World War Z

   The story that has stuck out my mind is for sure the "Vostok Station: Antarctica" story.  This man, "Breck" Scott, is purely evil.  He used the scare of "African rabies" to make money and make himself rich.  He told everyone that Phalanx, a vaccine, would help prevent them from getting this "African rabies."  He said, "Fear sells," and that this was his mantra.  He thought it was funny that he was made a millionaire off of a fake vaccine and that he conned the American people.  This is the first time we see a truly evil person in the book.
    My group's story is the "Troy, Montana, USA."  Mary Jo Miller is the town's mayor, and they have built all these walls and "protective" structures around their houses and town to keep the zombies out.  The zombies have no problems getting through all these security features, and her husband manages to kill one zombie, while she rips another's head off to save her daughter.  The story ends, leaving it unclear if the husband shot himself because he might have been infected by the zombie attack or what happened to him.  He is not mentioned the second time Mary Jo Miller and Troy, Montana is mentioned.  In the second section, Mary Jo Miller takes the blame for allowing the zombie attack to spread so far to her people and says that all people in power should take the blame.  I thought this was interesting.  Not many politicians take the blame for anything anymore...they just point fingers.

World War Z

   I like science fiction, but I have to admit I am not a big fan of zombies. I do not know why; they just have never really interested me or freaked me out much.  I do like this book though; for some reason, it does not seem lame to me like most zombie things do.  Brooks did a good job making the stories seem realistic.  I also really like the way he presented the stories.  I think the composition of many different interviews on the same topic but from different places and different people all over the world helps make the whole zombie topic more believable.
   The story that sticks out to me the most is the one from The Amazon Rain Forest, Brazil.  This is a wild account where the man comes back to life as a zombie on the operation table and kills and starts to eat the doctor, Doctor Silva.  The narrator was involved in the black market organ donors.  He assisted Doctor Silva in a heart transplant, and he felt like something was off and not right.  But Silva insisted everything was fine and encouraged the narrator to leave.  The narrator left, and Silva could not have been more sorry.  The narrator returned after a shaken up nurse called him and blew the zombie's head off with his gun.  To make the situation even more sketch, all of the staff lied to the police with the cover story "that a homicidal maniac had broken into the clinic and killed both Herr Muller (the zombie) and Doctor Silva."  This was on page 25.  Then the said that "Silva was a victim of a probable 'car jacking'" to further cover up the whole mess.

Database Assignmet Continued

 I forgot to mention what database I am going to use for this upcoming paper. I am very familiar with Lexus Nexus. It has been very useful in the past and is very easy to use, so I will probably use that and the Academic Search Premier too. But my favorite is definitely Lexus Nexus.

Database Assignment

I am undecided with my major but am considering a major in Child and Family Studies, so I decided to see if I could find much within that field in the UT databases. I looked under the Psychology databases because I thought those would probably be the closest I would get to the field of Child and Family Studies. In Child and Family Studies, there is a major debate on whether the institution of the family is declining over time or if it is just simply changing with the culture and is resilient and will continue to be in all cultures.  So, I looked through the Psychology databases searching with "family decline" and "family resilience" as search terms.  I did not find any relevant articles in any of the five databases I searched.  However, there were many helpful Psychology databases if I was looking for something solely in that field.  There were some with clinical studies, scholarly articles, scholarly journals, dissertations, therapy and counseling tools, and an entire database that has many videos of therapy tools.  So, I guess I do not have a favorite database, since I was not able to find what I was looking for, but depending on what I was looking for in the Psychology database, I would have been able to pick a favorite database in the Psychology databases.

Dr. Strange Love

   Dr. Strange Love is addressing the American people's fear of nuclear war at that period of time.  The people were very scared of what a nuclear war would do, and it was around the time when people felt that the Russians could not be trusted.  The movie certainly portrays the people's thoughts and fears with a twist of humor that tries to lighten the bleak topic.  I feel like the movie almost backs up the belief that nuclear war is possible but is not as probable as everyone thought.  In the end, the movie strengthened the belief that the Russians could not be trusted and that the Americans should keep an eye on them.  The Soviet Ambassador had a hidden camera in his pocket watch and was taking pictures of all the war boards in the war room while General Turgidson continued to argue with President Muffley.  The movie also consolidated the belief that nuclear war was possible because it ended with the United States Air Force overcoming all the technological difficulties and dropping the bomb in Russia, although it was not their original target.  I think the movie conveys it's point very well.  The humor does not prevent the message from clearly being sent to the audience.  
   This movie is way more lighthearted than the Road.  It has a happier tone even though we are actually seeing the bomb being dropped, where the Road just shows the after effects, without much back story at all on what happened to cause that post apocalyptic world.  We see the cause but do not see the effect of this bomb being dropped in the movie.  But, in both places, it gives some information for everyone to form their own opinion about what caused the apocalypse in the Road and what will happen next in Dr. Strange Love. 

The Uglies Continued

   Tally is on her way to the Smoke to find Shay, and be a spy for Special Circumstances.  She is picked up in the helicopter, and the Rangers are explaining why they are setting the ground on fire to choke out some of those flowers.  One of the Rangers, Tonk, is talking to Tally about taking her to the Smoke.  I think it is really ironic that on page 183, the Ranger says, "Don't you know?  The location's a big secret.  Smokies don't trust pretties.  Not even us rangers."  The Smokies do not trust the pretties, but they do trust uglies.  They trust Tally, but she is the spy, not the pretties.  The pretties are not trying to give them up, Tally is, so that she can have the surgery and become a pretty.
   Now to the end.  I am not totally surprised about the brainwashing the pretties during the surgery, but for some reason the Pretty Shay still really disappointed me.  She was a much better friend when she was an ugly that could think for herself.  She was not like an ordinary ugly during the surgery since she fought it, "kicking and biting," but she was an ordinary pretty after the surgery.  For example, the first time that Tally had seen Shay since Shay had been turned pretty, Tally realized she was drunk.\
   I really liked this book, but I was a little disappointed by the ending. 

The Uglies Part 2

So, for the first part of the book, all we see are the Pretties and Uglies.  Then, on the day of Tally's surgery, she was told there was a problem and she was introduced to the Specials.  They are pretty but kind of pretty in a scary way.  On page 104, Tally is talking about the Specials and her encounter with Dr. Cable from Special Circumstances.  "The woman was a cruel pretty.  Her nose was aquiline, her teeth sharp, her eyes a nonreflective gray.  Her voice had the same slow, neutral cadence as a bedtime book.  But it hardly made Tally sleepy.  An edge was hidden in the voice, like a piece of metal slowly marking glass."  The Specials are people that rarely ever interact with the Pretties or Uglies.  They are the people that are just talked about, and a lot of people consider them more of a myth.  They are blamed when things out of the ordinary happen.  Peris comes to visit Tally after everyone finds out about her little visit with the Specials.  He says, "Specials are like gremlins; you blame them when anything weird happens.  Some people think they're totally bogus, and no one I know has actually seen a Special."
I am trying to figure out what group of people the Specials represent in our culture.  The Pretties represent the people obsessed with beauty and perfection and will sacrifice anything to be considered pretty by everyone, where the Uglies represent the people who do not care what others believe and are willing to stand up for themselves and things that truly matter.  The Uglies are the outsiders, the plain ole normal people that are not considered special to many people but value the beauty on in the inside per say.  So are the specials people that care about their appearance but also prioritize their lives and are not obsessed with perfection and beauty?

The Uglies Part 1

So far I really do like this book.  I think it is really interesting that our society is classified as the "Rusties."  I thought it might be possible to connect this with the effects of technology on society.  Basically, I think the book is implying that if societies do not continue to improve and develop and better with technology, so the Rusties did not improve and develop with technology, which is why the Shay and Tally visit the ruins of the Rusties.  There may also be a connection between technology and freedom of expression and obsession with appearances.  The increase in technology capabilities, such as plastic surgery, lead to the obsession of appearances and basically this world and separation of the Uglies and Pretties.  This obsession has lead to the decrease in freedom of expression.  All the Pretties look very similar, and the teens have no say in what they look like.  Tally reveals all this when she is trying to convince Shay to make what she could possibly look like after the surgery when all Shay wants to do is go hoverboarding.  The doctors that perform the surgery decide what look each teen gets.  The authorities, whoever they are, do their best to keep these two worlds separate.  The Pretties are not supposed to interact with the Uglies, especially not in person.  The Uglies are punished if they are found in the Pretties Town.  The decline of freedom of expression leads to the decline of personal rights.  The Pretties basically live the care-free, no responsibilities, party life, while the Uglies have more strict schedules and live in a much more dull world.  The Uglies actually have responsibilities and work that they have to do.  They are punished and discriminated against for not being pretty, even though they cannot be pretty until a certain age.

The Uglies

I have decided to still stick with the Uglies to read. For some reason, it just appeals to me more than the other books, even though I am sure that all of them are great books.  I think that the fact that I have heard so many good comments about it from people who read it for fun has probably influenced my choice. No matter the reason, I am reading the Uglies!

"Abstracts"

I guess we could apply this section on abstracts, from the Rhetoric of Inquiry, to our conclusions for this iSearch paper.  I have a hard time visualizing or planning out my conclusion before I write it, but I guess we could either write a conclusion based off of the problem that we researched, our research findings, what we conclude from our research, and how the topic is applicable or how it effects our world and everyone in it.  Or, we could write a conclusion based on the central argument, then the main supporting arguments without reporting the specific data, and end with how the topic is applicable or how it effects our world.  We would also add in if there needs to be more research done on this topic at the end and include the main sources that we used in the paper.
I am not so sure how this is helpful to us right now.  I would understand more if we were publishing this paper, but I do not have any intentions of doing any such thing, so I am not quite sure I see the point.  I am guessing it is good practice for maybe something else we will be doing in the future...I am sure Mr. Bevill will answer all of my questions in class on Friday.

More of The Road

On page 131, it caught my attention that the boy mentioned the little boy that he saw/ thought he saw a while ago in the book.  Do you think that the boy actually saw a little boy, or do you think that the little boy was delirious and imagined seeing a little boy?  What do you think that this little boy represented?  In my opinion, the little boy represented the old world, before the apocalyptic event, but the little boy disappeared.  I am curious if that means that there is no chance that the world will return to order and be anything like the world before the apocalypse. 
On that same page, the father flashes back to remembering the mother, and then thinks "each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins...so be sparing.  What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not."  At the beginning of the paragraph he says, "Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from.  Things no longer known in the world."  I cannot help but think that he had dreamt of the mother, and hates dreams like those because maybe he is afraid of romanticizing their relationship in his head, which might catch him off guard.  Catching him off guard will not allow him to be as aware as he needs to be in order to continue protecting himself and the boy and to keep them both alive until they finish their journey to the South.  These  memories or dreams make him very jumpy, so jumpy that on the next page, "he almost raised his pistol" at the reflection of themselves in a mirror.  It has obviously been a very long time since they have looked at themselves, so long that he probably had forgotten what they looked like.  This world has definitely taken its toll on the father, but amazingly not so much on the son just yet.

My definition of "apcalypse"

I have been thinking about what Mr. Bevill said this morning in class about defining apocalypse.  The first definition of "apocalypse" from Merriam-Webster is "one of the Jewish and Christian writings of 200 b.c. to a.d. 150 marked by pseudonymity, symbolic imagery, and the expectation of an imminent cosmic cataclysm in which God destroys the ruling powers of evil and raises the righteous to life in a messianic kingdom."  I do not think this definition is fitting for this class or assignment, so I am going to mix this with the more common meaning that almost everyone mentioned in their presentations- "the end of this world."  My basic definition of the "apocalypse" for this assignment and class is "the events that bring about the end of this world as we know it that God uses to destroy the evil authorities and take His children to His kingdom that He has prepared" (Erika Blalock and the Merriam-Webster dictionary).  This definition will shape my paper and affect how I look at the War between the Arab countries and Israel.  Did anyone else mix and match definitions to create their own?
So, I am really wrestling with this concept of defining my argument now. I do not really understand what I am supposed to do about that in this stage of research. Does anyone know exactly what to do and how to do it? Is our thesis just supposed to be if we think that our topic could be apocalyptic and how our event would affect the world?

The Apocalypse

   I was interested in these 5 topics from the Slate magazine:
       1. Diet (more people become obese and contract heart disease and die)       
       2. Rapture
       3. Big Brother (a supercomputer that takes over the government)
       4. Wealth gap (a gap grows between the wealthy and poor, so the desperate poor attacks the wealthy)
       5. Israel and Arab War
I was able to throw out the first one because I did not think it was very likely that heart disease would be the end of the world. I do not know anyone that believes that this would cause an apocalyptic event. Now to the Rapture. I had planned on making this my topic, but then I could not think of much research that I could do other than the Bible. I also did not want to bias my paper due to my strong religious beliefs. So, I decided to do something that I did not have any strong notions about. On to Big Brother, this was my number two choice, but I threw it out because I thought it would be very difficult to find many hard facts for this topic. The wealth gap also seemed a little out there and very unlikely, so I threw it out. That leaves the Israel and Arab War.

   The war between Israel and the Arab countries have been going on for many years. I know that they have been fighting over the land that they both claim is theirs. I read a book in high school about it, and the book really peaked my interest over this matter. It is important because what happens in one part of the world affects all parts of the globe, especially when nuclear weapons enters the picture. Also, our country has been an ally of Israel for a long time, but I know that President Obama has taken a different stand and declared our country otherwise. So this is a current problem that now directly affects our country because of President Obama's speech on that war.
   My research plan is to:
     1.  Research the background of this War
     2.  Research what our country's position in the war was up until Obama
     3.  Research what exactly Obama changed our position to now
     4.  Research how this war threatens the whole world, via nuclear weapons
     5.  Either interviewing a history or political science professor or surveying students to see what they think about this war and if it could possibly become an apocalyptic event.

The Road

While I was reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy, I really noticed how the format of the book has really affected my reading. At times it makes it more difficult to read and understand, but after reading the passage a couple more times, it becomes clear. McCarthy's abandonment of quotations and sometimes grammar coupled with his imagery compliments the book. It puts this apocalyptic society in order, that grammar is not what is important in this world or time anymore, that rules (grammar and society's laws) are no longer functioning or vital. The father and son are fighting for their lives in almost every way possible. They are on the road to the south to where they might have a chance of survival, if they can survive their trip there. One scene's imagery really burned itself into my mind. It demonstrates the effectiveness of McCarthy's imagery. The father and son had just slept in an abandoned truck and now are continuing on their journey to the south (46). They come upon a trailer in page 47, and the father decides to go in and see if he can find anything useful inside the trailer for them. He finds a skylight on the roof and climbs in. What he finds is horrifying- dead bodies "sprawled in every attitude." He describes the bodies as "dried and shrunken in their rotted clothes." The book up until this point has always been direct to the point of harshness in describing the conditions of the world, but this scene really puts it into context. It is a scene that is extremely hard to ignore and makes it almost impossible to continue seeing glimmers of hope that the boy and his father have a chance to survive. When the father entered the trailer, he lit some magazine papers on fire so he could see around him. When the flames start to die out, they are described as "leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose." A rose was a symbol of hope and romanticism and love, but these papers took the shape of a "molten rose", signifying that hope, romanticism, and love have no place in this world anymore. The last sentence of the passage seals the feeling of impending doom with simply stating, "Then all was dark again." This statement is straight to the point, leaving no room for doubt. McCarthy utilizes imagery to instill the conditions of the world in the reader's mind and plays with the idea if the father and son actually have a chance for survival by inserting little glimmers of hope and then diminshing that hope by accenting a mostly desperate world all throughout the book.

The Uglies

I was looking at the optional books while I was in the book store buying my text books.  I chose The Uglies by Scott Westerfield because I have heard really good things about it last semester in my English 101 class.  The summary of the book from what I read online and on the back of the book really caught my eye and made me actually want to read it; not many books can catch my eye and actually make me want to read them.  Every website that I looked at to research the book pretty much gave the same summary and showed the series' popularity.   
All of the optional reading books for this class seemed interesting, but this book seemed more girly to me.  The underlying concept of teen's underlying desire for beauty is something that is not farfetched.  It is something that will be able to relate to more easily because of how driven our culture is to be the most beautiful girl or most attractive guy in town.