Run Rabbit Run

Whenever I think of the movie "Just Add Water" my mind jumps to the image of the cover of the poster for the movie "Holes". Both movie are about the struggles in a place where the lack of water has taken over their towns. They were both once beautiful and prosperous places but as we have seen, when disaster strikes it leaves a mark on the town. The ending to these two movies are enarly exactly the same, the towns have not seen rain for god knows how long and once it begins to rain, everyones lives are changed for the better and the criminals are taken away in handcuffs.
Also, not a concrete object but one thing that I cannot help but thinking about is the song "Run Rabbit Run" by Eminem. The song just talks about how much his life sucks yet he must prevail over everything around him that is stopping him. Ray does just the same, he prevails over his terrible life and makes change for himself.

X-Men

This article for the most part was extremely boring and too drowned out with facts and names of genes for me to really enjoy it. I did however find it very interesting and the entire time I could not stop thinking about the movie "X-Men". I'm still not entirely sure what this article was trying to prove to us. For the most part of the article Phelan writes about how mutations in genetics are able to occur. The mutation that he describes is the lactose intolerant gene. This is what causes adults to not be able to drink milk. Today this gene is common among a good amount of the population yet has become less and less common throughout time. According to his article "How We Evolve" the gene appeared about 8,000 years ago but did not become common in the population until about 3,000 years ago.
As for our "self-inflicted extinction" it seems that he is referring to all of the natural disasters that he mentioned about 2 paragraphs before. The only way that we could "inflict" extinction on ourselves is through global warming and destroying our climate. It will ultimately lead to our extinction because if our climate continues to get worse than it already is then it will threaten our ways of life and ultimately our lives entirely. I think Phelan is correct in this thinking because if we cannot fix our climate problems now then soon it will be too late.

Lets connect.....

After watching the Hanes commercial and the clip from "Just Add Water", there are some similar pieces that we could connect to each other. In the Hanes commercial we witnessed the man in the mustard yellow shirt going on a down escalator and watching around him as all of the little kids gave him dirty looks. Showing that he i effecting their future by not being environmentally friendly. As for the clip from "Just Add Water" Danny Devito is one who is doing almost the same thing in that he is constantly looking around while talking to Ray, where he is going to get his morning coffee from. Not thinking about the future. However, I also feel that his character is of course one which over all looks to the future. He is bringing in a gas station and perhaps some thing to bolster the town into a place where there is little hope left. Is this a sign of change for Trona or just another failed business venture. The other friend in the Hanes commercial is one which is looking to the future, with his straight ahead gaze, not thinking about what is going on around him. This is kind of like Ray because he wants a future for Trona, that is why he picks up the trash on the side of the road everyday. He has his straight forward glance at Danny Devito throughout most of the conversation and stares at Devito before the conversation until Ray gets his attention. Ray is always looking to the future un everything that he does.
What I found to be dominant in the commercial at first was how Danny Devito was looking up in a gaze to his newly built station, almost in awe of it it all, directing the man with the crane as to where to place his crown jewel. Yet once we see the Chevron sign the arrows are pointing down, foreshadowing the terrible future which s about to pursue. Once he opens his gas station, Dirk and his boys ransack the place because they feel pressed upon. Dirk wants to make it known that this is his town and that he will not have anyone trying to change it. Kind of reminds me of the ending of Home Alone 3 when the song plays and goes "This is my town.....". I don't remember the rest of the lyrics but the kid defends his home just as Dirk is defending "his" town.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcUGR955n-E

Why is every article I read always about global warming.....

Shockingly the article by John Broome "The Ethics of Climate Change" is about global warming and climate change. What I did not expect to see in this article was the use of ethics to describe how to tackle this issue. The last thing I wanted to read about was utilitarianism again this semester. Anyway, this article uses the idea of how compensating someone for the terrible things that we are doing to the environment. I do not see how this is even a logical thought, are we supposed to send checks or trees to people in the future. This is our problem right now and is up to us to handle it. I think John Broome would be better off writing about ays to fix the environment instead of using ethics to think up creative ways. This article in my opinion is terrible. It is a waste of time and paper (resources). The article does not tell us anything but philosophical nonsense. The real way to fix this problem is the environmentalist way. STOP BURNING FOSSIL FUELS. Right before I read this article I read one fo rmy economics class about how to reduce the ppm number of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. That article had positive and realistic ideas as to fix this problem.
One other thing which I found to be interesting in here is that the idea of fixing society's well being through production. THat is the problem with our society today, we need to stop producing as much waste and start producing more environmentally efficient means of production. Things that in the long run will help us. Fixing our infrastructure is one, not giving someone an extra bathroom as mentioned in the article. He needs to use examples that mean something and actually have to do with global warming.

"Just Add Water"

Recalls to our readings, from the movie "Just Add Water":
The idea of greed from our reading of "Faustian Economics" is one which may not seem to be the most obvious in this movie but certainly is. We see this through Dirk and how he basically runs the entire town. He makes people pay tolls just to get onto their own streets. This is the epitome of greed because Dirk only does this because he can; he has the power to do it in that town. Also, the fact that him and his friends rob the new Chevron station and delivery trucks just shows how greedy he is. The rest of the town is suffering and barely getting by while he has control over everything in Trona, California.
The idea of “Do we create what we observe through the act of our observations?” (230) from "The Reality Tests" is evident in this movie through everyone's actions. In a sense the general meaning of this quote is strongly conveyed to us. Through the lines when Danny Devito character asks Ray if he ever had any dreams and if he was ever going to follow them. Ray is able to begin to create some change in this town when he realizes exactly how bad things are getting. The last scene that we saw was when he was breaking into Dirk's house looking at the boxes that he had just received. Also, going in the opposite direction of this, the people in Trona create their own crappy world by not having any hope or even thinking about a better future. They merely sit by and allow Dirk to run the entire town. Dirk is able to see his "dreams" through this because he takes over a weak town and does whatever he wants there.
The idea of "an era of creative destruction” (292) is one from the article "Big Foot" yet this idea is also shown in the movie "Just Add Water". We see how dirk is taking over the town, however it is not through force or violence for the most part. He is doing all of this through business, most of it is illegitimate however. Ray tells Danny Devito's character that Dirk bought up everything in the town a while back when the government declared the place a toxic waste site and most people had moved out. That was a business venture for him. Now he has his own Meth Lab and has his friends keep as toll booth attendants in a way for whoever wants to get onto their streets. This is where the destructiveness of his creativity comes into play, yes he is creating new business ventures for himself in the town but he is also ruining the lives of almost everyone that lives in the town. Most of the adults are drunks or are on drugs. He is destroying the town for his own benefit and is doing it in a number of ways.

Where do I begin.....

Questions for "Just Add Water":

1. Why is it that everyone in the town is so disconnected from reality and family ties?

2. Is it normal in that town for a father to get his son a prostitute?

3. Why is Charlene afraid to go outside of the house?

4. Why in the world would Danny Devito open up a gas station in that town of all places? He doesnt seem like he needs the money.

5. Is it because Dent is just so burnt out from his high school years that he cannot move on and that is why he holds the football and and tries to reminisce with Ray every now and then?

6. How is Dirk able to turn off everyone's electricity? Isn't he only like 15?

Who's a writer?

A writer is anyone that is able to physically write or type and convey their ideas to someone else using written language. I am a writer, everyone in this class is a writer. What have we been doing in this class for the entire semester? Writing. What else could that possibly make us? It doesn't matter why we write, what we write about or who we write for, the fact is that we are writing.