JOE PATERNO

Believe deep down in your heart that you're destined to do great things

Born in Dec. 21, 1926, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S. American collegiate gridiron football coach who, as head coach at Pennsylvania State University (1966– ), was one of the most successful coaches in the history of the sport.

Paterno served in the U.S. Army in the final year of World War II before accepting an athletic scholarship to Brown University, where he studied English literature and played quarterback for the football team. Upon graduation in 1950, he intended to enroll in law school but was lured away when his former coach at Brown, Charles (“Rip”) Engle, became head coach at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State). After 16 years as Engle's assistant, Paterno succeeded him in 1966.

Paterno made an immediate impact on the program, leading Penn State to consecutive undefeated seasons in 1968 and 1969; the team posted another undefeated season in 1973. However, Penn State was denied a national championship in each of these three seasons, as it failed to finish first in the final football polls following each season. Penn State won its first national championship of the Paterno era in 1982 and added another—as well as a fourth undefeated season—in 1986. Penn State started playing football in the Big Ten Conference in 1993, and they won a conference title the following year after Paterno guided the Nittany Lions to a record of 12 wins and 0 losses. In 2001 Paterno posted his 324th career win, surpassing the record for all-time major college coaching victories held by Bear Bryant of the University of Alabama. (Paterno's victory tally was bested by Florida State's Bobby Bowden in 2003, and the two coaches remained in a close race for the record throughout the decade.) Paterno also owned the record for career coaching victories in bowl games.

In January 2002 Paterno became the first active coach in 20 years to receive the Amos Alonzo Stagg Award, the highest honour given by the American Football Coaches Association. A four-time winner of the association's Coach of the Year award, he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2007. Not content only to build the football program, Paterno was an advocate for academic integrity and donated millions to build up the nonsporting programs of the university.

MILEY CYRUS

If you believe in yourself anything is possible

Miley Cyrus (real name Destiny Hope Cyrus) was born in 1992, in Tennessee. She earned the nickname "Miley" as she was constantly smiling as a child.

Her parents, Billy Ray and Leticia, were related to Hollywood. Thus, little Miley was always fond of acting. Her debut TV appearance was in the father's TV show Doc. After that, she also starred in movies like Big Fish.

After a tough and long audition, she was selected to act in the lead role in Hannah Montana on Disney Channel in 2006. There she played a double role as a teenage pop star, still in high school. The show scored enormous success and turned the young girl into a star very soon.

The songs of the show also became popular with the fans and there was a huge demand for CDs of those tracks. Resp onding to this stipulation, she set out on a live tour, which in turn produced huge publicity.

In the meantime she appeared on the magazine Vanity Fair. Though most of the photos, by photographer Annie Leibovitz, were satisfying, a few of them showed an overexposed Miley Cyrus. With that she received mixed response from the critic world; the debate giving the young star further media hype.

With starring for the third season in Hannah Montana, she also gave voice to the lead character in Pixar's Bolt. The movie release of Hannah Montana is also due in 2009. Apart from these, Miley has been given million dollars for writing an autobiography and Portfolio magazine has said Miley Cyrus "will be worth over $1 billion by the time she is 18".

Miley Cyrus is famous for acting in the lead role for the superhit Disney Channel TV show Hannah Montana. She is also the daughter of country musician Billy Ray Cyrus.

MARGARET MEAD

A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

The American anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-1978) developed the field of culture and personality research and was a dominant influence in introducing the concept of culture into education, medicine, and public policy.

Margaret Mead was born in Philadelphia, Pa., on Dec. 16, 1901. She grew up there in a liberal intellectual atmosphere. Her father, Edward Sherwood Mead, was a professor in the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce and the founder of the University of Pennsylvania's evening school and extension program. Her mother, Emily Fogg Mead, was a sociologist and an early advocate of woman's rights.

In 1919 Mead entered DePauw University but transferred after a year to Barnard College, where she majored in psychology. In her senior year she had a course in anthropology with Franz Boas which she later described as the most influential event in her life, since it was then that she decided to become an anthropologist. She graduated from Barnard in 1923. In the same year she married Luther Cressman and entered the anthropology department of Columbia University.

The Columbia department at this time consisted of Boas, who taught everything, and Ruth Benedict, his only assistant. The catastrophe of World War I and the dislocations that followed it had had their impact on the developing discipline of anthropology. Anthropologists began to ask how their knowledge of the nature of humankind might be used to illuminate contemporary problems. At the same time the influence of Sigmund Freud was beginning to be felt in all the behavioral sciences. The atmosphere in the Columbia department was charged with intellectual excitement, and whole new perspectives for anthropology were opening up.

Early Fieldwork

Mead completed her studies in 1925 and set off for a year's fieldwork in Samoa in the face of opposition from older colleagues worried about sending a young woman alone to a Pacific island. Her problem was to study the life of adolescent girls. She learned the native language (one of seven she eventually mastered) and lived in a Samoan household as "one of the girls." She found that young Samoan girls experience none of the tensions American and European adolescents suffer from, and she demonstrated the kind of social arrangements that make this easy transition to adulthood possible.

On returning from the field Mead became assistant curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History, where she remained, eventually becoming curator and, in 1969, curator emeritus. Her mandate in going to the museum was "to make Americans understand cultural anthropology as well as they understood archaeology."

When Mead wrote Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), her publisher, concerned that the book fell into no conventional category, asked for a chapter on what the work's significance would be for Americans. The result was the final chapter, "Education for Choice," which set the basic theme for much of her lifework.

In 1928, after completing a technical monograph, The Social Organization of Manuá, Mead left for New Guinea, this time with Reo Fortune, an anthropologist from New Zealand whom she had married that year. Her project was the study of the thought of young children, testing some of the then current theories. Her study of children's thought in its sociocultural context is described in Growing Up in New Guinea (1930). She later returned to the village of Peri, where this study was made, after 25 years, when the children she had known in 1929 were leaders of a community going through the difficulties of transition to modern life. She described this transition, with flashbacks to the earlier days, in New Lives for Old (1956).

New Field Methods

Mead's interest in psychiatry had turned her attention to the problem of the cultural context of schizophrenia, and with this in mind she went to Bali, a society where trance and other forms of dissociation are culturally sanctioned. She was now married to Gregory Bateson, a British anthropologist whom she had met in New Guinea. The Balinese study was especially noteworthy for development of new field techniques. The extensive use of film made it possible to record and analyze significant minutiae of behavior that escape the pencil-and-paper ethnographer. Of the 38,000 photographs which Mead and Bateson brought back, 759 were selected for Balinese Character (1942), a joint study with Bateson. This publication marks a major innovation in the recording and presentation of ethnological data and may prove in the long run to be one of her most significant contributions to the science of anthropology.

Studies Relevant to the "Public Good"

Largely through the work of Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, the relevance of anthropology to problems of public policy was recognized to a degree, though somewhat belatedly. When World War II brought the United States into contact with allies, enemies, and peoples just emerging from colonialism, the need to understand many lifestyles became apparent. Mead conducted a nationwide study of American food habits prior to the introduction of rationing. Later she was sent to England to try to explain to the British the habits of the American soldiers who were suddenly thrust among them. After the war she worked as director of Research in Contemporary Cultures, a cross-cultural, trans-disciplinary project applying the insights and some of the methods of anthropology to the study of complex modern cultures. An overall view of the methods and some of the insights gained is contained in The Study of Cultures at a Distance (1953).

For the theoretical basis of her work in the field of culture and personality Margaret Mead drew heavily on psychology, especially learning theory and psychoanalysis. In return she contributed significantly to the development of psychoanalytic theory by emphasizing the importance of culture in personality development. She served on many national and international committees for mental health and was instrumental in introducing the study of culture into training programs for physicians and social workers.

In the 1960s Mead became deeply concerned with the unrest among the young. Her close contact with students gave her special insight into the unmet needs of youth--for better education, for autonomy, for an effective voice in decisions that affect their lives in a world which adults seem no longer able to control. Some of her views on these problems are set forth in Culture and Commitment (1970). Her thoughts on human survival under the threats of war, overpopulation, and degradation of the environment are contained in A Way of Seeing (1970).

Ever since Margaret Mead taught a class of young working women in 1926, she became deeply involved in education, both in the universities and in interpreting the lessons of anthropology to the general public. She joined the anthropology department at Columbia University in 1947 and also taught at Fordham University and the universities of Cincinnati and Topeka. She also lectured to people all over America and Europe. Mead died in 1978 and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Margaret Mead was a dominant force in developing the field of culture and personality and the related field of national character research. Stated briefly, her theoretical position is based on the assumption that an individual matures within a cultural context which includes an ideological system, the expectations of others, and techniques of socialization which condition not only outward responses but also inner psychic structure. Mead was criticized by certain other social scientists on methodological and conceptual grounds. She was criticized for neglecting quantitative methods in favor of depth analysis and for what has been called "anecdotal" handling of data. On the theoretical side she was accused of applying concepts of individual psychology to the analysis of social process while ignoring historical and economic factors. But since her concern lay with predicting the behavior of individuals within a given social context and not with the origin of institutions, the criticism is irrelevant.

There is no question that Mead was one of the leading American intellectuals of the 20th century. Through her best-selling books, her public lecturing, and her popular column in Redbook magazine, Mead popularized anthropology in the United States. She also provided American women with a role model, encouraging them to pursue professional careers previously closed to women while at the same time championing their roles as mothers.

ELIZABETH TAYLOR

Success is a great deodorant

Elizabeth Taylor was the idealisation movie star: violet-eyed, luminously beautiful, and bigger than life; nonetheless never the most means actress, she was the most magnetic, autocratic the spotlight with forlorn power. Few total have been the aim of such adoration, the aim of such ridicule, or the theme of such report and innuendo, and where so most prior to to and after her dry and died in the heated glisten of their fame, Taylor thrived; luminary was her lifeblood, the open eye her consistent companion. She knew no mediation — it was all or nothing. Whether great (two Oscars, a single of the initial million-dollar paychecks, and gift work), bad (health and weight problems, drug battles, and alternative tragedies), or nauseous (eight unsuccessful marriages, movie disasters, and large scandals), no delight or reversal was as good personal for media consumption.

Born Feb 27, 1932, in London, Taylor literally grew up in public. At the commencement of World War II, her family relocated to Hollywood, and by the age of 10 she was already underneath stipulate at Universal. She done her shade entrance in 1942′s There’s One Born Every Minute, followed a year after by a distinguished purpose in Lassie Come Home. For MGM, she co-starred in the 1944 instrumentation of Jane Eyre, afterwards appeared in The White Cliffs of Dover. With her initial lead purpose as a teenager equestrian in the 1944 family classical National Velvet, Taylor became a star. To their credit, MGM did not attainment her, notwithstanding her implausible beauty; she did not even reappear onscreen for dual some-more years, returning with Courage of Lassie. Taylor subsequent starred as Cynthia in 1947, followed by Life With Father. In Julia Misbehaves, she enjoyed her initial grown-up role, and afterwards portrayed Amy in the 1947 instrumentation of Little Women.

Taylor’s initial regretful lead came conflicting Robert Taylor in 1949′s Conspirator. Her adore hold up was already opening up offscreen as well; which same year she began dating millionaire Howard Hughes, though pennyless off the attribute to marry road house successor Nicky Hilton when she was only seventeen years old. The matrimony done general headlines, and in 1950 Taylor scored a vital strike as Spencer Tracy’s daughter in Vincente Minnelli’s Father of the Bride; a sequel, Father’s Little Dividend, premiered a year later. Renowned as a single of the world’s most pleasing women, Taylor was though mostly discharged as an thespian prior to to an glorious opening in the George Stevens play A Place in the Sun; soon, she was earning upwards of 5,000 dollars a week.

Taylor’s matrimony to Hilton valid short-lived, and in 1952 she tied together actor Michael Wilding. Often her regretful hold up overshadowed her career; indeed, her drive-in theatre of the early ’50s were mostly unused and often achieved feeble at the box office. In 1956, however, the thespian reunited with Stevens to star in his epic instrumentation of the Edna Ferber novel Giant. It was a blockbuster, as was her 1957 follow-up Raintree County, for which she warranted a Best Actress Oscar nomination. That same year, Taylor’s matrimony to Wilding ended, and she shortly voiced her much-publicized rendezvous to writer Mike Todd; his comfortless death in a craft pile-up the following year left her the world’s most glamorous widow, and her luminary grew even larger. Whatever magnetism audiences hold for Taylor fast vanished, however, when she was shortly identified as the alternative lady in the break-up of thespian Eddie Fisher and thespian Debbie Reynolds; their regretful triangle played out in the headlines of tabloids the world over, and nonetheless Taylor in the future stole Fisher away, the careers of all 3 performers were increased by the liaison — the open simply could not get enough.

Taylor’s voluptuous design was serve towering by an impossibly erotic opening in 1958′s Cat upon a Hot Tin Roof; an additional Tennessee Williams adaptation, Suddenly Last Summer, followed a year later, and both were rarely successful. To finish the conditions of her MGM contract, she grudgingly resolved to star in 1960′s Butterfield 8; upon completing the movie Taylor trafficked to Britain to proceed work upon the much-heralded Cleopatra, for which she perceived an rare one-million-dollar fee. In London she became dangerously ill, and underwent a life-saving puncture tracheotomy. Hollywood magnetism valid enough for her to win a Best Actress Oscar for Butterfield 8, nonetheless most of the great will lengthened toward her again dissolute in the arise of the ascent difficulties confronting Cleopatra. With 5 million dollars already spent, producers pulled the block and relocated the fire to Italy, replacing co-star Stephen Boyd with Richard Burton. The final total placed the movie at a price of 37 million dollars, creation it the most dear plan in movie history; scheduled for a 16-week shoot, the prolongation essentially took years, and notwithstanding plateau of pre-publicity, it was a outrageous mess at the box bureau upon the 1963 premiere.

Still, the notice paid to Cleopatra paled in some-more aged to the inspection which greeted Taylor’s ultimate romance, with Burton; she left Fisher to marry the actor in 1964, and maybe no Hollywood attribute was ever the theme of such heated media coverage. Theirs was a passionate, inclement relationship, played out in the press and onscreen in drive-in theatre together with 1963′s The V.I.P.’s and 1965′s The Sandpiper. In 1966, the integrate starred in Mike Nichols’ argumentative directorial entrance Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, arguably Taylor’s most appropriate performance; overweight, verbally cutting, and defiantly unglamorous, she won a second Oscar for her work as the ill-natured wife of Burton’s alcoholic professor. Their real-life matrimony managed to survive, however, and after Taylor appeared conflicting Marlon Brando in 1967′s Reflections in a Golden Eye, she and Burton reunited for The Comedians. She additionally starred in Franco Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew, though nothing were successful at the box office; 1968′s Doctor Faustus was a disaster, and after which year Boom! unsuccessful to sum even one-quarter of the costs. After 1969′s Secret Ceremony, Taylor starred in The Only Game in Town, a year later; when they as good failed, her days of million-dollar salaries were over, and she began operative upon percentage.

With Burton, Taylor subsequent appeared in a tiny purpose in 1971′s Under Milk Wood; subsequent was X, Y and Zee, followed by an additional wedding collaboration, Hammersmith Is Out. In 1972 the Burtons additionally co-starred in a radio feature, Divorce His, Divorce Hers; the pretension valid prescient, as dual years later, the integrate did in truth divorce after a decade together. However, couple of expected the subsequent growth in their relationship: In 1975, it was voiced which Taylor and Burton had remarried, though this time their kinship lasted hardly a year. In the meantime, she was mostly absent from films, and did not reappear until 1976′s The Blue Bird; a year later, she starred in the telefilm Victory at Entebbe. Taylor resolved the decade with a inclusive detonate of underline drive-in theatre (A Little Night Music, Winter Kills, The Mirror Crack’d) and TV work (Return Engagement), though audiences no longer seemed interested. Indeed, she done some-more headlines for her augmenting weight, one after an additional seizure problems, and revelations of drug and ethanol abuse than she did for any of her films. As always, Taylor’s adore hold up remained the concentration of most conjecture as well, and from 1976 to 1982 she was tied together to statesman John Warner.

With no movie offers forthcoming, Taylor incited to the stage, and in 1981 she starred in a prolongation of The Little Foxes. In 1983, she and Burton additionally reunited to co-star upon Broadway in Private Lives. Television additionally remained an option, and in 1983 she and Carol Burnett co-starred in Between Friends. However, Taylor’s first concentration during the decades to follow was gift work; following the death of her tighten friend, Rock Hudson, she became a personality in the conflict opposite AIDS, and for her efforts won the 1993 Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. She additionally launched a successful line of perfumes. And of course, Taylor remained a tie of publication headlines; she confirmed a tighten loyalty with an additional the one preferred aim of the tabloids, King-of-Pop Michael Jackson, and during a well-publicized stay at the Betty Ford Clinic, she began a intrigue with Larry Fortensky, a building a whole workman most years her junior. They tied together in 1989, though similar to her alternative relationships, it did not last. In between, there was additionally the occasional movie or radio project. In 1988, she and Zeffirelli reunited for Young Toscanini, though the design was never released; a 1989 TV instrumentation of Sweet Bird of Youth warranted Taylor substantial publicity, though she didn’t crop up in an additional movie until 1994 with The Flintstones.

In 1997, the thespian once again became a featured publication subject when she underwent brain operation to mislay a soft tumor. The same year, she perceived courtesy of a some-more auspicious accumulation with Happy Birthday Elizabeth: A Celebration of Life, a TV special in which she was paid reverence by a series of stars together with Madonna, Shirley MacLaine, John Travolta, Dennis Hopper, and Cher. In 2001, Taylor managed the considerable attainment of dredging up both aged publication headlines and formulating new ones, interjection to her starring purpose in the radio movie These Old Broads. Co-starring with Shirley MacLaine, Joan Collins, and her aged rival, Debbie Reynolds, Taylor’s impasse with the plan — which was co-written by Reynolds’ daughter, Carrie Fisher, and featured her son, Todd Fisher, in a ancillary purpose — engendered some-more than a couple of inches in the nation’s report columns, nonetheless both Taylor and Reynolds were discerning to indicate out which they had laid their differences to rest a prolonged time ago.

Academy Award-winning thespian Elizabeth Taylor has died of congestive heart disaster at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. She had been a studious there for some-more than 6 weeks prior to to succumbing to her illness. “She was surrounded by her children: Michael Wilding, Christopher Wilding, Liza Todd, and Maria Burton,” Sally Morrison, Taylor’s publicist, pronounced in a statement.

Starting out as a kid star, Taylor enjoyed a conspicuous career in film. She won dual Academy Awards for her thespian work in Butterfield 8 in 1960 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1965. In new decades, Taylor had stepped divided from behaving to concentration upon gift work. She determined the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1991.

Married 8 times, Taylor additionally captivated a lot of media courtesy for her personal life. She even marry associate actor Richard Burton twice. Health issues additionally tormented the thespian over the years. She suffered a distressing tumble from a equine during the creation of her new thing movie National Velvet (1944). Most recently, Taylor underwent heart operation in 2009 to correct a valve.

Funeral skeleton have nonetheless to be announced. Taylor’s family is asking which contributions be done to the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in lieu of flowers.

Taylor died upon Mar 23, 2011, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She was 79 years old. Through all her triumphs and difficulties, she will regularly be remembered as a beautiful, much-beloved lady with a participation clearly incomparable than life, both upon and off the screen

BABY CHAM

On the road to success, there's a curve called failure, a loop called confusion, speed bumps called fake friends & red lights called enemies.

Born Dameon Dean Beckett in Kingston, Jamaica on February 24th, 1977 at just age seven years old he began watching established deejays of the day honing their skill on the mic while sharpening his own deejaying abilities at school. "I was a good student, I wasn't focused on deejaying just yet", Cham recalls. "But you just develop the idea of being a deejay, holding the mic and rocking the crowd." One of nine children whose father died in1991, Dameon put aside his childhood aspirations of becoming polite because it would have been a financial burden for his mother, "so I found another way out," he says. 

While attending high school Dameon and friends would lyrically freestyle, receiving enthusiastic responses from their fellow students. Dameon was asked to perform at a talent show in Kingston, (Where he first adopted the moniker Baby Cham) for which he wrote several original songs, surprising many in the community with his skills. With his friends encouragement he began visiting Kingston's recording studios where young hopefuls and already established artists spends hours each day waiting for an opportunity to "voice", that is, record their vocals over a producer's pre-exisiting rhythm ("riddim") track. "Nothing started to happen for me until about age 15, that's when I voiced my first song," Cham recalls. "A year later, I voiced a song that got a little recognition in Jamaica, "One Bag of Hotness". Then sound systems started looking for me in the community to do dub plate specials (custom made acetate recordings lauding a specific sound system)" In 1995 Baby Cham met popular deejay Spragga Benz who took him to Donovan Germain's Penthouse studios. Spragga and Cham recorded "No Coco Mania" which rocketed to number one throughout the Caribbean, earning Baby Cham an opportunity to perform in Barbados, his first trip outside of Jamaica. 

As a result of his numerous visits to Penthouse, Baby Cham formed an alliance with Dave Kelly who was at the time the studio resident task master (engineer, producer, etc). When Kelly opened THE BOXX studio facility, Cham continued to call on him seeking an opportunity to record. "I always liked how Dave did his work," Cham remarks, "how his product sounded: him nah rush it, just one or two rhythms a year and they always last." Kelly, however, insisted the promising young artist finish school before he would record him. Since Baby Cham completed high school, his dynamic deejay style in combination with Kelly's impeccable sense of rhythms has forged an indomitable Dancehall combination.

Kelly's JOYRIDE rhythm released in late 1996 dominated the Dancehalls and radio airwaves for most of 1997, yielding two hits for Baby Cham: "Funny Man" with singer Mr. Easy and "Joyride" with singer Wayne Wonder. As the rhythm's popularity traveled outside of Jamaica, Baby Cham hit the road on a four week Joyride Tour of the US along with Frisco Kid, Alley Cat, Wayne Wonder and Mr. Easy. Under the guidance of the tour more established artists, Cham gained confidence and developed the powerful delivery which now trademarks his live performances. 

In 1998, the Dancehall celebrity spotlight shone even brighter on Baby Cham when he recorded "Que Sera (Bumper Cart)" over Kelly's RAE RAE rhythm. The song's popularity earned Cham his first advertised appearance on Jamaica's Reggae Sumfest - The island's most important Reggae Festival. The RAE RAE rumblings escalated to seismic proportion when Kelly released the SHOWTIME rhythm featuring one of Cham's best selling single "Gallong Yah Gal". Cham returned to Sumfest 1999, his dazzling performance rated among the finest of the festival. 

In July 1999, Kelly's much anticipated BUG rhythm began it's Dancehall infestation and with it arrived Cham's anthem "Ghetto Pledge". As the year ended the BUG refused to be exterminated spawning, instead Kelly's CLONE rhythm and another Cham's chart topper "Another Level" featuring Bounty Killer.

Baby Cham's music indeed raises Dancehall to another level - after listening to "Wow&. The Story", it's certain longtime fans and recent Dancehall converts will have a unanimous response: Wow Wow!!!!

JOHN C. MAXWELL

A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way

John C. Maxwell (born 1947) is an evangelical Christian author, speaker, and pastor who has written more than 50 books, primarily focusing on leadership. Titles include The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership and The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader: Becoming the Person Others Will Want to Follow. His books have sold more than thirteen million copies, with several on the New York Times Best Seller List and translations in over fifty languages. In 2003, he was honored by the State of Indiana for his lifelong mission in helping individuals develop as leaders, for his prolific authorship, and for the founding of EQUIP.

Personal life

John C. Maxwell was born in Garden City, Michigan in 1947. Maxwell followed his father into the ministry, completing a Bachelor’s degree at Ohio Christian University in 1969, a Master of Divinity degree at Azusa Pacific University, and a Doctor of Ministry degree at Fuller Theological Seminary.

Maxwell credits his leadership instincts and his early leadership training to his father. He currently resides in South Florida with his wife, Margaret.

Career

For over thirty years, Maxwell has led churches in Indiana, Ohio, California, and Florida. After serving as senior pastor for 14 years, in 1995, he left Skyline Church, near San Diego, to devote himself full-time to speaking and writing. However, in 2004, he returned to ministry at Christ Fellowship in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, where he is currently a teaching pastor. On November 16, 2008, Maxwell began serving as a guest pastor at the world-famous Crystal Cathedral, in Orange County, California. Maxwell’s mentor, Robert H. Schuller, has had a variety of noted evangelical pastors preach at his megachurch since his son, Robert A. Schuller, resigned as senior pastor in 2008. Maxwell has returned to preach at the Crystal Cathedral several times, and his messages are broadcast worldwide on the Hour of Power television program, seen by an estimated 20 million viewers.

Maxwell is an internationally recognized leadership expert, speaker, and author who has sold over 13 million books. His organizations have trained more than 2 million leaders worldwide. Dr. Maxwell is the founder of INJOY, Maximum Impact, ISS and EQUIP, an international leadership development organization working to help leaders. EQUIP is involved with leaders from more than 80 nations. Its mission is “to see effective Christian leaders fulfill the Great Commission in every nation.”

Every year Maxwell speaks to Fortune 500 companies, international government leaders, and organizations as diverse as the United States Military Academy at West Point and the National Football League. A New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Business Week best-selling author, Maxwell was one of 25 authors and artists named to Amazon.com’s 10th Anniversary Hall of Fame. Three of his books, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, Developing the Leader Within You, and The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader have each sold over a million copies.

Maxwell serves on the Board of Trustees at Indiana Wesleyan University and has a building named after him there, the Maxwell Center for Business and Leadership.

RODNEY DANGERFIELD

Men who do things without being told draw the most wages.

Even as a kid, Rodney Dangerfield didn't get any respect. Moving around the dingy neighborhoods of New York's five boroughs, the only stability in Dangerfield's life was his domineering mother, a woman whom he claims never showed him any affection and treated him as an unwanted burden (which he must have been to a woman whose only advice to her son was to "never eat a frankfurter from the man on the corner with the orange umbrella. Those hot dogs are made of snakes.") For Dangerfield comedy was the only escape from this incredibly fractured childhood. 

It's pretty clear from the first page of Dangerfield's autobiography, It's Not Easy Bein' Me, just where the self-deprecating humor and inferiority complex that have made his act famous developed. Though Dangerfield still harbors ill feelings toward his mother, her coldness acted as a catalyst for his career, helping to create his act as the unwanted, unloved, yet affable loser. It's almost surprising to find out that Dangerfield's hard luck personae has any basis in reality at all. "Could anybody really have had it that bad?" you might ask when listening to Dangerfield's act. Well, Rodney apparently did, and much of his autobiography is spent in his childhood, where Rodney talks about the lack of an attentive adult in his life and how that led him to associate with the life's losers.

It's no surprise that Dangerfield's most successful film roles (Al Czervik in Caddyshack and Thornton Mellon in Back to School) have been as average Joes who find monetary success, but never lose touch with his roots. That's Rodney's story. Dangerfield certainly wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth and much of the book deals with the odd jobs that he's performed throughout life just to get by, beginning with a series of delivery jobs he held as a young boy. Even into his forties, Dangerfield was still selling aluminum siding as he tried to break his way into show business! 

Dangerfield's story is a testament to underdogs who no matter what they have working against them have continued to fight for what they're after. Nobody ever handed Rodney a job. He worked for every inch he got as he describes in his various attempted entries into show business doing everything from working as a barker at a club, to waiting tables, to doing his act for free, just so long as someone was there to listen. All of this leading up to his big break, a bit part on The Ed Sullivan Show that blossomed into a regular appearance and eventually the role as everyone's favorite schmo.

What's most inspiring about Rodney's journey into show business is that when he finally got to the point where his name was as asset, where people knew his act and knew who he was, he used that fame to catapult other young comedians by opening his Dangerfield's comedy club in New York as well as through a series of HBO young comedians specials which staged the first acts by the likes of Jim Carrey, Sam Kinison and Roseanne Barr.

Dangerfield's biography is a veritable journey through American comedy of the last century (insert your favorite "I'm so old" Rodney joke here). With anecdotes on everyone from Jack Benny, Jackie Gleason, Joe Ancis, and Al Jolson to Lenny Bruce, Redd Foxx, and Andy Kauffman to the numerous comics who graced the stage at Dangerfield's, Rodney seems to have been part of nearly every major comic movement of the last eighty years. 

It's Not Easy Bein' Me threads these anecdotes with a rich collection of some of Dangerfield's best material on everything from sex: "People think I get plenty of girls. I go to a drive-in movies and o push-ups in the backseat of my car"; to marriage: "I remember before we were married, I told my wife, 'Honey, I love you. Will you marry me?' She said, 'If you really loved me, you wouldn't ask me to do that"; to, his favorite, disrespect: "I went to the store to buy some rat poison and the clerk said, 'Shall I wrap it, or do you want to eat it here?"

Even if you don't know much about stand up comedy, Dangerfield's life is interesting as a chronicle of the American entertainment industry, from the very bottom to the top. As the subtitle (A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Sex and Drugs) describes, along the way Dangerfield encounters lots of sex (I don't think he wanted to leave out a single tryst) and lots of drugs, but it's his initiative and unwillingness to give up and especially his ability to find humor in even the most difficult situations is the real juicy part here, and one that should inspire even the most defeated of aspiring stars to give it another try.

JIM MORRISON

A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself

Lead singer for the rock group the Doors, Jim Morrison was the poster-boy for the mind-bending, outlandish lifestyle of the 1960s in his brief but brilliant career.

James Douglas Morrison was born in Melbourne, Florida, on December 8, 1943. His father, a career Navy officer, was transferred from base to base during his son's childhood, but, by his Jim's early teens, the family had settled in Alexandria, Virginia. After finishing high school in Alexandria, Morrison took several classes at St. Petersburg Junior College and Florida State University before pulling up roots in 1964 and heading for the West Coast. By 1966 the twenty-two-year-old Morrison was enrolled in film classes at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), but a friendship with fellow student Ray Manzarek would sideline any plans he had of becoming a filmmaker.

While the two young men had known each other only casually as fellow students, they ran into each other one day by accident, on a Venice, California, beach. Manzarek, an organist, along with Morrison, guitarist Robbie Krieger, and drummer John Densmore, decided to form their own rock band to put their songs to music. The young men decided to call their group the Doors, a name inspired by a quote from nineteenth-century English poet William Blake (1757–1827): "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear as it is, infinite." As Morrison was fond of saying, "there are things known and things unknown and in between are the Doors."

A long-term gig at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go on Hollywood's Sunset Strip allowed the Doors to develop their stage presence, and it eventually drew the attention of talent scouts searching for new recording acts. Not the least of the group's attractions was Morrison, who sang in a husky baritone, wore skintight pants, and went even further than Elvis Presley had in incorporating sexually suggestive movements into his onstage performances. With lyrics like "Come on baby, light my fire," Morrison drove young women wild.

After the release of their first album, The Doors, the group went back into the studio and cut Strange Days, both of which came out in 1967. Other albums would include Waiting for the Sun (1968), The Soft Parade (1969), Morrison Hotel (1970), Absolutely Live (1970), and L.A. Woman (1971). Morrison, interested in Native American lore and the images of the American deserts, dubbed himself the "Lizard King" and wrote several songs, including "Celebration of the Lizard," in reference to his reptilian alter ego (another aspect of one's personality).

Caught up in a wave of popularity, the young band found itself carried into a new world, where drugs, alcohol, and sex played a major role. Morrison, whose status as a celebrity had begun almost overnight, found it difficult to handle the change: his growing dependence on alcohol would dim his talent in the years that followed, and the superstar status made him believe he was immune to normal authority.

On March 1, 1969, Morrison and the Doors were booked for a concert at Dinner Key Auditorium, in Coconut Grove, in Morrison's home state of Florida. During his performance before thirteen thousand screaming fans, Morrison exposed himself briefly to the audience. Nothing was done until pressure from disgusted Miami-area residents forced local police to issue a warrant for Morrison's arrest. The singer, who had been vacationing out of the country, turned himself in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and returned to Miami, where he went on trial on August 12, 1970. Found guilty of a misdemeanor (a minor crime) for profanity (vulgar language or behavior) and drunkenness, he was sentenced to six months hard labor, although the sentence was stayed (postponed) while his attorney appealed the conviction. Morrison would not live to see the outcome of that appeal.

After the trial in Miami, Morrison's life grew more chaotic, his relationships with band members more strained. Searching to recover a sense of himself, he went back to the poetry that he had loved while a college student. In 1970 he published his first book of verse, The Lords [and] The New Creatures, which had been privately printed the year before.

On July 3, 1971, Morrison's girlfriend found him dead in his bathtub. The cause of death was determined to be a heart attack, although an autopsy was never performed. He was buried at the Pere-Lachaisse Cemetery in Paris, France. His death was kept secret until after the funeral to eliminate the crowds of saddened fans that would likely have attended. Morrison's grave remains one of the most visited sites in all of Paris.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike - information and wit.

Stephen Butler Leacock was born in Swanmore, England. His father, after failing at farming in South Africa and Kansas, took his family in 1876 to Canada, where they settled on a farm in the Lake Simcoe district of Ontario. It was never a success, and Leacock's father eventually abandoned his wife, leaving her to raise the family of eleven children (of whom Stephen was the third). Leacock was educated locally and then at Upper Canada College, Toronto. After a year at the University of Toronto he became an unenthusiastic school-teacher in 1888; from 1889 to 1899 he taught at Upper Canada College, finding time to complete a degree in modern languages at the University of Toronto in 1891. In 1899, inspired by Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the leisure class, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he did graduate work in political economy under Veblen. He married Beatrix Hamilton in 1900, and upon receiving his Ph.D. in 1903 was appointed lecturer in the Department of Economics and Political Science at McGill University. In 1906 he published his first and most profitable book: Elements of political science (rev. 1921), a college textbook. In 1907–8 he went on a lecture tour of the British Empire to promote Imperial Federation, and when he returned to McGill he became head of his department, helped found the University Club, and built a summer home on Lake Couchiching near Orillia, Ontario. McGill, the University Club, and the home in Orillia became the focal points of his existence. In 1910 the first of Leacock's many books of humour was published, Literary lapses (New Canadian Library, with an Afterword byRobertson Davies). Elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1919, Leacock became a charter member of the Canadian Authors' Association in 1921, and that year went on a lecture tour of England. He remained head of his department until his enforced retirement in 1936, after which he made a triumphant lecture tour of western Canada that resulted in My discovery of the West: a discussion of East and West in Canada (1937)—winner of a Governor General's Award. In 1937 he received the Lorne Pierce Medal of the Royal Society of Canada. He continued to write prolifically until his final illness.

Leacock's humorous books usually gathered together, in time for the Christmas trade, miscellaneous pieces that had appeared previously in various magazines. As a result, most of them have little or no overall unifying structure. The mix in Literary lapses is typical: funny stories, some little more than anecdotes, others more extended; monologues and dialogues; parodies ranging from fashionable romantic novels to Euclid; humorous reflections and essays on a wide variety of topics. Much of Leacock's humour, in this book and in others, is exuberant nonsense that, like Lewis Carroll's, sometimes breaks out into a violence that would be disturbing if it were not so obviously in fun. More modern parallels might be the Marx Brothers or Monty Python's Flying Circus. Leacock's parodies (see especially Nonsense novels, 1911; Frenzied fiction, 1918; and Winsome Winnie, and other new nonsense novels, 1920), which are undervalued today, offered him an excellent opportunity to give vent to this strain of irresponsible anarchy. Lord Ronald in ‘Gertrude the governess; or simple seventeen’, who ‘flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions’, is the most famous example of this strain of Leacock's humour. Other parodies—such as ‘Guido the gimlet of Ghent: a romance of chivalry’ and ‘Sorrows of a super soul; or, The memoirs of Marie Mushenough’—provide examples of almost equally inspired absurdity. Often, however, a more serious note mingles with the humour, and some of Leacock's funniest pieces—such as ‘My financial career’, ‘Hoodoo McFiggin's Christmas’, or any of the sketches from Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914; ncl)—show genuine sympathy for decent but ineffectual victims of a coldly indifferent or actively hostile world. It is clear from pieces such as these why Leacock considered Mr Pickwick and Huckleberry Finn to be the two greatest creations of comic literature, and why he was approached to write a screenplay for Charlie Chaplin.

The most striking aspect of Leacock's style is the illusion of a speaking voice, which is so strong in all his works. Like his masters, Dickens and Mark Twain, Leacock was a great lecturer and raconteur, and many of his pieces must be read aloud or recited for their full effect. North American humour has always been rooted in the oral tradition, from Thomas Chandler Haliburton (whom Leacock did not admire but with whom he had much in common) through Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, and many others, including Robert Benchley and James Thurber, who were both influenced by Leacock. But Leacock's idiom has none of the frontier raciness we associate withSam Slick and his numerous progeny. Much of the humour of his best pieces comes from their modesty of tone. They seem to be recounted, as simply and straightforwardly as possible, by someone who is not intending to amuse us and would probably find our amusement puzzling. Leacock's finest achievement in this respect is the naively self-revealing narrator of sunshine sketches of a little town (1912; ncl, with an Afterword by Jack Hodgins). Another aspect of Leacock's humour that may also owe something to the oral tradition is the way in which he elaborates a single idea, capping one ingenuity with another until he reaches an inevitable but absurd climax (the final irrational act of the narrator that follows a crescendo of humiliations in ‘My financial career’) or collapses into an equally inevitable but absurd anticlimax (as in the apparent tragedy turned farce of ‘The marine excursion of the Knights of Pythias’ or ‘The Mariposa bank mystery’ in Sunshine sketches).

Leacock's two most important books are Sunshine sketches and Arcadian adventures. The first is a regional idyll portraying the essentially good-natured follies of Mariposa, a small Ontario town based on Orillia. The second, set in an American city, is much harsher in its criticism of a hypocritical and destructive plutocracy. These two books stand apart from the rest of Leacock's humorous writings in their artistic unity and seriousness of purpose. Apart from the works already mentioned, Leacock's thirty-odd books of humour include Behind the beyond, and other contributions to human knowledge (1913), Moonbeams from the larger lunacy (1915), Further foolishness: sketches and satires on the follies of the day (1916), The Hohenzollerns in America: with the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities (1919), Over the footlights (1923), Winnowed wisdom: a new book of humour (1926), Short circuits (1928), The iron man & the tin woman, with other such futurities: a book of little sketches of today and to-morrow (1929), The dry Pickwick and other incongruities (1932), Funny pieces: a book of random sketches (1936), Model memoirs and other sketches from simple to serious (1938), My remarkable uncle, and other sketches (1942, ncl), and Last leaves (1945). An original ncl collection is My financial career and other follies (1993), selected and with an Afterword by David Staines.

After the appearance of Literary lapses, (1910; ncl, with an Afterword by Robertson Davies) Leacock published, on the average, one book of humour a year; but he found time to produce many non-humorous works as well—numerous articles, and some twenty-seven books, most of which are of little lasting interest. Two exceptions are My discovery of England (1922) and The boy I left behind me (1946). The first is based on Leacock's 1921 lecture tour of England and contains two of his best pieces: ‘We have with us to-night’, a hilarious account of the tribulations of a public lecturer, and ‘Oxford as I see it’, a powerful defence of the ideal of education as a humane experience. The boy I left behind me consists of the opening chapters of an autobiography that was interrupted by Leacock's death. It is shrewd and unsentimental but evocative, and even in its truncated form is one of Leacock's finest sustained pieces of writing. Leacock's other non-humorous books, while skilful and sometimes genuinely eloquent, are lacking in originality, seldom rising much above the level of competent popularizations. However, many of these works provide important insights into the issues that concerned Leacock all his life and that underlie much of his best humour.

Leacock's most dearly held belief, which links him to the Victorian age in which he spent his formative years, was in progress, which he saw as culminating in the achievements of Anglo-Saxon civilization. This belief underlies his many works of history, political science, and economics, such as Baldwin, Lafontaine, Hincks: responsible government (1907), Economic prosperity in the British Empire (1930), Canada: the foundations of its future (1941), and Montreal: seaport and city (1942), among many others. For Leacock the essence of progress was an ever-increasing capacity for human kindness, which found its highest artistic expression in Anglo-Saxon humour, especially as it is reflected in the works of Mark Twain and Dickens. He argued this thesis most notably in Mark Twain (1932), Charles Dickens, his life and work (1933), Humour: its theory and technique (1935), and Humour and humanity (1937). Leacock's belief in progress may appear complacent, but it was not lightly held. Throughout his life there was a tension between his proclaimed optimism about the continuing progress of humanity and his feeling of unease (expressed most forcefully in The unsolved riddle of social justice, 1920) about the triumph of materialism, with its exaltation of laissez-faire individualism and its undermining of traditional social ties. Leacock's particular stance in this matter has been characterized by Gerald Lynch as Tory humanism, a particularly Canadian stance that Leacock shares to some extent with other Canadian social satirists such as Thomas Chandler Haliburton, Sara Jeannette Duncan, and Robertson Davies, and with philosophers such as Charles Taylor and George Grant.

Leacock's hostility to the chaotic forces that he saw threatening human progress was reflected in his views on imperialism. Like many of the Canadian imperialists of his day (again Haliburton and Duncan come particularly to mind), Leacock saw the British Empire, for all its failings, as a humane alternative, rooted in tradition and community, to the unfettered materialism of the American capitalist juggernaut—a kind of Mariposa writ large. To be sure, Leacock's imperialism often came out in unpleasant ways, as in his unyielding opposition to non-Anglo-Saxon immigration to Canada; but whatever the forms his world view sometimes took, it was deeply rooted in a genuine desire that the gradual progress of humanity not be brought to a halt.

Most readers of Leacock agree that his writing career shows little sign of development, either intellectual or artistic. He did, however, continue to produce excellent pieces intermittently throughout his career, such as ‘Eddie the bartender’ (1929), ‘My Victorian girlhood by Lady Nearleigh Slopover’ (1939), and ‘My remarkable uncle’ (1942); and in his last years he wrote some very fine essays, essentially serious but leavened with humour, among the best of which are the final chapter of Humour: its theory and technique, with its vision of the universe as a great cosmic joke, and two meditations on old age: ‘When men retire’ (1939), and ‘Three score and ten—the business of growing old’ (1942). Nonetheless there remains a sense of disappointment, of unfulfilled potential, in his career. It has been argued, notably by Robertson Davies, that, perhaps because of his impoverished and unstable childhood, Leacock craved the reassurance that fame and money brought, and that this led him to fall back uncritically on successful formulas. This is undoubtedly true; but another reason may be that the kindly view of an ever-progressing world that Leacock wished to maintain was at odds with his gift. Leacock's insistence that humour should be kindly is clearly wrong-headed when tested against the world's great humour, including his own, especially Sunshine sketches and Arcadian adventures, with their critique—implicit in the former and bitterly explicit in the latter—of ‘money-getting in the city.’ It is hard to see how Leacock could have continued in the far-from kindly direction that seemed to lie ahead of him after Arcadian adventures if he were to maintain his faith in progress. His emphasis on the need for kindliness in humour seems, then, a rationalization for his pulling back from the fullest implications of his essentially pessimistic vision of man in the modern industrial age. Ironically, it may have been Leacock's need to maintain his faith in the progress of humanity that thwarted his own progress as an artist and the fullest development of the gifts with which he was so generously endowed.