Profile of Serial Killer John Eric Armstrong

John Eric Armstrong was a 300-pound, former U.S. Navy sailor, who was known for being mild-mannered and who had an innocent child-like look, so much so, that while in the Navy he was nicknamed Opie by his mates. Armstrong joined the Navy in 1992 when he was 18 years old. He served seven years on the Nimitz aircraft carrier. During his time in the Navy, he received four promotions and earned two Good Conduct medals. When he left the Navy in 1999, he and his wife moved to Dearborn Heights, a working-class neighborhood in Michigan. He got a job with Target retail stores and later with the Detroit Metropolitan Airport refueling airplanes.   Those who lived around the Armstrongs thought of John as a good neighbor and stand-up guy who was a committed husband and devoted father to his 14-month-old son.   A Call to the Police Detroit investigators became suspicious of Armstrong after he contacted them in regards to a body he saw floating in the Rouge River. He told the police that he was walking on the bridge when suddenly he felt ill and leaned over the bridge and saw the body. Police pulled the body of 39-year-old Wendy Joran out of the river. Joran was known to the police. She was an active drug user and prostitute. Investigators noted that Jorans murder was very similar to a string of murders of prostitutes that had recently occurred. Police Suspect Armstrong Investigators looking into the possibility that a serial killer was murdering local prostitutes found Armstrongs walking along the bridge story to be highly suspicious. They decided to place him under surveillance. Once they had Jorans DNA and other evidence collected they went to Armstrongs home and requested a blood sample and asked if they could collect fibers from around his home and from the inside of his car. Armstrong agreed and allowed the investigative inside his home. Through DNA testing the investigators were able to link Armstrong to one of the murdered prostitutes, but they wanted to wait to get a full report from the testing lab before they arrested Armstrong. Then on April 10, three more bodies were discovered in various stages of decomposition.   Investigators set up a task force and began interviewing local prostitutes. Three of the prostitutes admitted to having sex with Armstrong. All three of women described his baby-like face and  the 1998 black Jeep Wrangler that Armstrong drove. They also said that after having sex, Armstrong appeared to go crazy and tried to strangle them. Arrest On April 12, police arrested Armstrong for the murder of Wendy Joran. It did not take long for Armstrong to crack under pressure. He told investigators that he hated prostitutes and that he was 17 years old when he first committed murder. He also confessed to killing other prostitutes in the area and to 12 other murders that he committed around the world while he was in the Navy. The list included murders in Hawaii, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Singapore, and Israel.   He later recanted his confessions Trial and Conviction In March 2001, Armstrong went on trial for the murder of Wendy Joran. His lawyers tried to prove that Armstrong was insane, but their efforts were unsuccessful. On July 4, 2001, Armstrong bargained down to a plea of second-degree murder, and as a result, he was sentenced to 31 years of life in prison for the murders of Brown, Felt, and Johnson. Altogether he received two life sentences plus 31 years as punishment for his killings. Armstrong later said that he began killing prostitutes after his high school girlfriend broke up with him for another man, who he claimed seduced her with gifts. He viewed it as a form of prostitution and began his killing spree as an act of revenge. FBI Launches an International Investigation The FBI continued to try to connect Armstrong to similar unsolved murders in countries such as Thailand, and all other places Armstrong was based while in the Navy.

War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength

1984 For as long as governments have existed, the people they ruled feared them. This fear and the desire to improve these governments have let to countless different attempts to perfect government. From the most liberal democracy to the most crushing dictatorship, governments have all faced some shortcomings. Because of the faults inherent in all governments, various types of governance have been the topic for many authors. The late novelist Ayn Rand wrote many books on the trouble that a socialist government could bring and espoused the virtue of individualism. She felt that by allowing government to limit our individual freedoms, we were sentencing ourselves to a certain death. She wrote that â€Å"We are fast approaching the†¦show more content†¦Another dominant example of irony is the Party’s slogan: â€Å"WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH† (Orwell 17). The slogan is an example of superficial verbal irony. However, upon clos er examination, it sheds more light on Orwell’s intent. By stating that â€Å"war is peace†, Orwell sends distinct messages to two vastly different groups. To the proles, the commoners, â€Å"war is peace† can be read at its most literal meaning, that there can one day be peace by defeating the enemy and securing victory. Despite the simple understanding the proles have of the slogan, those in the Inner Party, the group of people in charge of Oceania, have a much more devious understanding of it. To them, the slogan represents the shell game that they play with the common citizen. Much like the street gambler taking bets on which shell the rock is under, the Inner Party assures that the citizenry is focused on whatever country Oceania is fighting, rather than on the leaders of the country. This claim is further supported on page 161 where Orwell describes the futility of the wars that are being fought. â€Å"None of the three superstates ever attempts an y maneuver which involves the risk of serious defeat† (Orwell 161). Rather than try to end the wars, they continue fighting to keep the minds of the working class occupied with hate. The leaders in 1984 saw that it was not advantageous to advocate a strict moralShow MoreRelatedMethods of Manipulation in George Orwells novel 19841511 Words   |  6 Pages What does freedom signify? In a country where freedom to do what you choose is the greatest gift of all, there are laws that restrict the daily actions of humans. Additionally, these laws keep some freedoms for humans at bay. This paradox, along with many others, is taken for granted in everyday life. The slogans, formed through doublethink, and the ministries that are created by the Party in George Orwells novel 1984 are paradoxical in nature, as each individual aspect that seems self-contradictoryRead MoreOrwell s 1984 By George Orwell2061 Words   |  9 Pagesthe main tools of propaganda used by the Party is the three slogans WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. The Party utilizes the slogan WAR IS PEACE to promote the war between Oceania and one of the other two superstates that subdues the people and unites them against a common enemy; the meaning of the slogan is to display the similarities of war and peace in 1984. Furthermore, the slogan FREEDOM IS SLAVERY means that anyone who is free, who is an individual, is a bound toRead MoreAnalysis Of George Orwell s Nineteen Eighty Four 1122 Words   |  5 Pagesworld is largely conveyed through the dramatic irony in the three party slogans â€Å"WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH† These slogans are emphasised as Winston is a man guilty of â€Å"doublethink† and clearly does not agree with the slogans that his society is forced to live by. The impact of the irony on the responder becomes stronger, as we live in a world where we dream of no war, have the right to freedom and encourage educa tion. Winston believes that he should be living in a worldRead More1984 Critical Analysis1134 Words   |  5 Pagessaying is true. The inner party s slogans are â€Å"War is peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is strength† By using these phrases one can see that the inner circle can manipulate everyone into believing in what the inner circle tells them to believe in. The first slogan â€Å"War is peace† The inner circle has this slogan to convince people that there is no such thing as peace. The inner party seems to get people to believe they are in a constant state of war. When they are not fighting one country theyRead MoreParadoxical Slogans in 19841661 Words   |  7 Pagesgovernment. By using war as a method of keeping peace in the society or even going so far as to further the degree of ignorance to greaten the government’s power, Orwell constantly expresses the oppression of people under a totalitarian rule, the central theme of the novel. In an effort to gain the further support of the people of Oceania, the controlling party writes the following three paradoxical slogans on any propaganda poster: War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, Freedom is Slavery. These paradoxicalRead MoreTotalitarian Dystopia By George Orwell1078 Words   |  5 Pagessingular liberties have been eradicated by an â€Å"omniscient† power. Cit izens are robbed of their freedom, unable to foster any independent thought. Every innate human impulse is oppressed, and every action, scrutinized. Although the idea of such a society may sound extremely bizarre in today’s day and age, a few decades ago, this may very well have been a fast approaching reality. Around the time of World War II, the quick spread of a totalitarian regime had begun to propagate forced repressions of individualityRead More1984 - In the face of pain there are no heroes888 Words   |  4 Pagescan and cannot do. A society in which war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength makes individualism an act of blatant terrorism. When individuality becomes a crime the devastating power of the Party is illustrated through Winston’s attempts at freedom and independence. Oceania is a harsh, totalitarian state. The leaders of the Party rely on a message that they relay over and over again: â€Å"War is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.† They are a state that monitors andRead MoreEssay about Propaganda in 1984682 Words   |  3 Pageshappy. â€Å"WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.† and â€Å"Big Brother is Watching You† are examples of doublethink. These uses of propaganda prevent rebellion of the citizens of Oceania because they believe that this society is the ideal society. They believe they are protected, and that they could not be happier. Propaganda is the Party’s deadliest weapon of control. One use of propaganda used by the Party is doublethink. â€Å"WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.† TheRead MoreThe Mass Genocide Of The Republic Of Oceania Propaganda, Mythologies, Fear, Rumors And Misinformation Control1055 Words   |  5 Pagesto be in charge. War is essential to keep the masses poor, hungry, and humble. Counterintelligence and propaganda cause a breakdown in family stability and make relationships nearly impossible. Finally, fear is used to intimidate and break the will of the people. The symbol of the state s boot heal crushing the skull of a citizen is the dominant image that resonates in the novel--this is what will be remembered of the 20th century. The mass genocide caused by state-waged war against its enemiesRead MorePower of Propaganda724 Words   |  3 Pagescentral slogans are â€Å"WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.† is a good example (Orwell 4). The idea of the slogans is to convince the ci tizens that what they want is what they already possess. â€Å"War is peace†, it is a false sense of peace that citizens are led to believe that they are living peacefully in comparison to the warzone in Africa. Secondly, â€Å"freedom is slavery†, if a person has freedom, they becomes a slave to their own desires. Lastly, â€Å"Ignorance is strength† means if citizens

The Destructive Use of Pesticides in Agriculture Essay...

The Destructive Use of Pesticides in Agriculture When I was a child, I can remember my parents taking me into the apple orchard and picking apples. I couldnt wait to eat them until I got home, so I would have one for a snack right in the middle of the field. Today, when I take my children apple picking, I cannot let the children eat an apple out of fear of what pesticides could be on the apple and the harmful affects they can cause. Instead I have to take them home and scrub them before they can even take a bite. This is the result of the harmful pesticides that have left their mark on our argriculture. A pest is any species that competes with us for food invades our homes and gardens, destroys wood in houses, spreads disease,†¦show more content†¦In the United States approximately 25 percent of pesticide use is for ridding house, gardens, lawns, playingfields, swimming pools, and golf courses of unwanted pests. According to the EPA, the average lawn in the United States is doused with more than ten times the needed amount of insecticides. Each year more than 200,000 U.S. residents become a ill because of household use of pesticides resulting from accidental poisoning. Broad spectrum agents are toxic to many species while others called selective or in narrow spectrum agents are effective against barely defined groups of organisms. Pesticides very in their persistence in the length of time they remain deadly in the environment. Supporters of pesticides state they save human lives, increase food supply, lower food costs, increased profits for farmers, in the field that the health risks are in significant compared to the benefits(Miller, 1998). Since 1945, EDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbon and organic bio phosphate insecticides have probably prevented the premature deaths of at least 7 million people from inset transmitted diseases such as malaria (mosquito), bubonic plague(rat fleas), typhus(body lice), and sleeping sickness(tsetse fly). About 55 percent of the worlds human food supply is lost to pests before or after harvest in the United States. An estimated 37 percent of theShow MoreRelatedImportance Of Microbiology824 Words   |  3 Pagesï » ¿Importance of Microbiology| in Nursing Agriculture Pharmacy Advertisement Microbiology  is a subject dealing with microbes and related concepts.  Microbiology  has  come a long  way since discovery of microbes and is presently of great help to mankind. It is used in health care,  food production, diagnosis, production of alcohol, maintenance of sterility and cleanliness etc. Though the subject was initially limited to study of microbes and their characteristics or properties, latter it was explored toRead MoreAnalysing Earth and Its Subsystems Essay1464 Words   |  6 Pageshad one large common continent, Pangaea, before drifting into the several continents we have today. Plates have three kinds of boundaries: constructive, destructive, and conservative. Constructive boundaries are mainly ocean ridges. They are simultaneously being created and destroyed and the crust is moved horizontally in the process. Destructive is when the boundaries of oceanic plates are dipping down diagonally below a neighboring plate. These neighboring plates are frequently continental and theRead MoreEffect Of Farming On The Valley Idaho Ecosystem1104 Words   |  5 Pagesproduction. 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GMO foods should be supported because they are safe, utilize fewer herbicides and pesticides, positively impact the environment, and produce larger yields that can reduce malnutrition and poverty worldwide. Most anti-GMO groups claim that not enough scientificRead MoreLocally Grown Food1617 Words   |  7 Pagesmethods. Although in conflict with commercial agriculture; the locally grown food paradigm uses sustainable agricultural methods, protects the environment, and supports local economies. Tracing its origins back to the natural and organic food movements, local food producers regularly use ecological farming techniques developed through the years. Sustainable agriculture employs methods of food production which are healthy, not harmful, or destructive to the environment. This concept is an alternativeRead MoreThe Effects Of Pesticides On Organic Farming1653 Words   |  7 PagesHumans initially began farming organically when European farmers noticed a decrease in soil quality and crop health due to the use of chemical fertilizers (â€Å"Pesticides in Organic†¦Ã¢â‚¬  1). This drop in soil quality left the farmers no other choice but to cease the use of chemical fertilizers and begin implementing less harmful supplements in order to improve crop quality (â€Å"An Oral History†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ). This less invasive method of farming, otherwise known as organic farming, takes into account â€Å"the medium andRead MoreGenetically Modified Organism ( Gmo )1477 Wo rds   |  6 Pagesscientist that looks into the research and found the lack of research on the safety of genetically engineered food comes to the conclusion that these foods should not be on the market; they need another decade or two decade of research . The use of GMOs in agriculture is a risk that is simply not worth taking. Supporters of genetic engineering argue that the application of biotechnology are to improve the nutritional contents of various foods which will help people who suffer many deficiency diseasesRead MoreHow Will the New Technologies Aid the Environment and Standard of Living?812 Words   |  3 Pagesenvironment and killing off the wild life. This, subsequently, leads to a depletion of this species. Which could subsequently affect our quality of life by eradicating possible resources. That is not the only destructive path we are heading down. Continuing at the rate we are, the amount of pesticides we use now, if continued, will pollute the majority of our su rface water, and freshwater lakes and streams. 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The quality of topsoil used in agriculture is quickly degrading and it is estimated that there may only be 60 more years of usable topsoil remaining (What if the World s Soil Runs Out?). Topsoil is important because it supplies water and nutrients to plants, while giving microbes the carbon they need (What if the World s Soil Runs Out?). Degraded soil results in lower crop

What Is The American Dream - 1094 Words

Most Americans are unsatisfied with their lives. So many people live their lives discontented with where they are in life. They are discontented with their status in society, the money they make, goals they have yet to achieve, their profession, how they didn’t complete their schooling, and the list unfortunately goes on. We as Americans have a large advantage in comparison to most societies within the world, we have the freedom to live the American dream. What is the American dream? The Declaration of Independence states it is â€Å"Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.† We as Americans have great privilege, unfortunately this is also our downfall. I believe that our discontentment with our lives and the way they are being run is a large†¦show more content†¦His sons have failed his dreams that he set out for them. He longs for wealth, success and to be acknowledged within society as having ‘made it’ in life. He is in all aspects of his mind a failure. He believes that he is a lowly character, he has no self-confidence in himself as a human being. He has great dreams but no ambitions to accomplish them. The unfortunate part of it is that he is wealthy. He may not have money or fortune, but he has a wife who loves him, children who care for him greatly, and a roof over his head, food on the table and a stable job; which he appears to have loved at one point. He is a rich man, not in his pocket book, but in the company that is kept and the things we take for granted in this life. His great motivations are wealth made quickly and a dream to become successful within society. Unfortunately, Willy struggles in dealing with reality. He has mental struggles due to his perception of himself within his reality. Due to the overwhelming pressures of the realities of his low-key and consistent failures within his life; Willy’s mental health begins to disentangle. The tensions du to his many disparities, as well as his status within society that seemingly drive Willy to be the man that he is, cause him to struggle mentally; that mental struggle,

Dragonhaven CHAPTER FIVE Free Essays

string(150) " hated school I don’t entirely get this – seems to me not having to go to school might balance not having lots of friends your own age\." The first two years of Lois’ life are both really blurry and really clear in my memory. There are all kinds of little sharp clear pieces in it, mostly about watching Lois grow and worrying about keeping her healthy, that are still dead immediate like they happened yesterday. But I have very little sense of the time passing, except for Lois getting bigger, which I really liked seeing, was hooked on seeing, because it was the only clue I had that maybe she was okay and thriving. We will write a custom essay sample on Dragonhaven CHAPTER FIVE or any similar topic only for you Order Now I’m sure we had lots more close calls than I know about (or want to, even now) but one that I do know about, and scared me to death at the time, was the next time the school-form-filler-outer gang came to test me on the nonacademic stuff. I think they were suspicious of the apprenticeship, although at that point, with the hooha about the poacher going on, everyone who wasn’t one of us was suspicious of everything at Smokehill, and maybe it wasn’t only cops who hang around talking loudly in gift shops who thought there was something strange about Dad â€Å"handing over his only child† to the Rangers. So what happened was that the usual school pencil pushers brought a doctor along without warning us. Usually I got a complete medical only once a year, and the last one had only been them six weeks before Lois happened, so I should have had a long spell yet to get her used to staying by herself, or at least not needing skin, which she kept burning. And here less than six months later was this dweeb telling me to take my shirt off so he could listen to my heart. And he took one look at my stomach, of course, and freaked. Don’t panic, I said to myself. You look guilty when you panic. This is another of those great hindsight things – he must have been thinking about some kind of really kinky child abuse or self-harm (I can’t offhand think of anything that would leave marks like a dragonlet’s tongue), and if I’d seemed frightened that would have made him think so all the more, and he would have started raking through our business and discovered that we were keeping some kind of big horrible secret. Child abuse didn’t cross my mind at the time, but the big horrible secret sure did. I don’t know where I got the nerve – maybe from spending so much time with Billy, who even told cops where they got off calmly – but I looked at my stomach and said, â€Å"Oh, yeah, eczema. My mom started getting it when she was about my age.† The tension level immediately sank about sixty fathoms and although he still wasn’t happy – â€Å"Why didn’t you report it? We could have given you something for it long ago, before it got this bad† – I think he stopped worrying that he had something to report back to headquarters. He muttered about stress levels and preoccupied single parents and looking at my diet and changing our laundry detergent and taking some scrapings to see if it was some kind of weird fungus instead of eczema (he did this, and the results must have been negative for weird funguses, even if Lois did kind of look like a large walking weird fungus), since it was rather unusual eczema (duh), and then he said he’d prescribe some cream for it as it was a pretty painful looking case (that was true enough; I give him credit – he was very gentle with the scraping taking) and it was peculiar that it was only on my stomach. Here I showed him some other littler Loi s marks on my arms and my feet and legs, and this seemed to cheer him up. Doctors are weird. Then when he found out I was living with Billy and Grace he wanted to talk to Grace about laundry detergent and what I ate which I found pretty insulting but Grace thought was funny. But at least it meant I got back to Lois before she had a heart attack and Grace had to go up to the institute and get her instructions how to take care of me. At least the doc didn’t insist on coming to see my room. After that it was always the same doctor, and after a while he wanted to write some kind of paper on my skin complaint, which he wasn’t even sure was eczema, he said (bright of him), and he sure tried to get me to come up to some hospital and have some fancy tests done, but I didn’t want to go (leave Lois overnight?) and Dad wouldn’t make me, obviously, and since I was healthy except for the eczema, the doc reluctantly let it go. The other seriously scary near miss – except that it wasn’t a miss at all – was Eleanor’s fault. That she and Martha knew something was up in itself wouldn’t have been a big deal, necessarily, kids at the Institute were always being not told stuff, and overlooked or got out of the way – or told to get out of the way like it isn’t normal to want to know what’s going on. Being a kid is probably like that everywhere. It’s maybe worse here in some ways because we all live here – nobody goes home from the office. Martha and I knew this – I’ve been here since I was born and Martha since she was two – and it was just the way it was. But it’s one of the reasons that families with kids old enough to know the way the rest of the world works never stay here long. Even if both parents have jobs they like the kids hate it. They’re kept out of the grown-up stuff and there is no kid stuff. Since pretty much every kid I’ve ever talked to (and most grown-ups) say they hated school I don’t entirely get this – seems to me not having to go to school might balance not having lots of friends your own age. You read "Dragonhaven CHAPTER FIVE" in category "Essay examples" But I guess it doesn’t. Eleanor was another story. Of course she’s the youngest, so that’s a big thing right there – she’s always trying to be older. But Eleanor has to be out there. Martha and me, if we’re told to go away and leave the grown-ups alone, find a book to read or baby orphan to feed (ha ha). Eleanor hates being shut out of anything. Which is why, since she got old enough to be usefully and sort of applied-ly a brat instead of just a general brat sort of brat, Martha and I knew more stuff about the Institute than we used to, because she’s always generous (to the other members of our oppressed race, the children) with her info. And this time whatever they weren’t being told bothered Martha too; because I was in on it. I think Martha might have been kind of bracing herself for, this to happen – that I would suddenly become one of the grown-ups, or at least not a kid like her and Eleanor any more – and maybe she thought my solo ov ernight really had been it, the place where I crossed the line. But this was kind of more spectacular than she expected. And it drove Eleanor insane. I’ve already told you I felt bad about not really being friends any more. Friends with Martha anyway, interactions with Eleanor don’t really come under that heading. It’s like I’d barely seen Martha and Eleanor except for my fifteenth birthday party which after the first hour I just wanted to be over with because I had to get back to Lois who I knew would be starting to shred the bedclothes. That’s not too flattering to the people at your party. It was already a strange party because Grace hadn’t come – but someone had to stay home and make not-alone noises for Lois. Billy brought the cake she’d made but it was still strange. And I saw Martha and Eleanor when the school testers came, but none of us was at our best then. That was one thing we had totally in common. All three of us hated the grown-ups who came to prod us and take notes like we were some kind of science project or field survey. I felt like giving them tips. Our R angers did it so much better. But while it was Eleanor’s idea, I think in this case Martha went along with it. And so one afternoon when Lois was about seven months old and I was home alone doing extra schoolwork so I could sit still longer and let Lois sleep on my (bare) feet for longer, first because any time she was asleep I wanted to keep her that way as long as possible and second because I’d been over three hours at the Institute the day before and she’d been pretty panicked and crazy by the time I got back. (Panicked and crazy was getting bigger and heavier too, she was going to be leaving bruises some day soon, as well as eczema, never mind the grisly idea of her giving the slip to Billy or Grace or whoever her jailer was that day, and galumphing up to the institute to look for me. Or just getting hopelessly lost in the woods. This really was not likely – at least not until she was big enough to keep galumphing with Billy or Grace hanging around her neck – but it was still another thing that worried me.) Also . . . this is another of those things I don’t know how to explain, even in hindsight, although I have a much better idea what was going on now than I did then . . . my stupid permanent headache was sort of better when I was thinking about stuff: I’ve said it was easier to live with if I was doing something, but that’s not quite right. It’s like it liked certain kinds of brainwork. It liked educational stuff, not worry stuff. It didn’t exactly hurt less, but it hurt better. Remember I said, about when I first had it, that it sometimes seemed like it was trying to fit inside my head and couldn’t figure out why it couldn’t make itself comfortable? Well now it was like something in my head that was interested in some of the same things I was interested in. Headline in the National Stupid People Press: Boy Believes He Was Kidnapped by Aliens and Has an Alien Spy Thingy Implanted in His Brain. Photos on page seven. I didn’t â₠¬â€œ didn’t think I’d been kidnapped by aliens, I mean – but I did start to sort of half think of my headache as almost another thing – like me, Lois, Billy, Grace, the Smell, and the Headache – but without finishing the other half of thinking about it, because it was too weird. Anyway. So Headache and I were deep in this afternoon when I heard the door bang and I had about five seconds to jerk myself out of whatever I was doing and think that the bang didn’t sound right and that neither Billy nor Grace was due back till later, and then a voice I knew only too well said, â€Å"What is that smell?† and I was on my feet and would have been out of my bedroom door and closing it behind me in another five seconds but Eleanor was too fast for me. â€Å"Oh, shit,† I said. If Dad had been there that would have been my allowance for that week. (Sure I have an allowance, even in Smokehill. How do you think I paid for all those on-line hours of Annihilate?) But if he’d been there he’d’ve stopped it from happening somehow, I don’t know how, put a bag over Eleanor’s head and said three magic words or something. Dad copes. It hasn’t been good for his temper but he copes. Lois poked her nose around the desk leg, not happy at the abrupt removal of my feet, but generally speaking always ready to be thrilled at meeting someone else so long as I was there too. She did one of her peeps. Not that I could ever say for sure what happy was in Lois terms, but her spine plates, now that they were big enough to do anything, tended to erect themselves when she was what I would call happy and interested. They stiffened now. And her nostrils flared, and she did a kind of ooonnngg-peeEEEeep-oooonnngggg. I told you about my dad suddenly believing Billy’s story was real when he heard the weird noises coming from under his son’s shirt. Sound and smell are very convincing. Just seeing something that looks like a low-level goblin out of a bad computer game isn’t so convincing. â€Å"What is that?† Eleanor said, in that way you do when you’re really surprised: Whaaaaat is thaaaaaat? It takes a lot to surprise Eleanor. By this time Martha had joined Eleanor in the doorway, except by then Eleanor was out of the doorway and going toward Lois. I grabbed her arm. â€Å"Leave her alone,† I said. â€Å"Her?† said Eleanor. â€Å"Ow. You’re hurting me.† â€Å"Tough eggs,† I said. I was so shocked it was taking me a little while to get angry but I was going to be spectacularly angry when I got there. â€Å"What are you doing here?† I looked at Martha, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes. Eleanor wouldn’t meet them either, but that was because she was staring at Lois. Eleanor has no conscience. And Martha was pretty fascinated too. Who wouldn’t be? â€Å"What is that – she?† said Eleanor. â€Å"How do you know it’s a she?† â€Å"She’s a dragon, isn’t she,† said Martha in this spaced-out voice. She was as shocked as I was, sort of from the opposite direction. We were both seeing the last thing we expected to see. â€Å"No, she’s an aardvark,† I said. I couldn’t quite come out and say, yes, that’s right, this is my baby dragon, Lois. This is the big secret no one has been telling you. â€Å"What are you doing here?† Eleanor finally turned away from Lois long enough to look up at me. I still had her by the arm. â€Å"I wanted to know what was going on,† she said in her shoot-from-the-hip way. She might lie, cheat and steal to get where she wanted to go, but she’d tell you she’d done it once she got there. â€Å"But – † I said. I didn’t know where to begin. â€Å"They’re all in some meeting about something,† she said. â€Å"The grown-ups. So there wasn’t anyone watching us – for a change,† she said with scorn, although at eight years old and living in the biggest and wildest wild animal park in the country it was hardly surprising she wasn’t allowed to wander around by herself – and Katie did know that Martha couldn’t be expected to keep Eleanor from doing something she was determined to do. Where was Katie when I needed her? â€Å"Meeting,† I said blankly. I was trying to remember if Billy and Grace had said anything about where they were going. Billy usually didn’t. Grace usually did. But Grace wasn’t a Smokehill employee; she just sold the admin some of her drawings. She wouldn’t be going to a Smokehill meeting. Would she? All the grown-ups. And she loved Smokehill as passionately as any of us. â€Å"It can’t be all the grown-ups,† I said. â€Å"It is though,† said Eleanor. â€Å"They’ve closed the park for the day and everything. For this big special meeting. We’re not supposed to know about it. They close the park and the grown-ups all disappear but we’re not supposed to notice.† â€Å"Mom said she’d only be gone a couple of hours and everyone was busy,† said Martha mildly. â€Å"Busy going to the meeting,† muttered Eleanor. â€Å"We’re short staffed,† Martha continued as if Eleanor hadn’t said anything. â€Å"We’re always short staffed,† said Eleanor. â€Å"But there’s never been a meeting for all the grown-ups before.† â€Å"About the caves?† I said, completely at a loss. I remembered Dad yesterday saying, really casually, that I could have the day off, stay home, away from the Institute. At the time I thought he just meant, and give Lois a break, because I’d been so long we knew she’d be in a state when I got back. He probably did mean that – but had he arranged for me to be delayed yesterday, to give himself the excuse to tell me not to come up today? What damned meeting? But suddenly I knew. And I didn’t want to know. Eleanor gave me one of her famous you-don’t-know-anything-you-pathetic-schmuck looks. â€Å"No, stupid. About the dead guy. Oh!† She looked back at Lois. â€Å"You’re right, Martha. It’s a dragon.† That’s another thing about Eleanor. She never believes anything anyone tells her until she works it out for herself and it suits her to believe it. â€Å"The dragon the dead guy killed was a mom dragon, and this is her baby.† I decided without any difficulty not to say that this was her fifth and only living baby, and how I knew this, but I didn’t deny that Eleanor was right. Pretty good thinking for eight. . . â€Å"She doesn’t look like a dragon,† Eleanor continued. â€Å"She looks like. . .† Eleanor actually paused. I’ll tell you for free that most people’s imaginations aren’t up to describing what a dragonlet looks like, and Eleanor was always so busy trying to figure out how to get in the way out here in the real world she hadn’t worked on her imagination much. I was allowed to describe Lois to myself as looking like roadkill or one of the monsters out of the first series of Star Trek, but I didn’t want anyone else doing it. So I managed to interrupt. â€Å"Just stop there. I don’t want to hear.† Martha knelt down, the way you do with small children and animals to get them to come to you. This works too well with Lois – she peeped delightedly and shot out from under the desk where she’d been keeping the backs of my legs hot. I dropped Eleanor’s arm just in time to fend Lois off. â€Å"Don’t – she’ll burn you.† Too late, of course – Martha might have listened but Eleanor instantly reached out to pat her. â€Å"Ow,† she said, like Lois had hurt her deliberately. This made me madder than it should’ve. Not at Lois. At Eleanor. â€Å"I told you,† I said, trying to be patient. â€Å"She’ll burn you. She can’t help it. She’s just hot.† â€Å"What do you – † Eleanor began accusingly, and then stopped and looked at her hand. She hadn’t touched Lois long enough to have left a red mark. â€Å"Oh,† she said. â€Å"Eczema. It’s not because your mom had it.† The things that kid picks up. â€Å"No,† I said. â€Å"If she opens her mouth, can you see the fire inside?† said Eleanor. It was a reasonable question for an eight-year-old. â€Å"No,† I said. â€Å"It’s a special organ, like you have lungs to breathe, dragons have a fire-stomach for fire.† Which was about as much as anyone knew: We were all eight-year-olds about dragons. I was down on the floor now too, with my arm around Lois’ neck. It was mostly only fresh bits of me that weren’t used to it that really burned any more – although my stomach stayed pretty scaly – and I was wearing a longsleeved shirt. Eleanor sat down in front of me, staring with renewed fascination at Lois, now only a few inches away. I was used to it, but at this distance you could feel her radiating heat, like sitting too close to the stove. â€Å"Your eczema should be a lot worse,† said Eleanor. â€Å"You get used to it,† I said. â€Å"I’ve always wanted to see a dragon up close,† said Martha. And suddenly we were on the same side again. Suddenly I realized that while everything, Lois’ life, Smokehill’s future, everything that mattered, was about to have to rely on whether we could come up with a good reason to make Eleanor keep her big blackmailing mouth shut, it was also a relief to be a kid among kids again, even if I was the oldest and Eleanor was a pain in the butt. When you’re the only kid surrounded by grown-ups, even when the grown-ups are busy protecting you, you spend a certain amount of time just holding your own line, just hanging on to being yourself. When you’re with other kids you don’t have to do this. Well, not so much. Eleanor has always been pushy. She was a pushy baby. â€Å"Yeah,† I said. â€Å"Me too.† â€Å"What’s her name?† said Martha matter-of-factly, as if naming a dragon is a perfectly ordinary thing to do. As if having a dragon to name was a perfectly ordinary thing. â€Å"Lois,† I said. â€Å"Lois?† said Eleanor. â€Å"That’s a stupid name for a dragon.† This was so typical an Eleanor remark I didn’t bother to answer it, and I didn’t care either. But Martha said quietly, â€Å"I think it’s a nice name,† and mysteriously this made me feel really good. We all sat there a little longer, staring at Lois. Lois, who was extremely used to me holding her off from flinging herself on the few people she ever got to see, had given up, and collapsed half onto my lap, grunting and murmuring a little from the awkwardness of her position, but also because she had this funny habit of muttering into silences in conversations. That was how we usually have conversations, right? Someone talks while everyone else is quiet, then someone else talks while the first person shuts up, and so on. I hadn’t had a good shouting-over-each-other match with Dad since Lois came. Probably all the conversations she ever heard were polite ones. Snark had known my schedule better than I did, and if I was late to be doing something (like getting on the sofa after dinner to watch TV, so he could join me), he reminded me. Lois didn’t seem to have much sense of time, but she had a sense of conversation. If no one else was saying anything, she did. And I†™d got in the habit of letting her finish. After Lois had had her mutter, I said, â€Å"What is this about the poacher?† Martha sighed her worried sigh, but Eleanor launched straight in. â€Å"His parents are on TV all over the country saying that dragons are too dangerous and they should all be killed!† I gaped at her. â€Å"They’ll never make that stick.† Martha said, â€Å"They’re very, very, very, very wealthy.† I don’t know how good an idea about money most kids have, but I’d grown up listening to my parents not just trying to figure out how to make the year’s budget work and what we could get along without so it would stretch a little farther, which probably most kids listen to in most families, but about the really dazzling mess of getting, keeping, justifying, and accounting for funding for the Institute. I knew about congressional subcommittees and private donors and action groups and lobbyists. And I knew instantly – as Martha, whose mom was a member of the Institute’s budgetary council, also knew – that very, very, very, very wealthy people who wanted something and didn’t care how they got it were very, very, very, very dangerous. I hadn’t thought I could worry any more than I was already worrying, all the time, about Lois. I was wrong. â€Å"It’s been going on for months,† said Martha. â€Å"Well, since – since it happened. At first nobody took them seriously. But they just kept at it – â€Å" Kept throwing money at it, I translated silently. â€Å"And they’ve started the Human Preservation Society† – I didn’t know Martha knew how to sound that scornful – â€Å"and they’re really well organized.† Have hired goons to write letters and hang out with members of Congress and other people who like playing with money and power, I translated. And because they have lots of money, they’ve hired effective goons and send lots of letters. I hoped Dad’s coping mechanism was up to it. My brain was doing a slow, dazed reshuffle of my awareness of the tension level around the Institute. It made me feel silly and self-absorbed (or Lois-absorbed) to be reminded that the world – the world that mattered – didn’t actually revolve around us. I wasn’t enjoying the reminder. It was also incredibly stupid of me to have forgotten about the death of the poacher, even if it had been months ago now, and I didn’t want to remember. I remembered the death of Lois’ mom all right. I still thought of her every day. You can’t pet a dragonlet. Well, you can, but in the first place you’ll probably burn your hand, depending on how sensitive your skin is, and in the second place I figured it couldn’t feel like much to the dragon. Even as a squishy baby Lois had noticeably thick skin, and now that she was growing scales, it was more like running your hand over pebbles. But she was certainly an interactive creature and, as I say, noisy. I was having the petting reflex as I thought about the poacher – I’d half petted the hair off Snark when I was worried about something – but I’d learned to deflect the reflex in Lois’ case. Unfortunately I didn’t think about this any more – I wasn’t used to having people around with me and Lois – so I burbled at her. I could do a half-decent Lois burble. I couldn’t peep and I couldn’t mew, but I could burble. She turned her funny snout up toward me – sheâ €™d been staring at Martha and Eleanor as keenly as they were staring at her – and burbled back. â€Å"You’re as goofy about that dragon as you were about your dog,† said Eleanor, who was four when he died and shouldn’t have been able to remember him at all. He wasn’t her dog and she’d never found him interesting. She probably didn’t mean to sound as snotty as she did sound, but she sounded pretty snotty. I stood up. I did not have a brilliant coping mechanism. â€Å"You shouldn’t be here, and if I tell anybody you were here you’ll get into more trouble than you’ve ever imagined getting into,† I said to her. This was not what I’d planned a few minutes ago when I’d been thinking about how my first priority was to think of a way to make Eleanor keep her mouth shut, but then I hadn’t had any plan. If I hadn’t been so pissed off at her saying what she’d said, though, I’d have known better than to threaten her, which was always the thing that worked least with her. But Martha surprised me. â€Å"She won’t,† said Martha. She’d stood up when I did. Martha wasn’t big for thirteen the way I was big for fifteen, but she was still a lot bigger than eight-year-old Eleanor. This is a lot of Eleanor’s problem, as I say. She takes on the world because she hates being littlest; and she’s a little littlest. But although I saw her face pulling into its usual pig-headed brat the-thing-I’m-going-to-do-first-is-the-thing-you-don’t-want-me-to-do lines, she looked at me and then at Martha and wavered. This was a first with Eleanor so far as I know. She doesn’t know how to waver. Martha and I must have looked pretty fierce. I was feeling like pig-headed brat roast for dinner, but I didn’t know Martha knew how to look fierce. I looked at her though and she did. She didn’t sound angry the way I did, but she said, very calmly, â€Å"Eleanor, this is about all of our lives. This about you and me and Jake, and Mom and Dr. Mendoza, and Billy and all the Rangers, and everybody you know. And it’s about Jake’s dragon and all the dragons in Smokehill. You know dragons are why we’re here, don’t you?† Eleanor is one of these people who when she comes into the room, whatever is going on becomes all about Eleanor. I didn’t think even Smokehill really got through to Eleanor. I was wrong. I don’t know if Martha knew her better than I did – if maybe she was more Martha’s sister than I’d realized. But Eleanor looked thoughtfully at Martha for a moment, and she looked smaller for that moment, just an ordinary kid. â€Å"Yes,† she said, â€Å"I do.† She added in more her usual manner, â€Å"I’m not stupid.† And then she turned on me and stuck her chin out and clenched her fists and said, â€Å"And I’ll even keep your secret for you, but first you have to apologize, and then you have to ask me nicely, and I don’t care what you think you can do to me.† I was over my bad temper by then. And besides, Lois was so much more important. (Lois, who I was keeping trapped between my shins so she couldn’t go burn Martha and Eleanor and, among other things, maybe give the game away after all.) â€Å"I’m sorry,† I said, almost sincerely. â€Å"Please don’t tell anyone about Lois, okay?† She pulled her chin in a little and crossed her arms. â€Å"Okay,† she said. And I believed her. The grown-ups were really preoccupied at dinner that night, so they didn’t notice I was really preoccupied too. Kit and Jane were there as well as Dad, and Grace and Billy. I don’t know if having more silent grown-ups there was supposed to make the silence less obvious but it didn’t. Grace and Lois and I kept the conversation going. Grace did a pretty good burble too, although she always did it the way you make â€Å"mmm-hmmm† noises at a four-year-old (human) who wants to tell you a story. It reminded me of being four, when Grace sometimes babysat for me. This didn’t actually improve my mood. It seemed to me they were still â€Å"mmm-hmmming† me really. I wanted to ask them how the meeting had gone, but I couldn’t, since I wasn’t supposed to know about it. It did make me a little angry that they seemed to think Martha and Eleanor wouldn’t have noticed, even if they thought they had me safely tucked away (they were right about that, which was part of why I was angry), but I’ve noticed before the way children are conveniently assumed to be dumb when adults need them to be. You’d think the adults would learn. But who am I to be sarcastic? I didn’t want to know about the poacher. The villain. I didn’t want the poacher ever to cross my mind for any reason whatsoever. It was bad enough thinking about Lois’ mom, every day, which I did, as I told you. I used to try to blot out the memory part of it by deliberately calling up that dragon cave I still dreamed about sometimes, which usually had her in it, because there she was alive which is how I knew it was only a stupid childish dream and it meant I really was a wuss. I mostly could blot the poacher out. But this was the worst yet: that he had parents who could make big trouble for Smokehill. How do I explain this to you though? I did think about it, that evening, with all these preoccupied grown-ups eating Grace’s food and pretending really badly that everything was normal, whatever normal was any more. I thought about it and kind of realized – although writing it down like this makes it again a whole lot more rational than it was at the time – that I couldn’t think about it. It was too much. If there was a line, this was over it. My job was to raise Lois. Somebody else was going to have to deal with the villain. About the time Lois started riding on my shoulders she also suddenly hey presto housebroke herself. What a major relief that was. Dragon diapers are the WORST. (And I should say I didn’t do all my own laundry, if you counted Lois. We all did Lois’ diapers. And – speaking of needing generators to run stuff – I can’t imagine doing baby dragon diapers without a washing machine. Or anyway I don’t want to. Mind you we were probably destroying the local groundwater table or whatever. They took more than one go and you didn’t just throw them in without some preliminary detox either.) But it was weird, how fast it happened, and how little I had to do with it. It makes sense if you figure that this must be the stage when the baby dragon is not merely old enough (and scaly enough) to look out of its mom’s pouch but old enough to climb out and do its business outdoors, which must be a major relief to Mom. I had noticed that Lois’ scales first started really looking like scales on her head, like they grew there first so she could look out and get used to the idea of out. It was a relief in other ways too – her tail was turning into a tail, and the diapers didn’t fit so well any more, and even Billy’s ingenuity has its limits. Big disgusting yuck. I used to make jokes about Super Glue. Especially when – No, never mind. The point is that suddenly it wasn’t a problem any more. Except that it was because everything about Lois was a problem and the problem got bigger as she got bigger, and while no more dragon diapers was TOTALLY a good thing, dragon dung doesn’t disintegrate that fast, so I had to get out there and bury the stuff all the time, and dragonlet digestion really puts the stuff through, so while I would have said she was never out of my sight when we were outdoors together (she’d better not be) she still managed to leave piles I didn’t notice her leaving. Then there was the fact that dragonlet pee slowly burns holes in almost everything it touches (it didn’t burn right through the diapers, but it wore through fast enough that we had to patch them, and needlework is not my thing but Grace let me use pretty much anything in her sewing box, so some of them got kind of artistically interesting over time and repeat mending) and fortunately Billy and Grace’s house didn’t have any lawn to destroy, but she still almost managed to kill one of Grace’s Smokehill-winter-proof, tougher-than-the-French-Foreign-Legion rhododendrons before I figured out how to persuade her – Lois, not Grace – to pee and crap in one sort of general area. Although this still wasn’t foolproof. I swear I was always out there with my shovel – to the extent that if a dragon could get neurotic I should have given Lois a complex – and even so half the time when Kit or Jane came round the conversation woul d begin like this: Kit or Jane: â€Å"Hi, Jake. There’s a – â€Å" Me: â€Å"Okay.† And I go get my shovel. (If it was Whiteoak, he just looked at me. And I’d go get my shovel.) And miss whatever they’d come to say, probably, which may have been the idea. Lois would always come with me. Far from developing a complex she was delighted for an excuse to go outside and play some more, and as far as she was concerned (evidently) my strange compulsion to bury her leavings was as good an excuse as anything else, and the house was getting smaller and smaller as she got bigger and bigger. (I wonder what she thought about the toilet. I always used to wonder that about Snark. I don’t know how good a dragon’s sense of smell is, but it would have to be really bad not to draw the correct conclusions about what the toilet is about. And a dog has to know. So isn’t it thinking, Hey, why do you get to use that thing when I have to go outdoors even when the wind chill makes it sixty below and the snow is coming in sideways?) She weighed about thirty pounds when she housebroke herself, but that’s still a pretty fair weight to carry around on your shoulders (if you’re only a human), especially when it wiggles. The thing I worried about the most – the most after the possibility of someone taking a wrong turn and wandering into Billy and Grace’s backyard some day, especially some day when I hadn’t got out there with my shovel, or maybe in fact I was out there with my shovel, and with Lois herself – was that she was going to start practicing her fire-throwing. The fact that she was alive proved her igniventator was working, and the skin on my stomach sure believed it. And as well as getting bigger and noisier she was getting livelier and she wanted more action. How do you teach a dragon to come, sit and stay? Fortunately she still had little short legs and couldn’t run as fast as I could. (Snark had been able to run faster than me by the time he was twelve weeks old, although I was still pretty little myself then.) But I was pretty sure this wouldn’t be true much longer. I was also keeping a sharp, anxious eye on her wing stubs, but they didn’t seem to be doing anything much yet either. But speaking of training a dragon, it was at this stage, when she was beginning to spend significant amounts of time outside her mom’s pouch equivalent that I began to realize . . . this is going to sound really stupid . . . that she was trying to, uh, respond to me, I mean aside from the fact that she still got hysterical if I wasn’t around for more than about two hours. I’ve raised, or helped raise, baby birds and baby raccoons and baby woodchucks and baby porcupines, and watched the Rangers raise baby bears and baby wolves and baby eagles, and some of them even survived to grow up and fly or run or trundle away. But when a baby robin gets all excited and sticks its neck out and opens its mouth and goes â€Å"ak kak kak kak kak† at you it’s not exactly responding to you. It’s responding to the prospect of getting fed. It never thinks about being a robin, and it doesn’t care what you are, so long as you’re feeding it the right stuff. (Chopped up earthworms rolled in dirt are a favorite. Delicious.) I also know that animals raised by humans tend to grow up funny because they aren’t getting socialized by their own kind and don’t learn how to do it, but even then I’m not sure that what they’re doing is confusing themselves by trying to be human. What they’re doing is failing to learn how to be themselves. And I was a little silly about Lois . . . okay, more than a little. But can you blame me? The point is, when she started spending more time at a little distance, so we could like look at each other – that was another thing, her eyes had suddenly gone all sharp and focused at about five months; I’d begun to think that maybe dragons don’t use sight much (and then I’d remember her mom’s eye, sharp and clear and focused as anything – and dying – and then I’d remember all the impossible stuff I’d seen in that eye about hope and despair – and then I’d take my mind off it like peeling Snark as a puppy off the shoe he was disemboweling) anyway, when Lois could watch me properly, she started trying to do what I was doing. For a while I could ignore it, put it down to why your cat walks on your keyboard when you’re trying to use your computer, why your dog suddenly wants to play fetch when it’s y our turn to get dinner. But she wasn’t just trying to get my attention. It took me a while to figure this out – dragons and humans are shaped so much different. It’s not like baby chimps learning to crack coconuts with stones by picking up a stone and banging with it because that’s what Mom’s doing. Or maybe it is. When I was typing, if she didn’t want a nap, Lois used to dance. I should maybe say I’m kind of a dramatic typist. I had had to practice keeping my legs and feet still when Lois first got out of the sling, so she could lie on them while I typed. If they weren’t held down, my feet started tapping all by themselves. (Which wasn’t actually such a bad thing, because if she didn’t want a nap – and she way too often didn’t want a nap – she’d dance with my feet. This was a little distracting I admit, but I usually managed to keep typing.) She made great wheezy inhale noises when I was breathing in som ething especially wonderful that Grace was taking out of the oven, but that may just have been that she agreed with me. When I’d scratch my head or pull my hair and grunt while I was doing schoolwork I didn’t like (which tended to make the Headache worse too) she’d scratch and shake her head – and grunt. Sometimes it was more complicated than that – or maybe what I mean is it was harder to decide it didn’t mean anything. But when I was doing laundry she began to collect whatever small loose stuff she could around the house, shoes, magazines, dropped pencils, wet rain stuff hanging over the radiators, and including snaffling towels off the rails (which in theory were hung too high for her to reach), snuggle them around a while on the kitchen floor (I tried to rescue the towels in time), leave them while the washer ran, and then bring them outdoors and spread them out on the ground (sometimes this was kind of hard on the magazines) when I hung the stuff up to dry. This really did catch my attention because it seemed to me to say something about her attention span and her, you know, mental processes generally. It was way too complicated, you know? In fact it started making me think scary Dragons Are Intelligent thoughts so I concentrated on trying to prevent her from â€Å"washing† anything that would make more work for me. I told myself that baby critters are always getting into other things – especially things you don’t want them to get into – it’s what they do. It’s part of being a baby critter. It’s part of growing up. Half-grown raccoons are incredibly creative escape artists and nosy and boy can they get into trouble. It’s hardwired. Nothing to get paranoid about. Nope. Nothing at all. And I’ve said she was noisy. Well, I talked to her a lot. That went back to that very first day, that awful day when I found her, when we were like both yattering from our different traumas. Well, same trauma, different angle. It’s like we’d just never stopped, it’s just the frenzy level had dropped some, and most of our yattering now was pretty cheerful. A little overwrought sometimes maybe but pretty cheerful. I’ve told you she had learned really quickly to â€Å"talk† during pauses in a conversation – the one time she consistently broke this rule was while I was in the shower. (She’d gone on not liking to get wet.) I always left the bathroom door half open so she could follow me in if she wanted to (which she always did, but I kept hoping . . . ) and she talked to/with the shower. I could hear her – the water going whoosh whoosh whoosh and Lois going kind of woooosh whoosh waaaaaaaash wiiiiiiiiiiiish, as if she assumed the shower was either one of my noises or a major monologist, and didn’t quite understand why it only made this one sort of splash-and-splatter-punctuated roaring cry. So if there was no one else at home sometimes I sang. Now there is a noise to drive the birds from the trees and the dragons into the deepest caverns of the Bonelands. Even Lois’ mimicry boggled at trying to do the dragonlet version of a shower and Jake singing. Although she did do a good hum. In fact her humming was the nearest of all her noises to any of the noises humans make. Sometimes we hummed together. But I think I played with her more once Martha and Eleanor were in on it. Things just felt a little less harrowing. That being-on-the-same-side thing even made me feel a little more at ease with the child welfare people, and I swear child welfare people pick up the smell of fear like mean dogs do and have no clue that the fear might be of them. (Mean dogs know perfectly well that it is. We’ve – Smokehill I mean – only ever had maybe two mean dogs since I’ve been old enough to notice, and they don’t last past the first snap. One of the families with kids, one of the kids ran away when Dad banned the dog, and then the rest of the family gave up and left too. More of Dad’s graduate students. He doesn’t have the best luck with his graduate students.) Eleanor nearly ruined everything though by deciding to be helpful by adding corroborative testimony, like in police shows on TV. She asked the doctor if he couldn’t do anything else for my eczema (his creams hadn’t worked, not surprisingly, but also because I hadn’t bothered to use them) because she was sure it hurt more than I admitted. Thanks, Eleanor. Maybe it worked out okay though, since the doctor knew that Eleanor was a busybody. So maybe that Eleanor pretended she knew it was eczema was corroborative testimony. (I taught her to say â€Å"corroborative testimony† and she forgave me for being ticked off that she’d opened her big mouth about it at all.) Anyway. Lois used to lie on my feet at supper (everybody else carefully and awkwardly keeping their feet out of the way around Billy and Grace’s little kitchen table, especially after she started to generalize about people and wanted to be friends with everybody she saw. Even if you were unsympathetically wearing shoes she’d put her hot, scratchy nose up your pantleg to be sociable) which was usually the four of us humans plus one dragon. Except when Dad couldn’t get away or Billy was on duty or aggravating some investigators or checking what the diggers and builders were (still) doing to the caves after they’d closed down for the day (work on this had slowed down a lot since the scandal started). And then sometimes we had – Jane or Kit or Whiteoak – or Nate or Jo, who Billy’d added to the dragonsitting/Jake’s Sanity Conservation rota – and people having a meal together talk (except Whiteoak of course. I learned â⠂¬Å"thank you† and â€Å"please pass the whatever† in Arkhola from having Whiteoak for dinner. Even Whiteoak wasn’t going to risk being rude to Grace I think). Maybe they talk especially when they aren’t completely comfortable with each other, and Dad and I hadn’t been completely comfortable with each other in years, and we also weren’t seeing as much of each other as we used to, so most of the time we talked a lot to cover up the silence. (Except of course if there’d just been a big meeting about what to do about the poacher’s parents – which nobody ever did tell me anything about, just by the way, until years later, when I asked Dad. He looked at me blankly for a minute and then gave a sort of hollow nonlaugh. â€Å"We didn’t figure anything out, that first meeting,† he said – and Dad doesn’t talk in italics all the time the way I do. â€Å"We didn’t figure anything out. We just sat around and moaned and shouted and tore our hair.† He stared into space for a minute, frowning. â€Å"It was pretty goddamn awful.†) It was a joke for a long time when, if a silence did manage to fall, we’d hear Lois doing her peeping and burbling under the table, which got gruffer and rougher as she got older. But I think I’m the only one of us humans who noticed that it wasn’t just getting gruffer and rougher, but it was starting to rise and fall in a rhythm – kind of a lot like the sound of people talking. I thought about this for a while, kind of hoping that someone else would notice too, but if anyone did they didn’t say anything to me. But dragon noises, as I say, are peculiar so probably only my ears could make anything about Lois’ sound effects seem familiar. It had been Eleanor’s remark about my goofiness that had really made me think about it. Between Lois and . . . between Lois and Lois it was really easy not to think about anything but getting through every hour as it came. So up till Martha and Eleanor met Lois I suppose I had kind of been thinking about Lois almost like a funny looking dog with strange habits. Snark imitated all kinds of human things and we all just said oh, what a clown. Eleanor made me realize that while I was just as goofy about Lois as I’d been about Snark, I was goofy about her differently. Not just because she wasn’t a dog. Not just because she was the first addition to my family after fifty percent of it had died. Not just because of the dreams. So one afternoon when I’d done more schoolwork than I could stand, and it was sunny outdoors, and we were alone at the cabin, I took her out (she waddled and murmured behind me, her scaly feet and the tip of her now steadily lengthening tail making a funny little scuttling noise on the kitchen linoleum like maybe there were several baby dragons following me instead of only one) and sat down on the ground with her and said, â€Å"Hey, Lois.† I said it very carefully and deliberately. â€Å"Heeeeeey† on a falling note and â€Å"Lois† as two distinct syllables, â€Å"Lo† higher and stronger and â€Å"is† dropping off and down. I didn’t sit on the ground with her so much any more because for some reason this got her all excited and she was too inclined to stick her face in my face and give me more eczema (what a good thing she wasn’t a face-licker), but it was a good way to get her attention. When she rushed over to touch her nose against mine I fended her off with a hand and said â€Å"Hey, Lois† again. She stopped trying to make face contact and looked at me as if she knew this was important. She didn’t have that squashy look of something that had been stepped on any more, and her head was beginning to look almost a little horsey, narrow at the muzzle and wider between the eyes. Her eyes were a little bulgy like an animal’s who expects to have a lot of peripheral vision, but they were also protected by some nobbly, bumpy ridges, so who knows. Maybe dragons see the world with a nice scalloped frame around it. Baby dragon eyelashes, by the way, are halfway to being spines, which means that when your baby dragon blinks its eyes when it’s falling asleep against your stomach, you feel like you’re being peeled. (Some of the spinal plates, the erectile ones, have slightly serrated edges too, which are in effect more like a cheese-grater.) I must have good resistance to pain or something. I never minded the eczema or the peeling nearly as much as I minded the di apers, and the diapers were over. She peeped at me. â€Å"Hey, Lois.† She peeped again, except it was more of a grumble. â€Å"Hey, Lois.† Another rumbly peep. But this one was a three-syllable peep, and the first syllable was longer than the other two. â€Å"Hey,† I said, more softly. â€Å"Lois.† And she answered a quieter three-syllable peep, and the long syllable fell down the scale and the first short syllable was higher and stronger and the second short syllable was lower and deeper. I looked at her and she looked at me. Sure, mynah birds can do better, but do they do better while you’re both straining with alertness at each other? It takes weeks to teach a parakeet to say its first words. The air was nearly humming around us, and the Headache tried to break out of my skull again, which it didn’t do so much as it used to except when I woke up from dreaming about big dragons and caves with weird lighting effects. I suppose I’d noticed before that the Headache tended to get worse when Lois and I seemed to be getting, you know, intense at each other. But I wasn’t thinking about that either. I did wonder occasionally if maybe it was a brain tumor, but weirdly since I’m so good at worrying about everything I could never really get going worrying about that. So I sat there looking at her with her looking at me. I was excited and thrilled and also . . . frightened and horrified. Frightened because it was like I was finally facing that I had this whole extra responsibility I’d only been trying to keep her alive, which had been more than enough, but now I’d been reminded, forcefully, that just feeding a wild orphan isn’t enough, and what do you teach a dragon about being a dragon? What was Lois trying to learn from the very funny-looking dragon she thought was her mom by mimicking the noises she (well, he) made? I had no idea. And nobody could tell me. And I had read Old Pete’s journals so often I knew them almost by heart and he couldn’t tell me either. And I hated the idea that the best Lois had to look forward to was growing up to live in some kind of cage and being dumbly fed by humans for the rest of her life because no one would’ve taught her how to be a dragon. Okay, Lois being alive was a miracle. I wanted more miracles. That’s all. I also perversely suddenly didn’t want any other humans to notice that Lois was trying to speak human. Add this to the long list of things I can’t really explain. I was afraid of . . . how their reactions might make me think about it, I guess. Just the fact that they’d have reactions (Dad would get all fascinated and remind me to keep careful notes and Billy would just nod slowly and go on with whatever he was doing) felt like someone putting a hand on your soap bubble: pop. (Although as soap bubbles go, Lois didn’t make the grade.) But I was realizing what it really meant that Lois was Lois to me first and a dragon second, however stupid that sounds, like I could forget 1,61. half a nanosecond that she was a dragon. But everybody else could afford to see her as a dragon. And this meant I saw her as . . . ? I had a lot of sleepless nights after that afternoon. While Lois snuffled and gurgled under the bedclothes. While I worried I also noticed – especially noticeable in an enclosed space like between your sheets – that her burps and farts smelled more and more like singe and char. I was sure Lois would be brokenhearted if she woke up one morning and discovered she’d fried me in her sleep . . . but what if she did? How to cite Dragonhaven CHAPTER FIVE, Essay examples

Globalisation And Sustainability Essay Example For Students

Globalisation And Sustainability Essay Globalisation And Sustainability Essay: The Importance of Government Sidney Rua Student #: 990129213 Frasier Valentine POL103Y1 April 10, 2000 The world was once vast and unknown. Communication was once dreaded as messages would take exceeded amounts of time from one point of destination to the next. Countries would not know of each others affairs for months because the world was large beyond anyones imagination. But as soon as technology reared its head the world rapidly became smaller. It modified everything within its grasp. Communication that once took months could now take seconds. Travelling abroad that would have taken years now took hours. Every institution that fell into this form of globalisation changed. It is obvious to see that governments have also been effected by globalisation in such ways that they can either imitate or contrast with each other. Yet a controversy exists about the issue on the effect of globalisation on governmental power. On one side of the argument globalisation is considered as a force that weakens the power of government whereas others debate the contrary, claiming that there is no effect and power remains constant. Still both arguments fail because of the extremity that they impose. A better argument would be that globalisation does effect government power, not to the point of weakening, but ensuring that no abuse of power occurs unknowingly. Globalisation is simply a tool that enables the actions of governments to be monitored by other countries and world organisations. With comparison of Australian and Canadian environmental policy, it will be clear that actions taken by the government have been influenced (not controlled) by globalisation. The idea of the world becoming a small interactive village is what many would consider the effect of globalisation. Boundaries are no longer an issue and can be crossed with an easy click of the mouse. But globalisation is far from being a new concept that came along with technology. It has existed since humans have had curiosity. The exploring of new lands, the discovery of new peoples and nations, to the fascination of natures physical features, people have been in the process of globalisation for centuries. Technology had simply allowed globalisation to progress a little more rapidly than what it had accomplished in the past. Although it seems that globalisation brings promise of a unified Utopian society this is far from becoming the truth. Todays world is based on the market. The selling of goods and services to the consumer to gain profit. Therefore globalisation has become the expansion of the market place with greater opportunities for production and trade in new locations.1 Relations are established between nations, not for the mere satisfaction of peace, but for the insurance that a trading partner exists where profit can be gained. This motivation from profit leads to the element of the manufacturing process. In order to achieve maximum profit corporations need to spend less in producing a product. They go about this through means of cheap energy fuel (usually fossil fuels like coal), low labour wages, and cutting costs in waste disposal. For an exceeded amount of time corporations have been able to escape the clutches of the law because it was seen that damage to the environment was a small price to pay in exchange for high profits. For instance abuse to the Canadian forests in the past two centuries has led to a large proportion of it being cut, 8 000 kilometres long and hundreds of kilometres wide.2 When large damage has been inflicted only then will peoples concerns be aroused. Governments then needed to intervene, to steer corporations from inflicting anymore damage to .

Education and Training Research Association †MyAssignmenthelp.com

Question: Discuss about the Education and Training Research Association. Answer: Introduction The WSQ framework is a nationwide credential system which is responsible for providing services such as personal development, training, accessing and identifying the competencies of adult workers. These qualities are necessary for them to maintain their employment status. The VUCA environment is a combination of qualities which together characterize some problematic situation or condition in a market. This report will critically evaluate the relationship between VUCA environment and WSQ framework. As per Bound Lin (2010), the Singapore Workforce Skills Qualifications is created on standards issued and validated by the Singapore Workforce Development Agency. The prime goal of WSQ framework is to provide the necessary skills and knowledge to the workers which they require to perform their job. The actions of WSQ framework is connected with the standards of Industry Skills and Training Councils (ISTCs). The WSQ framework provides clear progression pathways to the workers which they can use in order to update their skills as per the market standards and stay employed in adverse conditions. According to Lin Bound (2011), the training and assessment conducted by WSQ framework analyze the workers based on their competencies rather than academics, therefore, the before the certification, the employees are required to illustrate their skills. The WSQ framework provides a certificate to experienced employees without the requirement of training. Every worker in Singapore can benefit from the WSQ framework since the entry criteria focus on competencies rather than qualifications of employees. As per Bennett Lemoine (2014), it is an acronym for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, combining they characterize the nature of some problematic market situations and conditions. The VUCA was first used by the government of United States at the end of Cold War, after that in the 1990s; the business sector started using it to define the problematic conditions of the market. The VUCA environment concentrates on the behavioral and system failures of individuals and groups which are related to the organizational shortcomings. The volatility defines the deficiency of stability and opportunities which cause an unpredictable and instant change in the market, the factors contributing change include digitalization, connectivity, competition, and trade liberalization. As per the research of Johansen Euchner (2013), the uncertainty can be defined as a deficiency of predictability in the future events and issues, the process of management decision making affected by uncertainty due to lack of reliability of information. The complexity defines the difficulty of the situation which causes due to rapidly changing environment which makes it near impossible to establish a connection between events. The ambiguity can be described as lack of clarity which makes the process of correctly recognizing and codifying of future opportunities and threats considerably tricky. Relationship between VUCA Environment and WSQ Framework As per Brown Tan (2011), the WSQ framework is initiated by the government to address the challenges faced by workers in VUCA environment. The SkillsFuture Singapore Agency is another initiative of government which concentrates on education and training of workers while the WSQ framework focuses on work and employability problems. The challenges faced by workers in VUCA environment is addressed by the training, education, skill, and knowledge provided by WSQ framework. The VUCA environment is the uncertain and proper development of skills and knowledge help workers retain their jobs. The issues faced by workers in VUCA environments such as lack of opportunities, job threats, and technological advancements can be overcome by WSQ framework since it improves market flexibility and skills portability of workers as per the requirement of the market. Mannherz (2017) provided that in order to remain employed in changing the environment, workers are requiring updating their competencies as per the market requirements. Therefore, the WSQ framework has a direct relationship with VUCA environment since it provides necessary skill and knowledge to employees which they can utilize in the uncertain and unpredictable market conditions. Conclusion To conclude, the WSQ framework is initiated by the Singapores government to provide the necessary training regarding skill and knowledge to the workers which is required in VUCA environment. The VUCA environment describes the uncertainty and complexity of the marketing conditions which makes it difficult for employees to keep their job. The future market conditions are ambiguous and uncertain; therefore, the growth of corporations is significantly influenced by the knowledge and skills of their workers. Hence, the WSQ framework is introduced by the government to fill the gap between workers skills and market requirements. References Bennett, N., Lemoine, J. (2014). What VUCA really means for you. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2014/01/what-vuca-really-means-for-you Bound, H. and Lin, M., 2010. Singapore workforce skills qualifications (WSQ), workplace learning and assessment (stage I).Institute of Adult Learning, Singapore, p.25. Brown, A., Tan, J. (2011, April). New researchers and new research communities: an exploration of strategies for the development of research capability and capacity in continuing education and training in Singapore. In14th Australian Vocational Education and Training Research Association (AVETRA) Conference, Melbourne. Johansen, B., Euchner, J. (2013). Navigating the VUCA world.Research-Technology Management,56(1), 10-15. Lin, M., Bound, H. (2011, April). Workplace learning experiences of trainees engaged in Singapores Workforce Skills Qualifications (WSQ) training. AVETRA Conference. Melbourne. Mannherz, T. (2017). New leadership models for the VUCA world. Five leadership approaches to cope with uncertainty.