving a woman after he was recruited by the major leagues. He is shot by a woman in a hotel room, and then, driven away by the bad

The purpose of this paper is to introduce, discuss, and analyze the film The Sound of Music. Specifically it will discuss the music and theme of the film. The Sound of Music is one of the most classic Hollywood musicals, and is still a family favorite today, even though it was first released in 1965 to movie theaters. It is a heartwarming story that tells the story of the rise of Nazi power in Austria in the 1930s, and how one family coped with the historic and frightening events swirling around them. The film tells the story of the Van Trapp family, an Austrian family made up of Captain Georg Ritter von Trapp, his seven children, and their governess. Essentially, the story is true, it is taken from real occurrences, and the Von Trapp family was real. Maria, the governess was real, too. Her name was Maria Augusta von Kutschera, and she did belong to the Nonnberg Abby in Salzburg. However, the Abby sent her to the von Trapp's to help Captain von Trapp nurse his eldest daughter

The relationship between Tomas and Tereza is torn into emotional chaos so many times that a reader can easily begin to wonder if they really like one another or if they are just kind of riding it out together. After all the story is set in the middle of a political crisis, with the massive Soviet show of force making everyone nervous and fearful. It might cross the mind of a reader that this couple has carved out a survival kind of relationship, like a man and a woman who were both lost in a deep woods, found each other, and now need each other to stay alive with all the dangerous animals around. And the history of the Cold War period is one of tremendous tensions for people in Europe, who haven't really recovered from World War II yet, and all its bloodshed and fright. This couple was set in this novel by Milan Kundera, the reader understands, partly because of his own desire to show the world what it was like when those tanks rumbled into Prague, taking away any hope of a true

Love is, not surprisingly, one of the most frequent themes in all literary creations and especially in poetry. As such, throughout the centuries, love has been represented in many different ways in poetry, according to the specific aspect that the poets were trying to communicate. The two chosen poems, Variation on the Word Sleep by Margaret Atwood and Alive or Not by Al Purdy appear to be dissimilar at a first glance. Upon a profounder examination though, the poems reveal a few common elements. While love is certainly the theme of both poems, it somehow seems to elude the reader at first. This is because the poems are somehow atypical: they seem to avoid the intensity of the actual feeling of love and focus on the representation of two dream sequences instead. Atwood's poem translates the author's wish to plunge into the dream of her lover, while Purdy's text relates a bizarre dream in which he is trying to save his wife from an accident. Both poems offer thus differe

Introduction When people make the statement that racism arises out of ignorance, their statement is not too far from the truth; but it is not the complete truth, and if any part of a statement is false, it renders the entire statement false. Therefore, the blanket statement of racism as ignorance is not sufficient to understand the source of racism. The ignorance that most of us associate with racism is the ignorance that remains in people when their formal education ends abruptly or is insufficient in nature as to counter the fallacies of their living environments. In those instances, as is often found to be the case amongst radical hate groups such as the white supremacy Arian Nation; racism is inherited through the generations, and is often times consistent with the lack of formal education and lack of exposure to other cultures, or even other members of society who are not people of color, but are more cultured and educated. However, deep resentment and hate of a particular rac

Maureen Dowd discusses the 2008 race for the Democratic nominee in terms of race and gender. For the first time in the history of the United States, the Democratic Party--any party for that matter--is choosing between a woman and an African-American on the ballot. The contest can reveal a lot about America's national character, notes Dowd. One of the lessons learned from the race might be how ingrained both sexism and racism are in the national consciousness, and which of the two beasts will be easier to overcome. American voters seem to be torn along the thorny issues of race and gender in the current Democratic race for the 2008 nominee. Yet Dowd claims in an opinion piece for The New York Times entitled "A Flawed Feminist Test" that the Democratic nominee will be chosen more for character and integrity than on either race or gender. Dowd claims that Hillary Clinton faces a tough battle between appearing stereotypically feminine and surviving in what can only be rightful

First of all, it should be mentioned that this novel is both a political and a philosophical novel, and the characters and the setting relates to what life was like in a post-WWII Soviet satellite nation. It was the Cold War period; and Prague, where the novel is set, had somehow avoided the terrible destruction that many European cities had to endure. And while the European cities that had been bombed or were otherwise plundered by the Nazis, were using this post-war period to rebuild – in a renaissance-like atmosphere of regeneration and hope – it seems that Prague was falling into a period of stagnation. Meanwhile during the novel the Soviets invade Czechoslovakia in a brutal show of force to put down any thoughts that the citizens may have of becoming a democracy like the west. So politics plays a big part in the novel, and clearly author Milan Kundera is expressing through his literary prowess his own experiences and philosophies with regard to the Soviet Union. Kunde

Both Lewis Carroll's 1871 classic Through the Looking Glass and Phillip Pullman's 1995 work The Golden Compass incorporate the happenings of two very different worlds which exist simultaneously with the same characters directing the action in both. Both Alice in Carroll's work, and Lyra in The Golden Compass exist as young girls in their unique versions of reality, but also enter in to a surreal dreamlike world while simultaneously existing in real life. This parallel existence can be related to a theory in psychology first introduced by psychologist Carl Jung. In his 1952 work Synchronicity - An Acausal Connecting Principle, Jung proposed the idea that parallel phenomena was at the root of all coincidences. By looking at both Carroll and Pullman's work under the theoretical framework of Carl Jung, the duplicity of worlds, both r

Seeking Unity, Obama Feels Pull of Racial Divide By Ginger Thompson (NYT – 2/12/08) Senator Barack Obama first began seriously considering running for presidency about two years ago. At that time, he and his group of political advisors devoted only a few minutes to the issue of race, which the senator considered relatively unimportant in affecting his chances for success. Now, after several victories over his fellow Democrat and rival for the Democratic nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the initial lack of concern with race seems to have been justified. In radio interviews, Obama himself referred to his primary victories in Nebraska, Utah, and Idaho, which states do not have large contingents of African American voters. In the same interview, the senator also pointed to h

Successful and highly praised novels always stand out because the literature has great characters, fascinating and sometime bitter ironies, clashes, conflicts, and noteworthy objectives that rise far above the actual plot structure and embrace much bigger worldly themes. Symbolism is always part of good literature, and the alert reader should be mindful that nearly every important situation presented in the novel could be placed on a bigger stage in terms that make the book more universal. In other words, in both of the novels reviewed in this paper, The River Between and Nectar in a Sieve, the characters are doing things that have application to people and cultures everywhere else on the planet. And in both novels, the struggle between and within cultures is not only against other cultures but also against the changing times and the modernization (globalization) of the planet. What a reader finds immediately profound and dramatic about The River Between is the symbolism of the two mo

Introduction: The original version of the Privacy Act of 1974 (S. 3418 Public Law 93-579) according to the Department of Justice (www.usdoj.gov/oip/1974intro.htm) was actually singed into law on September 27, 1975. It was called an "omnibus" (meaning that it packaged together several pieces of legislation in one bill) code of "fair information practices" and it set out to "regulate the collection, maintenance, use, and dissemination..." of information through and from the federal executive branches that is personal and should be restricted from general circulation. (This directive of course soon related to educational institutions in addition to federal agencies, and that information will be reviewed later in this paper.) The Department of Justice (DOJ) account of why the bill was necessary explains that the bill was passed "...in great haste" toward the conclusion of the Ninety-third Congress. Elected officials who streamlined the process for t

The world we live in can be considered as being a complex system of values and traditions, of customs, and national identities. The differences that lie at the basis of each of the world's civilizations and cultures is what gives our society its sense of individuality but at the same time can be the reason of unpardonable mistakes which can offend the other's sense of nationality and of traditional values. From this perspective, it is important to always be aware of the cultural differences and at the same time, of the similarities that parts and keeps us together. We tend to have different perceptions of ideas, of notions and concepts, of beliefs, even of colors and rituals. It is precisely such rifts that give our world the sense of diversity and makes cultural interaction an exciting and at the same time risky affair. Despite the possible difficulties we may come across when we come in contact with a different culture, the experience can prove to be worthy of the struggle

How does baseball, and especially its literature, propagate and foster American cultural myths? "If you build it, they will come." "Say it ain't so, Joe." These familiar phrases, from the films "Field of Dreams" and "Eight Men Out," respectively, exemplify the mythical centrality of baseball in American culture. Books and the film version of The Natural suggest that every individual can succeed, provided he takes a risk and dares to realize his dreams. This is also the theme of "Field of Dreams," which shows how a man who has a vision about a baseball field accomplishes the miraculous. Even the seedy side of baseball shown in "Eight Men Out" suggests th