Joke of the day

 

 

Must Watch: The Amazing And Incredible Spirit Of Qian Hong Yan

A lesson of remaining Happy in difficult circumstances.
We must all be thankful for what we are ,and must always give hope & help those in need.

“Qian Hongyan lost both her legs in an accident at only three years old in 2000. Hongyan’s family wasn’t wealth enough to provide her with hi-tech equipment to help her walk, so they gave her a basketball to help her move. Hongyan used brushes as low-level crutches. She was able to travel to and from home and school by bouncing on the basketball. Five years later, doctors were finally been able to give her prosthetic legs.

The seventh national special sports-meeting was held in Kunming in May 2007. Qian Hongyan went to watch the games every day and seeing the handicapped players struggle in the matches deeply moved her. After the sports meeting, Qian Hongyan was determined to join in the special swimming club. She and her parents went to consult the opportunity with Zhang Honghu, a well known coach who has trained many handicapped swimming champions. Then, Qian Hongyan began her life in the swimming club and did professional swimming training.“Qian Hongyan studies hard. She never grouches in training although she was confronted with many difficulties at the beginning”, her coach said.

At first, Zhang didn’t pay much attention to Qian Hongyan. “The individual’s capability is important in choosing a player”, he said. “Qian Hongyan doesn’t have legs. It seems that a ship has no a helm, then the ship could work well for lack of a sense of direction”. In order to solve the problem, zhang made a special training plan for Qian Hongyan to help balance the shoulders.

Qian Hongyan swims for about 2000 meters in a day. She always does the exercises and sit-ups, dumbbells and so on carefully. After a short period, to Zhang’s surprise, he found that Hongyan was gifted in swimming. Zhang said, “Hongyan is a very good swimmer but it would be boring and take a long time to train her and repeat the exercises every day. I couldn’t ensure she would be a world champion. However, I can tell that she is definitely a promising swimmer. Our biggest wish is to train her to have a positive attitude to life”. Qian Hongyan’s dream is to take part in the 2012 special Olympic Games and become a world champion. She works hard to achieve her dream”. – Juesatta.com

 

Where The Mind Is Without Fear

Poem by Rabindranath Tagore

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

 

Near Forty Years Ago, Viet Nam

by Roaddog Wolf

I have been trying to get out of here.
Away from this jungle’s seemingly inevitable death,
away from this war’s tormenting evil, hate and endless fear.
My soul longs to be free of this perpetual agony’s breath.

Our spirit’s are crying this wars bloody tears.
Is there no escape from this darkness we are shadowed by,
embracing the dying, holding on to life with death so near,
wandering with no direction, not lost, not knowing why.

Why do we live and for what is no longer clear,
we’ve become cold empty men, hungry exhausted and worn,
putting one foot in front of the other, we walk on or disappear,
in a war that rips and maims and leaves us tattered and torn.

Our hopes and faith fading with the stench of death so very near,
stumbling along the dark damp jungle floor not knowing where,
each of us trying to hold onto something our memories hold dear,
looking in our hearts for a way out only to find empty despair.

We look for that splinter of light or any sign to a path with hope,
but we only struggle in our minds through the depths of anguish,
our bodies through the sweat, blood and pain with which we cope
and our hearts agonize through the horrors while our memories wish.

The glory and honor is seldom ever what it may appear,
but in war, no matter the turmoil of it’s evil we must stand
and against all odds on the path of death, misery and fear
we stand and go on knowing life is not something we hold in hand.

I’ve been trying, for near forty years, to get out of there,
I can still remember their names and faces we left behind.
The human agony and missing souls, the eyes of men with an empty stare.
I left a part of me there, in Viet-Nam, that I still long to find.

The agony of wars never changes nor does the question, why?
War’s never end and peace is only a dream in memories of men.
Time turns to history lessons mankind has never learned by.
Seems we’ll never realize the price we pay, for wars that never end.

 

Police arrest goat accused of armed robbery

Wanted: Witnesses claimed a man turned into a goat to get away after an armed robbery (file picture)

By Mail Foreign Service

Police in Nigeria are holding a goat on suspicion of attempted armed robbery.

Vigilantes seized the black and white goat, saying it was an armed robber who had used black magic to transform himself into an animal to escape after trying to steal a Mazda 323.

‘The group of vigilante men came to report that while they were on patrol they saw some hoodlums attempting to rob a car. They pursued them.

 ‘However one of them escaped while the other turned into a goat,’ Kwara state police spokesman Tunde Mohammed said.‘We cannot confirm the story, but the goat is in our custody.‘We cannot base our information on something mystical. It is something that has to be proved scientifically, that a human being turned into a goat,’ he said.

Belief in witchcraft is widespread in parts of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation.

Residents came to the police station to see the goat, photographed in one national newspaper on its knees next to a pile of straw.

 

Lives In The Balance

Song writers Jackson Browne – Lives In The Balance –

I’ve been waiting for something to happen
For a week or a month or a year
With the blood in the ink of the headlines
And the sound of the crowd in my ear
You might ask what it takes to remember
When you know that you’ve seen it before
Where a government lies to a people
And a country is drifting to war And there’s a shadow on the faces
Of the men who send the guns
To the wars that are fought in places
Where their business interest runs On the radio talk shows and the t.v.
You hear one thing again and again
How the u.s.a. stands for freedom
And we come to the aid of a friend
But who are the ones that we call our friends–
These governments killing their own?
Or the people who finally can’t take any more
And they pick up a gun or a brick or a stone
There are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire There’s a shadow on the faces
Of the men who fan the flames
Of the wars that are fought in places
Where we can’t even say the names They sell us the president the same way
They sell us our clothes and our cars
They sell us every thing from youth to religion
The same time they sell us our wars
I want to know who the men in the shadows are
I want to hear somebody asking them why
They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are
But they’re never the ones to fight or to die
And there are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire

 

At Hobby Lobby

by Rosa Alcalá

 She tosses a bolt of fabric into the air. Hill country, prairie, a horse trots there. I say three yards, and her eyes say more: What you need is guidance, a hand that can zip a scissor through cloth. What you need is a picture of what you’ve lost. To double the width against the window for the gathering, consider where you sit in the morning. Transparency’s appealing, except it blinds us before day’s begun. How I long to captain that table, to return in a beautiful accent a customer’s request. My mother kneeled down against her client and cut threads from buttons with her teeth, inquiring with a finger in the band if it cut into the waist. Or pulled a hem down to a calf to cool a husband’s collar. I can see this in my sleep and among notions. My bed was inches from the sewing machine, a dress on the chair forever weeping its luminescent frays. Sleep was the sound of insinuation, a zigzag to keep holes receptive. Or awakened by a backstitch balling under the foot. A needle cracking? Blood on a white suit? When my baby’s asleep I write to no one and cannot expect a response. The fit’s poor, always. No one wears it out the door. But fashions continue to fly out of magazines like girls out of windows. Sure, they are my sisters. Their machines, my own. The office from which I wave to them in their descent has uneven curtains, made with my own pink and fragile hands.

 

Desiderata

You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees & the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labours & aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery & broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.

Be cheerful.

Strive to be happy.

“Desiderata” was written in 1927 by Max Ehrmann (1872-1945).

 

Deep in the Stillness

by Amrita Bharati      

He threw me away
like a clod of earth.
He didn’t know
I was a thing with a soul.
He didn’t know
I was alive.

He kept on throwing me
like a clod of earth
out of his way -
onto that neglected path
that happened to be mine.
And so I kept travelling
along my own way.
Each time some fragment broke off -
some infatuation, some addiction to happiness,
some earthly hope,
some dream squandered on man.
Each time some fragment of my being
would break off.
And now it was my turn.
The world was already left behind -
like a desert in a sandstorm,
like an ocean in a hurricane,
like a desolate city.
Man, step by step descending,
was already left behind.
And now it was my turn.
Standing on the last patch of earth
I gathered myself into a whole thing
and hurled myself into the stillness.
This was my silence -
pervasive and expansive.
Now the world was either a dream
or a sea-flower
imagined at the end of the ocean.
Deep in the stillness.
Only the sound of my footsteps.

 

An Easy Way to Update Your Resume

By Amanda Frank
Monster Contributing Writer

Leaving the job you held for years? Time to update your resume?

Here’s the scenario. You know your job inside and out. It’s etched into your being. Almost robotic. You can do it with your eyes closed and your hands tied behind your back. You can do it drunk on sherry with Streisand blaring in the background.

The problem is you can’t explain much less glamorize it in writing. You’re caught in the eye of the storm. You need to step back and analyze the whirlwind of work you’ve accomplished during your tenure. How? Use reverse search. What is that you ask?

Reverse Search Method

If you find yourself at a loss for words to adequately describe what it is you do exactly, an online job board can be your best friend. Tap into the giant online repository of job related information compiled by the people whose job is to know all about jobs, including your job and how it fits into the larger organizational whole. All you really need to know is your job title. You can use the reverse search method to find job descriptions of relevant job postings.

What are you supposed to do with job descriptions? Remember paraphrasing in your research papers back in the day when you were a student? It’s a little reminiscent of that, minus the citations. This is not a forum for plagiarism. You can’t outright copy. You’re gleaning from the best practices of those who’ve paved the way. I’m a huge proponent of best practices. Something instilled in me by my most formidable managers and esteemed mentors. Your topic is your career. The facts you’re pooling are the tasks that pertain to your job.

Input descriptive terms and keywords in the search box at the top of the Monster job search page to narrow down to the most relevant results. Spend a bit of time surfing around, and stay on the lookout for anything that could apply to you. Pluck the content you want. At the end of the exercise you’ll have the basics to draft your work experience. Then you’ll need to personalize.

Exercise in Editing

The best part of working backwards like this is avoiding the dreaded blank page, or screen as it is nowadays. Editing is easier than writing from scratch. Use the statements you’ve collected and extract the key phrases. Rewrite your sentences but don’t worry about not being a profound or prolific writer. If you know what you’re going to communicate, bullet points are easy to bang out. Start your sentences with action words to add octane and up the cadence of your bullet point sentences. Good business writing is clear, concise and logical.

Quantify your Work Experience

Tack on your personal accomplishments. How much revenue did the company earn thanks to your efforts? What’s the percentage of growth to your customer base? How much did you increase company response time and customer satisfaction from the customer service plan you implemented? How did the company benefit from the business intelligence you contributed thanks to your weekly reports?

Use One Voice

Not the one you use to speak to your pets. Your business voice. Not sure you have one? It’s the professionally conservative version of your writing. You’re not role-playing. Keep your words authentic to you. You’re pooling a bunch of sentences authored by a multiple of people. Unless you want to be mistaken for someone with a multiple personality disorder, you need to convert it to a singular voice.

Double Duty Job Search

Since it stands to reason that your entire motivation is to look for a new job, this particular practice is doubly efficient. You’ll see lots of jobs waiting to be filled. While you’re in the midst of searching for inspiration for your resume, jot down the posts you would like to apply for and come back to them to submit your resume once you’ve completed your masterpiece.

So? Ready to update your resume yet? Pop in a little Streisand, launch your favorite browser and get to work! No reason to feel daunted by the fact that you haven’t updated your work experience in years. The reverse search method is a foolproof workaround for resume writing.