....Netbooks?

So I was going to blog about how these small cute Netbooks take up all our class time starting up, but it took so long to start up that I now have to shut it down and have no time. Shame.

The Olympics: More Danger!

Watching the Olympics my heart goes out to my own sport, synchronized skating, one that has not been admitted to the Olympics. Yet. But I am not here to advocate for the sport, even though I would very much like it to become part of the Olympics. I'm here to talk about what people look for in the Olympics. And that, is danger.

Sure, there are sports that are not very dangerous, but they have been around in the Olympics for much longer periods of time. But if you look back in time, more recently in that, you think about what excites people about the Olympics. Yes, team USA winning gold is most definitely exciting, but what else do you remember? Injuries and death. And when we watch, what do we talk about? That's right, who fell and hurt themselves, or maybe just who had a really epic fall. You may disagree with me, even I know that we watch the Olympics for other reasons as well, but we all know deep down that this is correct. On the women's downhill skiing slope, it was so icy that many women fell, very intense falls. The next day at school, that was ALL people were talking about. Before the Olympics even started, a luge athlete died. I hadn't even processed the Olympics were starting until I heard about the guy dying while practicing on the Olympics course.

So why did I introduce my own sport? Synchronized skating is being debated this summer on whether or not it will become part of the Olympics. As I looked online for opinions of this, the first article I clicked on showed me exactly what I have been arguing above. The author first talks about the history of synchronized skating, and how it is much different than people would expect, and much more difficult, but then the article turns to a personal experience. The experiences turn to injury, a calf being sliced open, fingers almost sliced off, and all these girls hopping right back into their program to finished what they started. People cringe as they hear this type of experience, the exact type of cringe you want when you watch the Olympics. As the author goes on to describe more experiences, all they talk about is the dangers and high speeds the skaters go at. And then concludes that it should become an Olympic sport on that knowledge alone.

In my mind I'd want to be advocating for Synchro in the Olympics because of the difficulty of it and the strength of the athletes, but instead I'm forced to use the apparently stronger argument of the high speeds teams go at, the high likely hood of crashes during intersections, the many slashes a blade has done to human flesh, and the dangerous lifts that higher teams do.

Discrimination Commercial

I just finished watching LOST, and as a little experiment I decided to count how many African American people showed up in the commercials. In class we talked about commercials a little while back, how they've changed, and how they are constructed to get people to want the product. Our big discussion on kids and toys.

As I watched I counted 40 commercials, give or take a few. The amount of people in the commercials? Way too many to count. The percent of the people who appeared African American? Very little. There were maybe 22 appearances, 10 of which were part of another show being advertised and the others were put in places normally associated with the lower class. There were gangsters, a barber shop owner, and a factory worker. I've always been aware of an unbalance but watching more intently I really realized the impact it has. People design commercials to relate to the average person, so they can reach and convince the most people possible. Watching the smiling, thoughtful, decidedly average people with their "white" skin color I realized that even watching TV African American people are discriminated against and given bad symbols for who they are supposed to be. Under that notion, should we ban commercials? Of course that can't happen, but it makes me wonder why people don't see the problem in this type of discrimination.