What are the clauses of the bet and what happens when the bet is over?

When the banker and the lawyer agree to make a bet, they stipulate the following conditions:

1. For the duration of the bet (fifteen years), the lawyer shall live in a lodge in the banker's garden and shall not have any contact with the outside world. This includes hearing a human voice and receiving newspapers and letters.


2. The lawyer shall have access to books, musical instruments, wine, cigarettes and is permitted to write letters.


3. The lawyer will receive these goods through a little window in the lodge.


4. The lawyer shall be in confinement for "exactly" fifteen years: that is, "from twelve o'clock of November 14, 1870, and ending at twelve o'clock of November 14, 1885."


5. If the lawyer tries to break any of these conditions, he immediately forfeits all of the prize money.

At the end of the fifteen years, however, the lawyer agrees to leave the lodge a few hours early. He deliberately makes himself the loser of the bet and does this because he is no longer interested in winning the money. This comes as a great relief to the banker who would have become bankrupt, had the lawyer succeeded.

In Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," is the lottery a collective act of murder?

The lottery is collective murder because everyone in the town acts as a mob, choosing one person at random to kill a year.

There is no one person who is the evil genius at work in this village.  No serial killer is preying on these poor people.  They consent to the entire thing.  The people of this village are so beholden to tradition that it is stronger than both human dignity and common sense.  They value tradition over life.

The lottery is a fundamental part of the fabric of village life.  Consider Old Man Warner’s response to the rumor that nearby villages are discontinuing their lottery.

Old Man Warner snorted. "Pack of crazy fools," he said. "Listening to the young folks, nothing's good enough for them. Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live hat way for a while. …. There's always been a lottery… 

He never gives a reason why there should be a lottery, or the purpose for it.  He never questions the killing. He just says that there has always been a lottery, and that means there should always be one.

The town is even afraid to replace the black box and the three-legged stool.  Everything must remain exactly the same.  Even when Tessie’s name is called, the complaints she makes are not that the lottery is wrong, but that the process was somehow unfair this time. 

People began to look around to see the Hutchinsons. Bill Hutchinson was standing quiet, staring down at the paper in his hand. Suddenly. Tessie Hutchinson shouted to Mr. Summers. "You didn't give him time enough to take any paper he wanted. I saw you. It wasn't fair!" 

Tessie is told to be a “good sport.”  If that isn’t crazy enough, they even give her very young son pebbles to throw at her so he can take part in the public stoning of his mother.  No one avoids the lottery.  Both the very young and the very old participate and no one asks questions.  That is state-sanctioned collective murder for no reason at all.

Why did Cherry and Marcia leave their dates in The Outsiders?

Cherry and Marcia left their dates because they brought alcohol.

Cherry and Marcia are Soc girls.  They do not approve of their boyfriends’ methods.  The boys get drunk too often, and get violent.  Cherry and Marcia explain that they left their dates because of this.

Oh, yeah, we found out why they were without a car. They'd come with their boyfriends, but walked out on them when they found out the boys had brought some booze along. The boys had gotten angry and left. (Ch. 2)

Socs and greasers do not usually hang out together.  There are very specific class distinctions between the two gangs.  They are often fighting, and the Socs have a tendency to jump greasers who are alone and not defended by their gang.  However, the main problem that Cherry has with her boyfriend Bob is his drinking.

Bob comes up to Cherry and tells her that he is only a little drunk.

Cherry looked mad. "A little? You call reeling and passing out in the streets 'a little'? Bob, I told you, I'm never going out with you while you're drinking, and I mean it. Too many things could happen while you're drunk. It's me or the booze." (Ch. 3)

Cherry does not want to get into the car with Bob, but she does because she does not want to cause a fight when the Socs see the girls with greasers.  Pony and Johnny are ready to fight, and she can see that.  Unfortunately, the Socs come back later and find Johnny and Pony in the park.

Later, Randy explains to Pony that Bob's parents were too lenient with him.  They let him get away with anything, and did not get involved even when he came home drunk.  He is a spoiled rich kid.

The incident at the movies snowballs into the disaster that sends Johnny and Pony on the run.  Bob and his friends jump Pony and Johnny in the park, and Johnny kills Bob to prevent him from killing Pony.  Neither of them wanted to kill anyone, even a Soc, but it was self-defense.

Which planet had the first moon?

Most of what we have available on the subject of the first moon in our solar system relates to the timeline of the formation of the first planet.  The idea is that the first moons were the ones around the first planets.  The first planets to form in our solar system were the Gas Giants.  They formed even before the Sun began nuclear reactions at 50 million years after the beginning of the 0.0-year Pre-solar Nebula Era, according to NASA's Goddard Space and Flight Center.  At about 10 million years after 0.0-year, the gas planets Jupiter, then Saturn formed during the Gas Giant Era. Jupiter and Saturn both have multiple moons (with Saturn perhaps in the process of birthing a new moon).  Jupiter has no lack of moons, both large and small, with 14 large ones alone. Two of the most important of Jupiter's moons are Europa and Ganymede, both about 4.5 billion years old, which is about the same age as Jupiter itself. Saturn has an abundance of moons as well, with 53 that are classed as "official" and 9 that are classed as "provisional."  If it is correct to theorize that the first moon (or simultaneously appearing moons) appeared with the first planet, then it can be said that the first moon or moons appeared around Jupiter because this gas giant, Jupiter, was the first to form in our young solar system.

Of incidental interest is that in 2012 a new planet was discovered in a solar system some 375 light years from the Earth.  HIP 11952b and HIP 11952c are two dual planets that have been established at around 12 billion years old.  There position, of course, exceeds the galactic limits of our solar system, but this dual planet system is older than Earth by about 8 billion years, our solar system being around 4.6 billion years old.  It is thought that these two planets came into existence about a billion years after the Big Bang.  If these extra-solar system planets have moons, then their moons could have been the earliest moons in our locale.

Were the sailors right to punish the ancient mariner? Who has the right to punish sinners in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"?

The ship has been drawn toward the South Pole. They are surrounded by ice. When the Albatross arrives, they treat it as a good omen. They feed the Albatross and the ice breaks, allowing them to continue on their way back north. 

The mariner kills the Albatross, seemingly for no reason. The sailors are upset because the Albatross seemed to be a good omen and they think the bird had brought them luck. After all, the ice breaks after they feed it and the wind picks up and sends the ship back to the north: 

And it would work'em woe: 

For all averr'd, I kill'd the bird

That made the breeze to blow. 

However, the fog and mist arrives and the sailors think it was right that the mariner killed the bird that brought the fog and mist. Then, the ship becomes stranded and the men are dying of thirst. Again, they put the guilt back on to the mariner, this time hanging the dead Albatross on the mariner's neck. 

It seems that they condemn the mariner for destroying their luck and/or killing an omen from God. It is not necessarily clear that they disapprove of the killing itself. In this case, they would be right to disapprove of, and perhaps even right to punish the mariner, but they do it for superstitious reasons. This calls into question the justification for their punishment of the mariner. 

The question of who has the right to punish sinners supposes that there are people in positions of righteousness who have the ethical and objective perspectives with which to make good judgments. The sailors punish the mariner for somewhat selfish reasons. They determine that their rotten luck is caused by the mariner's sin. In general, people often think of the phrase from the Bible, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." In other words, only those who have never sinned can punish or condemn others. This implies that no one has the right to punish another. Taking this notion with the fact that the sailors punish the mariner for selfish reasons, one could argue that their punishment is unjustified because of their reasoning. 

Had the sailors condemned the act of killing itself, their punishment would seem more just. The lesson of the poem is not the simple notion that it is bad to kill something. It has a more existential and ecological context. To be sure, it is wrong to kill for no reason. We are all part of the world, so when we damage the world, we inevitably damage ourselves. (This is the ecological, karma-themed, notion that we are all connected.) If the sailors did in fact punish the mariner for this more philosophical, ecological reason, his punishment seems more justified.

In the end, he is punished appropriately by "Life in Death." This is the punishment that actually serves a useful purpose. He must repeatedly tell his story and thus, he becomes a living lesson for others to learn. It is therefore a more logical punishment that hanging the bird on his neck. This addresses the general question about who has the right to punish others. If the punishment is appropriate in this way, the punisher would be justified. 

A punishment is more appropriate if it is done to improve the world in some way. Simple vengeance or revenge is a reactionary way to punish. This seems to be a lesson of this poem: that the punishment should serve to make things better. The mariner must become a living (in death) lesson, teaching others the hard lesson that he has learned. 

Why do you think Jerry wants to be with the boys so badly?

At its core, "Through the Tunnel" is a coming of age story.  Jerry and his mom are on vacation together, and like most teenage boys Jerry wants some freedom and independence from his mom.  At least that's how I felt as a teenage boy. Jerry loves his mom just as much as he ever did, but he feels that his mom's presence makes him appear less independent. It even makes him feel less independent. He sees the other boys going about their fun without any mothers around and Jerry wants some of that. He wants to prove to himself and to the other boys that he is no longer a boy. He sees himself as a young man, and he wants the other boys to see him that way too.  

They looked down gravely, frowning. He knew the frown. At moments of failure, when he clowned to claim his mother’s attention, it was with just this grave, embarrassed inspection that she rewarded him. Through his hot shame, feeling the pleading grin on his face like a scar that he could never remove, he looked up at the group of big brown boys on the rock
and shouted. . .

You can see from the quote that Jerry is sick of the patronizing "little kid" look that he normally gets. That's why he trains so hard to make the swim. The tunnel is a metaphorical gateway to becoming a member of the young man group that the other boys belong to. 

What are some inventions of the Sumerians that impact our life today?

While many people have images of the caveman chipping away at stone to fashion the world's first wheel, it was actually the Sumerians that invented the wheel. They utilized wheels on carted vehicles to transport agricultural goods. The Sumerians created many new technologies to help them improve farming.  Historians credit the Sumerians for presenting writing to the world. Farmers and government officials needed a way of keeping track of records, so they devised a system that evolved into written records. Obviously, writing has been pretty important in the history of the world, as it is today.

In his book about Mesopotamia, History Begins at Sumer, Samuel Noah Kramer attributes nearly forty "firsts" that the Sumerians invented. His list includes:

The First Schools, The First Case of `Apple Polishing’, The First Case of Juvenile Delinquency, The First `War of Nerves’, The First Bicameral Congress, The First Historian, The First Case of Tax Reduction, The First `Moses’, The First Legal Precedent, The First Pharmacopoeia, The First `Farmer’s Almanac’, The First Experiment in Shade-Tree Gardening, Man’s First Cosmogony and Cosmology, The First Moral Ideals, The First `Job’, The First Proverbs and Sayings, The First Animal Fables, The First Literary Debates, The First Biblical Parallels, The First `Noah’, The First Tale of Resurrection, The First `St. George’, The First Case of Literary Borrowing, Man’s First Heroic Age, The First Love Song, The First Library Catalogue, Man’s First Golden Age, The First `Sick’ Society, The First Liturgic Laments, The First Messiahs, The First Long-Distance Champion, The First Literary Imagery, The First Sex Symbolism, The First Mater Dolorosa, The First Lullaby, The First Literary Portrait, The First Elegies, Labor’s First Victory, The First Aquarium.

The Sumerians also developed the concept of time. They tracked days and months and years. They divided the minutes and the hours into increments of sixty, the same way it is done in the present day. The Sumerians also contributed the 360-degree circle, the concept of a number system, and irrigation management. It is obvious that the Sumerians had a great effect on history because of their innovations.