ASU Prof Denied Tenue Due to Pregnancy

When English professor Kathryn Milun first came to Tempe to teach at Arizona State University, she considered it her dream job, a great place to live, to work, and finally a great place to earn tenure, the thing all teachers secretly and not-so secretly yearn for. Job security, academic freedom, one can hardly blame them. Well, something happened to Professor Milun along the tenure track. Milun got pregnant. And as a result, she was not able to fulfill the necessary requirements to obtain tenure within the six-year time frame she was given when she first signed her contract at Arizona State.

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My 3 Favorite Beers

These are my three favorite beers, Guinness, Samuel Adams Boston Ale, and Pilsner Urquell.

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History of the Coffee Break

The roots of the modern coffee break dates back a century when social reformers and labor leaders were attempting to introduce such workplace reforms as minimum wage and workers' compensation. Two of the reforms that were adopted were a mid-shift break and the creation break rooms where employees could get away from the job for a short while. At some point, employees starting using this break time to indulge in a cup of coffee, hence the popular contemporary term "coffee break."

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Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus

Alexander Lukashenko is the greatest living President in the world today. The President of Belarus, who won a landslide victory in 2006 to earn his third term in office, Lukashenko has proven to be a truly inspirational leader in the areas of democratic reform and national security, both in his own country and internationally.

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Franz Kafka, a Prague Writer

Franz Kafka was a novelist, whose major works are universally considered to be among the most important of the 20th century.

His novella "The Metamorphosis" and his novel "The Trial" are required reading at nearly every university.

When he died at the age of 40, however, Kafka was basically an unpublished author. Most of his work was never finished and not published until after his death.

Born in 1883 into a middle-class Jewish family in the Jewish ghetto of Prague at a time when Prague was an administrative outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kafka grew up speaking German in a city whose inhabitants mostly spoke Czech. This relationship, being a cultural and linguistic outsider in the city of his own birth, informs the sense of isolation and hopelessness that pervades his written work.

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Famous People from Winnetka, IL

Winnetka, Illinois, an affluent bedroom community located about twenty miles north of downtown Chicago, may be best known as the setting for the NBC television drama, Sisters, and for being one of director John Hughes’ favorite towns for location shooting (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Uncle Buck, The Breakfast Club, and Sixteen Candles were all shot in Winnetka), but Winnetka has also been the hometown of some very well known people.

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A Neighborhood Guide to Prague

The Czech capital city of Prague, like any older city, can best be described as being a mosaic whose parts are made up of its neighborhoods. Not every neighborhood in Prague is discussed here, but only the ones that a traveler may visit or an English speaking person might want to find home.

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U.S.S. Cassin Young: WWII History in Boston

Boston, Massachusetts is, of course, full of history, and any casual visitor to Boston can easily find Colonial history, Revolutionary history, as well as history from the Federal and Victorian periods of the 19^th century. But what may surprise you is the fact that Boston also has a strong World War II history, and it is best experienced by visiting the U.S.S. Cassin Young, which is docked at the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston Harbor.

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New York Beyond the Travel Guide

As any visitor to New York knows, there is no shortage of things to see and do in New York City. From Times Square, to the Empire State Building, the great museums, the Statue of Liberty, and the Brooklyn Bridge, to name just a few, New York has a seemingly endless number of interesting sites. But for the traveler that has seen all the major sites, or maybe just for the traveler who wants to get away from the crowds of tourists, there are a lot of sites in New York that rarely make into the average travel guide.

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The Best Tex-Mex in Boston

When you're in downtown Boston, and you're looking for no frills Tex-Mex cuisine at very good prices, there's only one place to go, Fajitas & Ritas, located just one block from the famous Boston Common.

A popular destination for office workers who are not dining on the company expense account, local university students, frugal diners, and aficionados of Tex-Mex cuisine, Fajitas & Ritas doesn't bother with anything that is not important. Diners fill out their own order forms, individual napkins have been replaced by rolls of paper towels. The dining area is a mix of booths and tables that have seen better days. The décor is simple, and the lighting is dark. There is nothing extra.

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American Cajun and Tex-Mex Cuisine in Prague

If you're wandering the Center of Prague in search of a restaurant that resembles something like you'd expect to find in America, there is a place for you, Red Hot & Blues, located less than ten minutes from the Old Town Square by foot.

Like many restaurants in Prague, the size of the Red Hot & Blues is deceiving when first entering. In the first section of the restaurant, there is a bar and about a dozen tables. But simply keep walking around the bar, and you'll eventually find the real restaurant. You'll be surprised to see how large it is. The ambiance is very casual, almost thrown together. But it's very friendly and lacks any pretension. There's no need to feel self-conscience if you're not dressed in your best or if you're a little weary from sight-seeing.

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How to Make Friends in Prague

Some of the best memories that travelers have are those of times when they had a chance to meet some of the local people, spend some time with them and enjoy their company. In many places, this can be difficult, and the Czech Republic is one of those places. There are many reasons for the divide that exists between Czech people and tourists, but it is a divide that can be overcome. Below, I discuss three things a visitor can DO to meet Czech people in Prague.

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Mistakes Visitors Make in Prague

When visiting the Czech city of Prague, interacting with the locals can be a little frustrating. You not only have linguistic and cultural differences to overcome, there are unseen barriers. And it is these barriers that usually prove to torment the visitor. Here, I have provided you with three things you should NOT do and why.

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Skoda Auto Deals with Labor Issues

As Americans are coming to grips with its declining auto industry and attempting to seriously debate the issues of immigration and labor, it is interesting to take a look at how a plucky little car company in the Czech Republic is managing to boost both sales and profits while also having to deal with an intense labor shortage. The name Skoda Auto is a familiar one in the United Kingdom and Europe in general, but in the U.S. it is a complete unknown. Located in Mlada Boleslav, about forty-five miles from the capital city of the Prague, Skoda manufactured its first car in 1905 and is presently a member of the Volkswagen Group.

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Cambridge, MA; Harvard, MIT, & More

Located across the Charles River from its better known neighbor Boston, Cambridge, Massachusetts, a city of about 100,000 people, has been diligently carving out and maintaining its own identity for almost 400 years. Known as "America's First College Town," and home to both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge is truly a unique city with plenty of history, culture, refreshment and shopping for any traveler.

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Montreal's Churches: Where Faith, Beauty, and History Meet

One of the first things any visitor to Montreal notices is the literal plethora of its grand churches, cathedrals and basilicas. In the French language, Montreal has a nick-name, la ville aux cent clochers, which translates as "the city of a hundred bell-towers." American author and raconteur, Mark Twain once remarked of Montreal, "This is the first time I was ever in a city where you couldn't throw a brick without breaking a church window."

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Vaclav Havel to Premier New Play

It has just been recently announced that Vaclav Havel, the former President of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic will be returning to his first love, the theatre, for the first time in 18 years when a new play of his called Leaving will make its international debut sometime this year at a theatre in Prague that has yet to be determined.

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Hotel Ostel: East German Nostalgia

There's a new hotel in Berlin, Germany that not only offers the traveler a bed for the night, but a chance to experience a little time traveling. The Ostel is the latest effort by some former residents of the collapsed German Democratic Republic to take a nostalgic look at the Communist era and recapture some of the benign elements of life in communist East Germany.

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Recent Coyote Attack Highlights Problem

The news in Arizona has been filling up with so many stories of coyote attacks over the course of the last couple of years that it's threatening to drop from the news because these attacks have nearly become a daily occurrence. One of the recent stories involved a dog named Lexy (yes, after the car). Lexy was being taken for a walk by its owner in a well-to-do residential area of Phoenix, when out of the blue, Lexy found itself in the grasp of a coyote and fighting for its life. Thankfully, Lexy's owner had Lexy on a leash and was able to pull Lexy away from coyote while threatening the coyote at the same time. Lexy survived the encounter in tact, if not battle scarred.

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The Homes of Nathanial Hawthorne

Nathanial Hawthorne is generally considered the first truly great writer of literature in America. His novels such as The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables, The Blithesdale Romance, and The Marble Faun set the bar for 19^th century literature. Born in Salem, Massachusetts on July 4, 1804, Hawthorne lived most of his life in Massachusetts, and thankfully for the "literary tourist," four of the homes that Hawthorne lived in are today house museums open to the public.

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Literary Houses of Massachusetts

Massachusetts is well known for it Revolutionary history, but it also has a strong literary history, and this history can be experienced by the literary traveler today by visiting the historic house museums of some of America's greatest writers. Briefly reviewed here are the homes of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Emily Dickinson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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Literary House Museums of Concord, MA

The city of Concord, Massachusetts boasts of the being the most historic city in America. Most people know of Concord's place in the American Revolutionary War, the Battle at the North Bridge and the Shot Heard Round the World. But what many people don't know is that Concord has an equally strong literary history. From Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau to Louisa May Alcott and Nathanial Hawthorne, Concord has been home to and has influenced some of the greatest writers in American letters. And fortunately, for us, their homes survive today and are open to the public.

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Arizona's Chase Park

Chase Park in Phoenix, Arizona opened ten years ago and is the home of the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball franchise. It is a "modern-traditional" ball park, a style that became popular after the success of Camden Yards in Baltimore. Chase Park, however, is unique because of the special challenges posed by playing baseball in the Arizona summer. And the best way to learn about it is to take a tour of the ballpark. They are given daily, year round.

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Majerle Knows Sports Bars

When you're in downtown Phoenix and you're looking for an affordable sports bar where you can watch the game, drink some beer, and perhaps have a burger or sandwich, Majerle's Sports Grill is probably the place for you. Located in the historic Fry Building (dating to 1891, it is the oldest commercial building in Phoenix) less than two blocks from the U.S. Airways Center, home to the Phoenix Suns basketball franchise, it is named for Dan Majerle, who played for the Phoenix Suns in the late 1980s-early 1990s and proved to be one of the Suns' most popular players. Majerle is today a part-time color commentator for the Phoenix Suns.

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Sheriff Joe Arpaio Bans Inmate Mail

Arizona's favorite sheriff, Phoenix's Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, has proven yet again that tough sheriffs can get even tougher. The self-proclaimed "America's Toughest Sheriff" and author of the self-congratulatory autobiography America's Toughest Sheriff: How We Can Win the War Against Crime, has recently decided that mail delivery is not only not a prisoner's right, it's not even a privilege.

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Is Moscow the Most Expensive City?

When I saw the headline I couldn't believe it. "Moscow Ranks As World's Priciest City." The AP dispatch begins like this, "Moscow is the world's most expensive city for the second year in a row, thanks to an appreciating ruble and rising housing costs, a new survey reports." I have yet to travel to Moscow, and while I have known that things are changing in Moscow, from what I've been reading, I would have never imagined that it could possibly be more expensive than New York or London or Tokyo.

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Mozart Visits Prague

Most casual listeners of Mozart know that he was from Salzburg, Austria, and that he moved to Vienna as a young man in order to pursue musical fame. But what most people don't know is that Mozart had a very special relationship with the city of Prague, Czech Republic. Beyond his well known Symphony No. 38, which is commonly called the Prague Symphony, and Mozart's famous quote, "The people of Prague understand me," Mozart always felt a kinship with the Bohemian people of Prague. This, despite the fact that Mozart only spent about 110 days of his life in Prague over the course of three visits.

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Beer Drinkers Fear Sale of Budweiser Budvar

Last week, the European Beer Consumers Union (EBCU) held a press conference to denounce the idea of privatizing the Czech state-owned brewery, Budejovicky Budvar, brewer of the popular export beer, Budweiser Budvar (Czechvar in the United States). Basically, their only argument was that they feared that the quality of the beer may suffer as a result. And why? Because the brewery will clearly be purchased by the American brewing giant Anheuser-Busch, brewer of the beer that much of the world knows as Budweiser, within in the next year or two. They offered no evidence as to why the quality would suffer as result of Anheuser-Busch purchasing the brewery. Only inference.

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Searching for Isabella at the Isabella Gardner Museum

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts is one of the most unique art museums in the world. The museum, which contains nearly 3000 works of fine art from many of the world masters, was opened in 1903 and doubled as the private residence of Isabella Stewart Gardner, herself. The home was designed by her (with an architect), and each and every work of art was collected by her and located in the museum personally by her. The museum is her very personal gift to the world.

And a fun way to appreciate the personal side of the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum is to go in search of the " Isabellas," and other references to the name Isabella.

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Two Churches From Revolutionary Boston

Though sometimes confused by tourists visiting Boston, the Old North Church and the Old South Meeting House, despite their cosmetic similarities, cannot be more different. Their histories, architecture, and the roles these two churches played during the period of the American Revolution offer interesting insights to the conflict that would break out into war in 1775.

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Two Boston Churches by H. H. Richardson

Henry Hobson Richardson is, without argument, one of the most important architects in American history, and in Boston, Massachusetts, there are two of his most historically significant churches, the Trinity Church on Copley Square and the nearby First Baptist Church.

You can read about them HERE>>>