Blog for week of 1-22-1-28

Ok so here are some of the discussions we had on February 24th 2009.
First of all we watched a movie about how the government was educating people on malaria, and how to prevent the spread of it. I found it very funny that they suggested putting oil in water. Ok that good in theory, it kills the mosquitoes and stuff like that, but they forgot to mention that oil in water kills off many other things. These things would include fish, wildlife, pretty much anything that comes into contact with the water with oil in it. Oil is very toxic, and whatever scientists decided to do this did not d field tests to see what else oil in water would affect. I believe the mindset of people who were combating malaria, and had to deal with it were thinking so much about killing the parasite that they weren't paying attention to the repercussions this could have on other organisms in the community. Also Mosquitoes were described as killers, when in reality they aren't. The real killers are the parasites that live in mosquitoes, mosquitoes are pretty much doing what they are biologically programmed to do, and that is to survive. Which I thought was a bad interpretation of mosquitoes and the malaria parasite. Also we watched a movie about soviets and farming. During the mid 1900's the soviets were involved in a war. They depended on their agriculture for money and food for troops, so the soviets made a bunch of pro-farming videos and decided to make it look fun. They had music playing and the farmers were looking like they were having a good time. In reality farming especially for the worker is hard, and is very tough. Many people wanted to avoid farming but got stuck in it because that was one of the few ways to make a decent living. Also we looked at a news story about a poor little girl who was playing a game console and developed bad sores. It turned out she wanted to play so bad even though she had painful sores on her hands, are people starting to get that addicted to video games? It seems so, I remember when I used to play Halo 2 a lot, I remember I would play for almost 8 hours straight, it was addicting!

Moving on to February 26TH....

We started off a great discussion entailing, what are the basic themes behind rules. Rules can be interpreted many different ways, I believe language is the key to determining rules, and different cultures with different languages, and core values may see a rule very different then what you or I would see a rule. One thing is true we do have a certain core-value of rules that we all maintain. We all follow these rules and values, and we hardly ever stray from them. If we do stray from these rules or values we experience stress, because our core values or rules don't reflect our actions, to make up for this we try and justify a rule or action, maybe saying "Well everyone else is doing it", or something to that affect, so our core values still reflect our actions, but the exception is justified. Rules are also meant to be changed as society changes, or evolve, like a good example would be gay marriage, or civil rights, or women's liberation, are good examples. Also we talked about the meaning of filth and summarizing it, I belive one of the major themes in filth is pretty much anyone can be a hero. We also talked about one of them, which is love for a cat, I sort of feel sorry for the guy, because he just loves a cat and doesn't have a girlfriend lol! Really he was an ordinary guy though, and it turns out he is actually a secret agent too, and is a hero to many people. This is pretty amazing!

Another thing we talked about does condensing your writing into something smaller make you a better writer? I believe it does, as long as you can display your main themes and motifs in your writing while making it smaller, and not distorting it. An example of distorting it would be previews of a movie. We can take top gun and write a really good preview, but we can also distort the preview by making a top gun recut of the movie portraying a gay love story. After saying that, making things smaller is good, as long as you are not distorting or losing the major underlying theme of a writing, or book.