Big Loser

So a funny story quick. The other day I was riding my bike home from class and as I got to Regent street, I came across an elderly gentleman in a nice lookin' motorized wheelchair. He commented that he liked my bike, it was, "sharp". The he proceeded to tell me that his set of wheels was brand new too. I concurred, and we went into a short conversation. At the end of our little chat, the old man asked me where I was heading, and I told him that I lived on Vilas, so only about 4 blocks. Then he challenged me to a race from there to Vilas...mano y mano...his electric wheels against my "sharp" wheels. I accepted since I had nothing better to do with my time. Well we lined up at the intersection of Bowen Ct. and Orchard, and we took off on his count. I got out to an early lead, and then slowed myself down because I didn't want to be an ass and blow his wheel chair away by about 2 blocks. When I got back next to him, he got a grin on his face, grabbed his little shifter knob, and took off as if he had jets on the back. His little wheelchair was going about 35 down Orchard, and he never even stopped at the stop signs at Mound st....blew right threw there. Needless to say I lost a race to an 80 year old man in a wheel chair...he pulled a fast one on me, and I am a big loser. A quick sidenote, I am asking Santa for an electric wheelchair for Christmas this year.

Blog #5 How "cool" is this blog?

So I committed the ultimate rookie blogger mistake and didn’t write my blog for Monday on Word first and then paste it to the blog, and for some reason my blog did not publish so here I go again, writing it all over again, which sucks for two reasons. One, it is almost a week late, and two, I have to write the whole damn thing over again. So here it goes…

Last week in class we had the chance to go through Lexia to Perplexia, and I did not really understand it at all. I’m finding this is becoming a common theme for me. I probably didn’t understand the website much because I simply got caught up in the clicking and linking, and eventually I was only clicking to see what came up next instead of reading things. Eventually, I got the point where all I was doing was clicking to see how long this site would continue…it goes a while.

Anyway, now to some stuff that did make a little bit of sense to me. The whole idea of cool and what cool is exactly. In Jeff Rice’s book Writing About Cool, he tries to link things that we relate with cool such as hip-hop or Nike shoe commercials with cool in writing. The part I found most interesting was that Rice tries to explain to us that we need to “learn how cool has been transformed from a personality trait into an electronic writing strategy…” (pg.12). The area where this made the most sense to me was when he was explaining how websites have taken these ideas of what we find cool and using it to make money. Then he moved on to how this has changed cool from what was once viewed as somebody like James Dean who was rebellious teenager trying to go against the system, are now being used rhetorically against consumers. However, I would argue against him and say that James Dean’s appearance was used to sell the film industry, so Jeff Rice has to be careful with that subject.
Other than that, I think class really took off last week, and people are really starting to open up in class and share their thoughts. It isn’t always easy as some of us don’t really understand the readings until Scot explains what we were supposed to get out of it. I do have to say I definitely enjoy being in this section of English 201 rather than any other one though. I feel we are learning a lot of useful relevant information, not that we wouldn’t in another 201 section, but most of us have already learned how to write long papers, and not many of us have designed a webpage or been really involved with blogging. That’s all she wrote…

Exploration Time

Well, last night my roommates and I decided to go exploring through our house that we moved into this year. Our house is much bigger than our old place, and there is a lot of unused space. To give an example of the size, we have two living rooms, and seven couches between the two. There is also room for a dining room table in one living room. Anyway, even more exciting is the basement. It is like a maze down there. The first day we moved into our place, the fuse for the lights in the basement blew, and we haven’t been down there since. That was, until yesterday. We went down to check out this large maze, and stumbled across these large book shelves against a wall. My roommate and I moved the book shelves aside, and found a secret room. Pretty sweet, eh? Well, it gets better. We opened up the door, and it was loaded with old stuff. The sweetest part was all the old books. Boxes upon boxes of old books, which is pretty sweet because we’re making a library in one of the living rooms because there are some built in book shelves. When I was going through the books I came across some books that are relevant to this course. One book was a 1964 copy of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, which contains the two articles we read in class, and the other book is a 1966 copy of Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message. I thought that was pretty cool because whoever lived in our house during the 60’s had some reason to read those books. I am guessing whoever it was, was probably a really big nerd though. I’m going to end on that note. Later dudes!!!

A Little Rhetoric for the Soul

Thanks to James Herrick, this past week I have caught myself looking into so many different places of our lives and wondering if rhetoric was relevant in that situation. The biggest reason this came about is because Herrick raised the idea that rhetoric isn’t simply a speaking art form used in politics, but it is very pervasive in our own everyday social and private lives. He gives the example of rhetoric being used to pick up a date. According to Herrick, this would be rhetoric because somebody is trying to persuade another person that they are attractive, and the other person should go out with them. Now, I guess I can agree with that unless the person is like me, and isn’t so great in those kinds of situations, in which case, rhetoric and persuasion are out the window. Overall, I liked reading Herrick because he laid everything out very nicely as to how rhetoric actually works. I didn’t see this all right away, but after plenty of class discussion, it is starting to make sense.


This other guy, Marshall McLuhan on the other hand. I did not enjoy reading this at all. He tries to write about how “The Medium is the Message” (Pg. 23). Even after a lot of discussion this still did not really make much sense to me. The ideas are very abstract, and the way he writes about it doesn’t make it any easier. The only thing I really got out of what McLuhan was trying to say in this article was that when you look at medium vs. content in terms of a message, the medium is really what matters. For example, if you read a story in a book, and then watch the movie, the content of the two are pretty much the same, but they might seem very different because the media are different. This is the only way I can really see where the medium is the message. I apologize if this is not what he really meant, as I said before, this really did not make much sense to me. The second article we read by McLuhan got even better. In this article McLuhan started talking about hot vs. cold media. This article made me laugh. A hot medium is one that is low in participation (TV), and a cool medium is high in participation (telephone). However, he gave a lot of labels to arbitrary things, and this bothered me because in almost every case you could argue against the label he had designated. Then to top it off, instead of going into detail as to why he labeled the way he did, he decided to give all kinds of garbage like Shakespeare quotes. Not that Shakespeare is garbage, I love Shakespeare, but rather McLuhan’s use of Shakespeare and others is garbage.

useless info i guess

I would like to start off this blurb by making a correction in regards to my previous blog about rhetoric. I posted that blog before the class really discussed the readings. If you didn’t read the blog, I basically said that I felt rhetoric was very loosely defined, and that rhetoric is how we communicate. Well, that is sort of true, but not all the way. We use rhetoric very often in communication, but rhetoric is not simply communication. From what I have gathered in class and in readings, rhetoric is a very fine art form people use to persuade somebody else to see things a new way. There is much more to this, but I don’t feel like babbling on about class related topics this time.

The thing I most want to talk about, or complain about, is that Wednesday on my way to English class I was pulled over on my bike and given a citation. The citation was for riding my bike through a crosswalk. I don’t even think that is illegal, and if it is, I don’t believe it warrants the $135.60 fine that went along with it. The police officer informed me that I can attend a three hour bicycle safety course, and they will void out my ticket. Needless to say, I am not really looking forward to a course that I took when I was 5 years old and just got rid of training wheels. Well, I feel better now that I vented. I would just like to throw some advice out to any bike riders that may be reading this, and that is don’t perform the horrendous crime of riding your bike through crosswalks if there is a cop on the other side of the road waiting for you. Why didn’t anybody teach me that? If you need a small refresher, Wikipedia has some great bicycle safety tips for you hot rodders out there.

P.S. If any of you haven’t read The Onion yet, I recommend the clip on Bush’s “New Anti-Terrorism Strategy”. I found it to be hilarious. Alright then, adios!

Writing: Blog #1 (Rhetoric)

Rhetoric has been a word that I have heard many times over in my college career, but I never stopped to think about what it really meant. It is hard for me to define exactly how I would have described rhetoric since I didn't really understand what it was to begin with. However, I will try my best to get the idea across. When I heard the word rhetoric, I originally thought of fancy language used by ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, as well as old poetry and prose. Now that I have read part of Herrick's work on rhetoric, I have a completely new understanding of what rhetoric really is. From what I have gathered, rhetoric has a pretty loose definition, and is really more in the eye of the beholder. The main idea I got through the writing though was that rhetoric is basically the language or means we use to communicate with one another. Whether it be on the computer, an in person conversation, or a novel, all of these things are contained in the world of rhetoric. My original thoughts on rhetoric are not completely wrong, but I have found out that rhetoric is not a thing of the past, but very much still alive now.

so here's the deal

Well, this is officially the first blog I have ever hosted. I am a little excited about it since it is new to me. The main reason behind this blog is that I am currently enrolled in an English class where we are learning about Rhetorics of Network Culture, and this is one of the requirements for the course. Pretty crazy huh?! I think it is pretty sweet because I was under the assumption that this was going to be a lame class where we just wrote long papers all the time, but that's not the case at all. I feel that this blog is going to become another addiction along with my severe Facebook addiction, but at least this time I can blame it on the class. Well, that's all I have for now. adios