eng001:language and writing

2008-04-27T22:46:00.001-05:00

Sara Bareille’s “Love Song” is absolutely one of the worst songs in the history of American song writing. I can’t stand this song at all, I hear it everyday on the radio at least 3 times and it angers me. The video is even more angering, she is a mini person stuck in a booth that is supposed to have her write you a love song when ever you deposit a quarter? That’s idiotic if you ask me. The video starts out as a guy putting a quarter into a slot that says love songs above it, the show starts out and is a mini version of Sara playing a piano for this guy, who appears to be lonely. Throughout the video many people come into the booth to hear one of her love songs, but to me it doesn’t make sense because she is singing about how she isn’t going to write you a love song, but yet she is doing it all the time, therefore the video doesn’t make sense at all. At the end of the video she jams her video machine and makes it so no one else can get a love song, except the man who owns the video machine will have none of it and he fixes the machine and makes her perform more songs for people.

2008-04-23T23:05:00.002-05:00

The video I chose to write about was Lupe Fiasco’s “Hip-Hop Saved My Life.” I chose this song because Lupe is one of my favorite rappers, and this is his newest single he has out. I really like this song because it actually has a meaning to it, it’s not all about doing drugs, and killing people. It is the story of a kid who had it rough, his dad was in jail, his family was poor, he was a teenager and he had a kid, but he started rapping and became famous and got his family out of the “hood” and buy his girlfriend who has supported him through everything the things he thinks she deserves. The reason I like Lupe so much is that his music isn’t about things he says about himself to make him sound more like a “gangsta’”, it is actually about things that matter. One of his songs Little Weapon reflects on the situation in Africa about how there are very young kids who are trained with weapons and trained to kill people. The song starts out with Lupe saying “dedicate this one right here to my homey with the dream” what he is doing is pointing out that this song is supposed be an inspirational song for kids who want to become something, saying that if you try hard enough at something, eventually you will get there in the end.

rhetoric paper

2008-04-13T23:08:00.003-05:00

George Bush: President of the United States, some may wonder how this man actually became the leader of the greatest country on earth. Even though in 2000 he received fewer votes then Al Gore, but is in office, thanks to his brother in Florida. He has the lowest approval rating of any president in United States history, and has made many decisions that have made him look down right silly. Many people have taken making fun of the president to another level, take for instance a video that Will Ferrell made, it is him dressed up as George Bush, on a ranch and he is basically just doing stupid things that makes the President look like a fool. But some look at what he has done and applauded him, saying everything he is doing is right. Many people think that it is a good thing we are over in Iraq because they want justice brought to the people responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Centers (even though it has never been proven Iraq had any thing to do with that.

As you can see in the cartoon above, it shows Bush holding a blown out match in one hand, and the world with a lit fuse on top of it in the other, with a caption that says “The lunatics take over the asylum.” This cartoon shows the year 2000 on it so it is obviously from when Bush was elected for the first time, but how did the artist know that Bush would do many things that some consider to ruin the world. The author may have been a little harsh on Bush at this point, because obviously he hadn’t done anything at this time to deserve saying that he was going to blow up the world.

The Author contradicts him self in a way because he is using two different metaphors saying that the “lunatics take over the asylum” but the picture has nothing to do with an asylum at all. If you had only seen the caption and not the picture, most likely you wouldn’t picture the president holding a bomb, you would picture him in a straight jacket, perhaps in a room with padded walls.

The way the artist draws Bush, it makes him seem extra funny looking, I know that many people like to poke fun at the way our President looks, but this artist makes his head very small at the top, I take this as the artist is saying that he has a small brain. He is wearing a suit in the picture, but it seems that every political cartoon has who ever their subject is, be in a suit.

Although some may be critical against Bush, the artist probably used a scare tactic in this picture. No one ever thought that Bush was literally going to blow up the world, or even completely ruin it. Sure he has made himself unpopular with many people, but think about what he has really done. One of the biggest problems people have with Bush is that he started this war in Iraq, but if after the attacks on the World Trade Centers had he not taken any sort of action, (even though Iraq and Al-Qaeda have no correction), people would have turned it around on him and say he is a bad president because he didn’t retaliate.

This cartoon also uses hasty generalization to attack Bush because how could the artist have known what kind of president he would become. It has kairos in it too because if this would have been drawn recently, then it would just be speaking the truth, but since it was before he ever even took office then at the time it had a certain aspect to it that says “wow what if our country elected the wrong man, what if he destroys our country.” He was pre-judging Bush and had no idea what he would do. This also shows ethos because the character of Bush is being attacked by the artist. The artist uses ethos through parody, because he is deliberately mocking our president, and deliberately saying that he will destroy this world, and making him look funny in the drawing instead of a normal picture of him.

The artist uses a scare tactic approach to this cartoon also. He is making everyone who sees this cartoon afraid that George Bush really will ruin this world. How possibly could one may single handedly ruin the world, well I hope we will never know because Bush has not done that……yet. The drawing also uses a slippery slope perspective, saying that now that we have elected George Bush as our president, we are all doomed.

commercial

2008-03-12T23:51:00.003-05:00

This commercial takes place in a locker room. You can see there is a locker that has a jersey and maybe some other items in it, the walls look like a light green sort of tile, reminds me of any other locker room. You can hear people moving around in the background, I would think that since it is a commercial it would have better quality, but perhaps it is meant to be this way. Will Ferrell is dressed up as Jackie Moon owner/player/coach of the Michigan Flint Tropics. He is promoting the product Old Spice deodorant. His hair is in a fro but more of a white fro then the typical afro. He is wearing a head band that has two stripes of orange sandwiching a stripe of white on his headband, he also has two wrist bands in this same fashion. He starts off the dialogue with saying that everyone sweats six liters of sweat a day, and then saying he is not familiar with the metric system but he thinks it is equivalent to three hundred gallons of sweat a day, which of course is not right at all. According to Jackie Moon it is a fact that we sweat this much, so it must be true. He tells people that they need to cauterize their sweat glands. Usually cauterizing is associated with bleeding, but apparently it refers to sweat too. After Jackie is done talking there is a noise that reminds me of a sailor ship, it has that kind of NAVY sound to it for some reason. At the end of the commercial there is an ad for the new movie “Semi Pro” which of course stars Will Ferrell as Jackie Moon, there is a basketball being dribbled in the background, you can hear it but not see it. I want to see this movie very bad, but I have not yet.

2008-03-09T23:05:00.002-05:00

When I was listening to the Zaireeka experiment in class last Tuesday I couldn’t help but think, wow this is insane. To me it was just an absolutely crazy experiment but I kind of liked it. I thought it was really trippy and cool when the CD players were in perfect sync with each other at the beginning of the experiment, but even after they became out of sync it was still pretty cool. During one of the songs It really reminded me of the Elton John song “Rocket Man”. Which immediately made me think of the Bill Shatner version and caused me to laugh a little. I did some research and found that the name Zaireeka comes form the two words Zaire and Eureka. The country Zaire was used to symbolize anarchy, and of course Eureka which means I have found it.
I wouldn’t be opposed to listening to this CD (or four CD’s) again because I think that it is something that can be interpreted in many different ways.
I am really impressed with the way that the CD’s did come together to make an amazing sound. I’m no musical expert but the way that they were able to put those sounds together is very amazing. I especially liked in Track 7 the way that the piano and the trap set came together and made an awesome sound. My other favorite part about this experiment was that it was like surround sound in the class room. I really like that because if you turned your head just a little bit, there was a completely different sound.

Zaireeka

2008-03-05T22:51:00.002-06:00

When I first heard we were going to be doing the Zaireeka experiment, I thought what is Zaireeka? I get to class and am sitting on the floor, it is not very comfortable but that’s neither here nor there. The four people controlling the cd players press play and the experiment begins. I hear “Track 1” from every stereo and then in a deep some what “trippy” voice that sounds like it is in slow motion, I hear “cd 1, cd 2, cd 3, cd 4” from every direction in counter clockwise order of the stereos. Once the music begins there is only a baseline playing, but I really like it. Then the spiritual chanting begins to come form the stereo that is directly to the right of me. When track 2 begins it does the cd 1, cd 2, cd 3, cd 4 thing again and then the first half of the song only had instrumentals in it. What appears to be someone screaming is playing from the cd’s. Track 3 brings the same intro but once the music starts playing it reminds me of the song “Rocket Man”. Track 4 also has the same intro, the music starts and I automatically think of the movie “Fantasia”. Around track 5 the cd players are becoming off cinq. The fourth cd player is ahead of everyone elses. In track 7 there is a piano or keyboard playing at the same time as a trap set, and to me this is the best part of the cd. Track 8 is about dogs who chew toys up but for somereason have a bug that is the new baby. It ends with a bunch of dogs barking very loudly. It seems that it is an appropriate ending to this experiment.

Observation

2008-03-02T22:15:00.002-06:00

There are many different types of people who live in this country, but I myself witnessed some very interesting people come into the Kabredlo’s convenience store at 33rd and Holdredge.
When I went into the store he was helping a customer, who was paying for his gas he had just pumped. The customer was wearing a light jacket that had a Nebraska N on the back of it, with a backwards Nebraska hat on. I thought it was kind of strange that he was wearing it backwards because he was probably around 50 years old. Two younger kids walk in to the store and head straight for the candy aisle, the kids are probably about 10 years old, African-American, very short they are laughing a lot and after a while they come up to the counter to complete their transaction. They are both boys and the clothes they have on do not look very clean. They had about 3 dollars worth of candy and paid in all change, when the kids leave my friend explains to me that he can’t stand when people come in and pay in change because it makes his job so much more difficult.
The next customer to walk in is wearing a black fifty-nine fifty hat, and a zip up hooded sweatshirt, he is Caucasian about 22 or 23, 6 feet tall, and has a goatee. He walks straight up to the counter and right away I notice the smell of marijuana on this character. He asks for two grape philly cigars. Apparently many kids remove the tobacco from these cigars and fill them with their marijuana. My friend says that many people come in and buy these single cigars for this reason. I would think that if you know you smelled like pot you would not want to just walk into a convenience store where there are people at because it’s kind of like saying….hey I’m over here and I’ve been smoking pot. It just makes no sense to me at all, if you’re going to smoke pot stay in your house or something.
The next customer, a middle aged Asian woman who is very short and wearing a heavy winter coat, a stocking hat and mittens, comes in the store and buys a pack of Wild Horse cigarettes. Tyler explains that a lot of people who come into his store buy Wild Horses because they are the cheapest cigarettes they sell. We go outside so he can finish his Newport and I asked him what the craziest thing that has ever happened to him at the store was. He tells me about one time some guy filled his car up with gas and drove off. He called the cops and about an hour later they bring the guy back in the back of a police car. While the officers are inside they question Tyler about what happened and all of the sudden the guy kicked the back window of the car out and began running down the street in hand cuffs, but luckily the cops caught up to him rather quickly. I thought that this was a pretty cool to be able to tell your friends this happened at your work because it is not every day that you see someone kickout the back window of a Police car.
After he finished his cigarette we go back inside and I leave for the day, only to come back the next day to finish up observing. When I walk in the store there is an older man, probably 50, he is wearing dress pants and a plain white t-shirt, probably about 6 foot 4, who is at the counter scratching lottery tickets. After he loses on a ticket he goes into an angry rage about how he never wins and that these games are fixed so that no one ever wins. He finally leaves after he tells us that he has no more money. Now I think that people who have this big of a problem with the Nebraska Lottery system shouldn’t be playing any scratch tickets, but who am I to judge someone on their habits?
The next customer who came in looked pretty unkept. He had long hair a long beard and the clothes he was wearing tell me that he may have been homeless. He goes straight to the beer coolers and grabs two Steel Reserve tall boys, which he of course pays for in change. I could be wrong but I am also pretty sure that he had already been drinking before he came in. I asked my friend if a lot of drunk people come in and he says that they do all the time, but he says that a lot of the time the drunk people don’t buy more alcohol they go for the cigarettes.
The next customer who comes in is a teenage kid looked about 16 he’s Caucasian, and probably 5 foot 8, and is wearing a Lincoln High shirt. He asks for a pack of Marlboro Smooths and is asked for his ID, the kid calmly says he left it in his car and that he would be right back. We watched him walk to his car, get in, and then drive away. We start talking about kids who smoke that are underage and make fun of them for thinking that they are cool because they smoke cigarettes. He says that it happens at least once a night where someone buying cigarettes or alcohol says they forgot their ID in their car and go out to get it, and never come back. I think that it is kind of sad that that many people try to buy cigarettes or alcohol when they are not old enough because it is obviously illegal for them to have it, so why even try.
Then another customer came in and it happened to be one of my friends. His name is Arlo he is about 6 feet tall, has very pale skin, kind of looks albino, and is wearing a zip up Zoo York sweatshirt. He had to get some gas and some Parliament menthols. He stuck around for awhile and we all talked about what was going on the next night. After he left I asked him if a lot of people he knows come in and he says at least once a night one of his friends or roommates stops in, usually just to get a free drink from him. He gives out free drinks to friends, which is kind of nice because I drive by it on my way to work so I usually get a free drink on my way to work.
After being there for an hour of my time, observing customers, and sucking back a big gulp of some delicious Mountain Dew, I think that it wouldn’t be that bad working in a convenience store because you would never get bored because of all the people that come in. It was actually a very fun experience being in there and watching all of the different people come in.

2008-02-24T21:23:00.002-06:00

I am not really sure what this diagram is of but I believe that it is a diagram on how to grow a tree. Because Nebraska is home of Arbor Day I will just talk about Arbor Day then.
J. Sterling Morton moved to Nebraska City from Detroit. He was avidly involved in trying to bring more people to live in the state of Nebraska, but even though the land was rich with nutrients there were no trees for people to build their homes with. So in 1872 Morton ran the idea of a holiday to plant trees in front of the Nebraska State Board of Agriculture, and the holiday has been celebrated in Nebraska ever since.
April 10, 1872 marked the first ever Arbor day and there were supposedly one million trees planted in the state of Nebraska on that day. By 1894 every state in the United States was celebrating the holiday. April 22 is now that day that Arbor Day is celebrated on, this day was chosen because it is Morton’s Birthday.
In Elementary school I can remember when I would plant trees with my classmates on Arbor Day and I never really understood the importance of trees back then other then that they give off oxygen, but now I know with out trees the state of Nebraska would be completely different.

Test Post

2008-01-24T14:27:00.000-06:00

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