Fall down and get right back up

In today’s episode of The Simpsons Marge gets mugged right outside of the Kwik E Mart and then becomes very scared to leave the house. Marge stays locked in the house for a very long time just because she is that scared, so she heads to the basement and finds an old set of weights. So she begins pumping iron the whole time she locks herself in the house. After a while she becomes very strong and buff and eventually gets enough strength to get out of the house. Well after she left the house she runs into her robber and chases him down. This particular episode of the Simpsons teaches a very good lesson, this lesson is that once you fall down you always must get up again no matter how hard. By Marge being locked in her house she missed out on many things, just because of a little thing called fear. Many people have a bad experience in their life time usually in their childhood and become scarred for life and tend to stay away from whatever caused them harm. Many times it can be a little thing like riding a bike, as bad as this is many people often get hit by a car riding their bikes and then become scared too scared to ride a bike again. Many people often maintain their fear of them bikes into adult hood until somebody makes them realize that it’s nothing and they can overcome it. This show does a good job of showing people that it’s okay that they had a bad experience but they shouldn’t let that hold them back from having many good experiences.

Shallow

In class this week we have been watching Land of the Dead, so I will not be writing about my readings since we didn’t have any. I never saw this movie before this class, and I don’t even think I’ve ever saw any zombie movie before. To be honest I don’t really watch horror movies, not because I’m scared or anything it’s just because I don’t really like them. I would rather sit back and laugh at a comedy film of just get tied up in the suspense of an action film. So since this is new to me I have to admit it’s not to bad, the movie is not scary but it can be gory at times, like when they show all the zombies eating all the peoples skin. Besides the horror and the gore the movie also critiques the American society. When Cholo tells Kauffman that he wants to buy a house in the nicest part of town and Kauffman then tells him that it’s not the right place for him. This is just like the United States right now, many people have the impression that poor and low income/class people are worse then them. This is not true, just because somebody doesn’t have as much money as someone else doesn’t make them better. Although the rich person can afford the nice clothes and things on the outside the poorer person often has the nicer interior. They are the ones with the warm heart that would be willing to help anyone and everyone even though they could use help themselves. It’s things like this that make me realize how shallow people can really be.

Team Work

On today’s episode of the Simpsons learned about the importance of team work. Mr. Burns was very energetic in the morning after he drank his coffee so he decided to have a good old fashioned fire drill. Well it turns out that it took the entire nuclear plant of ten minutes to get out of the building, so Mr. Burns was mad and decided to have a company workshop weekend to build on their team working skills. So they all met up in the mountains and were randomly assigned a partner so that they could climb up this mountain to get to the cabin the quickest because the last team to arrive would get fired. Well all the teams worked pretty good they all managed to work together and make it to the spot where the cabin should have been. The reason the cabin wasn’t there was because Homer and Mr. Burns were on the same team and cheated by riding a motorized sled, when they got inside they caused a number of avalanches which buried the house under tons of snow. This episode is a great episode because it teaches the importance of good team work, and it teaches that cheating is never the answer. The reason I feel that this is such a important topic is because many of my professors keep stressing the importance of team work in and out of school. They constantly remind us that study groups work very good and that even after school you will most likely work in some sort of team at your future career. In the end if you look past all the humor the Simpsons really teach good lessons.

I Robot

For this week’s reading for class we were to read an essay called Deciphering I, Robot. This essay talks about the recent film I Robot starring Will Smith and a book called I, Robot written by Isaac Asimov. In this essay the author shows us how to break apart a movie and see what it brings to the table, and some of the elements that may snuck past us. For example, the fact that Will Smith is the main character in this film didn’t strike me as weird until after I read the essay. After reading the essay I started to remember the film a little better and just know realized that this is an entirely knew role for Smith, considering the fact that he is most famous for his comical role in the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, it was really different to see him take on such a serious role. Before I read this essay I wasn’t aware of the book I, Robot by Isaac Asimov and after reading this essay I found it interesting that this move was loosely based on a book. I say loosely because I’m almost positive that they didn’t stick to the entire storyline of the book. Still the fact that this book was written before major computers and now it is being used in a Hollywood movie is cool. Besides that the author of the essay did a good job on helping you analyze the elements of the movie such as the graphics. Most of the movie was computer animated but I really didn’t pay too much attention to that, I guess it goes to show you that if you really look into a move and try to analyze it you will see some things that you wouldn’t catch by just watching it.

Essay # 2

Today I turned in my second essay for my English class; it was called Comedy Equals Reality. I this essay I wrote an argumentative essay stating that comedy television is reality based because of the issues that they tackle in their shows. By comedy shows addressing these issues it makes the show more appealing to the viewers because they can relate to the characters because they themselves have been in that same situation. Anyways I feel that this essay went much smoother than the first. I don’t know why maybe it was because I had to knock off the dust or what, but I definitely feel much better about this one. It hasn’t been a very long time since I wrote an essay but I guess I just had to really get into the topic and into the writing mood. Besides that I never really wrote anything on television before it was always about the literature in out textbooks. Personally, that stuff never interested me, so now when I got a chance to write and essay about television I became interested in the subject and was able to just flow when I wrote my essay. Even when I went to write the rough draft for peer conferences I ended up writing two and a half pages unintentionally, not to say that I didn’t want to write I lot. I mean the way it came out I expected to sit there and stare at a blank page for a long time trying to figure out what I wanted to write about, but I didn’t it just completely flowed. So I feel pretty good about this essay so I will see how good I did after spring break.

Cheaters

In yesterday’s episode of The Simpsons, Homer and Bart learned a very valuable lesson in life; they learned that cheating doesn’t get you too far. In the episode Homer is driving and a huge fish lands on the hood of his car and messes it up bad. So he took the car to the body shop to get an estimate, the guy takes a look at the car and then the fish and says “yup it’s foreign, it’s gonna cost ya” so now Homer needs a lot of money to fix his car, so he decides to cheat people out of their money. So Homer then teams up with Bart to get the money to fix the car. In this episode they execute many schemes but my favorite is when Bart is looking for his lost dog, Dr. Hibbert asks him what the dog looked Bart replies by saying the dog was brown with a white spot shaped like a heart on it and it was wearing a red collar with bells on it. After Bart’s description Dr. Hibbert sees a newly caught shark being weighed with the red collar on it’s teeth. Feeling bad for the Bart he said that he would buy him a new dog so luckily Homer was walking by with a dog that looked exactly like he described earlier so Dr. Hibbert bought it. Now after a few schemes they got enough money and fixed the car, but decided to keeping cheating people for their money because it’s easy. Well it turns out that Grandpa used to be a big cheater so they use his help to try and pull off the biggest scheme of them all, to scam money from the old folk’s home. They pretend Grandpa won ten thousand dollars, so because of the shock he dies. So they tell the rest of the people that if they give him money he will be able to cash the large check and let them split the check. Well some was pretending to be and old person but really was a cop and arrested Homer and Bart. When they arrive to the police station he tells them that he will let them turn themselves in, in order to receive a lighter punishment. So Homer tells Wiggum that he wants to scare Bart straight so they go inside the cell. Once the cop sees that there in jail he steals their car, it turns out he wasn’t a cop he was trying to cheat people the same way they were. In the end the guy didn’t really steal their car Marge used him to teach them a lesson, so they would stop. So it goes to show you that cheating really doesn’t get you anyway, you may be ahead at first but not for too long your luck will catch up with you.

Family Values

In yesterday’s episode of the Simpsons, the whole family attended a renaissance festival. Well during the festival Lisa is chasing an animal from the petting zoo in the forest and finds a tent with a fortune teller inside. So Lisa decides to gets her fortune told, in the future she finds her true love and is going to get married. Lisa’s new fiancé is English and is trying to be nice to her family mainly Homer and Bart because of their stupidity. People say that you get wiser as you get older, but this is definitely not true in Homer’s case. He decides to make Lisa’s new fiancé feel at home by driving on the opposite side of the road. So now let’s skip to the wedding day, Homer wanted Lisa’s future husband to wear these pig cufflinks but he didn’t want to so Lisa went to go talk to him. Well he says that their just a joke he didn’t think that he actually had to wear them but since Lisa insisted he did. After he put them he made a comment saying that after the wedding we can go to England and never see her family again. Lisa couldn’t believe that he actually said that so the wedding was off because she said that can’t be with someone who can’t respect her family. Now you wouldn’t expect things like this from the Simpsons but in most of the episodes they have a good moral and instill family values, in this case it is to stick with your family even thought they might not be perfect, and sometimes aggravate you.

Mellow Out

In the reading assignment for Monday’s class we were supposed to read an essay about the queer in Seinfeld. Now let me start off by saying that I like watching Seinfeld because it is very funny, well in this essay the author shows how they have a few episodes about queers. These episodes try to show Jerry and George gay, now in the show they do this in a comical way not meant to hurt any body, but some people take it offensive. While reading the essay I began to remember watching these episodes on television and thought nothing wrong of it, I just simply saw it as another episode of Seinfeld. Well other people may have not and were offended by it, well I fell that many times people go looking for ways to say they were offended or discriminated against when they should just mellow out and realize it’s all in good fun. For example in the essay the author talks about when Jerry, George, and Kramer are in the locker room after some sort of activity (sports) and how Jerry saw his baseball idol. Well Jerry approaches his idol and tells him that he is a big fan, well it turns out that his idol is a big fan of Jerry’s comedy, so they hit it off. Later in the show they show Jerry talking to Elaine about how his idol wasn’t returning any of his calls and how men always do that sort of thing, wait a very long time to call you back. Well this scene makes it seem like Jerry and his idol have a relationship, but all they want is to be good friends. I guess what I’m trying to say is that in television nobody is safe and somebody will always be made fun of, so just take it and try not to dig so deep into it to intentionally find something that offends you.