Friday or Saturday?

The song "Friday" by Jessica Black has, no doubt, become a very popular song within the last couple weeks. However, much of it's fame has come from the remixes making fun of Jessica Black's music video and vocals. In one such video called "Saturday" that is posted on youtube, they take the same tune of the song but change the words, which makes it very entertaining to it's audience. The video "Friday" is pretty lame and takes you through the daily life of a middle schooler talking about waiting for the bus stop and eating cereal. It uses a very comic approach that grabs the viewers attention when it says "even though I'm thirteen" and "in case you didn't know the days of the weekend". In the original Friday video they never put any influence on the age of the girl singing or her friends in the video but you can automatically assume that it is a young person's song by her video and what she sings about. In the remix called "Saturday" they really emphasize on how young these kids are in the video and the activities that are going on which makes it really funny. Also they made sure to use a girl with brown hair and have her do generally the same thing as in the originally video only slightly twisted enough for you to get that it was a remix from the "Friday" video. Also in the remix she is completely off key which is similar to Jessica Blacks version because she was off key as well. In the remix she also emphasizes on how many times she says fun, which is really funny. The significance of these parodies is to entertain a large audience. When stupid videos are made like this it is any easy way to grab a lot of attention and become famous really quick and this is an easy video to do this with.

Comparing and Contrasting problems in our everyday life.

Audrey : Over the summer I wrecked my car by smashing into another car in front of me after they had abruptly stopped. However while my car was totaled my main problem was the fact that my mother was on a trip in a state 5 hours away and my dad was working in a town an hour away. When the police arrived and asked me who I could contact for help I wasn't sure. So in reality I had two problems I had to solve what to do about my car and who to contact to give me a ride home. With my wreck being in town on main street and by living out in the country I realized this task would not be easy. Also I was standing on main street with my car smashed and it happened to be at seven in the morning after I just woke up and ran an errand. I decided I could either walk to the nearest restaurant until I could find a ride, I could get a ride with the tow truck guy or I could get a ride to the police station. I finally decided to just get a ride with the tow truck man being that he knew my family and seemed to be the friendliest. Then after I arrived at the tow truck company I had to decide what to do from there, If I should call a friend and get a ride, wait for my dad to get back and pick me up, or call my aunt and get a ride with her. Being that my friend was out of town and my aunt just had surgery I ended up waiting for my dad who was at that time on his way back and was only thirty minutes away. Those who heard my story were glad I was okay. My dad later told me that he was glad I got a ride to the tow truck company because they were really sweet about it. Even though I wrecked my car I was relieved that I had a place to go after my wreck and glad my dad came back to give me a ride home. Shawna: While I was in high school I didn't have a job, instead I would just babysit during the weeknights and weekends for family friends. There was one incident that I can remember when I was asked to babysit my 8 year old twins nieces and these girls were a handful. They both came home from school in a bad mood because they did not have a good day at school and would not mind me at all!!! I had asked them to put away their dishes after we got done eating and that is when the disasterous evening began. From that point on they decided to not listen to any directions that I gave them. They put sunscreen in my hair, they locked me out of the house, and they made me a raw egg sandwich. You can believe that I was beyond frustrated, so i began trying to think of ways to get the girls under control. Obviously time outs and yelling at them were not working so I knew I had to be a little bit more creative with my ideas. I began to make jokes with them and try to help make their day better since I knew their day at school wasn't the best. We went on a walk which somewhat calmed both of them down and when we got back to the house we colored in coloring books, wrote on the sidewalks with chalk, and I read to them. I basically just did most of the things that I liked doing when I was a little girl. This helped a tremendous amount in making them settle down so I just let the bad behaviour slip until their parents got home. Whenever my aunt and uncle came home I had sat them down and told them about my adventurous evening with the girls. We ended up thinking of things to do for the girls so that next time I babysat them things wouldn't get out of control. Needless to say the girls did get in big trouble for acting out and ended up having to write me a letter. This wasn't the easiest thing to do, but under the circumstances I think I used my creative thinking skills to the best of my ability. In both of our stories I think we both used our creative thinking skills well. Both of the adults that we usually turn too whenever we have problems were both out of town and we decided to take things into our own hands. For our age I think we handled both of these situations the best we could and things ended up turning out for the best.

Is the internet as reliable as we think?

Many people have a hard time deciding which website they can trust to be reliable when writing their paper. By using unreliable sources you could be incorporating and promoting false information in your paper. Reliable information can be found by using cites other than ".com". In most cases those who use .com in their papers have received false information and their paper therefore has false information included in it. Most young writers do not realize the risks involved in receiving information off of the internet to use for their papers and need to be aware of the falsity involved with some websites. To start by telling if an internet source is more reliable than another source you can start by looking at the domain type. For instance a website with the domain type ".com" is based on a commercial business, organization, or company(Evaluating Internet Sources). Whereas, a website with a domain type ".gov" or ".edu" would be based on a nonmilitary government entity and an educational institution (Evaluating Internet Sources). So clearly the sites with ".gov" or ".edu" would be reliable if the site is based on the government or education. Also sites including ".com" could come from anywhere and be written by anyone. Therefore we need to make absolute sure that we are not citing websites that a fourteen year old could have written. Most likely if the website was written by the government or college the information is going to be written by an older, more experienced, person who knows what they are talking about. These are just a few ways to be able to incorporate trustworthy information and be able to support our information with reliable adequate proof.

Here is a video explaining how to find reliable websites:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVIG-Nsxi_A


Work Cited
"Evaluating Internet Sources" Taft College Home Page. Wev. 23 Mar. 2011. <http://www.taftcollege.edu/newtc/academic/inco48/sec6-4.htm>

You think your job sucks?

If you think your job sucks, imagining working at the age of 10. Many people are not aware of this and would be very concerned to think that ten year old children are working in some countries. So the question lies, should we know where our clothes are made and by whom? When thinking about this topic we both decided that the most realistic answer to this question is simply no. We should not care where our clothes come from and who makes them we should just be happy that we have clothes and a wonderful country that supplies us with stable jobs. If we stop and focus on where our clothes come from and discover that very young children are making them for little money, most likely we will stop buying them and try to help these children by starting a boycott. However, what we don't realize is that we are actually hurting them by not purchasing the clothing. If these children can't make clothes they can't make money. If they can't make money then they can't buy food. When these children don't have food they can't survive. In our country we have it easy we are taken better care of than in several other countries. Therefore, it may be harder to understand why other countries make very young children work for long hours instead of sending them to school.
As customers, we should not be concerned about where are clothes are made and by whom for several reasons. Even though many of our clothes are made by young children who work in sweat shops, most people don't realize that the reason these kids are working is to help support their family. We also purchase these clothes to help keep them from starving. Yes, this may sound terrible to us because we are never around this in our country but the circumstances are completely different in other countries where the income is so low that if they don't work they will starve to death and lead a harsher life.

“Snowmageddon” and the removal of what it left behind

The snowmageddon did not only make an appearance in Oklahoma but it also visited the big city of Idianapolis, Indiana. Indianapolis spent nearly half it's yearly budget towards removing snow, 3.4 million to be exact, just in one week. More than an inch of ice and almost 4 inches of snow were left behind by the snowmageddon. Altogether the city spent $5.4 million on snow removal so far which is 75% of of the $7.3 million saved for this years snow removal, not counting the 19,000 hours spent by city workers eight days straight. When reading the newspaper article on this snowstorm one begins to feel overwhelmed and stressed. In fear that another snow storm might hit and there not being enough money to pay for it's removal. They use pathos in this article by using persuasive text and dramatic wording such as "fighting these winter storms" and "nearly". Indianapolis is showing great concern for the long working hours spent to make sure roads and highways are clear and how much money is needed to get the tools to use to be able to perform these tasks. Indianapolis is probably also worried about there being more snow storms throughout the months of February and March. This could mean completely running out of money to remove ice and snow off the roads to make them safer for people to drive on. This money problem would also effect being able to work long hours pulling people out of the snow who got stuck.

Learning to Read as a Child

Audrey:
I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I started reading. I remember my mom would always read to my sister and I when we were little. We would always check out books from our town library and beg her to read to us every chance we could. I actually learned how to read at an event called “Story Hour” at our public library. This organization taught me how to read at a very young age and by 2^nd grade I was already reading some-what thick books. Learning to read at such a young age has given me a huge imagination and the ability to understand a lot faster. As a child I loved to read. I read almost every day. Some of my favorite books as a child, that I can remember reading, included the wayside story books and Goose bump books. I still enjoy spending time reading long novels over the summer when I have time and when I'm not busy with school work.

Shawna:

I also do not remember how old I was whenever I started reading. I do remember my mom and sisters always reading to me before bed and when I learned how to read thats all I wanted to do! I remember having reading logs in 2nd grade and we also had something called books for bucks. So every time you read a book you would take a test on a computer and if you made a certain percentage you got money. This definitley made reading interesting. Some of my favorite books were BoxCar Kids and Jenna B. Jones. To this day I still love to read, not necessarily school books, but more non-fiction type books.

Michael:

Before I was able to read I used to look at comics and make up stories which seemed to coincide with the pictures. I used to tell those stories to my friends and show them the comics at the same time. This early imagination probably helped stimulate my ability to read. My parents used to read to me often. After I learned how to read I started to read to my parents. There were also school competitions that would help stimulate my reading abilities. Some of my favorite earliest series to read were: The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, Hank the Cowdog, and Young Wizards. I beieve having a favorite series is something that can help readers learn how to read becasue they like the story and want to read t.