I’m not a professional resume writer. I don’t even play one on TV. Nevertheless, as a professional writer and active job-search candidate, I’ve learned a few things about how to craft killer resumes and cover letters, beginning with our vernacular… that’s a fancy word for the language or dialect spoken by ordinary people in a particular country or region. How we obfuscate the English language One reason why recruiters and hiring managers have caved into Applicant Tracking Software (ATS) is having to wade through hundreds of resumes that use trite, lifeless terms like utilize, monetize and re-contextualize. Words we never speak or write in our common conversations with other people.…
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Life on the Body Farm What really happens to our bodies after death?
When Mary Scarborough wrote the lyrics to “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” in 1923, she probably didn’t have a research facility in mind. She wouldn’t find cows, chickens or pigs at “The Body Farm” – just scores of rotting human bodies, covered in maggots. The Body Farm (officially known as the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Facility) was the brainchild of Dr. William Bass, a Forensic Anthropologist from Kansas who helps law enforcement agencies estimate how long a person has been dead. Determining the time of death is crucial in confirming alibis and establishing timelines for violent crimes. After 11 years of watching human decomposition, Bass realized how little was…
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I’m Mad as Hell and I’m Not Going to Interview Anymore Or, what’s gone wrong with the current job search process?
I’ve dropped out of the job market. I give up. I’m not retired. And it’s not that I don’t need the money anymore. I do. But I need intro-cranial bleeding, high blood pressure, and assaults on my dignity a lot less. So, I’ve adopted Howard Beale’s 1976 rant from “Network:” I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore! Despite everything you read in Forbes, on LinkedIn, and in Fish & Stream, there’s something seriously wrong with the job search process today. Industry experts shrug their shoulders, claiming there are just too many people looking for work these days. Poppycock. There’s something fundamentally broken with the system.…
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The Popsicle Story Eppsicles, fudgesicles and popsicles: the true story behind the frozen treats
As luck would have it, some of the best inventions that are part of our lives actually happened by accident. Who could possibly imagine going through a day without Kool-Aid, penicillin, microwave ovens, ice cream cones, Post it notes, potato chips, Super Glue, Slinkies or heaven forbid… no Popsicles? The Cold Start of a Legend The Popsicle was “invented” in 1905 by an industrious 11-year-old boy named Frank Epperson during an unseasonably cold San Francisco evening. After accidentally leaving his fruit drink in a cup on the front porch overnight, he discovered that the juice had frozen around the wooden stir stick. The next morning, he pulled the frozen drink…
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Great Achievements in Medical Fraud How the foot operated breast enlarger and Recto Rotor revolutionized medicine
If you were diagnosed at the turn of the century with lumbago, puking fever, black vomit, consumption, decrepitude, falling sickness, milk leg, ship fever, softening of the brain, St. Vitas dance, trench mouth, dropsy or heaven forbid, dyscrasy then you were in big trouble. Not only did the “modern” medical community misunderstand most of these diseases, they were also clueless as to how to treat them… until medical fraud appeared. To the Rescue Facing a life of interminable pain and suffering, many sufferers of these diseases resorted to hundreds of unfounded medical treatments – sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn’t. Here’s a brief list of some of the more…
