Farewell To Mary Travers

Folk music doesn't seem like a very powerful thing anymore. But if you listen to the stripped-down recordings of artists all the way from Jack Johnson to the White Stripes, you can still hear a desire for the organic feel of a guitar and voice all alone. Peter Paul and Mary remain among the all time top practitioners of unadorned acoustic music, but I'm not sure it's accurate to call them folk singers. They occupy a place between historical-flavored folk singers like Pete Seger and the more intellectual mid-60's artists like Dylan, Donovan and Simon and Garfunkel.
They took on a bit more pop music sheen over the years, but never lost the concept of music as a rallying cry - something that's almost totally lost today, unless it's rallying consumers to buy iphones. It's unfortunate that American life today has swung back to the same kind of conformity it had when Peter Paul and Mary arrived. It's a more sophisticated conformity, steeped in tatoos, wireless devices and other unversally accepted badges of "individuality," but in some ways I think it's actually far more rigid than the 1960's. Have you ever met a young person who doesn't agree with all his friends that the internet is cool?
Mary Travers seemed uncomfortable with her fame. She put on alot of weight in later years, which is always tough for someone who lives in the public eye. In her prime, however, she was a real rock star. Her great voice and her glowing, eccentric beauty gave PP&M's music a sexiness without trivializing it's meaning. "Leaving On A Jet Plane" remains one of the best pop vocals ever recorded. Check out some earlier examples of Mary Travers & friends live:
If I Had A Hammer
Blowing In The Wind
Nice mountain blues - Jesus Met The Woman At The Well

Melanie Oudin's Run - No Accident

Everybody keeps asking Melanie Oudin why she did so well in the U.S. Open, as if the whole thing was an accident. The reason is that this girl has a game. She's uses a low backhand slice to draw the big players like Sharapova forward, where they have to bend very low to hit. The result is usually a nice short return she can attack (the big Russian players in particular hate it when the ball doesn't rise up into their strike zone). Oudin is extremely shrewd about building points to where she can use the slice - very few players have the kind of knack she does for gradually gaining control of a point. The icing on the cake is that she can usually hit a winner if she gets the ball just a few feet inside the baseline. Usually, that is - her forehand just wasn't working against Wozniacki so she couldn't close the points out. Also, Wozniacki wasn't bothered as much by her slice as Petrova and the others.
Oudin has footspeed that rivals Venus Williams, is alot stronger than she looks, and has one of the best second serves in the women's game. If she learns to get some free points off her first serve and develops some net game she should win a major within three years. Here's the post-tournament interview with her:

Michael Jackson's memorial circus

Watching the comic spectacle of Michael Jackson's memorial event in LA, it's hard not to think of the many things he seems, in death, to symbolize:
1) Our strange, unhealthy American obsession with youth. How different is Jackson's pedophelia from a nation getting hot over a 10 year old boy singing like a man? Michael Jackson learned early in life that youth was something to be exploited in every possible way, and he followed through. Boy did he follow through.
2) The weirdness of Los Angeles. Tinseltown lives up to it's reputation by producing another big burrito with nothing real inside it. Mr. Jackson proves once more that dying can be great for your career, by turning out thousands of passionate followers who had no interest in him whatever three weeks ago. "It's nice to be thought of as a person instead of a personality" he once said. But with all the industry honchos and even his own family spewing only platitudes about him being the king of something or an icon of something else, it's clear that never happened.
3) The assinine infotainment that passes for news nowadays on CNN. I have to believe that something meaningful, perhaps even some small heroic act, took place in this world of ours last week. But all we got from television was a chance to marvel at countless photos of Michael and wonder if his nose was really real.
4) Lastly, and this is my favorite, Micheal Jackson is a perfect symbol of the American music industry: old, fake, badly preserved, and not turning out anything new of real interest. RIP creativity.

How Does One Study Nursing Online?

The revolution in "elearning" has led to people painting in their pajamas while taking art courses online and blowing up things in their kitchen as they get credit for a distance learning chemistry course. But how do you learn nursing online? The answer is that you can't - at least not at every level. Most nursing associate degrees reguire so much hands-on learning with live patients that they are generally taught in a hospital setting. Nursing bachelor degrees involve a bit more learning. Nowadays they are often taught as a mix of elearning and clinical work, the latter of which is done by a supervisor in the students area, approved by his or her distance learning school, which may be thousands of miles away. It's at the master's degree level that it's become most possible to get a nursing degree 100% online. Here's a bit more on the details of an Online RN to BSN Program

Criminal Justice Careers, Salaries and Job Descriptions

What exactly is a career in criminal justice? It depends on whether you want to be involved in an enforcement organization of the federal government, a local police force or the court system. Depending on whether or not you wish to be a front-line professional in the dangerous area of drug enforcement, an attorney or a scientist who analyzes evidence from crime scenes, there are a whole lot of different criminal justice careers out there where people are still being hired in big numbers in spite of the weak economy.

Bachelor in Health Science Degrees - What's The Upside

A bachelor in health science degree is flexible - so flexible that it's a bit tough to tell what kind of job it will land you. Some paramedics and other medical technicians get the degree to move into a more managerial position but keep a direct connection to patient care. Others take this degree into desk jobs in hospital administration or working for an insurance company. Here's a little more on the bachelor in health science degree

GM's Health Cost Problem - Soon To Be Your Health Cost Problem

General Motors has a product problem and a financial problem. I won't touch on the first: the fact that their products either are junk or are simply perceived as junk, depending on who you ask. But everyone agrees what the top problem in GM's financial structure is: the huge cost of covering health care payments for aging retirees.

GM is variously mocked for being stupid, shortsighted, backwards and all sorts of other nasty things for having made deals with the unions over the past 30 years that saddled the company with this impossible financial burden. But lost in the media coverage about the automakers is this fact: take a look at General Motors' problems and you get a pretty good preview of what's going to happen to the entire U.S. financial system once health care is nationalized.

The Obama camp's line of chatter that we are going to cut health costs by pouring billions more into insurance coverage reminds one of the silly word games of the Bush administration, who made a profession of pasting titles like "Patriot" on laws that nothing whatsoever to do with patriotism.

We're going to discover a couple of things about health care once we go to a nationalized system. First: the problems with U.S. health care don't revolve only around insurance coverage. Anyone who has shepherded a parent through the late stages of life in an American hospital knows that, even with great health insurance, the quality of patient care is being ruined by disorganization, competing physicians who do far too many treatments in the name of avoiding lawsuits, and compensation - yes, even from Medicare - that's often completely out of whack for the services provided. I'll never forget my aunt Flo, a nurse by profession, who was interested enough to look at the details of her heart surgery bills even though they were all covered by Medicare. One physician walked into her room each day, looked at her chart and said nothing to her, and then walked out. Total time of visit: 20 seconds. Total Medicare reimbursement per visit: $160. The government's involvement in medical care to date has done allot more to increase inefficiency and waste than to curtail it, based on what I've seen.

Second, I'll bet that one of GM's problems is that when you cover everyone's health costs, those retirees have a funny way of running to the doctor's office every time they sneeze. What's a health insurer to do? Well, if you're the government, you can restrict access. Take a good look at Ireland, England and a host of other European health care systems, and you'll find long lines of patients waiting to be treated and outright refusal to offer some services. And oh yes, most of those governments happen to be even more bankrupt than our own right now.

So before you laugh at GM, take a look at the "cost saving" health care plans you're going to be paying for before long.

"Guaranteed Admission?" Well, not exactly

It seems as though education writers these days are re-writing press releases without asking too many questions. My attention was caught today by an article on About.com stating that Ivy Bridge College, a two-year school that's part of Tiffin University, now "guarantees" admission to a bachelors degree program to anyone who completes the Ivy Bridge College associates program. About.com got it's info from Diverseeducation.com, which cheered that Tiffin administrators "are taking the concept of online education to a new level: creating Ivy Bridge College, which offers an associate degree for general studies and guarantee admission to select four-year institutions for successful students." Really? Are graduates of Ivy Bridge actually guaranteed a spot in a bachelor completion program? Well, not exactly. Ivy Bridge's own website is a bit more circumspect. The school says it has signed agreements with a number of schools including Bowling Green University that will "make it easier – and in some cases – guarantee that you’ll be able to transfer to the four year college of your choice." Sounds a bit different that About's statement that Ivy Bridge graduates "are guaranteed acceptance to one of several universities." Read the Diverse story here.

What exactly is an online accredited course?

People in higher education have argued for years about whether or not there should be a single national board to give accreditation to U.S. colleges and universities. But a group of old, regional organizations which operate with little supervision decide which schools are valid and which are not. Their decisions are critical - as any job-seeker knows, trying to shop around a degree from a school that's not accredited won't get you very far in terms of employment. Here's a more in-depth article about how to figure out which online accredited courses are for real and which are fakes.