William Turner's Weblog

Assignment was to participate in a forum discussion. I chose a Rays fan board.

gorays: The Yankees lose 7-5, still tied for 1st in Grapefruit League play
dan: And this falls under the most useless information category
michray:
Agreed Wins and losses in Spring Training are just about the most meaningless things on earth

raysgows: Yup, right up there with whomever is elected president.

(me): I see us winning in spring training as a great deal. It is good for the team itself and the owners of the team. A lot of fans often judge how well a team is going to be depending on how they do in spring training. If we win the majority of our games I think it will help attendance greatly. Also winning gives the team ‘swagger’. Last year when we lost all those games I think we lost a bit of our competitive nature a little. CC running into the catcher today was a great example, we are not playing like it is spring(besides for all the subs) the guys want to win now.

bill: I agree, winning in ST is great momentum to carry into the regular season.

rays31: I think winning is more important after the day off in the middle of the month than it is now.

We have been watching the movie Shattered Glass, a film about Steven Glass (Hayden Christenson) who lied about all of his news articles, in class this last week and I have to say after seeing Star Wars Episode Three; I cannot watch Hayden Christenson being another actor the same. That aside the movie has not been too bad so far and Steven Glass is finding himself in a problem. I liked the way Steven and the rest of his co-workers got along and were willing to help each other all the time. They had a solid group and everyone seemed to be having a great time actually having a job. Steven went as far as to not even calling it work. As far as him making up stories as long as it wasn’t too absurd I don’t see any problem with it so much in the movie itself. The story Hack Heaven did not hurt anyone’s business or was it so absurd it needed to be all true. He wrote for people to be entertained and that is exactly what he was doing. Stephen is doing a pretty nice job being able to cover himself up for the first half of the movie until he gets the new editor that won’t even try to stand up for him like the old one. I do give the editor credit for having to fire him for what he did after he was busted for it because nobody would of taken his writing seriously anymore after that.

We’ve all seen that picture on the internet of the alligator verse python battle. If you haven’t you fail on the internet and I went as far as digging up the picture to show you. http://msnbcmedia1.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Video/051006/n_scarborough_python_051006.300w.jpg Well the internet now predicts that they will invade the USA because of global warming. I am not going to point the finger because I for one believe global warming is happening (but what is causing it and or attributing is up for grab) but why do we have to blame global warming for everything. Sure the pythons can find the warmer weather more suited for them to live in but the real problem here is letting people have them for pets. Pythons happen to grow up to and sometimes over twenty feet and are a couple hundred pounds. Why do you need a potentially twenty foot snake as a pet, I have no idea. But once they get too big or the owner is tired of caring for it they tend to just release it. Florida has snakes, no problem right? Wrong. Sure these overgrown snakes are no anaconda but they still have plenty of reasons to be a threat. Besides eating native animals and scaring the also indigenous old ladies of Florida to death the snakes are not poisonous and won’t probably eat you alive. Link to the article in case you want to read it. http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/pythons-47022101

One of our assigned blogs for this weekend was to talk about the upcoming project. I am looking forward to project two a lot more than I was for project one. Project two has a wide range of topics. The one I decided to choose was the researching ethical dilemmas in films topic. I am still not sure what film I am going to pick. The list has some great movies on it but writing one-thousand words would be tough for just one movie. The movies I like are normally comedy movies but you can’t take a comedy movies’ dilemma seriously most of the time. The movie that I am probably going to go with is V for Vendetta. I have the movie so it would be the easiest one to write about. There are plenty of ethical dilemmas in the movie from both the citizens and the government. It would not be hard to prove my reasons for ethical dilemmas in the movie as they are stated throughout the movie itself. There are also some really good quotes in the movie that will help me write my paper. The major dilemma I am thinking about focusing on is whether to stand up and fight for what you believe in. In the movie the character V rallies the English people to fight back against the government that is making them all unhappy and is ruining the lives of most of them. I don’t think this upcoming assignment will be too tough and seems like a good project overall.

All throughout the past week or so there has been this thing up on the internet of a cheeseburger in a can. You buy the cheeseburger already assembled in the can. It is some kind of crazy European food idea and it looks absolutely disgusting. In order to cook it you boil the can in water and it heats up the cheeseburger in side of the can. Now the concept of cheeseburger in a can is pretty disgusting to me but I suppose it is not any different than other meals in a can. Just the fact that it had bread in it was nasty to me. But if Jimmy Dean and White Castle have been doing good with making frozen burgers even with buns who knows if the can market will take off as well. The pictures on the internet of people trying it were pretty funny. If you want to see them just Google “cheeseburger in a can” and there will be endless stuff on it. The company that sells the cheeseburger in a can is a German camping/hiking company so I guess it is more designed for food for while you are outside of the house. In that view that it is for camping I suppose it is no worse than the dehydrated and powdered meals you just add water to. I have not ate those before but I’m sure they are just as bad as a cheeseburger in a can.

In class on Tuesday we talked about whether or not you would give a homeless person a dollar. I normally don’t give them money but being in the group where you had to find exceptions to giving them a dollar kind of opened the thinking on it up for me. Part of me feels bad that they are homeless but you never know what they did to become homeless. With the amount of homeless people who are drugged out and alcoholics it is hard to tell who you can actually think deserves money among them. If someone has a drug and alcohol addiction and has not made the best decisions in life I still feel bad but it is not my fault that they made poor decisions. As far as which kind of homeless people, no I’m not categorizing the homeless; it would have to be one who I believe is a veteran or has children. I have given homeless people who have had their kids with them money before because I feel bad for the kids. If the parent is out there with their kids you know they are most likely and hopefully going to go help the kids with the money you give them. Another reason if I would give a homeless person a dollar or not is whether they look like a once wounded veteran. I feel bad for them if they have one leg or a stub for an arm for something they had no control over and that is why they ended up homeless. A lot of veterans are homeless and that is just plain wrong.

While looking around on the internet the last week or so I found this game where you have to try to guess where the country, cities, famous places, and some other known places on a map. The website is a flash game and can be found at http://minijuegos.com/juegos/html/index.php?id=5974 there are some pop-ups so if you don’t have a pop-up blocker you might want to watch out. The site link is also in Spanish but don’t worry because the game itself is in English so you should be able to play fine. It is a challenging game if you don’t know geography too well. I found the game very interesting and was playing with it for a while and when I was playing with it and one of my roommates went to try and couldn’t even get past the second round. I decided to blog about it because it is bad that some people can’t point out all fifty states on a map or even some other countries. On world news you always see how other countries try showing up the United States education system with geography. If they could implement this style game into school at an early age I think it would help them remember where some things are in the world. If you have read this without clicking the link it is worth a click because you wasted your time reading this the whole time.

This week’s assigned blog topic was to find a news article and write about it. I wrote about an article (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080207135801.htm) about fossils of a horseshoe crab. I chose this because they are interesting as I used to see them on a daily basis living near the water in Palm Harbor. In the article they show how the horseshoe crabs can be dated back to around a half million years ago. A team of Canadian scientists found the fossil during looking at a site where an old tropical sea used to be. In the picture of the fossil at the link it is remarkable how much the old fossil looks like the horseshoe crab of today. The article also talks about how the horseshoe crabs are losing their grounds due to development. Another serious thing dealing with horseshoe crabs that they forgot was gigging. People on boats use poles to stab them and then sell them for bait for nautiluses and other sea creatures. Another thing that harms horseshoe crabs is when they mate on the beach and kids flip them over. Anyways back to the article, the article talks about how horseshoe crabs surviving this long. It is amazing they have survived this long with the simple design that they have. It also tells that living horseshoe crabs are studied for medical research. If people want a reason to help keep these guys around that is a pretty good one.

The presidential ad I chose to analyze was from Barack Obama. In the ad it shows Barack Obama and some good things that he has been doing. It shows unity among Americans and pulling the country back together. The ad uses all three of the rhetorical appeals. The first one I am going to recognize is the pathos appeal. The presidential ad starts out with a very nice appeal to emotion, stating “what if” questions aimed toward the viewer. It starts out with statements dealing with America being together and not being divided with each other. This is an appeal to emotion because it addresses the emotions of people who think America is being divided in the present day. It goes to also talk about benefits for Americans that Obama supports; this is an appeal to pathos because it gives the viewers what they want done and what they want to hear. The ad also mentions how he was not for the war in Iraq even before it started, that is going to appeal to the people who are against the war in Iraq. Another appeal in this ad was the appeal to trust in authority, or just ethos for short. The ad mentions that he was a successful state legislator. It helps the viewer know that he had some kind of background in politics. The ad also appeals to logos, or the trust in logic. It not only tells you what the objectives are in the presidential ad, it also has the key phrases of what is being said typed on the bottom of the screen. In the text it has resources from where this information is from and emphasizes the numbers that they are trying to stretch. I picked this ad because I thought the ad was well rounded and was not too absurd such as some of the other ads out there for the candidates. Another thing I found interesting upon doing this assignment is that Microsoft Word did not recognize “Barack Obama” and tried to turn the “Obama” into “Osama”.

Well it is time for the first actual blog of the new semester. I thought about what to write and nothing really came so I decided I would write about the Rays. For those who don’t know me I am a Tampa Bay Rays fan. For those who don’t know who the Rays are well they are Tampa’s baseball team, and yes being a Rays fan has been tough over the years. Although most of us Rays fans preach “this will be the year we turn things around” every year, this year is going to be the year. Optimism, I know. But with the new ownership having the best offseason in Rays history in my memory this offseason I think the Rays are ready to turn the corner. Last year pitching was one of the Rays major problems. The Rays have had several moves to help that by bringing in Matt Garza and Troy Percival. They are still looking to require a lefty reliever as well. These moves alone will help us move over the .500 mark for next year. Another thing that will help pitching out this year is having Akinori Iwamura and Jason Bartlett in the middle of the infield. We had a lot of ground balls that should have been snagged last year that will be this upcoming year. On the corners it is looking like Carlos Pena and Evan Longoria. This hopefully will redefine “power corners” with both having the ability to hit homeruns. But the thing I want to work out the most for this year is Jonny Gomes. He has a valid chance to start in right field and win the job if he can start hitting again. I do not expect much from Rocco “my hamstrings are made of glass” Baldelli. It would be nice if he could play some backup first base if he can learn the position or maybe even DH if he can run.