Review Blog_Clinton Wright

One of my favorite songs is “Lose Yourself” by Eminem. I first heard the song as a pump-up song for our basketball warm-up in middle school and have loved the song since. I find the beat and lyrics to be uplifting and help to get your adrenaline pumping; in my opinion, the best pump-up song to listen to. The review I found online for the song focused on the music and did not pay much attention to Eminem. The writer, George Zahora, emphasized that the music alone, is what makes the song so good. He compares the song to “Eye of the Tiger” explaining how well it gets peoples adrenaline pumping. Zahora then says however, that the reason the song is good is because of the beat and music; not because of Eminem’s talents. His closing line says, “You could train a parrot to provide Eminiem’s share of the work.” This is where I disagree with the writer; I find that Eminems’ lyrics are a major part as to why the song is popular among different types of music lovers. Whenever the song comes on in a commercial, or on the radio; people do not just start humming the beat to the song, they start to sing the intro or the chorus because that is the part of the song they know and remember. The music leads them to start singing the lyrics that Eminem uses. Zahora uses a respectable list of criteria that looks at the musical instruments, beat, and lyrics to grade the song. While I do not agree with his review of the lyrical part of the song, I do agree with the criteria that he chose to evaluate the song.

http://www.splendidezine.com/review.html?reviewid=32440298051981777

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO2wA0Te0wM

Definition Proposal_Clinton Wright

I am going to define the word "safe".

Safe: 1) Free from danger and harm.
         2) Was not thrown out, made it to the base in time.
         3) A device used to lock a persons possesions so only they can get to them.

I am defining "safe" in my paper because of the different meanings it has. Safe can be used in sports, as a noun, or as a way to describe someones well-being. I will focus a little on how safe means different things to people in different places in the world. People in the U.S are safe from many things in life that people in the Middle East are not safe from.

My goal is to compare the deffinitions of "safe" and also the different ways it can be applied to people.

My audience is people that take for granted the life we live here in the United Sates and how truly safe we are.

Blog Entry #2: Definitions_Clinton Wright

            Patton Oswalt says that the words nerd and geek were a type of shorthand used by other cliques to describe himself and his friends. In his eyes, he never fit into the stereotype that people defined as a nerd or a geek. He never felt alone because he was friends with people who had the same interest as him. He was able to share his likes and dislikes with people like him and therefor did not feel like an outcast. Oswalt defined geeks and nerds to be people who were into science fiction, Dungeons and Dragons, and Stephen King. Otaku is defined to be people with obsessive and minute interest. He uses these three words to describe the culture he used to live in and how much American media has changed. He tries to inform the reader that if we do not change the way we get our information about pop culture, then there will be no more people with and in depth knowledge on one subject; we will all know a little about everything. I agree that the internet does make it easier for people to become more aware of multiple things and that they are less focused on a few little things. I do not think that geekiness has become normal because geeks were specialized in a few small fields of thought. People now-a-days do not know a lot about a few small things, they know a little about a lot of things.

            Supermarket Pastoral is the literary genre of the grocery store. Supermarket Pastoral is the story behind the organic foods that people buy; it is the trip that the food goes through from farmer to consumer. Pollan talks about the supermarket pastoral because he is trying to explain that organic does not necessarily mean small, individual farms. When people think of organic foods, they picture a small scale farm with a farmer who is still personal. The farmer farms his owns crops and then individually sells to the store. But supermarket pastoral shows that this is no longer true; one company produces 80% of the entire lettuce market. Organic farming is not a lot of small family farms producing crops to sell to the grocery store; organic farming has become an industry. What was once an idea to bring back the power between consumer and farmer to work for a greater good is now gone because the farmer has become a corporation. The culture of organic agriculture has morphed into the same big corporation industry as the regular agriculture industry is; it has changed from an industry interested in quality to one that is just focused on making a profit.