Guest post: How can a self improvement book help you?

Source: http://www.nationalmssociety.org/chapters/NYN/chapter-news/chapter-news-detail/image.aspx?id=3128

Buying a self-improvement book is not difficult now. You can just have a look in the market and you may find numerous such books adorning the shelves of bookstores around the world. Considering the huge competition in every field today, people want to get successful and compete with each other as fast as they can. Self-improvement books help you to develop an all-round personality. If you really wish to get the information on the topics of your interest, then you need to search a suitable book for yourself. The book you buy should be easy and reasonable to understand.

Guest Post: Hollywood’s 5 Worst Movie Sequels

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Bruce Willis makes a comeback with another ‘Die Hard’ sequel. Though the iconic action sequences of the earlier films are present in this latest sequel, you cannot wonder whether it was necessary to make yet another movie with a tired old formula. Mind you, the box office collection record shows that the producers of the movie are laughing all the way to the bank. There are other examples like the ‘Harry potter’ franchise and the ever green ‘James Bond’ movies which in between them have grossed several billion dollars.

But not all the sequels of an original hit have been as successful. Of course, nobody intentionally wants to make a bad movie but some sequels seem utterly unnecessary and very inept. Here is the list of 5 such movies which suffered from a steep lack of quality from the original movie.

Guest Post: Movie Review – Tropic Thunder

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Directed by and starring Ben Stiller, ‘Tropic Thunder’ is a parody of what could happen during the making of a ‘Vietnam War’ story. Mr. Stiller plays the action star hero – ‘Tugg Speedman’, who is trying to keep his acting career alive as his previous movies have begun to lose their appeal with the audience. The storyline of this flick is based on a fictional book of the same name, Tropic Thunder. Steve Coogan who plays the role of the director, decides to submerge the spoiled actors into the thickness of the jungle to shoot the film as acting setbacks and budget losses force him to take control of the situation. This parody of film creation easily becomes a memorable one.

Guest Post – Romantic Fantasy Writing: How to get started?

Writing a novel involves weaving a story out of many details and pieces of information. However, it’s important to remember that with novel writing as well as weaving, the quality of the finished product depends entirely on the quality of content that goes into weaving it. If you prepare properly, provide adequate details and specifics and invest yourself into the art of creating the story; when it’s finished, it should all flow well and fit together beautifully. Romantic fantasy novels have gained popularity over the past few years. While romantic fantasy authors must follow the same guidelines as authors of historical romance or suspense novels, there are a few additional tips that they can benefit from.

Guest Post: Movie Review of ‘The Chinese Cat’

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I love old movies and I also love Netflix streaming. Thankfully, I can have the best of both worlds as Netflix continues to offer up more and more classic films for me to stream to my laptop or game console. One of my favorite classic comedy/mystery series is called Charlie Chan.

The main character in the Charlie Chan movie series is an Asian-American detective from Hawaii played by Sidney Toler. He is like Sherlock Holmes and can solve even the most difficult cases. In the film, ‘The Chinese Cat’, he teams up with his ‘number three son’ ‘Tommy’ (Benson Fong) and the African-American taxi driver ‘Birmingham Brown’ (Mantan Moreland) to solve a six month old murder case and two other mysterious deaths.

As the three travel through a funhouse they uncover the sinister plot behind the murders and solve a jewellery heist along the way. Full of humor and action, this flick and the others in the series are well worth watching.

Guest Post: Reward Yourself for Achieving Goals

Using a reward system of any kind can really help you to stay motivated and stick to whatever goal you are trying to achieve. Of course, it probably depends on what you are doing and what goals you have that will determine what type of reward and what sort of system you use.

Want to know the different kinds of reward systems others have come up with in order to come up with ideas of your own? Here are some ideas to help you begin brainstorming:

Guest Blog Post: Movie Review – The Experiment (Das Experiment)

The movie is anything but new as it came out in 2001. But I only saw it a week ago and it left me speechless (at least for one week; now I have my voice again and can’t wait to use it to tell you all about the film).

“Das Experiment” is a German movie by the director Oliver Hirschbiegel, starring the famous Moritz Bleibtreu – if you’ve seen at least a couple of German movies, you’d probably know this actor.

I love movies that start out interestingly and don’t have even one second of unnecessary dialogue, musical intermezzo or photo shoots which don’t add something of value to the atmosphere or plot. “The Experiment” is one such flick.

Guest Blog Post – Growing Gun Culture on College Campuses

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As noted in an earlier post, guns are inseparable from American culture. As the National Rifle Association (NRA) lobby rallies its pro-gun followers, it’s easier now than ever before for an average citizen to purchase a lethal weapon. This is a very problematic and disturbing trend in America, one that has reached new heights as more and more states now permit universities to allow students and professors to carry concealed handguns on campus.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, five states permit students by law to carry concealed guns on public college campuses, an increase of four states over the past two years. The push to allow guns on campus was sparked after a 2007 Virginia campus shooting. Those in favor of carrying weapons on campus cite that they want safer campuses, which allow students to protect themselves.

Guest Post: An Examination of the Open Education Revolution

For some time now, the world of higher education has been shifting and evolving. As the U.S. Ivy leagues demonstrate, secondary education was at one point heavily concerned with reputation and name recognition. While this certainly hasn’t changed completely, there has been a recent shift towards more open and accessible learning across the globe.

A college education has become more about each person obtaining the skills and information needed for a successful career than it is about attending the most prestigious school or graduating with the highest of honors. This trend, however, has occurred in many different steps and over a longer period of time. The first step toward “open” education was the broad acceptance of online learning and the online college classroom.

Guest Post – Book Review: Freakonomics

Authors: Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
Publisher: W.M. Morrow
Pages*: 207 (readable), 242 (actual)
*Anything past page 207 is just about citing sources and the index section.
Genre: Non-Fiction(?), Observational, Existential

The Premise/Plot

This isn’t exactly non-fiction in the sense that it’s the opinion of the two authors on things. The authors formula is to simply take seemingly mundane topics like education and religion and put in their unique spin on it. Hence the cover features an apple with a slice taken out of it only to reveal that at the inside it’s an orange. The book is structured in a way that you don’t have to read all of it; you can easily pick and choose which chapters you’d like to read. In the version I got (which I assume goes for all physical copies); the table of contents even gives you a brief description of each chapter. It is extremely compartmentalized, meaning that each chapter stands alone and there isn’t any reference to earlier chapters later on.