A Business Plan For My Small Business - 2600 Words

This is a business plan for my small business called ‘ Molecule, The Modern Patisserie’. Molecule is a patisserie that has a combination of classic patisserie and a modern patisserie. The patisserie combines the techniques of classic techniques with modern methods, today’s culinary experience is all about preservation and knowledge and that what Molecule is all about. The Business plan will show Molecules mission statement, the tools that we will use, the competitive advantage to our competitors, the competitive market, the Marketing program and evaluation and control of the business. Mission Statement: ‘Molecule, The Modern Patisserie’ the idea behind Molecule was to revolutionize modern patisserie using modern techniques with classic recipes. Molecule is a patisserie that runs like any kitchen, but with desserts, we want to bring the customers closer to their desserts as to show them what goes into making these extraordinary items. People often get scared when they hear ingredients with big names or names that they cannot pronounce and that turns them off to trying and experimenting with these, but Molecule hopes to break this gap and create a bring. Molecules design is set up to create a relationship between the Chefs and the customer, a see through glass window from where customers can peep through and see what’s being done and how they are being done and the intricate details that goes into making of certain things. Molecule brings a combination of science and artShow MoreRelatedThe Key Elements Of A Successful Business1423 Words   |  6 Pagesto do my res earch in small business. I want to know what it takes to build a successful business. What are the skills needed to start a new business? What are some of the steps to building a business model and plan? I am working on getting my degree in business. 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Sunshine Chapter 6 Free Essays

string(55) " It was not one of our finest mother-daughter moments\." PART TWO It might not have been too bad, afterward, except for two things. The nightmares. And the fact that the cut on my breast wouldn’t heal. We will write a custom essay sample on Sunshine Chapter 6 or any similar topic only for you Order Now That’s nonsense, of course. If I’d been able to face being honest, there was no way it wasn’t going to be bad. I suppose I didn’t realize how rough I was that first morning. After I had one bath I had another. (Bless landladies with absurdly huge water heaters.) I washed my hair three times during that first bath and twice during the second. Hot water and soap and shampoo hurt like blazes, but it was a wonderful, human, normal, this-world sort of hurt. Getting dressed wasn’t too difficult because my wardrobe specializes in soft, well-worn, and comfortable, but finding shoes and socks that didn’t feel like they were scarifying my poor feet with steel wool was hard. Then I drank a pot of very strong tea and on the caffeine buzz I almost half convinced myself that I felt almost half normal and if I felt half normal I must look half normal. Wrong. At the last minute I didn’t burn the dress. I put it in the sink with some handwash stuff and then hung it in a corner with a bowl under it to drip dry. It leaked thin bloody-looking water and this made me so queasy I almost screwed it up to be burned anyway. But I still didn’t. I did burn the underwear I’d worn. It was like I had to burn something. I took it out – nearly on tiptoe, clinging to the shadows, as if I was doing something illicit I might be caught at – and stuffed it into the ashes and wood chips on Yolande’s garden bonfire heap. My hands shook when I struck the match, but that might have been the caffeine. It burned surprisingly well for a few scraps of cloth, as if my eagerness to see something go up in smoke was itself inflammatory. I stuck that note in a drawer so I didn’t have to see or think about it. Or about who had written it. The house key that had been a jackknife lay on top of a pile of books next to the sofa. It had been one of the first things I’d seen when I’d managed to lever myself upright. I had done all of this other stuff – wash, rewash, inject caffeine, set fire to things – while not deciding what to do about it. It wasn’t that an extra house key was an enormous problem. But it was a house key that had been a pocket-knife. Was supposed to be a pocketknife. And I missed my knife. I wanted it back. And there was only one way to get it back, which would remind me of all that stuff I was working on forgetting. I had returned to the world where I made cinnamon rolls and was my mother’s, not my father’s, daughter, and I wanted to stay there. I had opened all the windows, and the door to the balcony; I wanted as much fresh air as I could get. I wanted no faintest remaining scent here of anything that might have come back with me last night. The blanket that had covered me was soaking in the tub. I had brushed the sofa within an inch of its life, with a whisk broom that would take the hide off an armadillo. The cushion I had had my head on had spot remover troweled over it and was waiting to dry. I stood on the balcony, closed my eyes, and let the sun and the soft breeze move over me. Through me. I heard – felt – the leaves of my tree stir and rustle. My grandmother had taught me that if you handle magic, you have to clean up after yourself. Just like washing (or burning) your clothes or troweling spot remover on a sofa cushion. I went back indoors to pick up the house key that shouldn’t be left a house key. I knelt on the floor inside the balcony door, in the sunlight, near enough the open door to smell the breeze from the garden. It was so easy this time. I felt the change, felt the key slip from keyness to knifeness. It was like kneading dough, feeling the thing become what you want it to be under your hands, feeling it responding to you, feeling it transform itself as a result of your effort. Your power. Your knowledge. I didn’t like it being easy. But I liked having my knife back. It lay in my hand, looking like it always had. â€Å"Welcome back, friend,† I murmured, and refused to feel silly for talking to a jackknife. Maybe I was talking to myself too. Then I put it in my pocket and went to look for incense. I never use incense in my life as a coffeehouse baker – I much prefer the smell of fresh bread – but it was one of those things that people who need to give you something but haven’t a clue who you are give you. My aunt Edna, my mother’s other sister, every year at one solstice or another, gives me a packet of the current hot fashion in incense. So there was probably some lurking in the back of a cupboard somewhere. There was. I lit a wand of World Harmonics Jasmine and put it in a glass and said the words my grandmother had taught me. I didn’t have to remember them, they were right there, like my tree. Then I called the coffeehouse to tell them I was back, and all hell broke loose. Especially after Mom belted out to my apartment when I explained I didn’t have a car any more, to pick me up, and got her first look at me. I won’t go into a lot about that. It was not one of our finest mother-daughter moments. You read "Sunshine Chapter 6" in category "Essay examples" I did go to the doctor because everybody said I had to. The doctor said there wasn’t much wrong with me but minor dehydration and exhaustion, gave me a tetanus shot, and some cream to put on both my feet and my breast. He asked me how I’d got the cut on my breast because as he put it, in that portentously unruffled and infuriating way of doctors, â€Å"It looks a bit nasty.† But I hadn’t decided how much I was going to tell anyone, and having had everyone who had seen me so far freaking out (except the doctor, who was doing portentously unruffled like a kick to the head) wasn’t helping. So I said I didn’t remember. He said â€Å"mm hmm† and put some stitches in so it would heal neatly, muttered something about post-traumatic shock syndrome, offered me a reference to someone who could talk to me about remembering and not remembering, and sent me away. Mel had brought me. He borrowed Charlie’s car so I didn’t have to ride p illion on a motorcycle. (I hadn’t known Mel could drive a car. He drove his motorcycles in all weather, including heavy snow and thunderstorms.) And he brought me back. To the coffeehouse. The thought of going back to my apartment was only fleetingly tempting. I wanted to return to my life, and my life, for better or worse, was in the coffeehouse bakery. Also, I wanted to get the freaking out over with so that I didn’t have to keep coming back to it, and I knew Mom wasn’t through yet. Charlie had nearly had to tie her up to let Mel take me to the doctor. Mom is a bit prone to overreacting. But Mel, when he first saw me, turned haggard, and his eyes seemed to go about a million miles deep, and I suddenly felt I knew what he was going to look like when he was ninety. And he didn’t say anything at all, which was probably worse than the noise everyone else was making. Mom tried to insist that I stay at the house – move back in with her and Charlie and my brothers. I said that I would do nothing of the kind. I meant it, but I was a little hindered by the fact that I no longer had a car. (They never did find my car. I had liked that car.) That afternoon, after talking to the doctor and about forty-seven kinds of cop, Mom and I had a big shouting match that I didn’t have the strength for, and I burst into tears and said that I would walk home if I had to and then Mom started weeping too and it was all pretty ghastly. Charlie at this point reminded Mom in a reasonable facsimile of his normal voice (he kept starting to pat my shoulder and then stopping because I’d told him, truthfully, that I was sore all over) that there was no longer a bedroom for me: the spare bedroom and den had disappeared when Charlie knocked all the downstairs walls out, and Kenny had moved out of the boys’ bedroom into my old bedroom upstairs. This o nly made Mom cry harder. Then Mel, who had been left more or less singlehanded to run the coffeehouse while all the drama went on in the office, began collaring the staff who had crammed into the office door to watch and be a kind of Greek chorus of horror, and one by one heaving them physically toward what they ought to be doing, like minding the customers, before they all came back to see what was going on too, which, given Charlie’s kind of customers, they would be quite capable of. When he’d forged his way through to me, he handed Charlie the spatula he was still holding in his other hand, like the relay runner handing on the torch at Thermopylae, and said, â€Å"Can you hold the kitchen a minute?† and hustled me off to the bakery. My bakery. Just standing in my own domain again, where I was Queen of the Cinnamon Roll, the Bran Muffin, the Orange-Date Tea Bread – the Caramel Cataclysm and the Rocky Road Avalanche – made me feel better. I had to cancel the immediate impu lse to put on a clean apron and check my flour supply. It was far too clean in here for a Thursday†¦ â€Å"Nobody’s been in here while you’ve been gone. We gave Paulie the time off.† Paulie was my new apprentice. I had stopped crying for the moment but this made my aching eyes fill up again. â€Å"Oh†¦Ã¢â‚¬  â€Å"Hey, we didn’t know what to do. No Carthaginian idea.† Mel sounded grim but studiedly calm. For the first time I had some glimpse of what it must have been like for everybody here when I disappeared. I wasn’t the disappearing kind. They would have feared the worst. It was the right response. And given what could have happened, I probably looked a lot worse than I was, so everybody was taking one look at me and fitting this vision against what their dreams had been churning out the last two days. â€Å"Sweetheart†¦Ã¢â‚¬  I stiffened. â€Å"Hey. Sheer. This is me, okay? I saw you not taking the name the doctor wanted to give you about someone to talk to. You don’t have to talk to me unless you want to. Or anyone else, including Charlie and your mom. But if you tell me what you do want, I’ll help you make it happen. If you’ll let me.† Thanks to all the gods and angels for Mel. I couldn’t explain that while yes, I’d always been a bit solitary, a bit disinclined to talk about what mattered to me, about what I was thinking about, it was crucial that I be able to go home, to my home, my private space, now. Alone. Where I didn’t have to lie. I hadn’t forgotten nearly as much as I was pretending I had. Mind you, I’d forgotten a lot. Post-traumatic whatsit, like the doctor said. The cops mentioned post-traumatic whatsit too. I had to check in with the cops because Mom and Charlie had, of course, reported me missing. I said that I’d driven out to the lake Monday night and didn’t remember anything after that. No, I didn’t remember where I’d been. No, I didn’t remember how I’d got home two days later. No, I didn’t remember why I was so beat up. Mel went with me for that too, even though he was pretty allergic to cops. (Charlie, trying to make a joke, said that he hadn’t done so much cooking for years, and did I want Mel to take me anywhere else? Florida? The Catskills?) And the cop shrink they made me talk to had to go into it again. The gist is that you only remember what you can bear to remember. If you’re lucky, as you get stronger, you can bear to remember a little more, and eventually you get round to rememberin g all of it and by remembering it then it can’t mess up your life. That’s the theory. Fat lot they know. I didn’t say â€Å"vampires† to anyone, and I sure remembered that much. If I had said it, SOF wouldn’t have just talked to me, they’d’ve kept me. People don’t escape from vampires. I wasn’t going to think about how I’d escaped from vampires – let alone tell SOF about it – so let’s just pretend I hadn’t escaped from vampires. Post-traumatic shock, phooey. Seemed to me the trauma was trotting right along with me, like a dog on a leash with its owner. I was the dog. I had to talk to SOF, because anything mysterious might be about the Others, and SOF were the Other police. But I told them I didn’t remember anything too. By the time I talked to SOF I was getting good at saying I didn’t remember. I could look ’em in the eye and say it like I meant it. They were cleverer about questioning me. They asked me stuff like what the lake had looked like that night, where exactly I’d sat on the porch of the cabin. They weren’t trying to trick me; they were trying to help me remember, possibly to our mutual benefit, trying to help me find a way in to remembering. I pretended there was no door, or if there was one, it had six locks and four bolts and a steel bar and it had been bricked over years ago. It was easier, saying I didn’t remember. I walled it all out, including everybody’s insistent, well-meaning concern. And it turned out to be easy – a little too easy – to burst into tears if anyone tried to go on asking me questions. Some people are mean drunks: I’m a mean weeper. The first days started passing and became the first week. The bruises were fading and the scratches skinned over, and I began to look less like hell on earth. On the second Monday movies night at the Seddons’ after my return, people began to make eye contact with me again without looking like it was costing them. And I was making cinnamon rolls and bread and all like a normal crazed coffeehouse baker again, thus deflecting poor Paulie’s imminent nervous breakdown. He was going to be good, but he was still new and slow from lack of experience, eager to gain that experience, he’d been several weeks going through the wringer, or the five-speed industrial strength mixer, with me, and then I disappeared and everybody was barking at him because his presence reminded them that I wasn’t there, and sending him home. I wanted to cheer him up, so I let him in on the secret of Bitter Chocolate Death and he made it, beautifully, first time. This bucked him up so much he started humming while he worked. Gah. It was bad enough having someone in the bakery with me some of the time, so I could teach him what to do and keep an eye on him while he did it: humming was pushing it. Was it absolutely necessary to have a cheerful apprentice? Charlie found someone who could loan me a car till I could replace the one they never found, and then found another one when the first one had to go back. The insurance took forever to cough up but it did at last. Their agent wanted to complain about my not remembering exactly what had happened, but he was promptly inundated by people from Charlie’s, staff and regulars, offering to be character references, the doctor I’d seen and the cop shrink I’d seen said I was genuine, and then Mom started writing letters. The company might have held out against the rest, but no one resists Mom for long when she starts one of her letter-writing campaigns. During borrowed-car gaps Mel gave me a lift on his motorcycle of the week (favors don’t get much more serious than giving someone a ride at four a.m.), and then I started using Kenny’s bicycle. Kenny was at an age when bicycles are deeply uncool and he didn’t miss it. Downtown where the coffeehouse is is a drag on a bike, cars and buses first run you off the road and then leave you asphyxiating in their wake, but it’s nice out near Yolande’s and bicycling helped make me tired enough to sleep through the nights. Although it meant getting up at three-thirty to get in in time to make cinnamon rolls. Which is ridiculous. Also, Mom was having kittens about my riding a bike after dark (or before sunup), and she was perhaps not entirely wrong about this, even if she didn’t know why, and even though there was no record of anyone ever being snatched off a bike in New Arcadia. There was no record of suckers at the lake either. So I did buy another car. The Wreck. It ran. I bought it from a friend of Mel’s who liked tinkering with cars the way Mel liked tinkering with motorcycles, and the friend guaranteed it would run, just so long as I didn’t want anything fancy like a third gear that was there all the time, or a top speed of over forty. It suited me fine. I didn’t feel like getting attached to another car, and the sporadic absence of third gear was an interesting diversion. The doctor took the stitches out of my breast. My feet healed. Life started to look superficially normal again. I took a deep breath and asked Paulie how he’d like to get up at four in the morning once a week to make cinnamon rolls. He was delighted. Another head case joins the inner cadre at Charlie’s. He chose Thursday. I now had two mornings a week I didn’t have to get up before sunrise. Theoretically. I didn’t tell him what if he was paying attention he already knew, that the coffeehouse schedule was a thing that happened on paper and never quite worked out that way. But letting him think he got to choose should be good for morale. His morale. And even an unpredictable series of fours in the morning I didn’t have to get up at was going to be good for my morale. Aimil and I started going to junk and old-books fairs again. And when I went hiking with Mel we didn’t go out to the lake. Not being able to decide what to tell anyone about anything had become the habit of not telling anybody anything. The funny thing was that the nearest I came to telling anyone was Yolande. There was something about the way she put me in a chair and made pots of tea and sat with me and talked about the weather or the latest civic scandal or some book we had both read, and not only didn’t ask me anything but didn’t appear to be suppressing the desire to ask me anything either. The second nearest I came was one night with Mel, when I woke up out of one of the nightmares, and was out of bed and across the room before I had registered that the body I had been in bed with – had had my head on the chest of – had a heartbeat. Mel didn’t say anything stupid. He sat up slowly, and turned the light on slowly, and made me a cup of tea slowly. By that time I was no longer twitching away from every shadow but I was too pumped with sick adrenaline to sleep. Mel took me downstairs and put a paintbrush in my hand. Every now and then he got talked into doing a custom job on one of the bikes he’d rescued. I had laid down primer and first coats for him a few times, and buffed finishes, but that’s all. That night he had me filling in the outline of tiny green oak leaves. When I had to stop and get ready to report for cinnamon roll duty I felt almost normal again. No, not normal. Something else. I felt as if I’d accidentally re-enter ed my grandmother’s world, where I didn’t want to go. But if that was where I had been, it had done me good. I wondered who the bike was for, why they wanted an oak tree. Mel would never do the standard screaming-demon thunderbolt-superhero sort of thing, all jaw and biceps and skeggy-looking flames, and one of the few little dumb things that would ruffle that calm of his was the sight of a bike decorated with a flying sorcerer, but a tree was a†¦well, a funny symbol for something with wheels that was built to go lickety-split. Or look at it another way. The main symbolism around trees is about their incorruptibility, right? Their immunity to all dark magic. This is not something you expect your average biker to be deeply interested in. I felt a little breeze – Mel had opened a window – heard leaves rustle. It hadn’t occurred to me that my secret tree might be, say, an oak, or an ash, a beech, some particular kind of tree that related to a tree I might find in an ordinary landscape. I didn’t want my grandmother’s world to have anything to do with this one. I didn’t want what had happened to me at the lake to have anything to do with this world, this ordinary landscape. I laid my paintbrush down and went and stood with Mel by the open window. After the first week or two of armed and sizzling silence after the argument, and all messages passed through pacifist intermediaries, Mom had started giving me charms. She’d turn up at the coffeehouse at about eight in the morning with another charm done up in the standard charm-seller’s twist of brown paper. I didn’t want them, but I took them, and I didn’t argue with her. I didn’t say anything at all except (sometimes) thank you. Mom and I hadn’t gone in for light conversation in years, since it never stayed light, between us. I did things with the charms like wrap them around the telephone at home, to soften any bad news it might be bringing me, or drape them round my combox screen, ditto. This kind of abuse wears charms out fast. I’m not a big fan of charms – barring the basic wards, which I admit only a fool would dispense with, fetishes, refuges, whammies, talismans, amulets, festoons, or any of the rest, I can do without ’em. They take up too much psychic space, and the sooner these new ones crashed and burned the sooner they’d stop bugging me. But Mom was trying to behave herself, and the charms seemed to relieve her feelings. Once I had a car again I started stuffing them in the glove compartment. They didn’t like it, but charms aren’t built to quarrel with you. The mark on my breast, which appeared to have closed over, cracked open again, and oozed. It was nearing high summer by then and I, who generally wore as little as decency allowed because it got so hot in the bakery, was suddenly wearing stranglingly high-necked T-shirts. You can’t ooze in a public bakery. I went back to the doctor and he said â€Å"hmm† and had I remembered yet how I’d gotten the cut in the first place. I said I hadn’t. He gave me a different cream for it and sent me home again. It seemed to heal for a while and then cracked open again. I grew clever about taping gauze over it and ripping the armholes out of my high-necked shirts and wearing lurid multicolored bras – fortunately there was a vogue on for lurid multicolored bras – so it looked like I was merely making a somewhat unfortunate fashion statement. Mel knew better, of course, and if it hadn’t been for him I would have stopped going to the doctor, but Mel was a stubborn bastard when he wanted to be and he wanted to be about this, drat him. So I had to go back again. The doctor was starting to worry by now, and wanted to send me to a specialist. A specialist in what, I wanted to say, but I didn’t dare. I was afraid I’d give something away, that my guilty conscience would start oozing through the cracks somehow, like blood and lymph kept oozing through the crack in my skin. I refused to see a specialist. Some cop or other came by the coffeehouse at least once a week â€Å"to see how I was doing.† Any of our marginally half-alert regulars knew the Cinnamon Roll Queen and chief baker had been absent a few days under mysterious circumstances and that whatever had happened to her was still casting a pall over the entire staff at Charlie’s. That was everybody. And our SOF regulars are better than half alert or they wouldn’t be working for SOF. So I had cops coming in and our SOFs watching the cops and the cops watching our SOFs. It should have been funny. It wasn’t. I think Pat and Jesse actually suspected the truth, although I don’t see how they could have. Maybe they thought it was ghouls or something, although ghouls don’t generally have the foresight to, like, store a future meal. But something had happened and the law enforcement guys wanted to get out there and enforce something. They weren’t fussy. If it was people, the cops were hap py to do it. If it wasn’t people, SOF was happy to do it. But I was supposed to choose my dancing partner and I wouldn’t, and this was making the troops restless. I did notice the difference between the people who were really bothered for me, or for the sake of the society they were paid a salary to keep safe, and the people who wanted to know more because it was like live TV or those cheesy mags with headlines like I ATE MY ALIEN BABY. Fried, with a side salad and a beer. The most serious drawback to the telling-nothing approach is that it made that much more of a mystery of what had happened, and the nature of gossip abhors a vacuum of the unexplained. This meant that soon everybody â€Å"knew† that whatever had happened did indeed involve the Others, because that made a better story. I think they would have liked to assume that it involved the Darkest Others, because that made the best story of all, except that, of course, I was still here, and nobody escaped from vampires. Nobody escaped from vampires. I didn’t know if the everybody who knew this included SOF or not, but I could hardly ask. Meanwhile there were the nightmares. There continued, relentlessly, to be the nightmares. They weren’t getting any better or easier or rarer. There’s not that much to tell about them because nightmares are nightmares on account of the way they feel, not necessarily by the mayhem and the body count. These felt bad. Of course they always had vampires in them. Sometimes I was being stared at by dozens of eyes, eyes that I mustn’t look into, except that wherever I looked there were more eyes, and I couldn’t shut my own. Sometimes there was just the knowledge that I was in a horrible place, that I was being contaminated by the horrible place, that even if I seemed to get out of it I would take it with me. The nightmares also always had blood in them, one way or another. Once I thought I had woken up, and my bed was floating in blood. Once I was wearing the cranberry-red dress and it was made of blood. But the worst ones were when I was a vampire myself. I had b lood in my mouth and my heart didn’t beat and I had strange awful thoughts about stuff I’d never thought about, that in the dream I would think I couldn’t think about because I was human, and then I’d remember I wasn’t human, I was a vampire. As a vampire I knew the world differently. I told myself that those two days at the lake were just something that had happened. That’s all. The dreams were like the wound on my breast: my mind was wounded too. The bruises and scratches were the superficial stuff: of course they healed quickly. And everybody dreams about vampires; we grow up dreaming about them. They’re the first and worst monster that lives under everybody’s bed. You do get mad Weres or a demon that’s tired of passing for human and not being able to do the less attractive demon things, but mostly it’s vampires. I never dreamed about†¦The funny not ha-ha thing was how hard I was trying to forget about him too. He’d saved my life, sure, but he’d destroyed my world view in the process. The only good vampire was a staked and burned vampire, right? So what if he’d shown a little enlightened self-interest about me – as well as having a sense of honor straight out of some nineteenth-century melodrama with dueling pistols and guys who said things like â€Å"begone varlet,† which was how I’d lived long enough to present him with an opportunity to display enlightened self-interest. He was still a vampire. And everybody he’d†¦my brain wouldn’t go there†¦was still dead. To put it another way: the loathly lady was still a loathly lady, she hadn’t been cured by whatever, and there was no reason to suppose she wasn’t going to go on eating huntsmen and their horses and hounds, and probably the occasional knight who didnâ⠂¬â„¢t give her the right answers as well. I didn’t think there was a word for a human so sicko as to rescue a vampire, so he could go on being a vampire, because no one had ever done it. Before. When I woke up out of one of these nightmares I didn’t dare go back to sleep again. And they kept coming. So after a few weeks I segued from being flipped out and exhausted by what had happened to being flipped out and exhausted from being flipped out and exhausted. During this first time in my life I didn’t want to read lots of news reports about Other activity, there seemed to be more of them around. Some of it was okay. There was another long heated debate – as a result of some statistical review stating that the numbers of those afflicted were rising – about whether incubi or succubi were living or undead, which is an old argument but no one has ever settled it. The obstacle to scientific study is that the moment the psychic connection is cut your object of investigation disintegrates, and by seizing one of the things for scientific study you are ipso facto severing the link. At least until the global council decides it’s okay to keep a human being as a thing-thrall, which is at present even for purposes of pure research highly illegal, although the official language talks about corporeal and noncorporeal subjugation. The reason it’s such a hot topic is that while incubi and succubi are a relatively small problem, some people think that finding out how they work would give us a handle on vampires, which is absolutely number one on everyone’s l ist about Others, and the medical guys can cure someone who has been a thing-thrall, which isn’t an option with vampire dinners. Well, usually they can cure someone who has been a thing-thrall, if they haven’t been one for too long. There was a project drawn up not too long ago with a list of volunteers to be thing-thralls but that never got off the ground, maybe partly because the ‘ubis like choosing their own prey and bait on a string doesn’t interest them, but mainly because there was this huge public outcry against it. Mind you, you have to wonder about the volunteers. ‘Ubis may be a bigger problem than anybody knows because thing-thralls are usually having a very good time and it’s their loving friends and families (sometimes their pissed-off colleagues) that start to wonder why they’re sleeping twelve or fourteen hours a day and spending the rest of the time looking like they just had amazingly terrific sex. Nobody knows whether thing-thralls really are having sex with their things either, or whether they only think they are. But even the best sex your nerve endings can be made to imagine they’re having has to be balanced against the fact that your IQ tends to drop a bout one point for every month you’re a thing-thrall. The cleverer ubis cut and run before the brain drain gets obvious, and a lot of people aren’t using their brains to begin with and don’t miss them. But sometimes it’s too late for the thrall to have any future more intellectually demanding than night shift shelf restocker. There is a bagger I know at our local Mega Food who had been New Arcadia’s top criminal defense lawyer before an ‘ubi got him. I used to read the reports of his courtroom antics and thought being a thing-thrall had improved his personality beyond recognition, but it had knocked hell out of his career prospects. There was a series of articles about how many different kinds of Weres there are, another favorite topic. Wolves are the famous one, of course, but they’re actually comparatively rare. There are probably more were-chickens than there are were-wolves, which if you’re asking me explains why comparatively few Weres go rogue as against, say, how many demons. And possibly why the black market in anti-Change drugs is so slick, although the idea of black marketeers with either a sense of humor or of compassion is maybe stretching it a little. More likely the were-chickens will pay anything for the drugs, and do. But there are were-pumas, for example, and were-bears. Were-coyotes are enough of a scourge that the SOFs go after them and do a horrible sort of mop-up about once a year. Were-raccoons are nasty little beggars and were-skunks are, well, beyond a nightmare. Get a were-skunk mad at you and your life isn’t worth living. There’s a special flying SOF unit for were-skunks. Every city over about a hundred thousand has a SOF were-rat unit, speaking of horrible mop-ups. New Arcadia has one. But according to Pat and Jesse you can stay one jump ahead (so to speak) of all the Weres, even the rats, as long as you don’t get careless. Nobody ever stays a jump ahead of vampires. Maybe because there was all this other stuff about the Others, and because, of course, I wanted not to be noticing, I ignored for a while that there were more local stories about vampires. Sucker sightings, sucker activity, which is to say fresh desiccated corpses, aka dry guys. As I say, New Arcadia is pretty clean, but nowhere is really clean of vampires. And so I didn’t notice right away – who wants to notice bad stuff happening next door? And even if it was happening, it didn’t mean it had anything to do with my little adventure. I could ignore it if I wanted to. †¦That we are both gone will mean that something truly extraordinary has happened. And it almost certainly has something to do with you – as it does, does it not? – and that therefore something important about you was overlooked. And Bo will like that even less than he would have liked the straightforward escape of an ordinary human prisoner†¦ The coffeehouse is in the old downtown area, called Old Town now. It had been a pretty grotty place when Charlie’s first opened, and he catered to grotty people, figuring that everybody has to eat. Since he apparently didn’t do anything – including, I swear, sleep – in the beginning but run the coffeehouse, he could do everything himself, including cook from scratch. He didn’t even have a regular waitress the first couple of years; the kitchen, such as it was, was lined out along the fourth wall. This kept his overheads low, and I’ve already said he’s a good cook. The cleaner and more lucid of his grotty clientele began to bring their less grotty friends there because of the food. When Mom and I moved in two blocks away the gentrification had only just begun – begun enough that Mom wasn’t totally stupid to move in – but there were still drunks and hype heads on more corners than not, and Ingleby Street was still al l old-books shops, the kind where walking in the door puts you at immediate risk of being crushed to death by a toppling pile of crumbly yellow magazines no one has looked at in fifty years. (This nearly happened to me when I was twelve, and the owner was so relieved I wasn’t going to tell my mom on him – my mom even then had a local rep as someone you didn’t mess with – that he gave me a great deal on them instead. This motley assortment included an almost unbroken run of Vampire Tales and Other Eerie Matters from the sixties, which among other Other things included the first serial publication of the early, less controversial volumes of Blood Lore. I was already Other-fascinated, but this may have confirmed the disease.) When I was still in high school the city authorities got really excited because New Arcadia was going to be on the post-Wars map. This was partly because we’d had – comparatively – quiet Wars, so most of the city was still standing and most of its occupants were still sane, and partly because our Other Museum by the mere fact that it was still there had become nationally and perhaps globally important. I had never liked it myself; the exhibits for the public were real lowest-common-denominator stuff, and you had to have six PhDs, no dress sense, and a face like a prune to get into the stacks or any of their serious holdings, which included stuff you couldn’t get on the globe-net. You could say my nose was out of joint. I was going to like it even less if it was going to swamp us with the kind of loony-tune academic that specialized in Others, but the city council thought it was going to be totally thor. One of their bright ideas about raising Old Town’s attractiveness level, since we were inconveniently close to the museum, was to dig up all the paving and put down the cobblestones that the city authorities had dug up seventy years ago to put down paving, and replace the old (and, by the way, brighter) street lamps with phony gas lamps with electric bulbs in them. Then they stuck a raised flower bed in the middle of what had been the road, and made it a pedestrian precinct. The old-books stores left and the antique shops and craft boutiques moved in, and for a while there Charlie and Mom were thinking desolately about trying to relocate the coffeehouse because we didn’t want to learn to make Jackson Pollack squiggles out of raspberry coulis, thank you very much. And if the taxes went up as predicted they would have to sell the house even if they kept the coffeehouse, which they probably wouldn’t do either because they wouldn’t be able to bear putting up t he prices enough for the sort of hash and chili and chicken pot pie and succotash pudding and big fat sandwiches on slabs of our own bread menu that we do so well – this was before my bakery was built and so before we were also known for toxic sugar-shock specials – to keep us in the black. Our regulars wouldn’t be able to afford it, even if the new upscale crowd wanted to eat retro diner food, or we wanted to serve it to them. Meanwhile the pedestrian precinct seemed to be pretty well shutting down our trucker traffic, and Charlie’s has had truckers from its first day. There used to be a joke that a New Arcadia route trucker wasn’t the real thing till he could get his rig within two blocks of Charlie’s. But it turned out there were more of the old grotty people still clinging on than anyone realized – well, we realized it, because most of them ate at the coffeehouse (including the better class of derelicts who knew to come to the side door and ask for leftovers), but we thought the Rolex shiny-briefcase thugs would drive them out. Only it was the Rolex shiny-briefcase thugs that eventually left. So the old grotty people are still here, and the coffeehouse is still here, and Mom and Charlie still live around the corner, and most of the antique shops have subsided or are subsiding more or less gently into junk shops again, and some of them are beginning to have piles of old books in the corners, and most of our truckers still come in the back way, although they can’t get within two blocks any more. And when the city in disgust told us to mind our own flower bed because they weren’t going to do it any more, Mrs. Bialosky, who is one of our most stalwart and ubiquit ous locals, organized working parties, and nearly every year since then our flower bed wins something in the New Arcadia neighborhood gardening festival, and I like to think I can hear the sound of city authority teeth grinding. Mrs. Bialosky owns a narrow little house on the corner of Ingleby and North where she can keep an eye on almost everything that happens, and the two-seater corner booth just to the right of the front door of Charlie’s also belongs to her in all but real estate contract, and woe betide anyone who sits there without her permission. Mrs. B, by the way, is suspected of being a Were, but there is no consensus on a were-what. Guesses range from parakeet to Gila monster. (Yes, there are were-Gilas, but not usually this far north.) For the most part our neighborhood is a good thing. Who wants to be dazzled by Rolexes and aluminum briefcases every time you want to have a quiet cup of tea sitting on the wall around the award-winning flower bed? I’ll take the odd wandering vagrant any day. But it means that if you’ve got vampires moving in from the outside they’re going to move into our neighborhood before they move into a neighborhood like the one the city authorities had planned for us. Suckers don’t like their food in a bad state of preservation any more than humans do, but our population is predominantly sound and healthy, just not very well-off or important. Furthermore, when the city went into its snit about our bad attitude, they had finished tearing out all the old streetlights but hadn’t finished putting in new ones, and since then they keep claiming they can’t afford to finish the job. Some of our shadowy corners are really very shadowy. And then one of the dry guys turned up on Lincoln Street, less than three blocks from Charlie’s. You might think the neighborhood would shut down, everyone staying indoors with the doors locked, iron deadbolts stamped with ward signs and shutters hung with charms, but far from it. Charlie’s was hopping the next evening, and since Charlie himself would almost rather die than turn away a customer – not because he always has his eye on his profit margin (Mom would say he never has his eye on his profit margin), but because a hungry and thirsty person must always be treated kindly – we had people leaning against the walls and outside against the front window. Maybe they were crowded a little closer than usual under the awning, where the coffeehouse lights were bright. Our dopey fake gas lamps dotted around the square looked even more pathetic than usual, but you’re pretty safe if there’s enough of you. Even a serious vampire gang won’t tackle a big group of humans without an extremely good reason. But it was just as well no fire inspector ca me out for a stroll that night and checked the numbers against our license. Although the local fire inspector was an old friend of Charlie’s, and would have stopped for a glass of champagne and a chat. Things got really exciting when the TV van showed up. I was in the bakery, feverishly turning out whatever-took-the-least-time to feed the extra people, but I heard the commotion and Mary put her head in long enough to tell me what was going on. â€Å"I’m not here,† I said. â€Å"If it comes up.† She nodded and disappeared. But too many other people knew I was there. I’d been interviewed – or rather they’d tried to interview me – right after it happened. SOF is supposed to â€Å"cooperate† with the media, but I know Pat and Jesse are in a more or less continual state of pissed-offness because someone is forever leaking more stuff from their office than they feel anyone but them needs to know, but their boss, or rather their sub-boss, widely known as the goddess of pain, refuses to try to shut it down, so they are stuck. In this case it meant that it had got leaked that SOF was very interested in whatever had happened to me, even if I hadn’t given them any reason to be interested, and even though apparently nothing else had happened since (if I’d developed a rider, like an incubus, or a hitch, from a demon having me on a tether, there are signs, if you’re looking). So now Mr. TV Roving In Your Face Reporter, exploring neighborhood response to a suck er in our midst, wanted to interview me, and at least eight people had told him I was on the premises. Mom, for good or bad, had gone home; she hates packed-out nights and in theory we didn’t need her. She would have given Mr. TV Pain in the Butt Interviewer something to think about. It mightn’t have been such great publicity for Charlie’s but we don’t really need to care what local TV thinks of us. Charlie is great at blandishing. Few people can resist him when he’s in Full Blandish. But he’s nowhere near as good at getting rid of assholes as Mel is, and it was Mel’s night off. Charlie came back after a while and asked if I could bear to come out and be stared at. â€Å"You can say no a few times and come back here; I’ll keep ’em out after that. But if you’d be uncooperative in person first it would be easier.† Charlie knew I hated the whole business, which I did, but that wasn’t the real problem. The ever-ready-for-fresh-disasters media guys had walloped my bruised and messed-up face onto TV seven weeks ago, though I’d refused to talk to them. I don’t suppose I could have stopped them even if it had occurred to me to try. I’d thought about it later. I hadn’t wanted to, but I did. Did vampires watch local news on TV? Seven weeks ago they might still have been prying up floorboards for where I might be hiding. Most of what goes on TV, even on local TV, gets archived on the globenet within a few weeks. And vampires use the globenet all right. Some people believe vampire tech is better than human. I went out front like Charlie asked. Mr. TV was there with his camera slave, half Quasimodo and half Borg. Mr. TV had amazing teeth, even for a TV presenter. â€Å"I don’t have anything to say,† I said. â€Å"Just come outside a minute, where we can get a clearer shot,† said Mr. Teeth. I wondered if vampires ever got their teeth capped. I went off on a teeny fantasy about specialist fang caps. Probably not. â€Å"You don’t have anything to get a clearer shot of,† I said. â€Å"Oh now you want to leave that up to us,† said Mr. Teeth, grinning even wider. He put his hand on my arm. â€Å"Take your hand off my arm,† I said. I had meant to sound huffy but it came out sounding like a person about to fly into the ozone and loop the loop. Damn. Mr. Teeth dropped my arm but his eyes (and his incisors) glinted with increased interest. Damn. He made a gesture to the slave, who raised his camera and pointed it at Mr. Teeth. I heard him start in with the TV introduction voice but there was a ringing in my ears. The scab on my breast started itching fiercely. I kept my hands clenched at my sides; if I scratched it it would start to bleed, and if it started to bleed it would leak through, and I didn’t want the Contusion That Wouldn’t Go Away to be on the eleven o’clock news too. Seven weeks ago I’d been home from the doctor for the first time and bristling with stitches (for the first time), which had been part of the shock effect of my appearance, since they showed. Back then while I hadn’t exactly been aiming for the Frankenstein look it hadn’t occurred to me I had anything to hide, and I didn’t want the little stubbly ends catching on my clothing. I had been avoiding thinking about any implications in a sucker victim found three blocks from the coffeehouse, as I had been avoiding noticing there was more local sucker activity at all. If I’d been avoiding it less hard, it might have occurred to me that some kind of news gang would turn up to pry a few ravaged expressions and maybe if they were lucky some sign of an incipient crack-up out of some of the natives. (Possibly not realizing that Old Town always had natives on the brink of a crack-up.) The police hadn’t identified the body yet – they called it â€Å"the victim† – and nobody at the coffeehouse was missing anyone. Vampire senses are different from human in a number of ways. The one that is relevant in this case is that landscape which is all one sort of thing is†¦more penetrable†¦to the extent of its homogeneity†¦ I had no idea what the homogeneity of TV broadcasting might be from a vampire perspective. I didn’t want to know. The camera swung to point at me. I raised a hand against it. â€Å"No,† I said. â€Å"But – † Mr. Teeth said. He was trying to decide whether more smiling was called for or if he should try a frown. I put up my other hand, blanking out most of the lens. Quasi-Borg said, â€Å"Okay, okay, I get the idea,† and let the thing sag. If it was still taping it was getting a good shot of a dirty apron, purple jeans, and red sneakers. Mr. Teeth, the mike still glued under his chin, said, â€Å"Miss Seddon, we only want a few words with you. You must understand that the assaults on any human by the Others are always of first importance to every other human, and it is the duty of a responsible media that we report anything of that sort as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Miss Seddon, a man died here.† â€Å"I know,† I said. â€Å"Fine. Go report it.† Mr. Teeth looked at me a moment. I could see him deciding on the hard-man approach. â€Å"Miss Seddon, it is very plain to many of us that whether you wish to discuss your experiences or not, you too have been a victim of an Other attack, and the fact that a mere few weeks later a vampire victim should turn up near your place of employment cannot be considered insignificant.† â€Å"Two months,† I said. â€Å"Not a few weeks.† â€Å"Miss Seddon,† he said, â€Å"do you still deny that you were set on by Others?† â€Å"I don’t say anything one way or another,† I said. â€Å"I don’t remember.† â€Å"Miss Seddon – â€Å" â€Å"She’s told you she has nothing to say to you,† said Charlie. â€Å"I think that’s enough.† He was so rarely hostile I almost didn’t recognize him. In the back of my mind, a thought was forming: if he can get rid of a tanked up six-and-a-half-foot construction worker with a few friendly words, which he can, and if he just failed a few minutes ago to get rid of a tanked-up-on-his-own-importance TV asshole because he had been unable to get confrontational about it, what does it mean that he’s suddenly feeling so antagonistic toward Mr. Responsible Media Reporter now? I didn’t like the answer to that question. It meant that he thought Mr. Responsible Media – and our suddenly over-watchful Pat and Jesse and their friends – were right about what had happened to me. How could they tell? I hadn’t said anything. And nobody gets away from†¦they couldn’t think it was vampires. Mr. Responsible Media was looking rebellious, but this was my country. I was Cinnamon Roll Queen and most of those assembled were my devoted subjects. â€Å"Hey, leave her alone, man,† said Steve, idly rolling up to stand next to the counter stool he’d been sitting on. Steve isn’t major league tall, but he is major league in the looming unspoken threat department. Things had gone kind of quiet in the last few minutes while everyone watched me refuse to be interviewed, and now they went quieter yet. One or two other people – that is to say, guys – stood up, just as idly as Steve had. I was suddenly glad it was Mel’s night off after all; under the good-old-boy exterior he had a temper on him, and he’d been feeling kind of protective of me lately. Over Mr. Responsible Media’s shoulder I met Jesse’s gaze. He and Pat and John were sitting squashed together at a two-person table. I could see by their stillness that they werenâ €™t standing up†¦and I didn’t have to think too hard to figure out that this was because they knew Mr. Responsible Media would recognize them as SOFs and they were giving me a break. Because they knew I needed a break. Oh skegging damn. â€Å"All right, all right,† muttered Mr. Responsible, and he waved at his camera slave, and they left the coffeehouse reluctantly. â€Å"Thanks,† I said to everyone generally. I patted Steve’s hamlike shoulder on my way back to the bakery (and sent him three cranberry and sprouted wheat muffins via Mary, which were his favorite) and didn’t come out again till closing, although Mary came in a few times to tell me what was going on. She had her break in the bakery too so she could tell me in detail about the interview Mr. Responsible had had with Mrs. Bialosky, who knew how to play an audience. She’d learned a lot in the years of running our flower bed, and she’d never been somebody any sane person would want to jerk around. Mary had me laughing by the time she had to go back to work. Jesse came in right after Mary left. It was like he’d been listening at the door. He stood there looking at me. I went on hurling large spoonfuls of batter into millions of muffin cups. Muffin cups in my bakery were real sorcerer’s apprentice material, like the dough for the cinnamon rolls every morning could have stood in for The Blob. â€Å"There isn’t room to hang around back here,† I said. There wasn’t, although people often did. It was illegal to have customers back here, but the local food inspectors were all Charlie’s friends, just like our local fire inspector was. We’d had the head inspector’s daughter’s fifteenth birthday party here about six months ago: the story was that the coffeehouse was the compromise reached between the party her parents wanted her to have and the party she wanted to have. I made six chocolate chip layer cakes for the event (and chocolate butter alphabet cookies to spell out HAPPY BIRTHDA Y CATHY over the frosting, because I don’t do fancy decorating, life is too short), and they were all gone that evening. Some of her friends were still coming back. I was going to need a second apprentice if Charlie’s became a haunt of teenage boys. â€Å"Mary was in here for fifteen minutes.† How to cite Sunshine Chapter 6, Essay examples

What Dont you Know free essay sample

I dont know you. I dont know what you would do with a million dollars, or why your fears are so daunting. I dont know if the things that you should be doing are interfering with things that you want to be doing, or the other way around. In those final hours, will you pray to a God, or face the great unknown with individual meaning? I do not know if you could take a life. I do not know what your future holds. I cannot know all that you dream at night. But I do know that you and me, I and I, are connected in every way. I cannot know all that I dream at night. I dont know what my future holds. I dont know if I could take a life. In those final hours, will I pray to a God, or face the great unknown with my own meaning? I dont know why my fears are so daunting, or what I would do with a million dollars. We will write a custom essay sample on What Dont you Know? or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page I dont know if the things that I should be doing are interfering with the things that I want to be doing, or the other way around. I dont know myself.

Sociology of Religion

Sociology helps people answer a lot of questions about the specifics of their interactions and the development of their community. Religion reflects the people’s visions typical for this or that social group. From this point, religion becomes the object of the sociologists’ study in order to explain the characteristics of the people’s interactions in relation to their religious beliefs and attitudes to the sacred.Advertising We will write a custom essay sample on Sociology of Religion specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More That is why, religion should be discussed as the social phenomenon which is typical for the definite religious group because religious groups differ in their visions and beliefs, and this fact influences the development of society significantly. Thus, the sociology of religion studies religion in its connection with the society and the people’s dependence on the definite religious beliefs a nd attitudes to form and develop their community. From this perspective, the sociology of religion is the specific sphere of knowledge in relation to which sociologists examine people’s religious beliefs, their sacred practices and attitudes in their connection with the social development. Sociology of religion is studied with the help of the methodological framework used in sociology that is why researchers are interested in the empirical information associated with the religious issues, people’s religious visions and practices. Thus, Johnstone determines the characteristic feature of this filed of knowledge which is in the fact that â€Å"the sociology of religion is conducted according to the scientific method† (Johnstone 6). The next important feature of sociology of religion is the discussion of religion as the social phenomenon in spite of the fact people are inclined to discuss the religious beliefs as the part of their personal life (Putnam and Campbell) . It is necessary to pay attention to the fact that both visions are relevant because according to Johnstone, â€Å"religion is a response to both individual and group needs† (Johnstone 38). Religion can be discussed as the reflection of the individual’s attitudes to the sacred, but the subject matter of studying sociology of religion as the sphere of knowledge is religion within the society. Moreover, religion cannot exist without its connection with society because it emerges as the result of the people’s interactions with each other. The subject of the sociology of religion is important because it is impossible to discuss religion without its references to society and to study society without concentrating on the people’s religious beliefs.Advertising Looking for essay on religion theology? Let's see if we can help you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More To develop successfully, religion should be based on the patterns and prin ciples which are typical for the evolution of the society, on the particular features of the social interactions. Thus, â€Å"society precedes religion. Before religion can develop, there must first exist general patterns of social interaction – that is, a society – that can serve as a model† (Johnstone 30). This statement can be discussed as the reason to support the idea that this subject is really important. Furthermore, sociologists study religion as the key aspect of the people’s development because religion exists within the society during a long period of time, and there are few situations when societies could reject their religious views even when the necessity of such rejection was imposed on them with the help of the political strategies. Sociologists began to focus on studying religion within the field of sociology not long ago. There were numerous attempts to examine religion in its connection with the social development and impact on the soci ety. Johnstone stresses that â€Å"the persistence of religion in its various forms has finally forced sociologists to renew the effort †¦ of attempting to understand the nature and function of religion† (Johnstone 19). Today, the sociology of religion is discussed as the independent sphere of knowledge operating the techniques which are typical for sociology and examining the notions which are characteristic for the religious studies. The moral presumptions, religious visions, attitudes to the sacred, religious practices and rituals followed by the representatives of the definite religious community can help make the necessary conclusions about the characteristic features of this social group. That is why, the studies in the context of the sociology of religion are important for sociologists. The sociological knowledge depends on examination of the people’s beliefs and visions which are different in various religious groups or social communities. The religious ri tuals and practices which are followed by the representatives of these groups reflect not only their attitude to the sacred but also provide the people’s vision of the general world picture and the community’s goals. To study the group dynamics, it is important to refer to those religious beliefs and attitudes which are promoted by the group representatives (Johnstone 2). Thus, the world can be perceived at different levels, and religion reflects the particular features of the people’s perception of the surroundings and of the sacred and magic at one of these levels. From this point, sociology of religion is important to provide the complex picture of the public’s vision of the world and the people’s role in it.Advertising We will write a custom essay sample on Sociology of Religion specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More To understand the role of the religious visions in constructing the society, it i s important to study the sources and nature of religion as a phenomenon. There are a lot of theories developed by sociologists to explain the emergence of religion as the complex of definite beliefs and practices. However, there is the question about the reasons of choosing this or that religion. It is possible to discuss this choice with references to the rational choice theory. This theory is used in the economic sphere to explain choices which are beneficial for people. Following the scientific approach to discussing the concept of religion, the rational choice theory is effective to accentuate the aspects according to which the person is inclined to choose his or her religious path. Johnstone presents the definition of the rational choice theory according to which this theory deals â€Å"seriously with not only the persistence of religion but also the observation that some form of religion appears to be ubiquitous among societies, even if some individuals deny the validity of t he religions that surround them† (Johnstone 36). From this point, the decision to follow or not the definite religion is in the sphere of the people’s free choices. This theory is effective to discuss the notion of religion from the sociological perspective. People choose something rationally, and the rational choice theory accentuates the fact that religion is also chosen rationally, with references to the persons’ vision of benefits and previous experiences. Sociology of religion discusses a lot of controversial questions which are associated with the role of religion in the development of society, the connections between the public and religion, and the nature of religion as the social phenomenon which emerged as a result of the people’s interactions. The significant subject of study is the people’s religious beliefs, attitudes to the sacred and to the magic, religious rituals and practices as important spheres of the people’s personal and social life. Works Cited Johnstone, Ronald. Religion in Society: A Sociology of Religion. USA: Pearson, Prentice-Hall, 2007. Print. Putnam, Robert, and David Campbell. American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. USA: Simon Schuster, 2010. Print.Advertising Looking for essay on religion theology? Let's see if we can help you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More This essay on Sociology of Religion was written and submitted by user Ryleigh R. to help you with your own studies. You are free to use it for research and reference purposes in order to write your own paper; however, you must cite it accordingly. You can donate your paper here.

Remnants of the Romanticism Period essays

Remnants of the Romanticism Period essays Few people today give real and positive meaning to the word Romanticism, even though our country began with the romantic ideal of personal freedom. Our forefathers staked their very lives to pursue the romanticized dream of living their lives according to their beliefs, subject to no one else's. The weakness with Romanticism is that quite often when the ideal is achieved, the belief so strongly rooted in this Romanticism dies with that success or victory. Romanticism represents the beauty of a dreamer's wish for an ideal and beautiful world. Ironically, the expression and fulfillment of these ideas have quite often lead to conflict and war. The Holy Crusades, the French Revolution, our own revolution of 1776 as well as our Civil War are unfortunate examples of this. But, when their romantic ideals were tested under fire and blood, many found the cost of their beliefs to be far too high. Romanticism is faithfully situated neither in choice of subjects nor in exact truth, but in one's deepest feelings, emotions and ideas. When people look for it outside of themselves, they will only find romantic expressions and views of others, not their own. There are as many kinds of romance and beauty as there are ways of seeking happiness. This is clearly explained by the "philosophy of progress." As there have been as many ideas as there have been ways in which the people of the earth have understood ethics, love, and religion; so romanticism will not consist in a perfect performance, but in a generation comparable to the ethical disposition of the age. It is because some have located it in the perfection of technique, rather than within their own lifestyle, that we have had the embellishment of romanticism, without question the most intolerable of all forms. Thus it is necessary, first and foremost, to get to know those aspects of nature and those human situations that many artists of the past have disdained or have not known. ...

Controversial Issue Essay

Controversial Issue Essay Controversial Issue Essay Controversial Issue Essay: Making It Controversial If you always set one and the same question to yourself that is: why controversial issue essay again? we are going to answers your question. Controversial issue essay is the best exercise, which is only possible to invent for the proper process of studying. Controversial issue essay develops a lot of different skills and helps students to become more experienced in academic writing. Thus, controversial issue essay develop: analytical thinking skills perfect writing skills ability to have own opinions to all the possible problems excellent searching and analyzing skills the ability to work with facts, to analyze them and to use them for your sake. You see, that is why controversial issue essay is considered to be one of the favourite professors assignments: Preparation for Controversial Issue Essay Writing It is reasonable to get acquainted with the kind of controversial issue essay before starting to write your controversial issue essays. If speaking in a simple language, any of the controversial issue essays are the essays, which serve as a bomb. It is silent and quiet until it flashes. Each controversial issue essay is like a fire, like a hot spot, which makes people start debating. It should be emotional, burning, exciting. The main purpose of controversial issue essay is to convince people that your point of view is the only possible approach to the problem. Persuading is the only proper way of writing your controversial issue essay. A standpoint you deal with in your controversial issue essay should be supported by the authoritative facts taken from the authoritative sources. The more examples and proofs you present in your controversial issue essay the more persuasive it is going to be. Any controversial issue essay demands a lot of creativity from the writer. A common dull controversial issue essay is never going to be controversial. That is why in order to get the high grade for your controversial issue essay writing you have to make it hot, debating, and exciting. There exist a lot of different controversial issue essay techniques which can make a simple essay to be unusual and bright. Use them in your controversial issue essay and you will write an excellent work. Controversial Issue Essay Help If you need any kind of help or assistance with your controversial issue essay writing, you may bravely appeal to our custom essay writing service. We will support you at any stage of your controversial issue essay writing and give you some useful pieces of advice. Read also: Business Ethics Paper Term Argumentative Term Paper Analysis Term Paper 250 Words a Page Term Paper 15 Page Term Paper

Stock Market Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Stock Market - Essay Example Disclosure is called for to be simultaneously carried out to all investors and therefore, nobody should profit from usage of such information before it reaches the public domain. Information cannot be said to be price-sensitive if it’s not factual or specific. Examples may include: Financial information about profits and losses, figures of sales of a company, take over bids information, big buys or disposals of shares by large shareholders, among others. The rules governing the London stock exchange stipulate that any price-sensitive information should this be made publicly available in the reasonable time so as to have a similar influence on the investors’ decision. (Graeme Pietersz, 2009) This is going to be a study related to price-sensitive information and its set out to answer, comprehensively, the question, â€Å"How has price-sensitive information evolved and how has it influenced the stock markets in U.K and U.S?† Use of price-sensitive information was legal, but before 1980. It could be applied by employees and people with close connections to a company. This resulted to insider trading because there was asymmetric information usage. Banning of insider dealings is seen as a later issue. Until 1980, insider trading was not a criminal offence. (Chadwick et al, 2002 p152) People convicted for breaking the insider trading rule are required under IDA 1985, to be sentenced for up to six months imprisonment of be fined an amount not more than the statutory maximum or in other cases both. If convicted under the crown court the person may be sentenced for up to seven years or affine that’s not limited or in other cases both. Since the 1985’s IDA Act, however, the record of enforcement is dismal. Conviction rate is said to be at low levels where about 50% have been convicted on this rules breaking. Low levels of conviction have been blamed to the so strictly set

Peer to Peer Networking In Business Research Paper - 1

Peer to Peer Networking In Business - Research Paper Example Peer to Peer Networking in Business Chapter 1 Introduction Background Peer to peer networks have attracted a significant amount of attention in the press as popular network architecture and this brings the need for a clear understanding of this application. Peer to peer (P2P) technology has seen an increase in usage since 21st century with both beneficial and destructive practices depending on which end of technology one is at. Millions of people are routinely trading in this digital in search of audio files, video, software, music games, and movies thanks to P2P technology. The increase in demand of the users and businesses is initiating the need for exploring the ways in which this digital content can best satisfy human wants in business to achieve maximum profitability. It is clear that p2p systems can either create or destroy huge amounts of contents depending on various conditions of use during file sharing process thus should be monitored keenly. The technology is beneficial to business development and application due to good profit returns and the ease associated with it use. P2P file sharing is important application in the conventional world following office application and business ethics in terms of benefits for business ideas and business ethics in terms of infringement of other people’s rights. ... Moreover, this technology can also be used in business to lower the cost of computing power following its capacity to enable parallel processing of information. Since this is a new technology in business, it has its pros and cons considering the nature of its application that is unique to business. Legally, the issue of copyright infringement has been the debate concerning P2P, application that is viewed by some law enforcers to be copyright infringement. Statement of the problem A number of businesses are in the verge of boosting their sales and efficiency of their business models to achieve good profits and this call for technology application. This has prompted some business owners to apply the best and latest techniques in business application, which includes P2P networking in business to enable them, compete profitable with other firms. The increased application of P2P technology has seen many business firms on the wrong side of the law and thus the aim of research is to establi sh whether businesses are comfortable with P2P technology. Purpose of the study The legal and ethical issues, which arises from the continuous use of P2P technology needs a careful study aimed in justifying the application and the use of this new technology in business networking. The business people need to get approval from research if the benefit of P2P application outweighs loses so that they can continue with its application. Hypothesis The review of related literature shows that there is less need collaboration between the business owners, copyright owners and the legal fraternity. The collaboration should be aimed at enabling business owners to make profits using P2P in such a way

Language Essay Essay Example for Free

Language Essay Essay Introduction Language is universal way to express how a person feels. So of course, it is essential in cultures to express their individuality within life. Most of the time people do not put a lot of speculation on what mental processes may be taking place subconsciously. These mental processes allow a person to think, speak, and express their personal thoughts through language. In order to properly analyze that language, cognition must be a part of the mental processes too. In this essay, we will delve deeper into how language and cognition are associated. Language Lexicon Language is an efficient and consequential use of information, which can be both comprehended and used by all living things. It is also the communication of thoughts to language. According to Merriam-Webster (2014), cognitive psychology can be defined as, â€Å"a branch of psychology concerned with mental processes (as perception, thinking, learning, and memory) especially with respect to the internal events occurring between sensory stimulation and the overt expression of behavior.† Accordingly, when a person or animal learns to understand through the use of language, and with the capacity of that language, there can be a cognitive process that helps to separate humans from animals. Language is completely generative, dynamic, structured, and communicative. In language, a lexicon is known as the vocabulary or psychological language. A lexicon can hold many different types of words, which can also include how to pronounce a word, and the parts of speech for each word (Galotti, 2014). A lexicon is used to help a person understand words that are spoken, and their meanings. The spoken words are compared to a person’s lexicon, which is how a person can understand what the word is. It could be near impossible to understand a language or vocabulary without lexicons. The use of lexicons are a very important part of a person’s language. Key Features of Language There are many key features that make a language. The following are the main properties: generative, communicative, dynamic, and structured. Language is considered generative because, a person has an unlimited capacity as to how they build their personal languages. Language allows people to communicate with one another, and it also allows other animals to communicate within the same species as well. Language is dynamic because it is forever changing, and also develops people into having larger vocabularies. Lastly, the structure of language plainly shows exactly how convoluted it truly is. The great thing about language, is that it can adapt and expand as a person learns more information. New words can be added to a language or vocabulary, while others can be erased or updated (Galotti, 2014). Language development is different for each person. Some people are able to learn language through their cognitive functions, but sometimes, it takes more time. For an example, with children, they have to learn everything, which includes their own names, how they are feeling, how to express feeling, and objects. But they also have to learn how to use the vocabulary they are learning. Lastly, the feature that influences more cognitive processes, mainly languages that can influence thoughts. It works in a rotating structure, language helps to influence thoughts, and language also helps to regulates thoughts. A person always uses language in order to interpret their own thoughts. The main reason that language influences thought is because thoughts are when a person is consciously speaking to themselves. Levels of Language There are four different levels of language in reference to the structure and processing, phonemes, words, sentences, and texts. Phonemes are the tiniest part of sounds or units that can be used by people in order to form words. Phonemes are a person’s sounds of speech, which is similar to each letter in the alphabet. The main dilemma with phonemes are that each person’s creation of them are different. When a person studies phonetics, they are studying speech sounds and their physical properties. Words help a  person make sense of phonemes. Words are made up of by multiple spoken sounds. A sentence is, of course, a set of words which complete themselves. A sentence will also allow a person to organize their thoughts when they are preparing to speak, or to write something. A text helps a person connect sentences in order to form a small amount of information, or a paragraph. These usually help to explain a specific topic, and always have to be about one topic. All four of these structures are a crucial part of language. To put this more easily, phonemes lead to words, words lead to sentences, and sentences lead to texts (Galotti, 2014). Analyzing the Role: Language Process Cognitive Psychology In order to properly analyze the role of processing language, a person has to first understand cognitive psychology, to study mental processes. Mental processes give a person the ability to think, believe, perceive, solve problems, make decisions, remember, learn, reason, and adapt. By using these mental processes a person can begin to understand and comprehend language, and with that, the process of the language is used. If a person does not understand the language’s structure, that person will not have the capability to understand texts, sentences, words or phonemes, which all make up a language. With lack of perceptive abilities, a person may not comprehend language, with all of its entirety. Cognitive processes help determine how the language is processed within the brain. When a person begins to learn and understand language, the cognitive process is in use. Conclusion The cognitive process known as language drives a separation in between humans and other beings. The lexicon contains words in which people can use to compare other words or parts of speech. There are multiple key features of language. These key features, as stated above are, generative, communicative, dynamic, and structured. With all of these features, language can become very intricate. If a person were to completely understand each one of these key features, they will be able to understand and comprehend how necessary they are to be used within language. Also, it is crucial for a person to analyze the role that cognitive psychology plays within the process of language. Cognitive psychology is important in many aspects of a  person’s life, but especially in the language process. References: Cognitive Psychology. (2014). In Merriam-Webster. Retrieved from http://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/cognitive%20psychology Galotti, K. M. (2014). Cognitive Psychology In and Out of the Laboratory (5th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt Essay -- American History Presidents E

Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt Throughout the ages there have been many great leaders. These leaders are powerful in many ways, with a strong control over the people, and a place in history. But who would have guessed that two cousins would be some of the greatest government figures ever? Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt, both American presidents, both American Heroes. Without these dignitaries, the American advancement into the present day would be incomplete and/or impossible. They gave people hope through hard times and the spirit to protect their country and one another. â€Å" S p e a k s o f t l y†¦ C a r r y a b i g s t i c k † Theodore â€Å"Teddy† Roosevelt was born into a rich New York family in 1858. His childhood was filled with sickness. He soon became interested in wildlife and nature. In 1880 he graduated Harvard. Happy with his new accomplishments he took on a wife, Alice Lee Roosevelt. Unfortunately, his mother passed away on the same day as the marriage. Heartbroken, Roosevelt moved west to the Dakota territories to hunt and explore. His first marriage was over soon afterwards. A few years later he ventured to Paris, France were he met his second wife. Back in America the Spanish- American War for the Southwest was in formation. Roosevelt, wife and all, headed back home. Enlisted and prepared, Roosevelt headed South. On the path to victory, Roosevelt met up with Leonard Wood, together the created the Rough Riders Regiment (RRR). In 1898,the RRR, under the control of Roosevelt and Wood, lead the battle against San Juan, Puerto Rico to come out victorious. Both men returned home to a hero’s welcome happy to be alive. It was the dawning of the 20th century. William McKinley was President and Roosevelt: Vice President. Under McKinley, he learned about the responsibilities of being a president. Suddenly without warning McKinley was shot and killed. In 1901, at 42 Roosevelt became the youngest president to serve office. He disagreed with how the nation’s economy was being controlled by Big Business. In his term he set about â€Å"trust busting† by initiating some 40 lawsuits against big businesses. It was said once that while hunting, Roosevelt came upon a bear cub. Despite the demands of his hunting partners, Roosevelt refused to kill the cub. This story touched the heart of millions. Soon cartoon strips, newspape... ...ld War II. During the war years he had not appeared often in public, but during his campaign for a fourth term in 1944 many who saw him said that he looked pale, thin, and old. The election, which resulted in his victory over New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, was a strain on the president. In the early spring of 1945 he went to Warm Springs, Georgia, in an effort to recapture his flagging energy. There he died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945. In conclusion I believe that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a greater impact on the American Society than his cousin, Theodore Roosevelt. FDR did so much in his lifetime as president that without someone like him to get us through hard times like the Depression or World War 2, and supply new improvements in the way life is conditioned. We wouldn’t be as successful as we are today. Theodore Roosevelt was also a great man, I am not saying otherwise. But FDR has the addition of four presidential terms. In fact being the only president to carry out four terms he created the cause for the 22nd amendment even after death. In turn with the addition of these two men in history we have not only changed the world but ourselves.

Ping Sweeps and Port Scans Essay

Recently, it was brought to my attention that there are concerns about some activities on the network that can be considered less than trustworthy. Specifically, the concerns are regarding network traffic called ping sweeps and port scans. I’m putting together this paper to explain how ping sweeps and port scans impact our network traffic. First we must understand what these two things do before we can understand how they are used to impact a network. I’ll start with ping sweeps. A ping sweep is a signal that is sent to a range of machines on a network to simply see if there is a reply back. This is done via an ICMP Echo request that is sent to each machine. The ICMP Echo request is a signal sent out to an IP address requesting an answer back. More commonly known as a ping. The ping will wait for a response from any machine that is using the IP address specified in the ping and will let the person sending the ping know if the port the machine is using on the network is open or not. The ping sweep takes the ping to the next level as it will send these pings out to a large range of IP addresses requesting responses back. It lets the person sending the ping sweep know what machines are alive and what machines are off. It is an easy way for a less than scrupulous person to discover where they might be able to start an intrusion at. But please understand that ping sweeps are not just used by intruders trying to crash our network or other nefarious actions. Ping sweeps are also utilized by our own networking personnel for use in troubleshooting issues on the network. It’s is also used in resolving licensing issues as well. So not all ping sweeps are bad for the network. Port scans are a animal that takes ping sweeps to the next level. The goal of a port scan is to actually see a machine on the network by probing for machines. Of course, the machine must be powered on for the port scan to find it. When it does find a machine that is powered on, the port scan will start getting to work. The port scan will scan for a port on the machine once it’s discovered one. It will then determine what services are running on the port that it’s discovered. This is important to the intruder because it gives them the information they need to take over the machine running on the discovered port. The risk to our network from Ping sweeps port scans is minimal. We have several tools at our disposal that are currently acting to block external ping sweeps and port scans from intruding on our network. The biggest protection we currently have in place is our hardware and software firewalls. They are configured to help block incoming echo requests and protect unauthorized intrusions on our machines. With that being said though, we must always work with the assumption that we are vulnerable to attack. This is because every day somebody somewhere is trying to figure out a way to get past the current protection technology that is in place. No network on the planet is completely locked down from intrusion and there is no exception. Education is also the key to staying protected against intrusions. Automated updates are in place on all our security software so that we continue to stay up to date with our security patches. Continuing our education of the employees within the company on network security by providing the latest readings on threats or via monthly newsletters will also continue. This, I believe, will provide the heightened awareness desired and protect our information stored or shared on our network.

Gambling addiction in today`s society Essay

Have you ever gambled in your life? We live in a world where some form of gambling is within our grasp. It can be fun, exciting, and life changing. Some gamblers may say they have control of their gambling behavior; however, a lot of gamblers do not! Most of them lose so much. They lose their jobs, money, family, and friends. Since gambling has so much potential for abuse, external measurements must be put in place to prevent abusive gambling. Did you know Hawaii and Utah are the only 2 states that prohibit all forms of gambling? Gambling is betting money on any game or event. It takes a variety of forms, from nickel-and-dime poker to state-sponsored lotteries and casinos. Different forms of gambling are legal in different parts of the United States. In the early 1900s, most forms of gambling were illegal in the United States. However, legalized gambling has been on the rise since the 1950s. Casinos are establishments where people can place bets on games. They normally offer a variety of card games, dice games, and games of chance. In 1931, Nevada became the first state to allow casino gambling. New Jersey followed in 1978, making casinos legal in Atlantic City. In 2009, legal casinos were operating in forty seven states. Today, different states have different regulations on casinos. In some states, they are still prohibited entirely. In others, casinos may only be run on the water, like riverboat casinos. Casinos also exist on Indian reservations throughout the country. The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, passed in 1988, declared that Native American tribes have the right to run gaming establishments on their reservations, as long as they are in a state that permits some form of gambling. By 1998, nearly three hundred Indian-operated casinos existed in thirty one states. Casinos have generated wealth and increased employment rates among Native Americans. However, many Native Americans, especially older people, consider the casinos a threat to their traditional values and way of life. The newest form of casino gambling is the online casino, which allows players to place bets over the Internet. Online casinos raise complicated legal issues. For example, if casinos are only legal in certain parts of a state, is it legal to make online casinos available in other parts of the state? If players are placing bets on the outcome of a game in a real, legal casino in another country, does that mean they are actually gambling in that country and not in their homes? Because of these legal problems, American companies have been reluctant to invest in online casinos. Nonetheless, consumers spent about 3 billion dollars in online casinos in 2000. Further restriction on internet gambling came when Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006. The purpose of the law is to prevent the use of certain kinds of payment, credit cards, and fund transfers for unlawful internet gambling. Another common form of legal gambling is the state lottery. A lottery is a drawing in which people purchase tickets. A ticket number is selected at random and anyone holding a ticket with that number wins a cash prize. The first state lottery opened in New Hampshire in 1964. By 2009, lotteries were operating in forty one states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.