Serving proudly since 1873 as the beautiful Nebraska Panhandle's first newspaper
Serving proudly since 1873 as the beautiful Nebraska Panhandle's first newspaper
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To learn a second language is difficult, if not impossible. At an early age, a child learns to think in his or her first language, and so his or her brain is set, hardwired for that first language. After that, an adolescent or an adult cannot stop thinking in that first language and begin thinking in a second or third. Thus, most people fail to learn a second language, despite loads of willpower and intense study. One guy said, after years of living in the Orient, “I am just not that good at l...
Today, we honor Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. In the summer of 1855, George Harding hired Lincoln to assist him in a patent infringement case because Harding needed an attorney knowledgeable of Illinois law. At the last moment, the trial was moved from Chicago to Cincinnati, and so Lincoln’s services weren’t needed. Instead of withdrawing from the case though, Lincoln headed to Cincinnati to offer his help. In the meantime, Harding hired Edwin Stanton, a polished lawyer from Ohio. In Cincinnati, H...
Historians rank Frederick Jackson Turner as one of the most noted of all American historians. In 1893, in Chicago at the American Historical Association, he delivered a paper he entitled The Significance of the Frontier in American History, and in it, he argued that the frontier shaped the American character. Turner insisted that on the frontier pioneers dropped their European characteristics and values, and picked up a respect for democracy, an intolerance of social hierarchy, a distrust of...
Vivek Ranadivé coached his daughter’s National Junior Basketball team at Redwood City, south of San Francisco, in Silicon Valley. Because Vivek had grown up in Mumbai, where he had played cricket and soccer, Vivek knew very little about basketball. His daughter’s team was composed of twelve-year-old girls, who were short, white, and displayed no talent. They could barely shoot, dribble, or jump, and yet they won most of their games, losing only in the championship game. How? Malcolm Glad...
The two Communist holdouts from the Cold War dominate the news again: Cuba on one page, and North Korea on the other. First, President Barak Obama wants to re-establish diplomatic relations with Cuba after five and a half decades of Communist rule. Then, the FBI has traced “one of the most punishing cyber-attacks on a major American corporation in recent memory” back to the Guardians of Peace, all because of a new movie that mocks Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s dictator. Both Cuba and North Korea...
Della sold her hair to buy “a platinum watch fob” for Jim, her husband, and he sold his watch to buy “tortoise shell combs” for Della’s hair. On Christmas Day they opened their presents, and neither he nor she could enjoy his or her gift. Without her long hair, she no longer needed the combs, and without his watch, he no longer needed a watch fob. That is the plot that the American author O. Henry reveals in his splendid short story, The Gift of the Magi. “The Grinch hated Christmas....
On Nov. 23, a week ago last Sunday, another Soyuz rocket launched three astronauts into outer space from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, and after a six-hour flight they docked at the International Space Station 268 miles above the Pacific Ocean. The three included the Russian cosmonaut Anton Schkaplerov, the European Space Agency astronaut from Italy Samantha Cristoforetti, and NASA’s Terry Virts. They joined the three others already there: NASA’s Barry Wilmore and two Russian cos...
Billy Graham will celebrate another birthday this week, his ninety-sixth. As far as I know, he still lives, despite a lifetime of poor health: “hernias, retina clots, pleurisies, headaches, nauseas, removal of a salivary gland, urinary infections, ulcerative colitis, jaw abscesses, tumors on the forehead,” plus “cysts, polyps, infections, pneumonia, chronic high blood pressure, spider bites, and a series of falls that have broken eighteen of his ribs.” When he was twenty-six, he came down wi...
President Obama visited Stonehenge three weeks ago, on Friday, Sept. 5. As he stepped around the stones, he said, “ How cool is this. This is spectacular! Knocked this off my bucket list.” Stonehenge is located west and south of London, in south central England, and is a popular tourist destination site. It is astonishing to see. Prehistoric men, who lived on the British Isles then, stood a series of giant stones upright in a circle, and archaeologists believe that the first stones were pos...
Although President Obama has ordered airstrikes on the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Pentagon is saying that “further strikes are needed in both Iraq and Syria to stop the militants from regrouping.” Then, from the Red Square in Moscow, Putin has “slowly ramped up his meddling in Ukraine, and with just enough uncertainty around each incremental escalation” so as to evade a larger war or a threat from the United States or western Europe. Then, today marks the thirteenth anniver...
Robin Williams was born in 1951, and I in 1953. Due to his rapid-fire wit, his zany antics and his overabundance of comedic talents, success came quick for him, more so than it did for others of our generation. In 1978, when I was trying to teach English composition to seventh- and eighth-graders in Lodgepole, Williams starred in his own television show, Mork and Mindy. Instead of learning to appreciate a poem’s text, my students would chant “na-noo, na-noo” – Mork’s nonsensical catchphra...
In an effort to raise students’ educational levels across the globe, the Program for International Student Assessment, encourages hundreds of thousands of 15-year-old students from sixty-five countries to take a two-hour test that covers just three subjects: math, science, and reading. In 2012, 510,000 students completed the test, and the PISA test scores reveal sobering news. The Shanghai Chinese students won first place in all three subjects, and Peru’s students took last place in all three. T...
Two boys were playing badminton, and because Andy played better than Bob, Andy won all the games. Bob threw down his racket, sat on a tree stump, and said, “I won’t play anymore.” So Andy suggested a different game. “Bob, let’s see how long we can keep the bird going between us and count how many times it goes back and forth without falling. Do you think we could make a score of ten or twenty?” Bob thought it a grand idea, and so the two boys resumed playing a cooperative game. From his office w...
In March of 1992, three astronomers, Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker and David Levy discovered their ninth comet, hence its name, “Shoemaker-Levy 9.” The team determined that S-L9 was orbiting Jupiter now rather than the sun. Because Jupiter is a heavy-weight planet, exerting an enormous gravitational pull, astronomers call it the solar system’s vacuum sweeper. In July of 1992, astronomers noticed that Jupiter’s force had broken S-L9 into 23 fragments that they labelled A through W and that ea...
Joseph J. Ellis says in his book, Founding Brothers, “No event in American history, which was so improbable at the time, has seemed so inevitable in retrospect as the American Revolution.” In other words, Ellis contends that the revolution was not foreordained to happen. In 1760, few English-speaking people, either in England or in its thirteen colonies, believed in the likelihood of an American rebellion against King George III and Parliament. Few, if any, foresaw its approach. According to...
Next week some five hundred visitors will convene at the Real Bird Ranch, adjacent to the Little Bighorn Battle site, near Hardin, Montana, to watch the 21st Annual Battle of the Little Bighorn Re-enactment. For four days men will dress in cavalry soldier uniforms and ride their horses in the 7th U.S. Cavalry, under the command of Brevet Major General George Armstrong Custer, played by Steve Alexander of Monroe, Michigan. Also, young Indians from the Crow, Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe tribes...
Floyd Landis rode his bicycle for the United States Postal Team for three years, from 2002-2004, alongside his teammate, Lance Armstrong, who won the Tour de France each of those years. Floyd admits now that during those three years, he cowered to Lance. It was known that “Lance called the shots on the team,” and “what Lance said went.” “He ran his team like a high-powered corporation.” Lance wanted to win big, and he did so by doping himself and his teammates. In 1995, Lance had lost a race...
A caveman lives in a cave, carries a wooden club with a stone head, dresses in animal skins, pats his pet dinosaur, and then drags women around by their hair. This stereotype originated in the comics. There is Alley Oop, who carried a mean-looking war club, lived in the kingdom of Moo, had a pretty girlfriend named Oola and a pet dinosaur named Dinny. Then, there is Fred and Wilma Flintstone, Barney and Betty Rubble, Pebbles, Bam-Bam, and Dino, Fred and Wilma’s dinosaur. Comics devoted to p...
On Tuesday, April Fools’ Day, several dozen Dartmouth students gathered in the office belonging to the university’s president, Philip J. Hanlon, and insisted that he respond to each of the items listed on their Freedom Budget. The students demanded a faculty that included more women and minorities, gender-neutral housing and restrooms, and harsher penalties for sexual assaults. In their Freedom Budget, they wrote, “We seek to eradicate the systems of oppression” that exist on the Dartmou...
We know so little of William Shakespeare’s life. We know that he was christened on April 26, 1564, and that his father, John Shakespeare, made gloves in Stratford and served as an alderman on the town council. We know that in November of 1582, when Will was eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, then twenty-six; that six months later Anne gave birth to a daughter, Susannah; and that in February of 1585, Anne gave birth to a set of twins, Hamnet and Judith. We know that in 1592, Will was a noted L...
Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan, Robert Downey, Jr., Britney Spears, the late Whitney Houston, and countless numbers of other celebrities have gone through rehab at least once, and each experienced far less than a full cure. The actor Danny Bonaduce—the red-headed middle son on The Partridge Family—said, “They charged me more than $40,000 for my stay, and I drank on the way home.” Treatment centers, such as Betty Ford, Sierra Tucson, and Promises Malibu, offer hope to an individual who suffers...
Three weeks ago, Hillary Clinton spoke at a fundraiser at Long Beach, California and suggested that Vladimir Putin’s actions in Crimea equaled those of Adolf Hitler eight decades ago. She said, “Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the 30’s. All the Germans that were the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right. I must go and protect my people and that’s wh...
Thelma Catherine Patricia Ryan is a very Irish name, and she had the red-hair to go with it. Born March 16, 1912, the day before St. Patrick’s Day, in Ely, Nevada, her parents moved to Cerritos, California, when she was a child. After high school, she worked her way through the University of Southern California, taught at Whittier High School, and then married the lawyer Richard M. Nixon. Patricia is the feminine form of Patrick, the name of the English missionary who introduced Christianity a...
The New York Times reported last Sunday that Queen Elizabeth II is strapped for cash. This is a surprising development for an English monarch who owns Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands, acres of farmland, horses, art, and jewelry, and has a net worth that Forbes magazine estimates at $500 million. In addition, she collects 15% of the income derived each year from the Crown Estate, assets that the nation owns but the queen uses, such as Buckingham Palace and the Crown Jewels. “The B...
Theodore Roosevelt’s first wife, Alice Lee, died of a kidney infection on Valentine’s Day 1884, just two days after she delivered her first child, a daughter, also named Alice. The tragedy was compounded when Theodore’s mother died of typhoid fever that same day. So grief-stricken was Theodore by the double loss that he packed up and headed for a ranch in southwest North Dakota where he tended cattle for two years, expecting his sister in New York to care for his infant daughter. Upon his retur...
