Often a nickname is a shortened form of a person's name, and it can also be a descriptive name for a place or a thing. Many American cities have nicknames. These can help build up an identity, spread pride among citizens and build their unity. Nicknames can also be funny.

    Los Angeles, California is the second largest city in population, after New York City. Los Angeles has several nicknames. One is simply the city's initials, L.A. It is also called the City of Angels because Los Angeles means "the angels" in Spanish.

    Los Angeles often has warm, sunny weather. So another nickname is City of Flowers and Sunshine. New York is called The Big Apple. So Los Angeles is sometimes called The Big Orange because of the fruit that grows in that city's warm climate.

    The American movie and television industries are based in Los Angeles. So it is not surprising that it is called The Entertainment Capital of the World. Many films are made in the area of Los Angeles called Hollywood. Millions of people visit the area. No trip to Los Angeles is perfect without seeing the word "Hollywood" spelled out in huge letters on a hillside.

    Many movie stars live in Los Angeles. The city is sometimes called Tinseltown. This nickname comes from the shiny, bright and often unreal nature of Hollywood and the movie industry.

    Another nickname for Los Angeles is La-La Land, using the first letters of Los and Angeles. This means a place that is fun and not serious, and maybe even out of touch with reality.

    A good place for watching unusual-looking people is Venice, an area on the west side of Los Angeles. A system of waterways designed after the Italian city of Venice has been built there. Many people love Los Angeles for its warm sunny weather, beautiful mountains and beaches, and movie stars. That includes Randy Newman, who sings about his hometown.

    On the whole, Los Angeles is growing attractive just for its rich nicknames.

    My school stood in a big square playground in southeastern South Dakota. One teacher taught all grades, first through eighth. Most grades had only two or three students.

    Our school day started with the flag pledge(宣誓). Then the teacher called one grade at a time to the recitation bench beside her desk. She'd check our work, explain the new lesson, and dismiss us to go back to our own desks and do our new work, all in less than ten minutes per grade.

    At noon we ate lunches we had brought. Our lunches consisted of homemade sandwiches and if we were lucky, dessert. My favorite dessert was a fresh pear, and a piece of Mom's delicious sour cream chocolate cake.

    The annual Christmas program was the most exciting part of the year. We hurried through our lessons during December to allow time to practise poems, songs, and plays.

    A few days before the performance, the school board members borrowed equipment from the town and set up a stage across one side of the classroom. We hung bed sheets for curtains.

    On the evening of the performance, petrol lanterns hanging along the walls cast a warm, though not very bright, light over the gathering crowd. We could hardly contain our excitement as we looked from behind the curtains to wave at our parents.

    On a spring Sunday in a new term, just before the last day of the school term, everyone in the neighborhood gathered for a picnic. Our moms set fried chicken, bowls of salads, and desserts on the teacher's desk and the library table. After the dinner, we played games. One of the school board members brought big buckets of ice cream in the afternoon to top off the picnic. How we looked forward to that treat!

    I was just nineteen years old when I started my first teaching position in a country school with thirteen students. I felt excited, nervous and happy as I prepared my lunch bucket the first morning of the term. I can't remember what kind of sandwiches I packed, but I do remember I put in a fresh pear and a piece of chocolate cake for dessert!

Product Description

    Life Without Limits helps you clarify what you want in every area of your life. By using Bassett's powerful techniques you will change; therefore your life will change. You control you life. will change. You control your life. And only you can take steps to change it. Life Without Limits helps you take back your power.

    Life Without Limits helps you to achieve satisfaction and fulfillment personally, professionally, and financially. Once you have defined what success means for you, you will clarify your dreams and start pursuing them.

Product Details

●Published in: 2001-12

●Released on: 2001-12-24

●Original language: English

●Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.7 x 8 inches

●Binding: Paperback

●304 pages

About the Author

    Lucinda Bassett is the founder and CEO of one of the most successful self-help companies in the country, the Midwest Center for Stress and Anxiety, Inc. Author of the national bestseller From Panic to Power, Lucinda Bassett produces and hosts the award-winning infomercial, Attacking Anxiety. She has shared her techniques with such clients as McDonalds, Chrysler, and AT&T. She has appeared on numerous talk shows, including Operah and The View, and been featured in Family Circle, Reader's Digest, and many more.

Customer Reviews

    This book has helped me to gain hope and courage to cope with all my fears and worries. Lucinda writes with such a great understanding and sympathy. She herself had problems with panic and worry. Her positive thinking tips are easy to follow. I don't get lost in a lot of mental problems. It's as if she were holding your hand, sitting right beside you, cheering you on! I believe I can do anything I set my mind to after reading this book. However, there are some other readers holding the contrary views.

    When Shakespeare was twenty-one, he went to London, a very interesting place, to try his fortune.

    There was the famous London Bridge and St. Paul's Cathedral, and palaces and markets and long streets full of shops.

    Then, too, there were the daily crowds where could be seen people from all over the world. Knights, scholars and the highwayman (拦路强盗）or thieves, who had been infamous for their clever robberies, passed by each other.

    Here, also, were noblemen dressed in gold, from Italy and Spain and France; slaves from Spanish America, sea captains and ministers, soldiers and servants—all held by chances or interests within the gray walls which circled London, and whose gates gave welcome to as strange a crowd as could be found in the world.

    Into this curious crowd came Shakespeare, quick to see and eager to learn. And before long all these strange sights were as familiar to him as the faces of his own town's residents. Each one told its story to him so plainly that, as before he had learned the secrets of the fields and woods, so now he learned men and men's interests that make up the great world.

    And he learned these lessons so well that when he came to write his plays, he made such use of them as no writer ever made before or since; for it is the use of this knowledge of the world, combined with his own genius, that makes Shakespeare the greatest dramatist that has ever lived.

The thing that sets children apart from adults is not their ignorance, nor their lack of skills. Rather, it's their enormous capability for joy. A friend told me a story. One day, when she went to get his 6-year-old son from soccer practice, her kid greeted her with a sad face. The teacher had criticized him for not focusing on his soccer drills. The little boy walked out of the school with his head and shoulders hanging down. He seemed wrapped in sadness. But before reaching the car door, he suddenly stopped, crouching(蹲伏) down to look at something on the sidewalk. “Mom, come here! This is the strangest bug I've ever seen. It has, like, a million legs. It's amazing!” The little face was overflowing with indescribable excitement.

Nowadays, however, when we walk into a classroom, especially in a high school, we'll be choked by towering books and papers, and hiding behind them are a group of motionless creatures, pens in hand, minds dry, just as the hollow men portrayed by T. S. Eliot. Their pursuit of joy has given way to their hunger for grades. Laughter and happiness are a distant memory for them.

    Although joy is an unaffordable luxury in today's increasingly fierce competition, administrators and teachers need a mindset shift from crushing students with assignments to getting them to take pleasure in productive activities which develop their important qualities, like perseverance and obligation. The assumption that pleasure is the enemy of competence and responsibility makes no sense educationally.

Adults tend to talk about learning as if it were medicine: unpleasant, but necessary and good for you. Why not think of learning as if it were food—something so valuable to humans that they want to experience it as a pleasure?

    A few years back I worked in a university building that also housed a department full of psychologists, all of whom seemed to see us as perfect guinea pigs(豚鼠) for their latest theories. If an eager graduate student showed up in my office bearing desserts and asked me to pick one, I'd cast a careful glance and ask "Why?" before grabbing the apple pie.

    So one day, when someone from the Psychology Department posted instructions in the bathroom persuading all of us to "Think about five things for which you're grateful every day for a week!" my response was frankly doubtful. I did the math. Five things a day for seven days is a lot of brainpower to expend without so much as the promise of an apple pie.

    I wandered into the office of Heidi Zetzer, the director of our school's Psychological Services Clinic. "What's with the gratitude thing?" I asked. You don't ask an academic question－even a simple one unless you're prepared for a long answer. Heidi came alive, and I sat down. That's when I first heard the term "positive psychology". The gratitude thing, as I had called it, was but one small and simple element of the practice. "Kind of like training the brain to focus on joy," my friend Heidi explained. "It's only a week," she urged. "Try it." I did. And guess what? It worked.

    Every day for a week, I found five distinct things for which I was thankful. They had to be different every day. I couldn't get away with just being grateful for my wonderful husband. But I could, suggested Collie Conoley, another positive psychologist, express my gratitude for specific aspects of a certain person each day. He's a great cook. He always puts our family first.

    Life will never be perfect. I still see new stories that annoy me. The traffic in my city is maddening. I wish I could speed up my recovery. But with just one simple exercise, I'm rediscovering the peace of that old saying: accepting the things I can't change, working without complaint to change what I can, and being wise enough to know the difference.

    And all it took was a little gratitude.