"Society's Need For A Queer Solution"

The second reading starts out with a person talking to there male friend who is nervous to tell the truth about his homosexuality. He gives them his journal which explains how though he is sexually attracted to males he is still just like everybody else so he became more understanding of his sexual prefrences. The authour expresses her total dumbfoundedness on the subject. She proceeds to say how before that point in her life she was continually praticipating in gay jokes, and generalizations. She asks the question why do we seperate gays from the society. The answer because they aren't part of the mainstream. The essay compares Ellen Degeneres and her coming out and how the show "Friends". Ellen lost alot of ratings after coming out compared to "Friends" because she advocated homosexuallity. "Friends" on the other hand made jokes of two women who were raising a child. Later they talk about Will & Grace and how different a homosexual acts compared to a heterosexual. For example Jack acts like the stereotypical homosexual male. Judith Lorber talks about gender and how it is assigned using genitalia. It differentiates masculine and feminine. The essay compares Will and Nathan one missing the world series the other trying on tight jeans. The essay compares how homosexuality is portrayed and how people tend to react to the way it is being portrayed. Personnally I thought the reading was intresting yet it's arguments weren't strong enough.

"Not that theres anything wrong with that"

The reading first begins about talking about the word queer, It's origins is from an AIDS activist group who began another group called Queer Nation. The word queer once a derogatory word for gays transformed into a term that was less derogatory and more of a name. When Seinfeld debuted in 1989 originally called The Seinfeld Chronicles it did rather poorly but in January of 1991 Seinfeld became widely popular. The reading begins talking about how the show was created and the actors mirror Seinfeld's real friends except in a more exxagerated way. The show targeted urbanity's and baby-boomers who looked forward to the new episode every Wednesday. As the reading describes the show seems to be generally heterosexually aimed. Seinfeld, Elaine, and sometimes George always had a new relationship with the opposite sex. Homosexuality has been illustrated in Seinfeld on three separate episodes they have homosexuality shown. Semiotics comes up in the essay referring to the pink triangle and the beginning of the episodes that were once used during the holocaust to mark the homosexuals for persecution. They describe how the name "Monk's" the restaurant they constantly go to is a brotherhood for men. Then the next few pages have dialect from some episodes about Seinfeld and his use of words or actions that make him very much masculine. Then the essay shows more dialect about how he has gay instances like when a baseball player separates himself from Jerry and Elaine mirrors it to her own personal relationships with men. The whole essay refers to how homosexuality comes up in the show and the different ways it comes up. The essay was pretty interesting by the ways it looks at how the show refers to homosexuality. Personally I don't understand how a person can look at every degree of a show to find homosexual tendencies in that specific show.

mythbusters

This week watching mythbusters, I watched them test disposable lighters, they tested several different myths about how they may explode. The first was in the dryer it didnt work the lighter didnt explode. Then they tried to put it in a hot car and the lighter did not ignite. They also try to ignite it using the sparks from a guy welding and that worked it ignited in a matter of seconds. The final and coolest myth they tested was they had the lighter ignited sitting on the floor and built a rig to hit the lighter with a golf club and upon impact all the gas was realead and a burst of flames ignited. I thought that was really sweet. The next myth they tested was about the old west and the guns they used. The first myth was can someone shoot off five bullets with a pistol before a silver dollar hit the ground and if you want an idea of how fast that was it was about .333 seconds which is ridicolously fast. Then they tried to put a whole through a solid dollar with a old west gun and were not successful. They did use a newer gone and it worked. Finally can someone being hung be set free by someone shooting the rope and cutting it. That actually was successful but it took 5 shots so it was more of plausible than confirmed. Before they left they put 500 disposable lighters in a car and but a heater in the car that heated the car up to 800 degrees. Finally they added an ignition source and the whole car was up in flames. This show is pretty sweet they prove whether a myth is true or not and sometimes its useful. Though this show has crazy explosions and ridicolous things happening i believe this show is very intellectual compared to reality TV a subject we spoke of all week. It uses science to dissprove everyday myths or some just outrageous myths. To some extent they even help clear falsely based fears that people may have because of myths.

reading

This week I read about reality TV and how it became popularized by shows like The Real World the reading was pretty intresting. While I was reading about Rosie I the author tends to speak about her as if she is an awesome person and is this open honest kind hearted lady, and also how she tends to steal the spotlight. I dislike Rosie alot one time I read in the paper about how some lady complaining about how she dictates the View, and a couple weeks ago i watched 10 minutes of it and that lady just takes over she has to be the loudest most talkative person out of the cast. Sex, drugs and cocoa puffs was a intresting read as well he makes the assumption that a majority of the time theres that odd couple that always argues. One being clean and neat, and the other a complete slob. Then ofcourse he sits down and watches the real world and how ridicolous that show was and kinda compares it to his own life making the show seem like it is reality based. However the show was different back then compared to now. Black bart was also a reading this week that i found kinda cool i never new of a Black Bart. And the way african americans take him and use him as an icon of the social ills going on was genuis. Overall I think this weeks readings were alot more intresting then the past.

Week 5

So I just finished the essay and it was kind of confusing. Describing what was going on in the advertisements was simple but after writing just the first advertisement about me it got a little redundant. The paper was just something that I wasn't interested in it was one of those essays a person feels like they were forced to write. I hope the next essay is a little bit more free to work with like of course i could choose the advertisements but it was a fixed idea, "How it reflects you". The rest of the class I feel is going great I began to speak up a little bit more than the first 2 weeks of class. I think that Ellen has done a good job with the new approach she took on getting us to separately disscuss the reading then talking about it as a whole class. Initially the class discussion wasn't much of a discussion at all. Reading through the syllabus I notice that there is no section for Music which i wish there was maybe teaching this class again Ellen can ad that as a key element of her teachings because music is something everyone listens to. Like I'm not the type to watch T.V. or movies or magazines. Music is more of my thing and I'd argue many students enjoy music rather than watch television and there is advertising in music ESPECIALLY RAP! so it will be a great addition to the class if Ellen decides to add it in her class.

Mythbusters 4

Today I watched Mythbusters again, this episode was very intresting. There were news reports about Jawbreakers exploding in young childrens mouths when they applied pressure on to the jaw breaker. A key part to this myth is that the kids would put the Jawbreaker in the microwave for a little while then bit them. So the mythbusters set up a rig to apply an equal force to what the average mouth could apply and tested this myth. They first heated the jawbreaker up then applied force equal to one bite of the average human. Results were clear that the jawbreaker exploded. The reasoning could of been many one was the mix of Vitamin C and the chemicals in the jaw breaker to cause this explosion after radiated heat was added into the mix. And the other was some colors of the jawbreaker heated faster than others so if the colors were in the middle of the jawbreaker it would cause it to expand and after pressure is applied it could cause an explosion. The color green was rapidly heated compared to other colors and it held that heat for quite some time. The other myth tested out was the myth about deadly playing cards. I've seen people throw cards into watermelons cut bananas cut a cigarette in half while in someones mouth. The question was can the card kill someone so they put it to the test and first threw it as fast as they could into a balistics gel that replicates human flesh and saw that it can't penetrate skin. They built a rig that made cards fly top speeds of 150 mph. and yet still couldnt penetrate skin any farther than .5 inch wen they tried it on a real person all it did was cause a few cuts. This was a really intresting episode they brought physics and chemistry into this episode knowing what I know now I wouldnt ever put a jawbreaker in the microwave. And I know a card has to little a mass to penetrate someones skin. Final thing I have to say is the guy I wanted to win Top Chef won and I'm happy about that.

Week3 reading

This week I read about cool hunters, and what there job consists of. I found that this job could cause a lot of controversy. It was surprising that companies would actually hire people to follow an everyday man or woman to see what they wear next so that the company can create a similar outfit with there logo on it and sell it. I thought asking an everyday person what they thought of a specific shoe as the woman did at the shoe store was a great idea however, I would of taken a larger sample of people to verify the chance of success for that particular item. The other reading about race in advertising was very interesting. During discussion I was surprised that the NAACP actually rallied to get the head scarf off of Aunt Jemima. Something in that particular reading we did not mention was how companies attack foreign companies because of the unfair trade agreements between the two countries. I found this very relevant to Detroit considering the Big 3 are losing a lot of money to their foreign rivals. Commercials for the automakers centralize around "Buy American" campaigns like the Chevy Silverado commercial with the song "This is our country" in the background. The final reading was all pictures and not much reading so I don’t have much to say about it besides that I thought some of the signs and pictures were really interesting and my partner and I have a lot to say about our picture so can’t wait till Monday to talk about our photographs.

Mythbusters3

Wednesday night a Mythbusters episode was shown that was different from the rest. This Mythbusters episode tried to disprove themselves, many fans write in saying that they may have made a mistake when testing a myth so the hosts go back to the drawing board to retest the myth. Adam and jamie tried to retest a myth about making a rocket fire with the rocket fuel being gun powder, bologna, and a special gas, when retesting the myth they found that they were actually wrong and the fans were correct. Bologna did not increase the force that the rocket fired and the reason it worked initially was because of the gas they used. Then next myth was explosive decompression the idea that if there is a whole the size of a bullet in an airplane the air would decompess the airplane and cause it to destroy. When retesting there results were conclusive and found that a bullet sized whole would not do the job but an airplane window would cause this to happen.