Awko Taco Movie Moments

      I can't blog about outside reading without it being boring and I especially can't blog about Beloved without it being boring. So...I know this isn't relevant to English class, but I would like to talk about movie soundtracks. As a musician/composer, music in movies especially stands out to me. In exactly the same way memorable movie quotes and film characters find their places in popular culture, film themes and scores have dug their way into our collective subconscious, but in a much more subtle and less obvious way. I think that too many times we see a film score as simply a 'tool' in movie making. I cannot even stress how wrong that notion is. Soundtracks enhance movies to the point of salvation. For example, have any of you ever seen All The Kings Men? If you have, you know what the "Nail Em' Up" speech that I'm about to reference is. If you haven't ever seen the movie, scroll down to the bottom and please enjoy a quick tangent by Sean "Please Give Me An Oscar For This One" Penn. 
    Okay...so now that you've watched that, I want you to imagine this guy doing his speech without the background music. HE WOULD LOOK LIKE A FLAMING PSYCHO. Nobody would vote for that, and we wouldn't be on the edge of our seats all like "Woooo! Nail em' up!! That's right Willie Stark, you done tell the government who's boss!". Instead we'd be all like "Go home, Willie. You're drunk." But we didn't tell Willie Stark to go home because James Horner created a magnificent theme with an upbeat that pushed Penn through to the end of that speech. There's so many scenarios when these types of things happen. I'm sure most of you have seen the Lord of the Rings, yes? And if you haven't...sorry but we can't be friends anymore. Anyways, what if King Theoden didn't have background music while he was giving his big battle speech before the Rohirrim charged at the massive orc army on the Pelennor Fields? The scene would be 12 times less powerful and we'd just be all like "Crap, I hope they don't die or anything" but instead we're all like "WOOOO! 'MERICA!!" so THANK YOU HOWARD SHORE. Anyways, I leave you now with a list of some of my favorite soundtrack composers that made would-have-been awkward moments into the most powerful scenes in movies.

1. Thomas Newman (The Shawshank Redemption, Skyfall, Finding Nemo, Road to Perdition, The Road, The Green Mile, etc etc).

2. Hans Zimmer (Inception, Pirates of the Caribbean, Gladiator, The Dark Knight, Sherlock Holmes, Transformers)

3. Howard Shore (The Lord of the Rings, Twilight...not that I even like that movie, but we'd all be laughing at Bella instead of feeling sad for her if his music wasn't playing in the background)

4. And there's like infinity others, but I don't have time to list them all and it's not like anybody is going to read this anyways.

Link: Sean Penn as Willie Stark in All the King's Men, "Nail 'Em Up" speech.

An Open Letter to The Intercom Lady Who Makes Announcements Every Day At 3:10

   
Initially, I was going to write an open letter to the intercom lady who talks every day at the end of 4th block. But then I realized that there are a lot more people I would like to write open letters to. So here's a few open letters dealing with some big issues that have been on my mind of late:

1. The Intercom Lady
Dear Intercom Lady,
          It's like every day at the end of 4th block you have to read the entire Grapes of Wrath to us. Stop talking. The teachers are trying to wrap up their lessons, I'm trying to finish my test, and you are NOT trying to be concise. See this? This is what concise looks like.
                                                                                     Love,
                                                                                         Becky.

2. The State Legislators That Enforced End of Course Exams:
Dear State Legislators,
          You haven't been in a classroom in 40 years. But who cares...I bet you must have soooo much knowledge about how modern day classrooms and classes work, you clever legislator, you! I mean, why listen to the opinions of the teachers that work in classrooms every single freaking day? They're clearly not as special as you because they don't run around in pant suits and make crappy stickers of themselves to get elected. It's really cute that you think you can sit up there on your high horse and enforce mandatory exams that make up a huge portion of students' grades. It's even cuter that  rather than easing us into exams, you decided that it would be cool to not let the teachers know what content is going to be on the exam and then make it a huge portion of our grades anyways. Cutest of them all is probably that you placed the exams in April because that definitely won't cause cramming, will it? I'm kidding. You're not cute and I think your ideas are a complete joke.
                                                                                     I don't love you,
                                                                                                      Becky.

3. Annoying Kids In the Dunbar School Parking Lot:
Dear Annoying Kids In the Dunbar School Parking Lot,
         If you blast your crappy music with the windows down and drive 25 mph in the parking lot in the expensive car that mommy and daddy bought you whilst refusing to yield to other pedestrians and cars that may be in your trajectory, I'M TALKING TO YOU. Nobody wants you here. Nobody even thinks you're cool. It's just annoying and you're gonna hit something or someone. Nobody is impressed by 25 mph so I don't even know why you think speeding through like a total d-bag is worth it. It's not getting you anywhere. You're stupid. You're really, really, really stupid. So stop acting like the school parking lot is a NASCAR race and go home.
                                                     Sincerely,
                                                            Everybody. Because everybody is annoyed with you.

Why All of You Are Wrong and I'm Right: A Minor Tantrum on Name Pronunciation.

       Bad at spelling? Nah. I'd rather write this blog about the issue of being BAD AT PRONUNCIATION. Why, though? Here's why: Sethe's (from Beloved) name is pronounced as such:

S-ehh-th.

Not "Seth-eeee" or See-thee" or "S-ehh-thh-uhhhh". You guys...those aren't even names! Like, nobody comes up with that. Her name is pronounced as it is bolded above. Here is why:

1. Seth is a name that is very plausible. There are many people who are named Seth. 
2. Typically, in most Western languages, an "e" is added to the end of a girl's name to assert that it is feminine and belongs to a girl. This "e" added at the end is most always silent. We should therefore logically conclude that "Sethe" is simply the feminine version of "Seth". Here are a few examples:
• Lucille (pronounces as "lew-seal", not "lew-silly" or "lew-sill-uh".
• Vivienne
• Danielle (This is an especially good example because we see that it is the feminine form of "Daniel".)
• Brianne
3. Notice that the above names had two consonants (a consonant blend) preceeding the SILENT "e" at the end of the name. In classic English phonics, when an e comes after two consonants, the "e" is silent and the vowel preceeding the consonant blend is not pronounced in its capital form (ex, "a" would be pronounced "ahh" as in "fat" instead of like "ayyy" as in "face"). Therefore, we can conclude that "See-thee" is out of the equation. Here are a few examples of what I mean:
• Moustache (pronounced "moo-stash", not "mooo-stay-ch-eee")
• Toilette
• Blithe (pronounced "B-lie-th", not "B-lith-ee")
• Binge
4. Yes, I understand that there are exceptions to the rules. There are SO many exceptions to the fricken' rules! But here's what doesn't make sense to me. Why can't we just follow the rules with this one, you guys?! Why are you so quick to conclude some obscure name that nobody even thinks of when the normal pronunciation that sounds like "Seth" makes so much sense?!!!! I just don't get it. I want to scream every single day in class because I'm just like, "Why are we saying this? Seethee isn't even a name!!!". 
5. It doesn't even make sense as a name. Nobody else in that book, despite how weird it is, has a name that is completely unusual for the English Language. Even Baby Suggs sounds like an ENGLISH nickname. Pronounced with English Phonics.Here's some examples of how normal (as in plausible) every single other name is there:
• Amy Denver, Baby Suggs, Denver, Paul D, Beloved, Mrs. Bodwin, Horace, Bulgar, Schoolteacher, Mr. and Mrs. Garner.....ALL OF THESE ARE NORMAL. Morrison just "out of the blue" isn't going to call a character some weird name like "Seethee" or "Seethuh" or "Sethuh". 
6. Toni Morrison is a weirdo. We all know she's a weirdo. I mean, look at this book! She knows she's weird, we know she's weird, and if she wants a name to be pronounced weird, she's gonna spell it weird because I think she's OBVIOUSLY pretty proud of her weirdness. If Morrison wanted it to be Seethee or Sethuhh or Seethuh or whatever weird stuff you guys keep throwing out there in class, she would be bold and spell it that way so she could continue to say to the world "Look at me! I won a Nobel Prize AND I'm a weirdo!". 

So please. Please somebody read this blog and please be normal about pronouncing. That's all I ask.

Everybody Loves Snail Mail

      I never read the link attached to the prompt, but as soon as I saw the question "When is the last time you received a hand written letter?" on Mr. Mullins's blog suggestions, I knew that it was mine to answer. I, Rebecca Anne Smiley, am probably the world's biggest advocate of hand written letters. To answer the question at hand, the last time I received a letter was a little less than two days ago. So why do I love letters so much? The list could go on for days, but my top reason is that they mean so much more than a text or an email or any other electronic form of communication that has replaced the snail mail belonging to years far before our generation. Here is why: Any one of us could just turn on our computer and begin typing and simply press "send" when we wish to contact someone. A letter, however, takes so much more effort than this. When someone writes a letter, rather than just sending a message like "hey watsup man?", they're sending a page full of their own thoughts that don't need to be immediately replied to. These thoughts are complex and they're thought out, and rather than just having a fragment of what your counterpart wants to communicate to you, you have an entire document in which they express themselves. As well, in writing letters, the writers are encouraged to communicate ideas in an eloquent manner that we have become quite accustomed to abandoning completely whilst conversing through the screen of a phone or a computer. Further, because there is no quick reply option, the writers of letters are forced to complete entire thoughts. Letters encourage thought complexity and have genuine meaning, whereas electronic mail encourages the utmost simplicity in communication. My favorite things about letters, despite all of this, is that you can keep them forever. An email can be printed, but that wastes ink and the originality of that person's handwriting and spelling skills are lost. A text can be saved, but we all know that phones don't last forever. So yeah, let's keep the snail mail going.

The Things They Carried

     Normally when I blog, I don't take things too seriously because I am aware of the fact that nobody ever reads these things. However, this one is going to be good because Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried was unlike any other novel that I have ever read before. As a reader, I was completely sucked into this narrative from the first few pages when O'Brien skipped straight to the point and started naming off  all of the things that the soldiers in his Alpha company carried. The way he did it, though...it was beautiful. I want to use the word poetic, but I know that it could never really do justice to the way that O'Brien characterized the young soldiers in a way that I never even thought a wartime author would. Each soldier was given a set of items: weapons, survival essentials, food, etc. Exactly what you would expect from an American soldier deployed in Vietnam. More than that though, they were each intimately characterized by the things that they carried which they held so dear to them. Kiowa carried his grandfather's hatchet and moccasins, Cross carried letters from the girl he loved, Tim Lavendar carried dope and tranquilizers because he was terrified of dying. It was these little things that reminded the reader that these were normal guys, barely even adults, just like the rest of us who were forced to go overseas and kill so that they would not be killed. The line that struck me the most, though, was after O'Brien listed off all the weapons that the Alpha Company carried, putting the burdens only in terms of weight: AK-47s, M-60s, smoke grenades, killer grenades, chains of ammo, and a lot more things that I can't really remember. But after listing off all of this, O'Brien writes "But most of all, they were all in a silent awe of the things they carried". These young men have been given tools that could destroy massive amounts of human life, as well as maybe save their own, and their "silent awe" just goes to show their shock  in actually having to accept that their job - the reason why they were sent to war - was to kill. Especially because this narrative is told by a Vietnam veteran drafted against his will, it really opens up a whole new perspective. It also makes the source reliable because we, the readers, can know for a fact that O'Brien isn't trying to dramatize something that he's only seen in the movies. He tells it like it was so that he can keep the memories of the men in his company alive.

     The book is also filled with numerous other narratives following The Things They Carried. Each one drew new insight into O'Brien's past in Vietnam and how it has shaped his present day life as he attempts to find closure for all of the events that happened. My only regret is that I only had an hour in class to write about this book because it honestly deserves a lot more explaining than just one hour will allow. So yeah...for those of you who like to read for fun, check this book out. There's like 12,000 copies of it in the library.

I Used A Vocab List 8 Word In My Blog Today

Today I would like to blog about how stupid it is that the Fayette County Public Schools administration won't call obvious snow days until 5:30 in the morning. I believe that this topic is relevant enough to school to blog about.

    Firstly, let's look at some facts. Fayette county ices their roads primarily with a Sodium Chloride compound salt. What rock salts like NaCl do is create a freezing point depression. This means that they simply lower the freezing point of water by disturbing chemical equilibrium. Sodium Chloride is capable of ionizing and doing this until temperatures drop below 20 degrees F, in which case the salt simply forms a layer of salt over the ice and no ionization occurs. Currently, the temperature outside is far below that, especially considering wind chill. I am aware that they also store in their reserves salt brine and liquid calcium chloride, which are effective until temperature drops well below 0 degrees. However, these are stored and used in much less quantity because they are more expensive. As well, they are generally applied before anticipated conditions, and we saw little of this happening during the day today before the onset of the storm. For the board to sit there and say that conditions have a good enough chance of being sufficiently better on the roads by tomorrow morning , it seems that they are not taking anything into consideration except for their own rudimentary insight which seems to simply include the effect of "time" and "is it still snowing or not?". The de-icing procedures that have been implemented today seem to simply have been "not enough" to have prevented such horrible driving conditions as the ones that Fayette county citizens have experienced well on into the night.

My point is that by waiting until 5:30 in the morning to call off school, the FCPS administration is wasting working parent's time who need to hire babysitters, employed students who could have scheduled to work extra shifts if we had known school was cancelled much earlier than 5:30 am, and the time of dedicated students who could be sleeping rather than staying up till 3 am just to do their homework. This is preposterous (note the use of a vocab list 8 word used. Go AP lit!).

Cavemen Who Obviously Made Bad Life Choices.

      Too many people are saying that they hated the ending of The Road. Well, for me at least, hating the ending isn't enough. I hate the entire book. Something about the constant bleakness and lack of light in both a metaphorical and literal sense reminded me too much of winter, which is also bleak and lacking in light. During this process of pondering, I am always reminded that "oh yeah, it's winter outside right now!", and then I am lost in a pool of depression. You know, there is this theory that humans almost always become more depressed in the winter because - naturally - our ancestors spent the entire season hibernating. This means that it is in our DNA to hibernate just like all other sensible mammals who know how to make good life choices.We are all sad because we should be hibernating, too. But we aren't. Instead we're blogging at 11:40 pm and eating cheerios because we have to. So, to whatever caveman thousands of years ago who said to himself "LOL hey we should try to stay awake all winter #YOLO"...I have three words for you: bad life choice. It is only now, in 2013, that we have finally realized that any idea preceding the phrase "YOLO" is usually a bad life choice. Our entire species has made a bad life choice.

    There is, however, one aspect of The Road that I really did like: the ending. Sure the dad dies. But hey, the dad wanted to die. The only thing that kept him from doing so was the need to protect his son. The way that I see it, the son's presence on earth didn't make the father's wish to live any bigger than it already was. Rather, it gave him a sense of duty and obligation; because he loved his son he had to look out for him. When the father dies, he is torn from his misery and hopefully gets to be reunited with everybody that he has lost. The father has also accomplished his goal. For the entire novel, the father had one thing in mind: his son's safety. Some may argue that reaching the coast was his main goal. I think that he knew within at least 50 miles of the coast that nothing in the atmosphere would be any different - the sky would not be lighter, the ash would not disappear, and civilization would still be wrecked. When the father dies, his son is taken into safe and loving hands with a family that looks after him and has faith. Henceforth, the goal of the entire novel has been accomplished. High five on that one, Cormac McCarthy!