Word: likelies
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Glee, the hit show about a high school Glee club, has very sharp claws, which is one reason kids like it so much. It is routinely, if hilariously, cruel (the sweet jock is described as so dumb, "he's cheating off a girl who thinks the square root of 4 is rainbows"). But no darker current--let alone motivation for parental monitoring--had occurred to me until I recently heard a bright, earnest youth minister tell a group of high school kids that he thought Glee was "anti-Christian...
...recent episode, seeing the Glee kids' insensitivity to the challenges faced by their disabled friend, Mr. Schuester ordered all of them to spend three hours a day in a wheelchair and learn for themselves what it was like to walk in their friend's shoes--or roll in his chair. A second subplot explored the love and tension between a flamboyantly gay kid and his devoted, conflicted dad. A third forced us to revisit the judgment we'd reached about the show's most gleefully conniving character, cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester, who has all the charm and subtlety...
...sleeves. (You see it in the Twilight saga too; we're O.K. with vampires and werewolves as long as they're fighting it out to protect a girl's virginity.) If, to some parents, J.K. Rowling's subtlety makes her lessons suspect, I think it makes them powerful. Kids, like adults, resist force-feeding. When a whole generation obsessed about Harry, parents everywhere were given a rich new repertoire of characters and plotlines with which to teach about loyalty, courage, humility and, Rowling's central message, the notion that love has ultimate power, even over death...
...could buy stock in gold-mining companies, but that added a layer of volatility and risk. Since 2004, however, it's been possible - through exchange-traded funds (ETFs) - to effectively own gold without the hassle of actually owning it. Gold is now something you can hold in a portfolio, like any financial asset. Lots of investors have chosen to do so. The SPDR Gold Shares ETF has assets of $40 billion, and similar ETFs around the world have another $10 billion. (See pictures of black gold...
Feoktistov stayed with the Soviet space program after his return to Earth, helping to design its later fleet of ships, including the elegant Mir space station. Like only a handful of other cosmonauts and astronauts, he lived to see a crater on the moon bear his name. And like too many of them--the Deke Slaytons and Gus Grissoms and Wally Schirras and others--he now passes into celestial memory...