 Moving into a New Century: 1990-Today Eulogy, Oseola McCarty One Sunday morning in 1995, the front page of my local newspaper carried the story of an 86-year-old African-American woman. She had spent her life taking care of ill family members and working as a laundress, and had decided to give away $150,000 of her life savings. OSEOLA MCCARTY wanted to give someone else an opportunity she had never had. I became the first recipient of the Oseola McCarty Scholarship at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her act was not a quest for fame. The gift was genuine good old-fashioned kindness that perfectly reflected the kind of person Miss Ola was. This small, quiet lady, who became another grandmother to me, lived a very simple life of charity. Miss Ola was sincere, sweet, hardworking and God-fearing. During one of my last conversations with her, she asked about the condition of everyone in my family by name--but she was the one in the hospital. Though Miss Ola dined with President Clinton, chatted with Oprah Winfrey and helped ring in the New Year in Times Square, she never lost her humility or her grace. Miss Ola gave up the peace and quiet she had grown to cherish over the years, doing whatever was requested and not once asking for anything in return. Her gift was so much more than financial assistance. It told the world that good people with good intentions still exist. I hope to live a life comparable to hers. --STEPHANIE BULLOCK, U.S.M. graduate student Oops! "The chemical purity of the air is of no importance." "While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility." "50 years hence...[we] shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium." "I think there is a world market for about five computers." "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home." "640K [of memory] ought to be enough for anybody." "The cloning of mammals...is biologically impossible." -From The Experts Speak by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky (Villard) Numbers $2 billion Amount spent on advertising to children in 1998, 20 times more than in 1988 30,000 Number of TV commercials seen per year on average by an American child 63.7 Number of hours per year children ages 6 to 12 spend reading at home $156 billion Assets of the world's three richest men: Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Paul Allen $136.2 billion Total GNP of the 43 least developed countries, the population of which is 600 million people 1.3 billion Number of people who live on less than $1 a day 84% Proportion of Americans who say government would work better if more people voted 49% Proportion of voting-age population who cast ballots in the 1996 presidential election, the lowest since 1924 $33 million Reported value of Michael Jordan's one-year contract with the Bulls $3 million Total 1997 payroll for the 96 players in the W.N.B.A. Verbatim "This is the sort of thing that happens to women who have their own careers. I suppose I could have stayed home, baked cookies and had teas." "It takes a village to raise a child." "You know this is the last crusade of a great warrior, a member of a generation of Americans who went out and made the world safe for democracy." "There's nothing left to do but go out and get rich." "The current economic performance...is as impressive as any I have witnessed." "Democracy benefits by the availability of information." "I can't believe I did it... I'm, like, in awe of myself." "We've been waiting for you" "Do I do my hair with a weed whacker? I admit [it]. But take into consideration what you're doing." Milestones in Science Rescued, 1993. The Hubble Space Telescope, by the crew of the space shuttle Endeavor. On live television, American astronauts performed daring orbital repairs on the nearsighted telescope and gave beleaguered NASA a badly needed boost. Discovered, 1993. Dark Matter. For a decade, scientists had been searching for the mysterious stuff whose gravity seemed to hold the universe together. They found it - or at least some of it - in the form of Jupiter-like clumps of matter know as massive compact halo objects, or MACHOS Crashed, 1994. Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, into the planet Jupiter. The two dozen mountain-size chunks of the comet that slammed into the surface created 2,000-mile-high fireballs and sooty smudges on the planet's cloud tops that were visible from backyard telescopes. Scientists learned much about how a similar impact on earth might have killed off the dinosaurs. Solved, 1995. Fermat's Last Theorem by Princeton's Andrew Wiles. The math puzzler, scribbled in the margin of a book in 1637, has stumped the world's greatest mathematical minds for 350 years. Wiles toiled for seven years to solve it. Landed, 1997. NASA's Pathfinder, on the planet Mars. The Sojourner rover beamed home spectacular pictures of the Red Planet and introduced Earthlings to rocks with names like Casper and Scooby Doo. The rover helped confirm scientists' suspicion that Mars was once a warm, wet place, possibly able to support life. Cloned, 1997. Dolly, a sheep, by British embryologist Ian Wilmut. Though animals had been duplicated before, Dolly was the first ever created from an adult cell rather than an embryonic one, raising the specter that a human will one day follow in her hoofsteps. Delivered, 1997. Septuplets, to Bobbi and Kenny McCaughey of Carlisle, Iowa. The infants ranged in weight from 2 lbs. 5 oz. to 3 lbs. 4 oz. Mom, Dad, first child Mikayla, and the seven newborns are America's Bravest New Family. Born, 1999. Jazz, an endangered African wildcat, from a frozen embryo implanted in a house cat. Jazz is not the first rare animal to use a common species' womb. A bongo antelope was born to an eland in 1984 at the Cincinnati Zoo, and two Holsteins, one in Cincinnati and one at the Bronx Zoo, have given birth to gaur, a rare species of wild cattle. |