ZanzeEssays

Submitting a purchased, borrowed, or stolen essay as your own work constitutes plagiarism. Write your own essay!

Serious or Silly?

Essays by Zanzelia, Written for the Web
  • The "My" in "My Documents"—Why "none of this is mine" in the Windows operating system.
  • The Mirror Crack'd: Memoir of a Frozen Face—Stress will do that to you! Finding humor in the onset of Ramsay-Hunt Syndrome.
  • Living Without Television—Spare yourself the expense of cable TV, and shun its shrieking and cajoling voices. Then enjoy the "bird shows" around you.
  • How to Speak French with a Heavy Texas Accent—
  • Candle Patrol—Is it true that "everything not forbidden is compulsory"? This essay was inspired by the stern instructions attached to a candle, coupled with the warnings on the new washing machine, and a flier from the City of Perris.
  • EduThrift Part One—An essential element of EduBiz: exploit your faculty. (Satirical.)
  • EduThrift Part Two—To be successful in EduBiz, be as stingy as possible with paper. These EduThrift flares were inspired by my year at an ESL program where faculty photocopying was limited to 100 copies per semester. (That's sixteen weeks, and that's 100 copies per teacher, not per class.) The program director advised me to write everything on the blackboard and have the students copy it, rather than passing out "handouts." Dark Ages! Waste of Time! Shades of "Bartleby the Scrivener"! (I heard an inner voice droning, "I would prefer not to.") "Be more flexible," advised the director. (Satirical.)
  • A Rerun of the Stanford Prison Experiment?—Written when the news of Abu Ghraib prison abuses first came to light. Proposes that Error One was the U.S. Government's decision not to treat prisoners of war according to the Geneva Conventions on POWs; that Error Two was to turn loose a pack of inadequately trained, overburdened Reservists on a crude prison, placing them in charge without clear rules. As the Stanford Prison Experiment showed, such a setting can transform a decent human being into a vicious, amoral animal within 48 hours.