Common decency and ethical behavior does not equal the ten commandments. Yeah, Jews and Christians recognize those ten specific rules a part of their religion, but a lot of that stuff is pretty universal no matter what religion (or lack of religion) people follow.
Strikes me as more of a case of him building his story around the facts of a sensational case of the time. Sort of Victorian version of the way shows like Law and Order and C.S.I. sometimes do "ripped from the headlines" plots on their shows.
Sounds to me like Poe liked spooky stuff and a story like Mary Rogers's, with all the sex and murder and mystery, probably really grabbed his attention. He realized that other people might be fascinated by the story too, and fictionalized it a bit here and there and made money off of it.
I didn't see anything in the article that was damning evidence against Poe. Knowing a lot about a case and giving a case a lot of thought means he found it interesting enough to follow the case intently in the news and such, not that he was a killer.
Mowog- That's an AWESOME question! I'm curious now,too. I bet he does get some secrets that more than one person have in common. It would be fascinating to know the top "Frequently Shared Secret".
Frank- How do you tell a fake secret submission from a genuine one? Or does it matter to you if they're genuine confessions from the person who sent them or not if they might resonate with someone who might read them?
I sometimes feel a little like a peeping-tom or a snoop for reading the secrets. I know that people posted them on purpose and part of the idea of posting the secret is knowing that people will read it, but still I get the feeling that I'm prying a bit, like reading someone's diary or personal mail. It's a bit of a thrill to read something secret like that, to look into something something that people aren't supposed to know, but at the same time, I feel a little naughty and maybe even a bit guilty. Do you ever get that feeling or do you hear a lot of people that kind of feel that way?
Stevemarth- I think the elaborate post cards serve a couple of purposes. First, they're cooler for the reader to look at. But more importantly, the post card maker can really express themselves in more than just words and even the act of making the postcard is more freeing than just quickly writing the words. If you just jot it down, you don't have to really embrace the secret and everything you're feeling about it the same way you do if you have to design and craft a card.
Plus, it probably cuts down on the amount of absolute garbage and frivolity and that Frank receives. A lot less people are going to go to the work of crafting a visually expressive post card just to goof around (unless it's actually really really funny). If you are willing to put all the thought and work into creating a work of art from your secret, you must really want to share and be a part of the project. I bet it increases the amount of genuinely interesting submissions. If people could just type or scratch out a couple of words, he'd probably get a lot more people that aren't taking it seriously. The extra effort required to be involved keeps the quality of the secrets up.
I think part of the choice to use men was probably also because of the high chance of fatal failure. In those early days of space tech, the chance of death was highly likely and the space program got a ton of publicity. The American public, especially back then, was used to the idea of male soldiers doing brave things and being injured or killed in the process. The idea of women going on daring missions and being killed or coming back disfigured was not already an accepted part of the culture. Accidently killing a "soldier" and accidently killing a "girl" would have made for very different headlines and reactions.
It would have been tragic if John Glen was burned up on re-entry to the atmosphere or Neil Armstrong had been marooned to starve on the moon. However, the country would have been more apt to accept the losses of those heros and keep on working on and funding and supporting the space program. The space program was able to continue after fatal accidents like the death of Gus Grissom. If a woman, the sex that most Americans at the time associated overwhelming more with being a loving wife or a nurturing mother or a sweet little daughter rather than a tough soldier, were to be killed in the space program, the public backlash might have been too great to keep the program's support up.
I thought, "Wow. That's cool looking! I love the ice effect!", then I saw that it was actually frozen blood. Yuck! Still cool looking, but totally icky.
Adopting when your husband is deployed or likely to be deployed is a terrible idea. Parenting alone can be challenging even under the best of circumstances. With the added difficulties of the child being adopted and being special needs, it was all the more important that she have the support of the father. This woman jumped in way over her head. Waiting until the time was right might have made things better for everyone involved.
Or if it was a case like someone mentioned above where she was just totally lonely and felt the baby would be the solution, waiting for husband to get back would have fixed her loneliness without a baby having to be involved.
Even if she didn't understand how hard it would be to mother the child all alone, her adoption agency should have encouraged to wait for her husband to be available at home. It might have been hard to accept that she wasn't ready right then, but that would have been easier to deal with than the heart-break she eventually went through.
Hooray! My home state of Arkansas didn't have a marker anywhere on it. I'm shocked. There's a ton of really conservative religious type people here that I would have thought might have supported some book banning.
I thought the point of all the yelling and such was about team-building. If all the guys you went through training with were all taking the same abuse together and hating the drill instructor together, you bonded over it. I thought it was sort of like a heavier more serious version of fraternity pledge hazing. Everyone going through the same hazing when they were freshment strengthened the bonds of brotherhood. You went from the happy safety of your parents and teachers being sweet to you, then you left home and joined the army and the cruelty of basic training broke you from your old life and bonded you together with your new military family.
I think the best thing would be a compromise between all out screaming verbal abuse and full-tilt coddling. I'm thinking modeling basic training after the kind of training a lot of sports coaches give would be great. You could still have the harshness and demandingness of the coach and the challenging physical tasks and building of team unity, but in a more supportive and less uneccessarily cruel atmosphere.
I think there should be a compromise between teaching it thoroughly and doing away with it completely. There is still enough communication done in cursive handwriting that I'd hate to see cursive become completely foreign to kids. I'd hate to see grandma's birthday cards, or hand-written personal checks, or hand-written memos from the boss, or margin jotted revisions and such seem unreadable. However, as cursive (and hand writing in general) are quickly being phased out by type, I don't like the idea of wasting too much class time on it. Pick a year, say 3rd or 4th grade maybe, and have that and spend a few weeks that year covering reading and writing cursive and be done with it.
I'd rather students spend more time learning grammar,vocabulary,spelling, typing, or even some useful words in another language (Spanish maybe?) than practicing penmanship. In this era, beautiful writing isn't important. If it's important enough to need to use your nice penmanship, you should really be typing it. You still need legible writing so that if you have to jot down a note by hand it's reasonably understandable, but not much more.
When people used to do most everything handwritten it mattered. When all of your business letters,legal papers, and other writings of importance were handwritten,it made a real impact whether your penmanship was professional or not. These days, with pretty much any writing of any importance, handwriting, either print or cursive is already fairly unprofessional no matter how pretty your writing is.
That letter is just sad. Poor thing. I wish there was a whole collection of letters from her so that we could follow the story and see how life turned out for her. Maybe she learned to like her new owners? Maybe the old owners bought her back? Maybe she even got her freedom somehow?
Primary sources like that make slavery seem so real and personal, not like some sort of distant historical evil. I was reading through old newspapers a while back while researching something else and in the classified ads were ads selling slaves and ads for people looking to buy slaves or offering rewards for the return of runaway slaves. It was so sickening to see right there in the paper on the same page as ads for livestock or wagons. It shouldn't have been a surprise since I was looking through newspapers from Arkansas in the 1800s, but somehow it being in print in the current tense with it being treated as totally normal everyday business like that was really upsetting.
It seems to me that they might consider adopting children instead of just making more at this point. They have some kids of their own to pass on their family name and genetic line. Here in Arkansas where I live (and the Duggars do,too), there are lots of kids in foster care and/or state custody that need either a temporary home or a permanent family. If the Duggars still have extra time, money, love, and guidance that they want to share with more little ones, why not share it with ones that are already in the world and in need of a family?
I'm with you, Foreigner1. I think it would be cool to have one for just in case of a catastophe, but I'd want it to be an extra useable space for regular day to day use,too. Maybe it could function as a wine cellar or rec room or something when there wasn't a crisis going on? Then I wouldn't feel silly if nothing catastrophic ever happened. If no one dropped the bomb, I'd still have gotten a pretty sweet bonus room out of it.
When I was in college, several people I knew got a lot of free air travel by being couriers. Courier services needed things delivered and would pay someone to fly with them on a commercial airliner and see that they are delivered safe and sound and quickly. Most of the time, they didn't even have to deliver it to a special location, someone would be waiting at the airport to sign for it. Then the couriers would be free to enjoy the day (or often the weekend)in wherever they were before they had to catch their free flight back home. It's the kind of thing that would have been fun for a young single college kid. Just getting a random day trip or overnighter to someplace else. I wanted to do it myself and was looking into it, but then I got married. I didn't want to travel without my hubby and the courier services doesn't need two people to deliver the same item. That was over a decade ago,though. I don't know if in the Post-9-11 age anyone still uses couriers like that or not or if maybe even if they do all the extra security makes it so that it has to be more of a permanent job type thing than just a weekend here and there kind of thing or if the security might just in general make it too big a hassle to be worth the while nowdays. But it might still be worth looking into for some folks.
Sounds to me like Poe liked spooky stuff and a story like Mary Rogers's, with all the sex and murder and mystery, probably really grabbed his attention. He realized that other people might be fascinated by the story too, and fictionalized it a bit here and there and made money off of it.
I didn't see anything in the article that was damning evidence against Poe. Knowing a lot about a case and giving a case a lot of thought means he found it interesting enough to follow the case intently in the news and such, not that he was a killer.
That's an AWESOME question! I'm curious now,too. I bet he does get some secrets that more than one person have in common. It would be fascinating to know the top "Frequently Shared Secret".
How do you tell a fake secret submission from a genuine one? Or does it matter to you if they're genuine confessions from the person who sent them or not if they might resonate with someone who might read them?
I sometimes feel a little like a peeping-tom or a snoop for reading the secrets. I know that people posted them on purpose and part of the idea of posting the secret is knowing that people will read it, but still I get the feeling that I'm prying a bit, like reading someone's diary or personal mail. It's a bit of a thrill to read something secret like that, to look into something something that people aren't supposed to know, but at the same time, I feel a little naughty and maybe even a bit guilty. Do you ever get that feeling or do you hear a lot of people that kind of feel that way?
Stevemarth-
I think the elaborate post cards serve a couple of purposes. First, they're cooler for the reader to look at. But more importantly, the post card maker can really express themselves in more than just words and even the act of making the postcard is more freeing than just quickly writing the words. If you just jot it down, you don't have to really embrace the secret and everything you're feeling about it the same way you do if you have to design and craft a card.
Plus, it probably cuts down on the amount of absolute garbage and frivolity and that Frank receives. A lot less people are going to go to the work of crafting a visually expressive post card just to goof around (unless it's actually really really funny). If you are willing to put all the thought and work into creating a work of art from your secret, you must really want to share and be a part of the project. I bet it increases the amount of genuinely interesting submissions. If people could just type or scratch out a couple of words, he'd probably get a lot more people that aren't taking it seriously. The extra effort required to be involved keeps the quality of the secrets up.
It would have been tragic if John Glen was burned up on re-entry to the atmosphere or Neil Armstrong had been marooned to starve on the moon. However, the country would have been more apt to accept the losses of those heros and keep on working on and funding and supporting the space program. The space program was able to continue after fatal accidents like the death of Gus Grissom. If a woman, the sex that most Americans at the time associated overwhelming more with being a loving wife or a nurturing mother or a sweet little daughter rather than a tough soldier, were to be killed in the space program, the public backlash might have been too great to keep the program's support up.
Or if it was a case like someone mentioned above where she was just totally lonely and felt the baby would be the solution, waiting for husband to get back would have fixed her loneliness without a baby having to be involved.
Even if she didn't understand how hard it would be to mother the child all alone, her adoption agency should have encouraged to wait for her husband to be available at home. It might have been hard to accept that she wasn't ready right then, but that would have been easier to deal with than the heart-break she eventually went through.
I think the best thing would be a compromise between all out screaming verbal abuse and full-tilt coddling. I'm thinking modeling basic training after the kind of training a lot of sports coaches give would be great. You could still have the harshness and demandingness of the coach and the challenging physical tasks and building of team unity, but in a more supportive and less uneccessarily cruel atmosphere.
I'd rather students spend more time learning grammar,vocabulary,spelling, typing, or even some useful words in another language (Spanish maybe?) than practicing penmanship. In this era, beautiful writing isn't important. If it's important enough to need to use your nice penmanship, you should really be typing it. You still need legible writing so that if you have to jot down a note by hand it's reasonably understandable, but not much more.
When people used to do most everything handwritten it mattered. When all of your business letters,legal papers, and other writings of importance were handwritten,it made a real impact whether your penmanship was professional or not. These days, with pretty much any writing of any importance, handwriting, either print or cursive is already fairly unprofessional no matter how pretty your writing is.
Primary sources like that make slavery seem so real and personal, not like some sort of distant historical evil. I was reading through old newspapers a while back while researching something else and in the classified ads were ads selling slaves and ads for people looking to buy slaves or offering rewards for the return of runaway slaves. It was so sickening to see right there in the paper on the same page as ads for livestock or wagons. It shouldn't have been a surprise since I was looking through newspapers from Arkansas in the 1800s, but somehow it being in print in the current tense with it being treated as totally normal everyday business like that was really upsetting.
That was over a decade ago,though. I don't know if in the Post-9-11 age anyone still uses couriers like that or not or if maybe even if they do all the extra security makes it so that it has to be more of a permanent job type thing than just a weekend here and there kind of thing or if the security might just in general make it too big a hassle to be worth the while nowdays. But it might still be worth looking into for some folks.