want to join the Mickey Mouse Club?

TV tokenism has been a major theme within our American Studies class this year. Going back a few decades, Annette on the Mickey Mouse Club became the most well know and famous mouseketeer because she was the most ethnic looking person on TV during the 50’s. They used her most on the show for that purpose. They wanted to show the best of what America was. This completely goes along with the idea of TV tokenism. It has been going on forever. She was the only person on the show that was ethnic looking. It is interesting that it is not just a current idea for shows to succeed. The Mickey Mouse Club was the most popular show for kids for many years. It is unfortunate that shows like this are not able to stay around anymore. I feel like there aren’t any shows like this on TV currently.

Did your parents watch the Mickey Mouse Club when they were growing up? Don’t you feel like there aren’t any real American icon shows anymore? Doesn’t it seem like most everything on TV is trash?

how appealing is a bear or a chimp mauling you?

At the beginning of the year we watched part of the movie “Grizzly Man”. It was a pretty memorable film about a man in Alaska who thought he had a major connection with bears and nature. It turned out that after being with them for years, there was one moment in time that the bears did not give him their usual response. He ended up getting mauled to death by one of the bears that he had a connection with. As I was watching parts of the news with my mom last night, a terrifying story came up. A woman in Connecticut had a pet chimpanzee that was considered part of the family. This chimp, named Travis had been a star on T.V. and Travis had been considered to be very tame and would do nothing to harm anyone. This was obviously proven wrong when the owner had a friend over and the chimp went crazy. He had been on anxiety medicine that may have caused him to be a little off. He mauled the woman (friend of the owner) for 12 minutes; he bit off both of her hands and tore up her face. The owner did try to stop him by stabbing him and bribing him and called the police, but when the police came he tried to attack them and so all they could do was hide in their cars and shoot him. He did not die instantly but he ran back inside to his play room and died there. The woman was sent to the hospital and had 7 teams of trauma surgeons trying to stabilize her since she was in such critical conditions.

The parallel between these two situations is pretty clear. They both show that even though you can tame a wild animal to a certain extent, they still have their wild life instincts. Nobody has any business acting as if a wild animal is a member of their family. If you are dealing with wild animals you need to be trained for the job you do, not as a leisure activity.

Would you ever consider working with wild animals or taming one to be your pet? What would you do if you were ever in a situation like these?

hey do you want to be my friend?

In class last week, Mr. O’Connor posed a question about how conversations start and made some comments on conversation “etiquette”. I have actually thought about it a lot how conversations really start and how they differ from person to person. When I am in a long conversation I think about it after how we got to the last part of the conversation. It is so interesting how the mind works and what words or sentences trigger your brain to something else that is sometimes relevant and sometimes completely random.
There are those certain people your friendly with but are exactly “friends” per say and the only type of conversations you have is small talk. Those are the worst because not only is it awkward during the conversation but then to leave it even worse. The conversations you have with people you have the most common ground with usually tend to be the most successful and longest if you have the time.
When I don’t have something that I need to ask or tell a person when we start to have a conversation I think of the last conversation we had or something I know we have talked about before and say something about it then start from there. Conversations can get really rough really fast if certain topics are brought up. Transitions are Mr. O’Connor’s specialty but most people have problems with them, in writing and in conversations. If certain topics just don’t flow together they need to have something in between to connect them somehow. It is hard to do this on the spot sometimes or even if you have time.
How do your conversations differ from person to person? Do you like to start the conversations or end them? Do you have any tips for people who have trouble conversing with people in person?

changing his mind

When former President George W. Bush deployed troops to the Middle East, he faced serious criticism. Then when he felt a surge of troops was needed many people said it would not work. The tables have turned now. President Barack Obama said throughout his campaign that he was going to bring the troops home and get them out of harm’s way, and there would be no way that he would deploy more soldiers. The funny thing is, now that he is in office and is getting the reality of the situations at hand, he has changed his course of action drastically. Now he is planning on sending thousands more soldiers overseas. Now that he is the president, what is the general public going to think of it? Is he going to be beat to shreds as was Bush, or is he going to be glorified? Is his whole campaign of “change” going down the drain? Will we find out more of who he really is and what he stands for now that he is actually in office? Realistically everything he said he was going to do is not going to happen. He is probably going to need to change his opinion and stance on many issues, as he has already. It will be interesting to watch out for is if he will be glorified or judged in a negative way.

money money money

As we were talking about misleading narrators and depicting what the underlying meaning is, we led into talking about athletes. The mythology unit really coincided with athletes. It all started with Michael Vick. The question brought up was if he “broke” the myth that athletes are untouchable by the law. Since he was sentenced to 23 months of jail time, obviously he did not, at least with the case with him and the dog fighting. Everything that happens within the professional athletic world is surreal and strange to me. Although they put a lot of wear and tear on their bodies, I don’t understand why they are paid as much as they are. There are so many other jobs that people have that make the world a better place and save lives and do actually good for the country, but they don’t get paid nearly as much as they should or as much as the athletes. I love sports and I could only watch sports for the rest of my life but I don’t think that the athletes deserve how much they get paid. Most of the time and with most of the money they earn, it is not even put to good use. The athletes buy multimillion dollar houses, hundred of the thousand dollars worth of cars, and it is all blown away. They should save it and use it for things that are necessary, not just things they want. I think that the main reason for it is that some of them come from families that had almost no money and now they don’t know how to manage the huge pay checks that they get because they don’t look at the big picture of life. Overall the money needs to be put towards better uses, before it all gets to the athletes and once the athletes have it.

What is your take on it all? Do you think that the athletes deserve all of the money they get? How else do you think the money should be used or distributed?