Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Check background of your child’s care takers

July 11th, 2010 admin

Every deci­sion that you take for your child is very cru­cial. Each of it will have a greater impact on their future. If you are try­ing to keep your child in a baby care cen­ter, then you must do a thor­ough check on the play school that you want to join your child and also see what kind of staff is work­ing there. You ensure that the staff present there are qual­i­fied and good enough to take care of your child. It is tough to do back­ground check on your own, so it is bet­ter to take help of some orga­ni­za­tion which will do this work and it eases your prob­lems. Intelius is one such com­pany which is lead by Naveen Jain, a MBA grad­u­ate. This orga­ni­za­tion empow­ers its con­sumers with online infor­ma­tion for per­sonal pro­tec­tion and intel­li­gent decisions.

The rea­son why I men­tioned this orga­ni­za­tion for the above kinds of sit­u­a­tions is, it is doing a free back­ground checks to the Boys & Girls Club of Belle­vue. Naveen Jain, is presently the CEO of the Intelius, is the key per­son in tak­ing this deci­sion. Usu­ally back­ground checks and infor­ma­tion about the care tak­ers is costly but if you can get this for free, then you can use that money for phil­an­thropic works. Boys & Girls Club employ­ees and vol­un­teers are respon­si­ble for a vari­ety of duties, includ­ing coach­ing sports activ­i­ties, lead­ing after school tutor­ing and men­tor­ing, and serv­ing as gen­eral instruc­tors, ref­er­ees and score­keep­ers. In less than three years of busi­ness, Intelius has gained more than three mil­lion cus­tomers who use Intelius’ infor­ma­tion to pro­tect their loved ones, busi­nesses and assets.

Naveen Jain has worked in Microsoft before start­ing this com­pany and is now head­ing a com­pany is another exam­ple of suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neur­ship. I wish him all the best.

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Tongue Twisters!

April 24th, 2010 shylock

Tongue twister is a phrase, sen­tence or a rhyme which is dif­fi­cult to speak. The dif­fi­culty is more pro­nounced when the twister is repeat­edly and quickly spo­ken. We will look at what it is that makes it a cool take.

Let’s start with a sim­ple one:
“Whis­tle for the this­tle sifter”

Did that get you going? Cer­tainly the twisters vary in their dif­fi­culty leagues. The hard­est tongue-twister accord­ing to Gui­ness book of world records is “The sixth sick sheikh’s sixth sheep’s sick”. But a few argue that the hard­est one is “The seething sea ceaseth and thus the seething sea suf­ficeth us”

To appre­ci­ate the beauty of a twister you need to speak it loudly and quickly. Most of the times it proves to be com­i­cal error of sorts due to the sim­i­lar pho­net­ics of the words.
To appre­ci­ate a twister, a basic under­stand­ing of allit­er­a­tion and rhyme will help immensely.

Allit­er­a­tion and Rhyme:

Allit­er­a­tion is a lit­er­ary device con­sti­tut­ing same con­so­nant sound at the begin­ning of two or more words in close suc­ces­sion. “Peter Piper picked a peck of pick­led pep­pers…” Here the allit­er­a­tion is with respect to the let­ter P. Allit­er­a­tion is mainly used in poetry to cre­ate the effect with word play. But due care is exer­cised; its acci­den­tal usage often mars the beauty of writ­ing. A rhyme is a rep­e­ti­tion of sim­i­lar sound­ing words. This tech­nique is mostly used in songs. Both the allit­er­a­tion and rhyme derives on repet­i­tive play of sounds or words.

Tongue Twister

A tongue twister is gen­er­ally designed in such a way that the reader is expected to stum­ble while pro­nounc­ing. Hence, tongue twisters can prove to be a very good medium for teach­ing elo­cu­tion. More­over, it also lays empha­sis on pro­nun­ci­a­tion, so it effec­tively can also reduce speech defects.

Some com­mon tongue twisters:

Peter Piper picked a peck of pick­led pep­pers.
A peck of pick­led pep­pers Peter Piper picked.
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pick­led pep­pers,
Where’s the peck of pick­led pep­pers Peter Piper picked?

I saw Susie sit­ting in a shoe shine shop.
Where she sits she shines, and where she shines she sits.

How many boards
Could the Mon­gols hoard
If the Mon­gol hordes got bored?
from the comic Calvin & Hobbes, by Bill Waterson

How can a clam cram in a clean cream can?

Send toast to ten tense stout saints’ ten tall tents.
by Ray­mond Weisling

Denise sees the fleece,
Denise sees the fleas.
At least Denise could sneeze
and feed and freeze the fleas.

Coy knows pseudonoise codes.
by Pierre Abbat

Sheena leads, Sheila needs.

The thirty-three thieves thought that they thrilled the throne through­out Thursday.

Some­thing in a thirty-acre ther­mal thicket of thorns and this­tles thumped and thun­dered threat­en­ing the three-D thoughts of Matthew the thug — although, the­atri­cally, it was only the thirteen-thousand this­tles and thorns through the under­neath of his thigh that the thirty year old thug thought of that morn­ing.
by Meaghan Desbiens

Can you can a can as a can­ner can can a can?

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Posted in General, english in use, internet, learn english 2 Comments »

How to Write Poetry? (Part II)

April 10th, 2010 shylock

In the pre­vi­ous post, we looked at var­i­ous ways to get started with poetry. We looked at express­ing our feel­ings, our senses effec­tively. Now we would look at few things which can prove to be extremely important.

Read Poetry:

Read­ing poetry is con­sid­ered one of the vital ingre­di­ents to writ­ing poetry. It not only gives you the strength of vocab­u­lary but also it gives you the strength of pow­er­ful imagery. Using metaphors effec­tively is one of the para­me­ters which dis­tin­guish a good poem from a nor­mal one. Ini­tially when you read great work you tend to get over­pow­ered by their style and their words. Some­times you would tend to lend their style. Watch out against this. Remem­ber they too must have started from square one. It’s their gift of vision that sep­a­rated them from oth­ers. Let me remind you again that hav­ing an absolutely first class, orig­i­nal vision help when it comes to words.

Walk away from drudgery:

Walk Away From Drudgery

You need to allow your­self time and space to come up with ideas. Until you lie down in a sofa and allow your­self a reverie you would not appre­ci­ate all your feel­ings. Each of our senses lives the same feel­ing dif­fer­ently. So if you don’t give time to your­self to indulge with the idea of a spec­tac­u­lar thought, you don’t fully live that moment. You need to move from the present realm of chores and ten­sions to the world of a beau­ti­ful thought. The moment you live each moment fully, you are ready to write poems which every­one else would die to read. Remem­ber the sole idea of poetry is to lift you from your present world and get you to a world of you and yourself.

Write and Share:

Start writ­ing! Start with few words which you already mocked up in your mind. Some­times the poems are not fin­ished in one sit­ting, but keep­ing it for long would also dimin­ish the flu­id­ity of the thought. Choos­ing a topic close to your heart shall help. If the topic is a pain stak­ing expe­ri­ence then you can use third per­son tone to bring about the pain. Do not hes­i­tate to take opin­ion of oth­ers. Remem­ber they always want to hear about someone’s expe­ri­ence which is dif­fer­ent from them. All the opin­ion is con­struc­tive. After the entire step to fur­ther heights stops at all positives.

Happy Poetry!

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Posted in General, learn english, universal english No Comments »

How to Write Poetry?

April 9th, 2010 shylock

At some point in time, most of us must come across verses which take our breath away. In these moments we pon­der about the beauty of the writ­ing because it plays with our imag­i­na­tion. How can a small heap of lines play with our mind, tran­scend­ing us sur­re­ally? If you have ever been touched by lines so deeply that they made you think about writ­ing poetry then you might find this post interesting.

Golden Rule:

There is no wrong poetry. There is no absolute advice to poetry. Every poet devel­ops his/her own flair over a period of time.

We will talk of very fun­da­men­tal nuances involved in poetry. I believe, this should help you kick start your jour­ney to infinite­ness, if you have already fid­dled with the idea of poem writing.

Poetry is gen­er­ally imag­i­na­tive writ­ing. It depicts the reflec­tion of reac­tions and emo­tions. Like most other form of writ­ten words, it is not restricted by bound­aries. It still main­tains a slight rigid­ity with respect to the plot, but that is mainly to avert the read­ers from oscil­lat­ing too much with imag­i­na­tions. Stim­u­lat­ing piece of poem writ­ing is honed over time. All you can bring into poetry is your un-blurred vision of a moment. The words would come with time. Remem­ber it always helps to have a first class, orig­i­nal, insight vision of a thought.

Imagination

As you must have realised by now imag­i­na­tion is the foun­da­tion to poetry. If you are look­ing for inspi­ra­tion, you should be look­ing around you. There is no def­i­nite place to find inspi­ra­tion. It strikes you when you are least expect­ing it. But you should be ready to cap­ture it once it strikes you. If you are look­ing to pen down strik­ing notes, you should allow your­self to appre­ci­ate the beauty of an inspiration/imagination. If you let in other tasks to soak you up, the instant of pure magic will always remain clouded. Remem­ber you don’t live the same instance twice. Pen it down, keep a note of it.

Now that we lived the moment we would look at fur­ther steps to process it into a poem. A poem is always an individual’s per­spec­tive. A same scene can appeal to two dif­fer­ent indi­vid­u­als dif­fer­ently. It is always how it caters to your senses. It is almost guar­an­teed that a par­tic­u­lar thing would appeal to the five senses of dif­fer­ent per­sons dif­fer­ently. Draw strength from the fact that a reader is always eager to know what you felt. So use imagery. Express your feel­ings, not the bor­rowed feelings.

We will look at other ingre­di­ents of poetry in the next post.

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Posted in General, english in use, universal english 1 Comment »
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