The final blog

For the final blog you have to do the following:

Write about your experience using blogs in the English class.

Say:

> What you think about the experience in general
> How much you feel your writing skills have developed
> What you would like to include in the future
> What else you would like to write about


Wordcount: 200
Make comments on 3 of your classmates' posts.

My favorite tv show

So this topic is quite broad. I immediately think about the X-men cartoons from the 90s, How I Met Your Mother that recently ended or cartoons like Slam Dunk. Some of you might think that I have spent a lot of time in front of the tv, and your completely right, I have. So, to make things simple I will say I have many favorite tv shows, like the ones I mentioned above, but I will focus on one that I think is sometimes underrated.

There was a golden time in television in which you could have a good show without drugs or killing someone. A time where Bryan Cranston wasn't a drug dealing psychopath that made bucket loads of money. Nope. The time I'm referring to is a time where Mr. Cranston is a struggling white collar worker with 4 children (5 in the last seasons), a bossy wife and a crappy life. The last part is also truth about Breaking Bad but the character in this series does not go on a drug-making killing spree.

This is the story of a pretty average suburban family in the US that has three children in primary school and one in military school. Having so many children, the family is always struggling to make ends meet and they picture that by mentioning that the children never have new clothes, which is handed down from brother to brother, by stating that they can't have vacations or that they can't afford to go out.  This family is composed of 4 children that have very different characteristics. The oldest one is in military school because he is always getting into trouble with the law and it was a military school or juvenal detention center. The second oldest son is not very smart and is always trying to pick fights. The main character is the third son who gets into trouble because he is too smart. And the youngest son tends to put the cuteness into every shenanigan these children do.

I really like this show because it is not centered in rich people who have rich people problems. Here, this ordinary family is struggling with real issues in a funny way. Some characters are divorced, others are Afroamerican, others are handicapped, others are Canadian and even German. This show has everything, love, fights, intrigue and a continuous criticism of western societies in general.

Which show is it?

You know the drill, at least 220 words and comment on three of your classmates' blogs.

Your favorite book or movie

So, the themed post is back and for today I have two easy options: write about your favorite book or movie. Fortunately, my favorite book and movie are the same: Fight Club.

Fight Club is a book written by Chuck Palahniuk, a former blue-collar worker. Palahniuk studied journalism but he worked as a diesel mechanic before becoming a successful novelist. While he was working, he attended book clubs and wrote short stories. That is how Fight Club began, as a 6-page short story. Later, and after receiving a good review from his fellows in the book club he tried his luck and turned it into a novel. 

Fight Club is a story about an unnamed average white collar worker who has a severe case of insomnia. While trying to fix his problem, because he was supposedly in pain, he received an ironic piece of advice from his doctor "You wanna see pain? Swing by First Methodist Tuesday nights. See the guys with testicular cancer. That's pain" And that is how he cured his insomnia, he started to attend meetings every night, every week, where different people would try to cope with their diseases. By lying to them and earning their empathy, his insomnia was magically cured. Unfortunately, another person, a woman named Marla, had the same idea and screwed his plan. Therefore, insomina was back. When things were turning for the worse, the protagonist meets Tyler Durden, a handsome soap maker and distributor who believed capitalism and consumerism were depriving society from their most talented people and were making our lives meaningless and useless by constantly brainwashing everyone. Society was so worried of owning things and preserving things that our early ancestors who had to fight to survive would be embarrassed. That's when they wonder if they had been in a real fight, and decide to fight. The fights cured the insomnia and attracted more people that were like them. I won't say anymore because I don't want to spoil the fun.

I really like this book because its main point is not physical violence, nope, the main point is that the society we are in is depriving us from our drive to do things, that we are being brainwashed all the time and that we are so immersed in it that we can't fight back, can we?

The book and movie are quite similar, and I really enjoy both.

Career-related website or An expert in your field

Hi, peeps, for today you can choose between two interesting topics: A website related to your career or an expert in your field. Obviously, I will give the sample language for both.

First, let's go with the career-related website I like.

The career-related website that I enjoy the most is Wikipedia (wikipedia.org). This website is an open encyclopedia that can be updated everyday by people from all over the world. The website has many sections and features being the most important one the ability to search in any given language any topic that you want. You just have to type a topic, pick a language and that's it. If wikipedia does not find your exact topic, it will provide other related topics.
I visit wikipedia weekly to look for information, decide disputes or just invest (waste for some people, but that depends on the point view) time.
I really like this site because inside each article, you find links to the articles of related topics, names of the people involved and you can click on them and continue learning. I have spent hours going from article to article only by clicking on the links, you can start reading about 9/11 conspiration theories and end up reading about the second law of thermodynamics. I also really like the fact that you have to give references for the claims you make in the articles because that gives wikipedia seriousness, for example. if an article does not have any references, wikipedia will post a notice stating that as a means to prevent people from believing in falsified or unreferenced articles

Now, let's go for the second topic.

One person that I really admire from Linguistics is Michael Tomasello. He is a North-American psychologist who studied his BA and PhD in the US and currently works in Germany. His main area of research is to establish the cognitive and cultural differences between humans and primates. In order to establish these differences, Tomasello has worked with different types of primates such as apes and bonobos, and he has studied how children acquired cultural norms to be active members of society. For example, he has established that primates share with humans some means to attract and direct the attention of others by using their hands and eyes. Also, great apes use gestures to communicate like we sometimes do.
When studying children's acquisition of cultural norms, he has focused on language acquisition. He posits the idea that language acquisition is a crucial aspect of the acquisition of cultural norms. On this topic, he has earned a very powerful enemy called Noam Chomsky. Tomasello goes against Chomsky's theory that children have an innate component in their brains to acquire language. Instead and based on his extensive research with primates and children, he posits the idea that children acquire language by learning social functions and using it, what people refer as socio-pragmatic or usage-based theory of language acquisition. Chomsky really hates Tomasello, and that feeling is mutual.
I really like Tomasello because he is quite emphatic when it comes to hating Chomsky and he is always finding new ways to disprove Chomsky's arguments.


If you go for the career-related website, you have to:

- provide the link
- describe the website (sections, features,etc)
- say how often you visit the site
- explain why you like the site.


If you go for the famous person in your field, you have to:
-Who she/he is. (short biography)
-What she/he has done. (examples of their work)
-Why you like her/him.
-Include his/her image

> About 170 words
>Add comments to at least 3 of your classmates’ blogs

My favorite song

So this is a free post in which you will write about your favorite song. I'm quite sure you have dozens of favorite songs but you can only talk about one.

My favorite song is Across the Sea performed by the North American band Weezer. This song is featured on their second album named Pinkerton. When Pinkerton was released in 1996, The Rolling Stone magazine said that it was the worst album of the decade and that Weezer would regret releasing it. Lots of magazines gave the same review. In the early 2000s, The Rolling Stone magazine said that they made a huge mistake and that Pinkerton was among the best albums of all times, furthermore, it gave Pinkerton a score of 5 out of 5 and added it to The Rolling Stone Hall of Fame. Pinkerton is full of songs about unrequited love: a lesbian whom Cuomo (lead singer) wants to marry, a girl who doesn't want to go to a Green Day concert, and a Japanese fangirl that infatuates Cuomo with a letter. That last description  is the theme for Across the Sea.

Across the Sea is based on a real life event that ocurred to Cuomo. He enrolled in Harvard to study English language and literature (like me) and was having a rough time, feeling quite empty and sad. Until one day he received a letter from an 18-year old Japanese girl written in a funny English. In this letter, she asks him several everyday questions. Cuomo has stated that she fell in love with this girl immediately although he never met her. And the song is about that. The opening lines are about the questions the girl made, and then, the song is all about Cuomo's reaction and desires being the most important his depressing feeling of being away from her. The song is filled with powerful guitar chords and a feeling of despair that hits right in the soft spot.

When I listened this song for the first time around 2008, I fell completely in love with it. I was feeling quite empty at that time, and I felt even emptier after listening to this song because I had no one. Nonetheless, I felt  reassured that if that nerd Cuomo was able to survive, I could as well.

So, you have to write about your favorite song stating:
- Who performed it
- In which album it was released
- The topic of the song
- Any funny stories related to it
- Why you like it
- And a link to the song.

The minimun number of words is 170 and don't forget to comment on 3 of your classmates' blogs.

I photograph I like

Hi, guys and gals, today I will show a photograph that I really like.

This picture was taken by a stranger that was at the rooftop at that moment. On the background you can see the Parthenon and you can see me with two of the best people in the world, my wife-to-be, Nati, and our Japanese friend, Satoko. This picture was taken on Saturday, October 6th, 2013.

To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this picture because this is the last picture that we have with Satoko before she returned to Japan. Therefore, I get sad because we spent an awesome time with her. We travelled through almost 20 countries together. I am also happy because we were able to spend some quality time with her and she was an awesome travel buddy. We went from Spain, through all Western and Central Europe to end our trip in Athens. We ate lots of weird food and drank lots and lots of beer (they say that beer creates a protective coat in your stomach). From time to time Satoko would cook Japanese dishes which were awesome. Also, we (and by we I mean I) had to carry a 30kg piece of luggage all through Europe. By the end of the trip I was really strong. I wish she could have stayed longer with us.

I also like this picture because I was wearing a band-aid on my nose which made look pretty badass. And the story behind that is badass as well. We were in Istanbul, 4 days before this picture was taken, walking in a beautiful park and there was a strong wind. A huge branch fell from a tree and hit me directly on the nose and my forehead making me bleed a lot. Luckily, I didn't fall or cry from the hit. Then we had some awesome kebabs, another great day.

 So, the instructions for tbis week are:

Write about a photograph you like.

Say:

Who took it
What it shows
When it was taken
Why you like it
Upload it too

Include any other information you'd like to mention.
Write at least 150 words.

Add comments to at least 3 of your classmates’ blogs

Today's subject: Christianity

Alright guys and girls, last class I gave you the chance to decide the topic for this week's blog. There were a lot of good ideas such as pets, favorite movies, books, bands, etc.. Nonetheless, the majority decided that the topic would be Christianity. That shows that democracy sometimes does not work very well. Here we go.

Although I'm not a Christian myself, I can see its influence not only in religions, traditions or laws. The Bible, a Christian work of art, has influenced art in all its forms. It is pretty easy to think about
examples for this: Da Vinci's Last Supper is clearly influenced by Christianity; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a poem based on the symbol that the albatross, a large seabird, represented Jesus. This rime was also turned into a song by Iron Maiden. Another example is Aslan, the talking lion in the Chronicles of Narnia, which is also seen as a representation of Jesus: he dies and then comes back to life to save everyone. Although Aslan is not afraid to get his paws dirty, he remains true to some of the characteristics that Jesus was supposed to have like wisdom and mercy.

Art critics, when they are studying different works of art, try to study which previous works of art have influenced them, and it is really common and easy to find a link to Christianity.

I read the Bible once I understood that if I wanted to gain a deeper insight to the art I like, I had to trace its influences in order to get to better interpretations. When I read books regardless of the gender, I often find references to the Bible. In all honesty, I enjoy finding those references a lot, although, as I said before, I am not Christian.

One reference I really enjoy is the reference to Judas's treason. In one of Isaac Asimov's books, the best science fiction writer ever, he makes reference to this. One character, Golan Trevize, asks another character, Munn Li Compor, how many silver coins he had received to sell him to the government. Interestingly, the reference does not stop there. After asking the question and getting an answer, Trevize reflects on the myth that that idiom "receiving silver coins means treason" is really old and is commonly used in all the planets of the galaxy. This story occurs in the future, in the year 22000 after Christ.

This reference is my favorite because it shows how Christianity has influenced our culture and will continue doing it even if there are no more people who called themselves Christians. I think that is the point that Asimov wanted to make, especialy if we consider that he was an atheist.

So as you can see, you can discuss the topic of Christianity in a free manner, it only depends on you.

The minimun word count for this week's blog is 140. And remember to comment on 3 of your classmates blogs.

Cheers