Lucy Liu’s AP Comp Blog

Laurie Fendrich’s students seem to portrayed as hypocrites that live in the utopia of their minds, or strive to get there. They are idealistic young people that have yet to be exposed to those things that turn people jaded. They have lived thinking that intellect is the currency which they will be able to spend to gain a better future. Little did they know that their dreams were about to be crushed.

Well, not exactly. Reading the French philosopher Rousseau at least makes them question their own ideals and to either change their opinions or strengthen the ones they already had. The blatant masochist perspective probably hit them the hardest, many students in question of why women were ever treated as inferior creatures.

The article “Shipping Out” was written with a very sarcastic tone. The author obviously wants us to think that cruises are an unnecessary expense and evil in the world that must be rid of. By numbers only, almost no one in the world gets to go on cruises. Most of the people in the world view cruises as being set up for life: glorious weather, amenities, services; what’s there not to like? This writer, however, gives us that exclusive inside story resembling those of the tabloids: cruises aren’t really that glamorous. The reality is that these grand shipdecks are littered with retired fogies that want a little peace and quiet. Forget the attractive people and the neverending fun and games. This author writes like he can’t enjoy it because of these things, but I bet the other 99% of the world would beg to differ.

1. John McMurtry’s personal anecdote at the beginning of the piece gives him credibility to report on the ethics and business of competition because he himself has been through it time and time again. He has been in the locker rooms, been beaten, battered, and bruised, and has tasted sweet victory and bitter defeat. He is not looking at the topic from the outside, but as a man who has been through it and now wants to more deeply analyze what he has seen and apply it to further research.

2. The comparison that is made between football and war is convincing because the author uses parallels from many different angles and sources. He starts out with logos, that the jargon for both things are the same: “‘field general’, ‘long bomb’, ‘blitz,’ etc. This association makes the reader think, “yeah, that makes sense, because if they have the same vocabulary set, the words associated must mean the same things.” The comparison further elaborates in addressing the semantics those words as well as many other adjectives of similarity: territorial aggression, inflated insignia, training camps, etc. The last appeal is toward ethos, when presenting war as the ethics of Patton and Nixon. With such evidence at our feet, who are we to refute the author?

4. The evidence used from the Harvard study to compare the ethics of football and business is based around personal interpretation. There isn’t too much elaboration on where each quality is found, “ability to turn oneself on and off”, “out to win.” The author offers this evidence with the assumption that his audience will understand the connection, but without any hard evidence, the argument is rendered redundant.

5. It is obvious from paragraphs 5-7 that the author doesn’t feel like football is any less harmful than war. He believes that while the influence of the consequences of each are different, that as long as the want to fight is there, humans have much to work on. I partially agree with him. I don’t think that football should be used as an outlet for anger, but at the same time, the values that it teaches, such as discipline, teamwork, and courage, are essential to the survival of mankind.

7. The reader has to know at least a little bit about football for the article to be convincing or even to make sense. There is jargon used, to be sure, but there are still more references to the internal operations of a football team, such as the locker room pep talk. McMurtry has quite a few notches on his belt when it comes to football, and it would be a lie to say that he wasn’t at least giving a shoutout to other football players/fans with this piece.

The general argument made by John Hockenberry in her/his  work “You Don’t Understand Our Audience” is that the ethics of the entertainment industry prevent people from knowing the truth. More specifically, Hockenberry argues that news on TV is diluted and filtered enough that the audience does not any real sense of what is actually going on in the world. She/He writes, reassured the audience by telling it what it already knew rather than challenging it to learn.”  In this passage, Hockenberry is suggesting that the news is now more about attracting the audience than it is reporting the news.  In conclusion, Hockenberry’s belief is that the commercial news programs are no longer reliable to use to obtain information.

In my view, Hockenberry is right because tragedy sells on TV. More specifically, I believe that the media conglomerates that own the news stations are businessmen to the end.  For example, tragedy, while more depressing, is more engaging than hope and happiness. People would be more willing to  Although Hockenberry might object that most people get their news from the TV
I maintain that for many, TV is the only connection, if any, that the audience has to keep up with current events  Therefore, I conclude that unlucky as we are to have a media industry that is so business-oriented, it is better to have somewhat-informed citizens than clueless ones.

“Shooting Dad” by Sarah Vowell is focused on the persona of the author and the other main characters. You get the feeling that as a child, she had an attitude similar to many other children when they look at their parents: they are more advanced, more complex, and more sophisticated people that their parents–that she is “above” her father. The language she uses to describe her father’s eccentric ways, “makeshift”, “tetanus shot waiting to happen,” portray this. Over the course of her life, and consequently, the piece, she begins to change her views when she finds parallels between them, “One thing that my dad and I share is that we’re both a little hard of hearing–me from Aerosmith, him from gunsmith.” She suddenly finds her persona humbled by the discovery that “my dad and I are the same person.” She gains the reader’s sympathy for being the way she is because she used to be derogative towards her father, but now has formed the bond of understanding with him, which is worth more than any snarky teen attitude victory can give.

This video shows a fantasy sequence of the life and death in a colony of bees. At the beginning, close-up shots of what appear to be real flowers (because of the uneven texture pearly luster of the petals) quickly give way to computer-generated characters (whose movements are too smooth to be real), namely bees. The process of making honey is depicted as a bee regurgitating an iridescently crimson nectar drink as glowing, golden honey. On the final try, the bee is unable to meet the honey quota marked by a white line on the clear tumbler. Beady-eyed birds equipped with tank tracks in place of feet stare the bee down and have him disposed of. In a sequence, a cross-section of a bird body shows that the creatures use the honey to fuel their own jagged movement. The light in this bee is literally beaked out, sending glass bulb shards flying in all directions. Life is over for this bee as he dramatically descends down a chute straight into a mound of carcasses. But for his offspring, fertilized in a complex and rotational mating dance (parts of which are interspersed throughout later scenes), life has just begun. It is for these eggs that the traditional honeycomb arrangement is reserved for, each egg nesting in its own hexagonal box. And, just as the mixing blades turn to pulverize the flowers, the life of the bee has come full circle: it is up to his children, governed by the machine bird children, to generate the honey that fuels them all.

Baldwin and Buckley show a sharp contrast in how they deal with things. Buckley has learned through observation of situations about the passive behavior that citizens exhibit in hopes of keeping the peace. He writes, complaining about people that don’t make enough complaints. Sure, it is evident that a certain type of people tend to speak up and complain about something like the government, but at the same time, the majority of people are sitting back and letting others decide for them.

Where Buckley feels that apathy is wrong, Baldwin comes in with a different viewpoint: the one of a minority. Baldwin feels that there is nothing wrong with blending in and wanting to disturb the peace in his situation, because acting out of line would automatically be associated as the result of his ethnicity.  Baldwin makes the audience understand why he is forced to stay quiet, and that if he could help it, that he would do all those things that Buckley wants people to do. Buckley’s reason for holding back, in the first story he tells, is because his wife didn’t want him to complain. He has his own personal reasons, but still finds it in himself to complain about others, like he wishes others would act out for him.

“Dumpster Diving” is the real-life account of a man who, during several years of homelessness, scavenged as a means of survival. His attempt to turn an experience into a journalistic piece to enlighten the public worked well. When you hear about homelessness, you tend to assume and expect a piece that is full of pathos, pulling on the heart strings and crying for your sympathy. While this piece was not devoid of this, it certainly understated the emotional journey he and other scavengers had to take. Because he was able to detach himself from this piece as a firsthand account, (”I mean to put some of what I have learned down here, beginning with the practical art of Dumpster diving”) it is able to come across as more of a light informative piece for the purpose of bettering society as opposed to being a dark commentary about the state of society.

In 2007, I changed my mind about seniors being lazy bums who lazed around and didn’t want to do any more work because they thought their futures were all secured with the submission of their college applications. They were annoying pricks with nothing to do other than watch TV and talk about them loudly for the rest of the year.
In 2007 I realized that I had become one of those seniors. I don’t do work in a few of my classes anymore, I watch tv all the time, and have a general sense of finality to the year. Now, it’s just a matter of time.
I wouldn’t call seniors lazy anymore. All this college stuff is seriously stressful, and overall the amount of effort that has to be put in is made with the assumption that eventually, there will be an award in the end. For the college-bound senior, college might not be the first reward on their mind. Rather, the freedom and sense of relief is the much bigger deal. And that’s how I feel now. That I shouldn’t have to do so much work now because over break I finished 5 applications in 3 days. I would like to be rewarded for that kind of effort.

James Randerson’s response seems intriguing because it is about politicians vs. scientist. Scientists are allowed to flip-flop their opinions becasue it is how humans learn things. But if a politician flip-flops, they are criticized for being indecisive. Sometimes as a young person growing up in America i feel like changing my views is a sign of weakness, and i see other people refusing to do so for the sake of keeping their reputation.

Jordan Pollack’s response about electronic messaging reminded me of a few days ago when gmail seemed to double the storage space they used to offer, from about 3 GB to 6 GB, for free. I have yet to find a person who was nearing 2GB worth of email on their Gmail account, much less 3GB. When gmail first came out, the 2 GB that it offered caused dropped jaws and rapid service switch. Within a few months, yahoo and hotmail had increased their storage dramatically, and in the last few months, have matched Gmail’s original 2GB. however, it seems that gmail just needed to outdo the others, and it didn’t matter that it is nearly humanly impossible to fill that whole 6GB with email.

Kevin Kelly’s response to wikipedia shows his age and his inability to understand our generation through his doubts of wikipedia. It’s such a part of my life now that that only time i question it is when i see grammatical errors (which are an endangered species) and when i know without a shadow of a doubt that the fact is wrong.