Chess Heart

the REAL how-to guide on surviving holidays!, Nov 15 2002

In their successful 1999 publication, "The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook", the authors Piven & Borgenicht gave us useful advice for surviving everything from a shark attack, to how to take a punch in the face with the minimum of injury. Now, as we swiftly approach the holiday season, they give us their latest work which focuses on holiday survival.

While you won't find information on how to safely jump out of a 2 story window into a trash dumpster, you WILL find information on how to gain control of a one-horse open sleigh, how to defend yourself against a charging reindeer and how to extricate yourself or someone else who is stranded in a chimney.

For the "rest of us" who… Read more

Back in the Belly of the Beast, Nov 4 2002

When we last left the Baudelaire orphans at the cliff-hanging ending of the 8th book in the Series of Unfortunate Events series, The Hostile Hospital, Sunny, Klaus and Violet were hiding in bullet hole-ridden trunk of Count Olaf's car on their way to parts unknown. As it so happens, the orphans are out of the frying pan into the fire in this new book, a phrase that herein means, "have gone from one bad situation where Violet was barely saved from certain unnecessary surgery, into a possible worse one by hiding in the trunk of the Count's car."

The count, as it turns out, is barreling off with his troope of odd characters to the tent of Madame Lulu the fortune teller, who lives far out in… Read more

Excellent examination of major, unspoken problems, Oct 26 2002

Anyone with children will realize that the Golden Age of Education is over. Gone are the halcyon days of elementary school where children were first taught how to be good human beings and live in a civilization, and academics came second. Now, with high-stakes testing and the punitive "No Child Left Behind" initive by the Bush administration (which is more accurately called "No Child Left Untested" by the author), testing has become paramount to just about anything else teachers do or have done in decades past.

Case in point: a school district in Michigan has a 539-page curriculum for PRESCHOOL. Student's ranking in schools and teacher's salaries are directly linked to one or two… Read more