Blog Post for April 23

So, this week in class there were numerous events that we did. One thing was actually finishing our book, Farenheit 451, and then we watched a video on Brave New World. So to our book. F451 ended the exact opposite of how I thought it would. I figured that sooner or later Montag would get caught, but I didn't even think that he woul dhave to burn his own house, along with the books. Then Montag ends up killing/burning Beatty and then being on the run. He runs to Faber's house and Faber passes along some useful information that Montag needs to get to the river to be safe and join the other "readers". He does finally catch up with the other readers at the river and as that happens the city goes down (bombed). The head of the little group started talking to Montag about how to actually remember what happened in the past. Montag then starts to remember where Mildred and he met, which was one of the first things that led Montag to being "unhappy". As I pointed out in my previous post from last week, Montag again is running, just like the sieve and the sand. The faster he runs, the more trouble he gets in, but this time he actually got away with what he did just in time. I really liked F451 and this book made me realize how important literature is to us. We don't really realize we need something until it's gone, and in today's world we are not quite where Montag was, but we need to get a handle on what's going on before we end up like thier society.

The video we watched in class scared the crap out of me! I never would have imagined that people are already putting micro chips in themselves to show who they really are. What ever happened to the old fashioned way of telling people who you are? I understand that there is a lot more indentity theft and thats the main reason of this chip invention, but it's totally bizzare! So, from what it looks like, Feeds society will be here before you know it, and we'll be the one's in the with the chips in our heads!

Blog Post for April 16

Fahrenheit 451 is defintiley getting interesting. During my groups discussion, we talked about numerous topics with the book. We brought up Clarisse is very similar to Violet. They both seem to be the rebels or outlaws of society and ironically enough end up dying, or getting killed. While reading the Sieve and the Sand part of the book, Montag has a flashback while in the subway. He say's, "Once as a child he had sat upon a yellow dune by the sea in the middle of the blue and hot summer day, trying to fill a sieve with sand, because somw creul cousin had said, 'Fill this sieve and you'll get a dime!' And the faster he poured, the faster it shifted through with a hot whispering. His hands were tired, the sand was boiling, the sieve was empty. Seated there in the midst of July, without a sound, he felt the tears move down his cheeks" (Page 84).

After reading that quote and then throughout that part of the story, I can make the interpretation that Montag is just going to keep on doing this. In the quote, he mentions that the fatser he put the sand in the faster it came out, and I havd the feeling that the quicker he tried to convince people that the world was wrong, would only cuase more harm then any good. In my opinion, I have the feeling that Montag is going to be running from now on! But with Faber in his ear, one would think that he would slow down and take Faber's advice, but Montag kept going faster! When he read the poem to the friends at his house, he had Faber in his ear telling him to stop and be quiet, but once agin Montag didnt and kept right on going. Montag needs to take his time and do this the right way to make it succeed, but from the way part two ended, it might already be too late!

Blog Post for April 9

Fahrenheit 451 is a little different, but it continues to grow on me as I keep reading. A topic that really struck me was whenever Clarisse and Montag first meet. She asks Montag all these questions like, "Have you ever watched the jet cars racing on the boulevards down that way?...I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly...". For some reason this quote sticks in my head, and the more and more I think about it, it relates to us all in our society! How many times have we been out driving on the same road to go to work or school, and we just drive from point A to point B, and never notice anything. But when we have someone along with us, they say, "look at how nice that old barn is now since they repainted it." So we glance over and see the barn and we normally say something like how long has it been since it was freshly painted? And the person tells us it's been like for a month or two, but we didn't realize it! This is exactly what Clarisse is talking about. In today's world, we never take time to smell the roses! We are too busy to do that, we have so many places to be, I know I'm one of those people. It's just ironic that this is almost how we are in today's world. That just caught me eye for some reason.

But overall, the very first couple pages of the book were rather dry, and felt like it was just dragging on and on, but then as we started to get to understand what Montag actually does, it added a lot more interest in it, and I can only imagine that Montag is going to end up being a victim of having books. He's already taken a couple, and I'm waiting for him to have thousands stored up in his attic too!!

Blog Post for Friday March 26

A Clockwork Orange is a very strange book, but yet I did like it! In the novel, Alex and his droogs, are out and about at night and end up causing all kinds a damage to people, places, and to themselves. As the story progresses, I almost got a feeling that something would change Alex and make him a nice person. Well, I was right. At the middle part of the novel, Alex gets caught and is thrown in jail. While he is in jail for a couple years, the new treatment comes out, which is to watch basically what you've done in the past, and then you will feel sick if you try to do it ever again. Alex watches all this videos or "films" and gets the sick when he watches them, which is a sure sign to the soctors, that he is getting better. So after watching these horrible films for a fortnight, he does get released out into the world again. When he gets out, he goes home, and finds out that his parents have basically took in John, a laborer, into thier home, almost as a replacement of Alex. Alex is quite furious, I can't balme him for that, I mean what parents would do that to thier son, but when he even thinks nasty things, he starts to get the sick feeling, like when he watched the films. He then leaves his house and goes out on the town. To make a long story short, he joins another gang, but doesn't do any of the violence part. Its almost like he feels like he's not worth anything to anyone since he left for jail, and his own parents didn't want him. He then one day sees Pete with a wife, and this makes Alex almost think t himself that maybe it is actually time, to turn into a good person, and settle down, and find out how to love instead of hate.

One thing that I thought was very ironic, was that after all the sick feelings he had while watching the horendous films, he actually went right out into public and did what he always did, by joining a gang. I think that it relates in today's world with people that get out of jail, are extremely likely to go back into jail for the same reasons they were in there previously for. It just hit me a certain way to think that yes jail is sometimes a curable notion for people, but yet some just go in, do their time, and then go right back out into the world and do it again. There needs to be a line drawn, people need to be put through theropy like Alex. Eventhough he did join a gang, he was not doing all the violence acts, like he was, which is a step in the right direction.

Blog Post for March 19

As I started to read A Clockwork Orange,I was thinking to myself, what a mistake on picking this book to read!! The slang they used completely baffled me, and when I would look at the Nasdat dictionary to try to help me understand what the words meant, it took about an hour to read one page! Not exactly an hour but longer than normal! This book strikes a lot of resemblance to today's world, as we know it! The main characters in the book are Alex (the gang leader and narrator), Pete, Dim, and Georgie, which are the other gang members a.k.a. his "Droogs". The pages that I have read are filled with violence such as beating people up, raping, robbing, etc. But also in class on Thursday, we discussed about certain topics we agreed or disagreed with that went right along with the novel.

The topic in class that really made me think about was whether aversion therapy should be used. In my honest opinion, I think it definitely should be used. If we have a person running around on the streets that is stalking someone and watching their every move so they can plan the perfect time to kill that person, I think that the killer should have to go through the exact same pain that the other person went through. As one of my group members was telling us the one day, that from the video of Clockwork Orange, they actually use this tactic on Alex and after watching it (the acts that he has done) makes him get sick in his stomach, because he can't stand to watch what he, himself did! That's the whole purpose of my point. People may not realize how much they do hurt others when they do a certain crime or action. And in my opinion, jail time is a good thing, but that person could walk right out of a jail and do that same crime again within the hour. But what causes this, society, parenting? That's the key, I think it's a little of both. If we see all the great movie stars doing certain acts and scenes, and they get all the money and hype about it, so we go and do the same thing to try to get the same recognition, but get in serious trouble. And yet, parents can try to raise their kids a certain way, but the kid has a choice on what they want to do and are going to do it, no matter what. These topics are just my opinion, and can go either way, I just thought it was a very interesting thing to talk about,since it fit right in with A Clockwork Orange.

Blog Post for Feb 18

So Feed was a very interesting book to read. With all the crazyness and the funky langiage made it very interesting. I actually did enjoy reading the book. It really kind of put a perspective on how life actually could be like later on down the road, which is really scarey!! In my opinion, the Feed has a lot more disadvantages than advantages. Some of the advantages: Having all that information with you all the time would be really useful when one does try to go out and buy something, and thats it for advantages. The disadvantages are: not using it for what one should be, losing civilzation, and very independent. Not using it for what it should be used for could go various ways. Like whether you use it for looking at what kind of car to buy or whether you are chatting with a friend while eating supper with the family. I think it should only be used for certain things such as while making a purchase, and not to be used with a chatting. Thats just a sign of how we are so addicted to technology. Another disadvantage would be that it would lose our regular civilzation. We are already almost here. We hardly ever talk to someone face to face for example. We'd rather text or chat with them on facebook then aactually go out and meet them and talk, which is putting us in a bad spot. The other disadvantage I have is that we are very independent. We would rely on the feed to do everything for us. What happened to people having thier own gardens and growing thier own food? Thats very rare in this day! It would just be another distraction that would hurt us even more. I honestly think that we already do have a feed with the cell phones being almost computers and we are already hooked on them, so it's only going to get worse. Remember that the feed might have its advantages, but are they really worth all the pain?

Blog Post for Feb. 12

What determines a person to be smart or dumb? Really, it can't be determined if you ask me. I know more about sprint cars then anybody in our class and I'm sure they know way more about other things than I do so are we both dumb or both smart? Well, according to the great Dr. Bauerlein, our generation is the dumbest. To be honest, I do somewhat agree. Whenever we watched some of those clips in class; ex fill in the blank-the old man and the______. Hardly anybody knew that. It really showed me that people are not recognizing classic novels, quotes, authors, etc. And a lot of the people say, "well that's classic and it doesn't mean anything in today's society". And then we were told of a statistic that a number of people couldn't even find the United States on a map! Here's your sign! Whats wrong with this picture? Well, the classics are classics for a reason. It shows how society was back in that time period, and how everything was. And yes, probably some of today's works will be classics in 15-20 years. But I think there does need to be a balance between them. I remember doing Julius Caesar in high school and kind of thought it was interesting when most of the class thought it was stupid. But then when we'd do other works in a more recent time period, i wouldn't like it and they would. It's just a persons preference on what they like, but yet they should have a little bit of understanding in both worlds.

Now, with the dumbest generation standpoint, I do agree somewhat. I think that we probably are the dumbest generation due to the fact that we ALL rely a lot on technology to do things for us. But yet I think we have the capability to be the smartest generation. We have all kinds of resources and technology at our finger tips, but yet I think we don't know how to use it. Computer for example, the first thing most of us do when we start our computer is check facebook or myspace. Is that really what computers were made for? I thought that's what phones were for, oh and actually talking to the person face to face. But yet we tend to use all of these valuable resources the wrong way, which I think does make us be the dumbest generation. But yet, with all this technology, why are we the ones to blame? Technology all came about when the Europeans built ships to come to the Americas, so isn't technically building a ship new technology for them? And then when industrialization started to take over everything, that's definitely technology taking over. So, why are we the ones to blame when all of this "stuff" was created before our time? It looks like we are just getting the short end of the stick!