Swoosh!

Nikes swoosh sign to the advertisement industry is like the fish or the cross to christianity, thats how much meaning it holds! After reading Swoosh! by Read Mercer Schuchardt i realized that a small logo, that once cost $35 to create is much more powerful than most people could ever be. Nike's Swoosh logo is probably one of the most recongized logos in the world.
The logo never has to be transalated. like Schuchardt says "the Swoosh transcends language". The fact that i had to capitalize the word Swoosh in this blog just shows you how much Nike's logo controls. Even through the exploitation of people, the Nike Swoosh continues its advertisment legacy.

Big Mac Attack

The documentary Supersize Me that we watched by Morgan Spurlock was an interesting piece of film. I thought that it helped to shed light on the problem of obesity in our country and showed how eating too much fast food is very detrimental to your health..Food at McDonalds and other fast food restaurants is not healthy and even the healthy stuff, like salads, have dressing (with a large amount of fat) to accompany them. On friday after the football game I went to McDonalds and decided to try the Apple Dippers. This is just apples in a bag, but McDonalds cannot have just that, they have to add caramel on the side to dip the apples in.

While certainly a lot of the blame for the obesity crisis should be blamed on fast food establishments, I don't think all of it should. There comes a point when you look yourself in the mirror and realize that it is your decisions that effect your weight. We do not live in a dictatorship where you are forced to go to McDonalds or Burger King for meals. Instead, you have the choice to not eat foods that are bad for you, and you have the choice to exercise and be healthy. It's true that the bombardement of advertisements that we see throughout our lifetimes is very tempting, but it is time for Americans to have some self control and not eat as much fast food.

I NEED A DOUBLE CHEESEBURGER

Spurlocks Documentary Supersize Me accurately identifies the problem with the fast food industry and the effects it has on one's health. He also showed ways we can can solve the problems with unhealthy/harmful foods being offered, especially in schools. I do believe his experiment was valid but i think the rules were a little extreme and outrageous. Maybe I'm uneducated in this area, but its hard to believe someone would get fast food for all three meals for a month. The other possible problem with the experiment was the Spurlock had gone into the documentary and experiment attempting to reveal fast food's dirty secrets. so Hindsight bias probably occurred and you could almost tell there was hindsight bias when he was talking about his arms feeling heaving after eating the quarter pounder.

Fast Food Every Day?

I think that Spurlock's documentary does a great job of identifying the problem with obesity in our country. People love to eat fast food because it's easy to get, cheap to buy, and it tastes really good. When Spurlock was interviewing regular people off the street, I could not believe that some people ate fast food every single day. It's amazing how much eating fast food for a month can mess with your health. The solution is simple: don't eat it. He demonstrated how badly it can affect your health and I think people will learn from that not to eat it so often. I think he treated the issue fairly because he wanted to see for himself the affects off fast food. He didn't judge the people he met on the street. The most effective part of Supersize Me was when he started to gain a ton of weight in just one week. It really made me think twice about eating fast food.

Love,Peace and Insanity

I absolutely agree with those that believe One flew over the cuckoo's nest by Ken Kesey is filled with misogyny and racism, but so is reality. Banning a book because it brings up issues that people face in the real world everyday is insane. Its understanding if schools choose not to promote some of the themes of the book, but to deny students of a fascinating piece of literature, seems a little extreme. Besides Cuckoos nest bringing up issues like anti-feminism and racism, the book also brought up a little more uplifting issues that made the book a huge hit with the sixties counterculture. A huge part of the book as to do with rebelling against authority and non-conformity. throughout the book RP McMurphy refuses to conform and become like the rest of the guys in the insane asylum. RP McMurphy is also always questioning the nurses authority. Even chief Bromden at times may mentally question the authority in the hospital. the counterculture in the sixties probably found the book to be inpiring and gave them more of a reason to be "different" and rebel.

So Easy A Caveman Could Do It

"Its so easy a caveman could do it."

That is the slogan of the popular series of commercials by Geico that first aired in 2004 and continues to air to this day. The Geico cavemen have appeared in 19 commercials that have run throughout the United States. The cavemen in each commercial are angry that Geico is degrading them in these advertisements.

These commercials have absolutely nothing to do with the car insurance company, Geico but they are funny and that is one of the critereum for a good commercial in today's market. When I read The Brand Expands by Natalie Klein these commercials came to mind. The acclaim of these commercials was so great that a television series, that lasted very shortly, was created. Klein in her essay worries that branding and advertising will become a dominant part of our culture. Ratings for the showed tanked and this proves that we are not quite to the culture where the brand is a star, but the very fact that it was able to become a television series proves that we are on our way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5JV0Fs_GE8

Cuckoos Nest, Cuckoo Book

When I started reading the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I had an open mind about tried to have an open mind about it. As they say you can't judge a book by its cover, and in this case I am glad that I didn't. The cover is full of quotes praising the book saying things such as: "Brilliant," "Powerful," "A smashing achievement," and "Impressive." But soon after reading it I did not think that this book was "Brilliant," or "Powerful," I, in fact, thought that this book, titled rather appropriately, is cuckoo.
The novel is not just crazy, I agree that it has several misogynistic and racist qualities to it. Any mention in the book of a woman so far has been negative. One of the main characters Nurse Ratched is the vilain of the story and others in the ward have had negative experiences with females in their life. The book is also somewhat racist because it portrays African-Americans in a negative, and inferior position. These "Black boys" in the story are seen as evil minions of the nurse. Truly one cannot judge a book by its cover, when its cover is full of lies.

Rage Against the Machine: Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest

Although the book has received much criticism, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest shows the world through a man's eyes who is mentally ill and is on drugs. I don't feel like this book is bad in any way, and i don't think it should be looked down upon or banned. The man who is telling his story, Chief Bromden, is very much so separated from reality and says many things that are considered to be offensive. He refers to the African Americans that work in the ward as "Black Boys" and he is constantly using rude generalized gender slurs to refer to the Big Nurse and other women who work on the ward. There are people who look at this book as a bad, unethical piece of literature and I am not sure why, because from reading this book you can get that he is always talking about being in a "fog," obviously normal people who aren't ill don't walk around seeing everything in a "fog." In one part of the book, he has a dream that he thinks is reality where the floor opens up and the workers of the ward hang one of the patients by their foot and open him up. No one who isn't divorced from reality would ever dream this up and believe that it is reality. Why anyone would take his book and find it offensive in any way is beyond me.

Mean Girls

Even though this movie was not meant to be a serious movie that teaches you a lesson, or provides a commentary on the social interactions between teenagers, it succeeded in both. The movie showed how being popular and trying to strive to be liked makes you a bad person in the end. Cady, in the movie, originally was trying to sabotage the "Plastics", a group of the three most popular girls in the school. But in her pursuit of this goal she forgot who she was and why she was trying to break up this group in the first place. By the end of the movie she had become plastic and was not any better, if worse than the other superficial members of the plastics group. At the end, in the climax of the movie Cady apologized and realized the lesson that screenwriter Tina Fey wanted this movie to portray.

Mean Girls

After watching mean girls with a new look on gender i have found that the movie is a good representation of how girls and boys act in high school and how different they are. i found it so ridiculous that Cady thought she had to act like she didn't know how to do math so that Aaron would like her. It also shows clearly the difference between girls and guys because never in the movie did any guys (except for maybe Damion) betray any other guys. On the other hand many girls are always striving to be the prettiest or the most popular in school . It also made it seem that guys only want sex from a girl, this was the scene in the lunch room when that guy came up to Cady and asked her a question and Regina cut in and asked if Cady wanted to have sex with him and she said no, so Regina told him he could go shave his back. That also made men look like they take advantage of girls who are innocent and in a new environment, because Cady was still new to the school and extremely oblivious of what was going on. Although this movie is made up and the gender stereotypes are stretched out a bit, it still shows how high school creates many gender stereotypes as well as stereotypes in general of groups of people.