Happy New Year! Are you ready for 2012? It’s a big year for The Voice Magazine: 2012 marks our 20-year anniversary, and we’ll be celebrating all year with special content reflecting the past two decades of history that have made The Voice what it is today. And what better way to start off our look… Read more »
Christmas is lurking just beyond my emotional horizon. It’s an ambiguous day for me. Sometimes I’m in a festive spirit and look forward to the eggnog, but other years crass commercialization overwhelms my sensibilities, and I’m not so merry. Christmas is ideally a festive, family-oriented season. However, this year the holiday brings with it mixed… Read more »
?Let there be peace on earth,? country crooner Vince Gill sings, ?and let it begin with me!? It’s a song from my childhood, lyrics that come back to me every time I hear the phrase ?peace on earth.? This Christmas season, I’m finding myself humming it much more frequently than ?Jingle Bells,? ?We Three Kings,?… Read more »
(Read Part I of this two-part series here.) I have to keep on riding?what else can I do? In one village I stop for gas. Five elders and a few women are sitting under a thatched kitchen shelter on a bench made from the dried stems of palm branches. One of them is the Chairman… Read more »
Nimba County, Liberia. After five hours, I admit to being lost. I’ve been riding through the African jungle on my slick-tire Chinese street bike. The mud covers everything; my boots are saturated and my Denver Hayes jacket is red from the rich soil. I had spent the night in the village of Gblarlay, where I… Read more »
Holiday cravings settling in? Surf the web this season, and you’ll be overwhelmed with articles, blog posts, and Tweets full of tips and tricks to avoid growing your own Santa belly. Overindulging in treats isn’t the only seasonal pitfall we have to contend with. Yet It’s harder to find similar tips for avoiding a different,… Read more »
Found any great deals lately? It’s strangely ironic that one of the biggest shopping weekends in North America?beginning Black Friday?coincides with the final weekend of Financial Literacy Month, a push for greater awareness of where our money goes and how to manage it. It’s no secret that an increasing number of North Americans have no… Read more »
Quitting has always gotten a bad rap, but often It’s undeserved. In fact, sometimes it takes undertaking a project or life change to figure out where you want to go?and then quitting the project to get there. Every November, I’ve felt the urge to join in the craziness that is NaNoWriMo. The phenomenon?National Novel Writing… Read more »
I remember waking up in my bunk to the first volley from the artillery guns just across the motorcade from where we slept. The entire old school building would shake, and dust from the concrete ceiling came down in trickles. I remember jumping out of the slowly moving vehicle on Route Brown, watching where we… Read more »
Actions speak louder than words, but images can speak loudest of all. In fact, as the old saying goes, pictures are worth a thousand words?and in today’s visually-oriented culture, where quick, image-related stimuli are a primary means of propagating brands and concepts, they may be worth much, much more. So when you create a picture,… Read more »