cultural experiences 2 & 3

#2

For my second cultural experience, i went out and rented Shakespeare In Love. While I have never been a huge fan of Mr. Shakespeare's literature, it was one of the few movies on the list that I had actually heard of so I thought I'd give it a shot. After watching it, I must say that it was actually rather interesting. Perhaps it was the fact that listening to Victorian English is a bit easier than reading it.

One of the things that I found to be interesting was the overall plot of the movie. The movie is about Shakespeare writing Romeo and Juliet, and the events of the actual movie unfold along very similar bases to Romeo and Juliet. If anything, this helps explain the actual play to those who couldn't quite comprehend it in 6th grade, which most kids probably couldn't. The way the creator of the movie intertwined the plot within the plot was very well done.

Another more cultural aspect of the film was the role of women back in Shakespeare's day. Back then, women were not even allowed to act in a woman's role in plays. Instead, boys with high voices played the part. Other than the Queen, women really had little to no significance in society. In the film, the princess, or whatever type of royalty she was, was forced with the task of getting married to better relations with a royal family from another country. Roles such as this were basically the only major contribution women had back in the day. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but that's how it was.


#3

Last weekend I went to see the play Pygmalion performed at Eureka College. I went with my two buddies because their sister was the lead female role and I needed another cultural experience. First off let me say the play was very good and all the actors performed amazingly. Pygmalion is the story of a psychologist who bets his fellow colleague that he can take an ordinary girl living on the streets and turn her into a proper woman in six months. However, he comes to find this is no ordinary girl. She is crazy and talks with sort of a hill billy British accent. One would think there is no way she could be turned into a proper woman. In the end, he ends up winning his bet, but gains more than the stakes. He discovers how his psychological "experiments" can affect the other person.

The aspect that struck me most about this play was the undermining moral of the story. Even though the professor made the girl into a proper lady, he took away the one thing she had. Happiness. Even though she was living on the streets and poor, at least she knew who she was and was happy. After being changed, she was gorgeous and wore only the finest garments, but that wasn't who she was. What I took away from this play was that a person should never try to change who they are or another person, simply to fit in with society. To find true happiness, you only have to look inside yourself.

Christmas is in December, not October

Something that has crossed my mind this past week is the obsession this country has for preparing for Christmas so freakin early. Every year well before December, all the Christmas songs start playing 24/7 on radio stations and people decorate for Christmas as early as possible. One of my neighbors has had their Christmas tree up since before Halloween. They skipped two holidays to set up their tree!! Now this year I suppose since the weather has been rainy and cold most of November I can see why some people might put lights up outside early, but there is no need to put up a Christmas tree 2 months before Christmas. But you know what, I could deal with the decorating if it wasn't for the songs. Not only do they start playing WAY too early, but every good holiday song has been butchered by various artists who try to incorporate their own style into it, which I guess is necessary if you are gonna play songs every minute of every day for a month.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against the Christmas season. I enjoy the holidays just as much as the next guy, but people have made Christmas too materialistic. I believe it was Jordan who posted in their blog last week about this subject, and if it wasn’t Jordan than I apologize to whoever it actually was. It’s not about who can set up the most lights and have the brightest house on the street. If it was, my house would get last every year because my family is too lazy to ever put any lights up outside.

Terrorists in Central Illinois?

Tonight as I was flipping through channels, I heard the words terrorist coming to central Illinois on one of the local news stations. As you can imagine, those words intrigued me a little so I stopped to listen what was actually going on here. Apparently an idea is being thrown around to bring some of the alleged terrorists and place them in a prison in a small town of about 800 people I believe around 30 miles outside of Peoria. As they were interviewing some of the local town’s folk, many of them were against the change. As you can probably guess, their reasoning was they didn’t want convicted terrorists so close to home. I can understand that, seeing as most of the people were elderly individuals who tend to keep safety their number one priority. But then they showed Aaron Shock and Dick Durban, two of Illinois representatives, saying the exact same thing. This made me a little uneasy. Perhaps they are unaware of the economic boom a prison can bring to an area. Not only would the government federally fund this facility, but think of the jobs it would create. Maybe Mr. Durban and Mr. Shock are oblivious to the current financial problems we are having. And don’t tell me safety is the issue. There are several correctional facilities located all across Illinois that haven’t reported any mass break outs last I heard. If there are ex-terrorists locked up, think of the security that is going to be required. It’s not like we are just going to meet the bare minimum on this one. And the more security needed the more jobs that will be created. What’s the hesitation here? Sure, Grandma Smith doesn’t want the prison because safety comes before employment for her. Plus she hasn’t been elected to represent our state and looking out for the best intentions of Illinois as a whole.

Diving Deeper

The ad analysis that we recently wrote has been one of my favorite activities we’ve done so far this year in English 110. This paper didn’t simply require you to just give you opinions on what you saw or observed, but rather it made you think deeper into some hidden message. This allows each person to dwell on his/her own thoughts about their specific topic. To me, this is more rewarding to a writer. In our previous papers, we pretty much had to just give our opinions about certain aspects. For the ad analysis, not only did we have to give our opinions about what our ads were trying to convey, but also what evidence we could uncover to support that opinion. While I’m not saying that my other works of writing were simply written half heartedly with no conviction, I felt that this paper took the most thought to write. I feel that this bring a new level to the paper, or at least it did mine, that compels the reader to keep reading to find out what message you are getting at.

Not only did the assignment make me dig deeper into the ad to write a quality paper, I also found it sort of entertaining. To be honest, if I had never heard about this assignment, I probably never would have looked deeper into any ad to find some hidden message. But now that I’ve completed it, I think it’s kind of cool to see what a seemingly simple magazine ad can really be saying or conveying.

Battle for Terra

Yesterday I had to baby-sit my two little cousins and to keep them from fighting like they always do, I decided to rent a movie from the library. Since my knowledge of children’s movie isn’t as great as some, I asked which movie would be good for smaller children? With a little assistance, I picked out the movie Battle for Terra. As we started to watch the movie, I was surprisingly drawn into the movie. For a kids movie there was a good amount of action to keep the older viewers involved with what’s going on. I was really impressed with that because most of the time children’s movies just seem to dwell on the younger viewer’s needs and desires. If a movie appeals to older people, whether it be through subtle jokes that go over younger people’s heads or other tactics, the movie appeals to a much broader audience. A movie that does a great job of this is Wall-E. Battle for Terra uses action for older people to focus on while it involves a heartwarming plot for those who do not prefer the action scenes. Most movies I watch seem to bore me rather quickly, but surprisingly this movie meant for 10 year olds was able to keep my attention for the entirety of the film. While I won’t say this is a blockbuster by any stretch of the imagination, nor would I expect you to even watch it if you were bored and alone one day. But if you ever have some younger kids and need to kill time, I would definitely recommend you go rent this movie.

Travel Essay

When Stephanie assigned the travel essay and handed out the travel essay example packets, I thought to myself well damn, this doesn’t sound like much fun. First of all it took me about a week to decide what to even write about, and by that time I had hardly any time to actually go to my place and conduct my research. I put the assignment off as long as possible because I really didn’t want to do it. So as I actually wrote my paper, I did my best to make it interesting and effective but I just felt like it lacked in areas where my others works were fine. Finally I had a “rough” draft done and it was something to work with I guess.

However, as I look back on the assignment and reading over my paper, I’ve decided that the travel essay wasn’t that bad overall. I’m not entirely sure why I had such a negative connotation when it actually wasn’t half bad. I still wouldn’t go as far as to say it was my favorite assignment ever, but things still flowed relatively smooth. During my peer response as I was reading my paper out loud, I was surprised that it sounded as good as it did. Even though it still has its areas that need some major improvement, I don’t think I’m as far away as I originally planned. Granted there is still a chance that it sucks and my expectations were low, but I’m going to assume that’s not the case. I feel better this way.

Obama's Peace Prize

As you have probably already heard, last week President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. While I don’t want to say that our president has done nothing to earn some regards for improving our country and our world, I am a bit skeptical about giving him such an honor when to be perfectly frank, he hasn’t done much to earn it. Sure, he has told us what he hopes to accomplish and how he wants to improve conditions, but he hasn’t done it yet. The nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize are due by February 1^st, which means he had been president for two weeks before the deadline. Two weeks! I don’t care how much you hope to get done in four years, but even still he didn’t accomplish anything world changing in two weeks. In two weeks, he told us that he wanted to accomplish a list of things. On that list were reducing nuclear weapons throughout the world, easing tension in the Middle East, and fighting climate changes by reducing the amount of fossil fuels used. Ok, so let’s see what he has done so far. I’ll even give him the benefit of being evaluated to today, October 12^th, instead of February 1^st. No countries are reducing their nuclear weapons build up, not even the U.S., we are still at war with Afghanistan and who knows what is going to happen with Iran, and I will give him credit for trying to be more energy efficient. So that is one out of three things accomplished that he won the award for. And I’m not being critical of Obama here, he never said he would get all this done in half a year. I commend him for the work he has been putting forth to try to improve the world, but why did he win the Nobel Peace Prize?! You can’t say it’s for good intentions, you just can’t. Even I have good intentions yet I’m not winning an award. If you ask me, they should have given the award to someone else and in a couple years if President Obama has accomplished a bit more, than we give him the award, but he hasn’t had enough time to actually deserve it.