Blog #9

The three texts I found to be most important to me were Isaac Asimov’s Intelligence, The Vocabulary of Comic by Scott McCloud and finally an excerpt from Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. These three literary works have influenced my writing aspect but also my thoughts and beliefs on some of their opinions themselves. The sources I chose are mostly important again because most of my papers have incorporated the idea of these brilliant minds where McCloud’s idea of who were comes to life and what we know as Asimov explains deals with where our talents lie. My works themselves tie into these works because of relatively inspirational they can be.

One of my favorite works was Asimov’s Intelligence because he speaks about how he can score the highest on standardized tests and even prosper in the fields of English but if you asked him to build a car from scratch he would not be able to (Asimov 2). That knowledge is not a combined structure but split into multiple divisions of commonality. In the work, he shows this joke that his mechanic had told him which is said like this "Doc, a deaf-and-mute guy went into a hardware store to ask for some nails…..He wanted scissors. How do you suppose he asked for them?" Indulgently, I lifted by right hand and made scissoring motions with my first two fingers. Whereupon my auto-repair man laughed raucously and said, "Why, you dumb jerk, He used his voice and asked for them"(Asimov). In this joke that the mechanic catches Asimov in it shows that since Asimov was very educated he could not catch the witty answer to the joke as the mechanic who had the smart of just building cars would have know the answer. I myself can relate to this scenario because I can excel in skills of writing and history I could take hours to solve one mathematical equation. Asimov had shown me that knowledge is not based off of this idea of common sense but that common sense is the division of separate knowledge.

McCloud’s Vocabulary of Comic stood out to me personally on the way he describes cartoons as the shells of human beings. “Another is the universality of cartoon imagery. The more cartoony a face is, for instance, the more people it could be said to describe” (McCloud 202). This is a powerful analogy he tries to push out to his audience. It caught me with a lot of ideas behind it and I came to an agreement to his idea. I believe that the simpler something is the more we can fill in the void of our complexity. In connection to cartoons we watch on Saturdays or at least the ones I used to watch, I see these simple characters and even though I may not know it as complex I could relate to the cartoons putting my thoughts and my feelings into this empty simple shell of cartoon. Another way this theory pertains to me is through novels, when I usually read these characters are empty shells just names to be know but in time I start to fill that character’s role as myself which allows me to live their life through the narration.

In Schlosser’s excerpt “Your Trusted Friends” in his novel Fast Food Nation, he introduced the marketing strategy of ‘synergy’ (Schlosser 185). This idea of synergy is the incorporation of a strong character or product that can be endorsed by other companies to help the advertisements sell at extremely high rates. This idea to Schlosser was adapted by Walt Disney as he says “Among other cultural innovations, Walt Disney pioneered the marketing strategy now known as “synergy.”During the 1930s’ he signed licensing agreements with dozens of firm, granting them the right to use Mickey mouse on their products and in their ads”(Schlosser 185). This was a boom in the marketing industry and I also found out how to proccess this through my writing skills. In Assignment #2 that was used as a compare and contrast of two food labels, I was able to identify the synergy being used by Nabisco and Kraft to use their snacked baked crackers as an icon of healthy choice for kids.

Blog #8

Pollan describes in the chapter Ethics of Eating Animals that there is multiple ways of ideas people have to eating meat and their feelings for animals (Pollan 304). There is two aspects on where you can look at it, being that you do feel bad for the consumption of animal’s meat and how they are mistreated but you cannot give up the delicious flavor it provides but then others who detest the cruelty of animals do not eat meat at all because animals are looked at as humans and should not be inferior. I fall into the category that does not support animal cruelty and have been a vegetarian for 5 years. The reason why I had chose this aspect is because of the evidence that was shown to me on how animals were slaughtered so that we can eat their meat. I believe that animals like humans have the same equality in the idea of feeling; if we can eat animal meat then we show that like history has proved animals are being discriminated much like African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement and Women during their suffrage of not being able to vote and being looked at as property. So the consumption of meat that was produced through the cruelty of animals is strongly explicit in my view. I cannot avoid or detest the view of others who I bet dislike how animals are slaughtered but enjoy the taste of meat that cannot be given up so lightly.