Word: access
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Green has always relied on comedy when confronting adversity. A class clown, he and Ottawa school friends videotaped their fights with security guards who got after them for skateboarding in parking lots. After college, his quirky public-access show was picked up by a Canadian cable channel, and he was touted as the country's next Mike Myers. When he auditioned for MTV in 1998, he slathered himself with shaving cream and went into mock convulsions. "That to me was genius," says MTV programming president Brian Graden. "He delivers attitude and pushes buttons, but he provokes people with a smile...
...Computer College in February, the thesis committee gave a distinctly nonscholarly reason. "This is illegal!" the school's dean fumed. De Guzman wanted to write a program to "steal and retrieve Internet accounts of the victim's computer," allowing people to use those stolen log-ins to access the Internet free. The response from a faculty member, scrawled in the margin of the page: "We do not produce burglars...
...parents defused our sibling fights by enforcing some unusual ground rules at home. My siblings and I were told to treat the word hate like a forbidden swear word. We also couldn't tell one another to "shut up." Without access to this sort of incendiary language, fighting was less satisfying. And although no one ever insisted that I had to like my brother and sisters (yuck!), we were expected to be grudgingly loyal to one another. This was driven home to me the time my big sisters intervened in a problem I was having with a playmate by telling...
...course, do such potent variables as geography (coastline, access to rivers, ports), climate, religious heritage, sponsorship by superpowers and luck. Political explanations (imperialism, colonialism, racism) have passed out of fashion, if only because, true or not, they represent a protest without a program, a righteousness ultimately feckless...
Anyone campaigning for optimism runs the risk of sounding like Ronald Reagan in his fable of the invincibly sunny child who searched for a Christmas pony in the manure pile. A person must have access to optimism--not often an available grace in areas of great poverty and disease (the African AIDS belt, for example). And it depends what the object of your optimism is. An optimist who hopes to start a flourishing small business is different from an optimist who hopes to blow himself to heaven by driving a car bomb into the Great Satan's military barracks...