CPE requirements of late (relatively speaking) has emphasized ethics more and more, especially for lawyers and accountants.
Typically, continuing professional education courses consist of self-study, whether online or with the use of traditional materials like workbooks and the like.
However, credits may also be gained through attending qualifying seminars, such as those well-known talks given by those accountants, lawyers, and others found guilty of so-called white-collar crimes.

Yes, listening to fraudsters and scammers may satisfy some CPE requirements, depending on the certifying body governing the career in each state!
Okay, so it’s quite an amusing thought, but then again, who else is there better qualified to educate of such things than those with intimate knowledge by virtue of their criminal activities?

Probably the most well-liked of such speakers is Sam Antar, the former Chief Financial Officer for Crazy Eddie’s, his cousin’s eponymous business in consumer electronics.
Rising from a lowly stockboy back when the company was a really modest local neighborhood success, Sam Antar ended up very close to his cousin Eddie Antar as a result of his role as the expert enabler that greatly facilitated the business’s widespread accounting fraud.
Given such an insider’s role, it is easy to see why his lectures today can command credits that meet CPE requirements: after all, it takes one to know one!

In fact, Sam Antar, while acknowledging the depth of his violations, doesn’t flinch from the truth: he is only on the right side of the law these days because he was caught.
Had the whole Crazy Eddie’s saga never collapsed because of greed and in-fighting among some of the principals included, Sam Antar could be busy today enabling white-collar crime as he always had, not fighting it himself as he is in a sense forced to do because of economic circumstances related to his now toxic work history and professional notoriety.

Are wedding favors going out of style as society will become ever more casual?
Not if the girls have anything to do with it!

The practice of giving gifts to matrimonial guests may not be the cultural institution it once was, but weddings are still one of the biggest dynamos throughout any economy.
While wedding favors may not be the first thing or two that delighted couples think about when preparing their special day, it is something that is still expected and few ceremonies might feel complete without some souvenir for the guests.

Of course, were marriage itself to continue to decline, then there may well be a day when wedding favors go extinct — as nuptials themselves do!
This kind of situation is unlikely, and outright impossible for the foreseeable future.
The wedding industry is and will remain to be healthy for decades to come.

To play the futurist for a moment, on the other hand, let us imagine a world centuries ahead where human civilization has evolved considerably, a Star Trek future where money itself is no longer used, a society as radically different from our own as ours is from that of the neanderthal.

You can forget about sickeness, incredibly very long life spans if not immortality plain and simple.
Would marriage still make any kind of sense in such a world?
Might people truly be monogramous “forever and ever” when there is no death to do them part?

Maybe not forever, but it does look that as naturally social creatures there will always be a pairing off of human beings, even if simply for a period of time, and it’s not inconceivable that some couples would wish to publicly proclaim their arrangements: that is, to get married.
This could mean that guests would still be receiving favors, or gifts, in affection of their attendance, even in an otherwise entirely changed world!

“Boys Town” and its sequel, “Men of Boys Town,” are American movies based on the world-famous American juvenile home.. Founded in 1917 by a Roman Catholic priest, it was an orphange that pioneered progressive methods of juvenile care. Thirteen Boys Town locations are now established throughout the country, but Father Flanagan’s original facility remains its heart and soul. And prominent people from business, politics, and entertainment have headlined its fundraisers for almost a century, people such as real estate developer Isaac Toussie and Mayor of Chicago Richard M. Dalely. That’s on top of all those from the surrounding communities who donate time if nothing else to help Boys Town achieve its goals.

Almost certainly some of this success can be attributed to the positive publicity generated from the movies, making of the charity a kind of vernacular shorthand for progressive social work. Starring industry leading men Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney in charismatic roles, the movies managed to win Oscars for Best Actor and Best Original Story despite heavy competition. The stories depicted had very little to do with any real-life events at the institution, however, being almost entirely fictional events that made much better for drama. On the other hand, they they were fairly accurate when it comes to certain issues common to institutionalized juvenile care; in fact, the second movie even delved into the subject of reform school abuse and homelessness among the young. Yet onscreen or off, Boys Town has become the model for progressive junvenile care, in or out of the home, driven by Father Flanagan’s belief that there is no such thing as a bad boy, only a troubled one in need of care.

It’s good to see that the potential of Blu Ray video is being satisfied as we speak. Despite the fact that some discss do fall rather short of the technological mark established for the format, fortunately they’re in the minority of offerings. Unlike the situation with DVD a decade before, when many discs were nothing but straight ports of VHS copies, and nothing special about the picture or sound or anything else, such as promised by the (then) new standard – many didn’t even offer chapter stops and played straight through in the then-familiar manner of videotapes – the Blu-ray format has not been subjected to any such humiliations (yet). What’s more, with prices that rival those of a DVD, it’s no wonder that consumers have switched in droves!

Wind chimes are not just pretty decorations to hang up around the house or garden which happen to produce noise once in a while.
They have actually been used in real music, from high-brow modern music to popular everyday fare such as videogame soundtracks.
The French composer Oliver Messiaen has written for glass, wood, and seashell chimes in his opera based on Saint Francis of Assisi, while David Sitek of the American rock band TV on the Radio often hangs a wind chime at the end of his guitar for texture.

Possibly the most famous unknown use of wind chimes in the world was made by Koji Kondo, lead musician at Nintendo, the Japanese videogaming giant.
He is accountable for the music in such bestsellers as Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, and has incorporated chiming sounds throughout his work, such as the theme for the “Vanilla Dome” world (or stage – that is, game level) in the sequel Super Mario World.

Nonetheless, it needs to be noted that musical instruments already can be found which employ chimes or chime-like hardware.
Indeed, one such device, a mark tree, is also usually known as a chime tree or a pair of bar chimes.
It is played by sweeping a finger or stick through the length of hanging cylinders, typically made of metal though of varying lengths.
These cylinders are hung from a bar and fitted in pitch order.

Very similar instruments include tubular bells and the bell tree.
Like wind chimes proper, they are generally thought of as percussion instruments, generally employed for musical color.
Tubular bells, however, can produce harmonic spectra
and so are capable of melodies.
But these are usually very simple, and few solos are written for tubular bells.
One noteworthy use of the instrument is made by the animated television series Futurama, for its theme.
In the 1980s, the popular children’s show Sesame Street also featured tubular bells throughout part of its closing credits.

Diversion safes are the stuff of childhood dreams for me, when every book, key, or other frequent item could contain a key or treasure map in its hollowed-out core.
They capture the imagination like nothing else, for what is a child’s creativity but that everyday things needs to be in reality extraordinary?
That secretly, the world is not as it seems like.

Such is the suspicion of a child slowly and gradually waking up from childhood, slowly adapting to the chance that the world is both more restricted – with its guidelines and adults – and much more fantastic – with its secrets and diversion safes – than apparent at first sight, the first sight of childhood.

There’s something intrinsically intriguing about objects that double as something different – or, to put it another way, objects that pretend to be one thing while actually functioning as another.
And thus there’s something of the moral lesson in diversion safes, which may describe a child’s fascination with them.

That’s probably the single biggest reason why the Transformers line of toys were such a runaway success.
There had never been anything like it before – robots that would have been quite interesting in themselves, as robots, but to that was added the ability to, well, transform into (generally speaking) some non-robotic object, generally vehicles such as cars and airplanes but sometimes even animals like dinosaurs.

Now isn’t that somehow rather similar to a diversion safe?
An automobile that hides a robot, an apparently unthinking vehicle housing in fact artificial intelligence of the most incredible order.
A car, or a plane – or a hand gun, or a radio cassette player (with the cassettes themselves transformable into birds of prey and hunting dogs).
There have been few objects which Japanese toymakers didn’t, origami-like, re-imagine as robots.

And so a safe transforms straight into memories of the Transformers!

So you want to be a lawyer. You understand it will mean a lot of learning, a lot of time invested with books – but you like reading, and figuring things out, and you enjoy words, language, and all the semantic nuances included.

You even know that the LSAT test for admission to law school is hard, and something to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for, for special prep courses, coaching classes and the like. You also realize that law school itself will be tough as nails, at least through the all-too-crucial First Year.

Great. Maybe you even know that you will be forever hitting the books as a practicing lawyer, forever taking online CPE courses and their tests, one after the other, in order to maintain your position with the professional association governing your licensure.

Super.

But did you know that it will be quite tough getting a high-enough-paying job as lawyer in order to repay your student loans? In fact, those online CPE courses will surely cost some money, too.

Oh, you probably think you have that covered. You’ll graduate at the top of your class, or you’ll be accepted into an Ivy League law school and graduate none too low in the rankings so as to get hired by a top corporate law firm and effortlessly recoup your investment in two to three years’ time.

And indeed, if such a thing does happen, your odds would be much better than those for essentially the rest of your peers, even in this economy. But “better than” does not imply “inherently good.” ’Cause guess what – globalization is coming to the legal profession too.

Yes, that’s right – outsourcing. Certainly, some of the online CPE courses available on the worldwide web were produced overseas! And though the legal profession has attempted to resist it (after all, it took a whole decade for everyone to change from WordPerfect to Microsoft Word!), it’s finally started to affect the industry.

Blu Ray media is the latest thing to hit the home entertainment market in some time now. It promises clarity like never before, many times the definition available on today’s DVDs. Though the difference between a VHS image and one from a DVD is noticeable enough, that between the DVD and a Blu-ray disc will knock your eyes out! Go to the store and see for yourself. Small surprise, then, that shoppers should run to Blu-ray so enthusiastically, a market has grown around recordable Blu-ray media that allows people to preserve their own special occasions in the clearest most life-like manner possible yet.

Have you ever come across what’s known as guerrilla marketing? I found it unwittingly a few blocks away from On Off Digital World in the middle of Manhattan. What guerrilla marketing is, is just undercover marketing. Yeah, covert marketing! Such as what happened with me, for instance. I happened upon a pair of stunning young ladies who wanted me to snap their photograph for them – a frequent request around the tourist mecca that is Times Square. In the process, however, they would be showing me everything about their new digital camera – having me all curious about it in no time! That’s guerrilla marketing done right, advertising to me in a way that gets past my usual defenses!

China, China, China – what’s the big deal?
Why is every person going on and on about China on a regular basis?

Okay, so they own billions (or is that trillions) in American securities, currency, whatever.
And they make lotsa stuff.
Like NFL beach towels and stuff.
Yeah.
Okay.

It’s not like most people want to work on an assembly line in any case, making trinkets and curios for Walmart.
But whatever.

Okay, so it’s not merely NFL beach towels that they make.
It’s that they are also climbing up the food chain, making stuff that’s a lot more high-value, such that good-paying jobs may be the next to go.
They’re hardly making textiles any more – notice that most of the clothing nowadays come from even more amazing locales – like Indonesia and Sri Lanka?

In fact, to be fair, it isn’t NFL beach towels that anyone’s upset over.
It’s the fear that aircraft manufacturing may be next!
Already the Chinese government is on record as gunning for leadership in green energy products such as wind mills and solar panels, and undoubtedly they are well on their way toward dominating those industries.

But does it have to be a zero-sum game?
Does China’s rise mean everyone else’s loss?
Put another way, are they basically gobbling up ever more slices of the pie – or can Chinese ascendancy grow that pie for everyone involved?

Well, speaking of the NFL, it’s interesting to compare and contrast that sporting league’s business decisions with that relating to the NBA.
Basketball keeps growing in popularity over there while years ago an organized exhibition game of American football was canceled almost at the last minute.
If this serves as any indication, it may be that being in place is preferable to staying on the sidelines!

Among the most popular names in American charity for just about a century, Boys Town was given National Historic Landmark status in 1985 at its original Omaha, Nebraska location. Launched by Father Edward J. Flanagan as a boys’ orphanage in 1917, its success has led to some thirteen others all over the United States. Two major Hollywood motion pictures about it were made, starring some of the industry’s best talent including Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney. But what really put it on the philanthropic map was its original progessive approach to juvenile care that has become an example throughout the world.

As may be imagined, the great job that Boys Town did attracted considerable financial support year after year, star-studded attention with many a leading individual from business, politics, and entertainment, from people like real estate developer Isaac Toussie to United States Senator Richard Durbin. Indeed, donor contributions comprise essentially twenty percent of total funding in any given fiscal year, with program expenditures being like eighty-six percent of total expenses.

One of the most important endeavors undertaken by the organization involves internal research by its Boys Town National Research Institute (NRI), set up to properly evaluate the utility of its own services. By implementing the latest strategies, the NRI distinguishes Boys Town from fellow non-profit organizations in how it is so intensely numbers-driven, pro-actively leveraging technology to stay relevant in the new century.

And so Boys Town is still a pioneer, helping to change modern family and child care. Vital to their approach has been a focus on combining the assortment of available services – from governmental and non-governmental sources – to provide a holistic solution capable of addressing present-day challenges. With a multitude of projects currently underway, Boys Town expects to stay on top of changing needs.

A concern with justice, with fairness, has always been at the heart of Judaism, from the very moment when Abraham questioned G-d over the morality of destroying a whole city for its wickedness lest there should prove to be even just ten righteous men or women residing there. This passion for balanced dealings is what lead Talmudic scholars to sanction Jewish farmers from yoking oxen with horses for ploughing the field, for being stronger it is evident that an ox would always have to do most of the work. It is a similar sense of responsibility that informs Jewish notions of the tzedakah, or religiously prescribed donations to charity.

And actually, the Hebrew word “tzedakah” literally means “justice,” “righteousness,” but now refers to the cultural practice – indeed, the cultural institution – of setting aside income for purposes of charitable contribution. Performing tzedakah is viewed as a religious duty, such that tradition holds the act to be one of only three types that may mitigate any divine decree. Thus it is that even criminals will donate to charity in the hopes of actually annulling any heavenly judgment!

Such hopes and fears aside, at the heart of tzedakah is a sense of social responsibility and social justice. Judaism teaches that all men are brothers – then asks, why should my brother not fare as well as me? From this simple yet not-easy-to-answer question comes the rabbis’ decree to look after others as a matter of course. For this reason, performing tzedakah is so common in the Jewish community that two kinds of tzedakah have developed: the original religiously inspired type and one undertaken to distinguish special occasions like bar mitzvahs and high holy days like Pesach. This latter category returns a feeling of individual free will to the act of giving, while the former endures as an important feature of the Jewish way – so crucial, in fact, that even the poor themselves are to give, as they are able, so that one need not be a Robert Toussie in order to be of assistance.

Many Blu Ray releases are but the most recent embodiment of the notion captured by the famous French proverb that notes how “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” That’s because just as with the introduction of DVD a decade earlier, not every release in the new Blu-ray format lives up to the potential of the technology. Sharper pictures? Over seven channels of discrete sound, including the subwoofer? Not always, no matter the 25 GB of space offered on typical single-layer discs. While an improvement over what happened with DVD, when VHS got sent right to disc, still too many a Blu-ray title seems rather like the DVD version!

To me, On Off Digital World is like the old Montgomery Ward in Penn Station, one of them big old old-fashioned electronics retailers that once existed all over The Big Apple. Such businesses were just mom-and-pop operations that became kind of successful, to where they employed like maybe fifty employees — still thought of a small business by many accounts but certainly still prosperous. But it was all before the big box stores and I was but a youth at the time so they were all “big” to me — after all, there were so many gizmos available! That’s what comes to mind whenever I chance on one of the few remaining stores like this.