FINAL PORTFOLIO

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The Shawshank Redemption

A true underdog story mixed with a gripping combination of intellect and crime. Andy Dufresne (played by Tim Robbins), the main character, is sent away to prison for being falsely accused of murdering his cheating wife. In prison, he becomes close with Red (played by Morgan Freeman), and the two of them become good friends. Throughout his time in prison, the film focuses on Andy's inherent traits of intellect and integrity, as he works to financially frame the warden who involved him in a money laundering scheme. Along with the dark piano musical score, the true nature of the darkness of prison as well as an individual's short-term futility with those more powerful truly connect the viewer to the sturuggle of an innocent Andy. Moreover, the film describes an individual's ability to be free even in prison, and, more specifically, the ability of truth to spwan hope. A must see!

The Devil Wears Prada Review

In the first ten minutes of this film, the true nature of the entire film is exposed. Ann Hathaway and Meryl Streep star as the main duo as the underdog, fashionless college grad applying for a job to a high-end fashionista's glamor magazine. With the accompaniment of music and with the divulging comparison of Hathway to the other ladies working at the magazine, you truly feel sympthay for Hathway's character. With her odd-ball antics as well as her awkward dialogue, the viewer is truly put into the situation of the movie. And the star Meryl Streep is very convincing, as she always is, playing the snobby fashion exec. Looking forward to watching the other 120 minutes of the film!

Website critique.

As imagined, I critiqued Tyler's website. Her layout and overall site is much more in-depth than my own website- I especially like her color scheme. It makes it very easy to read everything and also adds an almost soothing effect to the website in general. Her introduction page is a very in depth description of herself and the website's purpose; it makes it very easy to get ot know her and also connect with the writings. The (cheesy) pictures on her intro slide also add a personal level that adds to the entire effectiveness of the website. I especially enjoyed the side by side layout of her pages, with one side containing the writing and the other containing the description of the writings. At the bottom of her blog page, there is a link to her entire blog, which adds a nice touch. Her ICW page scared the hell out of me with the music for the game- maybe a little misplaced. The consistency in heading with the pen and paper pencil adds a great touch to the website.

Ad Blog: Marines "The Climb"

My chosen advertisement for the assignment is the Marine Corps' recruiting ad titled "The Climb". It is a very well-thought out advertisement playing on many different dynamics of potential recruits as well as their families. Another interesting facet of the commercial and its underlying meaning is the fact that the commercial is paid for with American tax dollars funneled into Defense spending; therefore, the makers of the commercial produced what they felt was the clearest, most poignant advertisement with as little risk as possible.

The whole advertisement is a long-running metaphor for the process to become a Marine. What's important to realize is that the intended group is Marine recruits: high school dropouts and graduates, blacks and whites, the weak and the strong. The only linking characteristic of the target audience is the fact that they can understand and want to be pushed by the challenge of joining the Marines. When the man starts out climbing (a very unrealistic climb, mind you, straight up a crumbling rock face with no safety mechanism at all) it shows the potential recruit the path will be a tough one. As the man reaches the top, it shows that he is tired and haggard from the climb, yet still able to move, making the process of becoming a Marine attainable. And when the man is saluted by the other dressed Marine, with the voice over saying that he will be joining the brotherhood of the few, it makes the trip seem worthwhile.

The entire advertisement is a very interesting use of personality profiles for potential recruits. In some ways, it is funny how the makers of the commercial chose their own path, playing off a man's masculinity and inherent macho-ism to get the to join the Marine Corps. I look forward to expounding upon some of the basic ideas I have laid out here in my project.

Spam 10.26.09

I have never eaten Spam. My decision to never eat Spam is roughly based on my seeing Spam at a young age and immediately vowing to never put that gelatinous meat goop into my body.

Reading Chu's "Spam: Meaning" showed me that some people eat Spam consistently, despite their own palates, out of necessity. She even goes so far to mention that there are people who eat Spam not out of necessity but out of desire. Spam has become the brunt of many lower-class jokes but is there such a lower-class monopolization of Spam to merit these jokes? Chu argues no, that Spam, although cheap and disgusting in all of its not-exactly-natural goodness, can be chosen, even craved.

And although some people love Spam and some people unequivocally hate Spam, there is not a single person in this world is uninterested in a can of Spam. The bold, deli-style colors of its can, strange consistency, and processed contents make it intriguing, while its class status make sit more or less fascinating.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

Having gone back and forth on the topic an infinite number of times, I feel almost like the ending steps of a Maclaurin series finally having reached a suitable topic.

My family is very sports-oriented. My younger brother is a wide receiver at the University of Richmond, the defending D-1AA national champions. My oldest cousin is a scholarship baseball player at Catawba College in North Carolina and is planning on being drafted into the Major Leagues either this draft or the next. My younger cousin was ranked as one of the top ten baseball players in North Carolina for his age when he was 11, 12, 13, and 14. He is now the quarterback of a championship high school in North Carolina. My mother and grandfather run marathons to this day.

I, however, am not so naturally blessed with athletic ability. Although I am not by any means unathletic, although most of my sporting ability comes from having, by threat of ridicule, to play competitively against my brother and cousins in every sport imaginable.

My efforts to be an athlete left me in an untenable position, resulting in a profligate use of time and energy. My area of ability has always been in the classroom through thought, speech, and language. I am admittedly a nerd deep down. I can hide it well sometimes, but it eventually comes out.

I will do my project on my struggle to identify myself, even sometimes to this day, with either the world of academia or athletics. These two are by no means by definition mutually exclusive, but it's funny how it often tends to be.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc:

Roughly translated: "after this, therefore, because of this"

Did I become a fan of the classroom simply by default? Was I pushed into something other than sports when I realized that I could no longer hang with my two-years-junior brother? Interesting to think about.

"Introduction to Financial Crises" by George Cooper

The one reading I am drawn to enough to write about here is "The Introduction of Financial Crises" by George Cooper. An excellent read for any person who is interested in the, well, origins of the financial crisis, this book spends a predominant amount of its pages reuting the Random Walk Hypothesis. This hypothesis, a cornerstone of economic theory, states that the activity of a financial market today has no effect on the activity of the same financial market tomorrow, that market performance follows a 'random walk.' However, using empirical evidence and solid logic, George Cooper casts serious doubt on the foundation of the Random Walk Hypothesis and its applications.

And it all makes sense as well. The Random Walk Hypothesis states that because a market follows no set path and that, you can't predict it. Because a market can only go up or down, the application of the random walk hypothesis is like flipping a coin x number of times. The larger x becomes, the likelier the outcomes of the coin flip become perfectly split (100 flips- 50 heads 50 tails). A market's value according to the RWH should always remain halfway in between the two extremes, negative infinity and positive infinity, or exactly zero.

However, common knowledge states that once recessions occurr, they snowball, and become deeper, and not by chance alone. It is a clear shortfall of the RWH that once markets start to fail, people react, facilitating their failures and withdrawing all of their money.

This reading is a great read for anybody remotely interested in what is happening in today's economy.

Group Work

Our group worked together well on our semicolon project. Unfortunately, I was sick during class on Monday, but The Mustangs, a group of very capable grammatical fanatics (grammatical fanatics?), accomplished a bulk of the conceptual work last Friday and on Wednesday. We worked very well together, managing to enjoy ourselves while we presented a topic as boring as punctuation. However, I quickly noticed I needed the lessons, as I was unsure about a few of the punctuation uses presented in class.

Did You Know 2.0- "evolution is good"

Did You Know 2.0 (DYK) is a very well-intentioned video. And it does stop and make one think. That is about all I will afford it.

This clip is asinine to its very core. The maker visions himself as a beacon of hope, as some sort of lighthouse warning the world of danger on the horizon. Ignoring the fact that every single one of the "facts" included are completely unsubstantiated, I still consider this movie completely ignorable. Hell, it was created by a MARKETING firm, and the basis of marketing is purely shock value. If they have caught your attention, they have succeeded. And clearly with this video they succeeded, as so many in class are speaking of how it made them stop and think about how technology affects them.

http://www.spitfiremarketinggroup.com

Let's roll our sleeves up and dig a little deeper into the logical fabric of this movie. This movie is about the changing world, and how we are becoming more and more dependent on technology. This dependence was not present 10 or 15 years ago, so the world is changing. By definition, we are evolving. And it is important to realize that the world does not have a conscience of its own, able to change any which way on its own whim. The world changes because PEOPLE CHANGE. The same people that are being warned of over-dependence on technology in this video are the people who text message constantly and make cell phone calls and drive with GPSes because it makes life easier.

This video contains many threatening, caution-inducing undertones. The maker is issuing a promulgation that we need to be aware of the dangers of technology, that the overuse of technology is inherently bad. As we have already mentioned that the world does not change itself, and that the citizens of the world change the world, there must be a majority of people who are in favor of change for change to occur. Put simply, nothing will change if no one wants it to change. However, the fact that the world is evolving clearly shows that the majority of the citizens of the world are in favor of change.

This change can never be considered wrong, at least in the sense that wrong is undesirable. To an individual, change can be wrong. To an individual, change can be undesirable. But to society, change can never be considered wrong or undesirable. In retrospect, change is always desirable, in the fact that if it weren't a desirable change, it never would have happened in the first place. Therefore, to warn us of something we ourselves are implementing on the world is completely trivial, in the same sense that warning people of the potential podiatric dangers will not inhibit them from wearing flip-flops. People wear flip-flops because they are comfortable and people want to, the world is changing because people LIKE new technology and they WANT to use more of it.

Theoretically, this clip could have been made at any point in history. Why couldn't homo erectus warn its own people throgh grunting and pointing of the dangers of becoming too dependent on fire? Why didn't Man of the Stone Age caution its people of the use of bronze, which as we know introduced the world to the Bronze Age and a new era of tools and machinery? What about the Industrial Revolution of the early 1800s? Without technology developed there, we would not have the foundation of quick travel or efficient manufacturing. And now, we are being warned of becoming over-dependent on technology. If we just stopped and sat back and enjoyed the ride, who knows where we as a species could be in 50, 100, 200 years?

Take a second to think about this assignment. In class, we were warned about becoming over-dependent on technology. What do we think about this movie? For homework go and write a BLOG on the INTERNET using a WIRELESS NETWORK through the largest internet-based company in the world, GOOGLE. We weren't told to stencil a response on a Mesopotamian-era sheet of clay, or asked to write heiroglyphics on a pyramid wall, or asked to use write on a sheet of papyrus. Evolution is good. Natural evolution occurs and should be welcome. The basic economic principle of stimulus-response drives the world and turns the wheels of mankind.

Evolution should not be inhibited. Those who try to stop the natural flow of things are only keeping man from self-betterment. As much as the makers of this movie consider themselves cutting edge and forward thinking, they are living in the past. In thought and deed.

Coming full-circle, this movie did have its merits. It brought up a controversial topic of change, which people are naturally hesitant about. However, its warning nature is useless and archaic.

Literacy Awakening

Upon first hearing of this project in class, I started thinking of different topics upon which to expound. A few things crossed my mind, each one more uninspiring than the one before. I cannot remember a single moment or a single experience or a single thought that I have ever had that I can remember made me want to read or write. I wish I could remember my mother and father reading to me, but I honestly can't. I can't remember the first book I read. It may have been something with dogs, but I can't be sure.

So I reverted to what I usually do when I get frustrated with an assignment and started poking holes in the instructional fabric of it. Why is this important? Other than the general fact that this will allow us to identify what makes us veritably "tick", what merit does this project have? And then I started really getting into it and wondered if this could be construed as a forcible extraction of self-incriminating evidence? What if I was made to write about something with which I did not feel comfortable, could I legally be held liable for what I write?

Moreover, if the internet is construed as public domain in court, how egregious of a post must I "publish" for my first amendment rights be rescinded? Theoretically, one could construct an infinite number of blogs each with a different combination of the alphabet until hypothetically one controlled the blogging world. Upside and downsides are associated with this- I would have to deal with a million disgruntled Philly fans who, instead of being able to write a blog that no one reads about their group of thugs that they call the "Eagles" (cool name, and since when are eagles green? I digress), must actually search me out to annoy me. However, certain rights guaranteed by the constitution would be compromised if no one could blog anymore. It's give and take.

Now, mind you that none of these were legitimate qualms I had over the project. My being bored, I tend to play these mindgames, for lack of a better word.

And then I got back to the topic of the project, and realized that my literacy moment was learning how to think and form and argue and reason in a logical manner. My father is a lawyer, and he wouldn't even humor an argument I made (more allowance, even progressing to a new car) if I did not present it in a logical way. One time when I was ten or twelve or eight years old, I offered to babysit my three younger siblings ig I got paid for it. He gave me ten dollars for five hours. I told him that was crap. He told me that I shouldn't get paid to sit on the couch and make popcorn and play videogames, which at the time I thought had merit to it. I took what I could get. Ten dollars it was.

A minute after that, he asked me if I knew what I should have said to argue that I deserved more money for five hours. He told me I should have said that the President of the United States is still the President even when he goes golfing for a day- it's not about what you do, it's about what you're responsible for. But he didn't give me any more money. I quickly learned my lesson.

So that was my introduction lesson to argument and thought. I like to believe I haven't looked back since. But I still have a long way to go.