ESPN

A few days ago I was watching ESPN and of course the sports reporters were discussing Brett Favre and his return to the NFL. Now, I’ve always been a die hard Chicago Bears fan, I mean who isn’t? But I do not care what anybody says, Brett Favre is the man! He has broken every single quarterback record you can think of. People are saying how he’s too old and can’t move around like he used to. Well obviously he is older, but he has a straight rocket for an arm. Yeah he tore his bicep last year, but look at what he did before that happened. The Jets were in first place and he was still breaking records, he is pushing 40 and he threw six touchdowns in one game. Favre’s the man hands down. Another topic that came up was Michael Vick. Now I’ve already blogged about what I think of Vick but that was regarding his punishment for dog fighting. Hopefully he gets reinstated into the NFL, and if he does I hope someone picks him up and uses him as a slot receiver. It would be sick if he was returning kicks and doing crazy trick plays with him. Also he would be a terror running the wildcat offense. It wouldn’t kill me not to see him play quarterback again, even though he was so exciting to watch because you never knew what he was going to do. But let’s be honest no one wants to see Vick throw, he’s a boss on the ground

Adaptation

I recently watch the movie, “Adaptation” for my third and final cultural opportunity. The reason I chose Adaptation is because it was the only movie on the list I had heard of. Also I have always somewhat enjoyed Nicholas Cage’s work. I am really not too sure still what I thought of the movie. It definitely was a different type of movie that Nicholas Cage isn’t normally in. In the movie he was a twin, he was some kind of writer and was always looking for his homerun piece. His brother was kind of like the cooler one out of the two, or whatever you would call it, he definitely was a lot happier. The one thing I can say for sure about the movie and his character is that he was absolutely miserable. He had the worst people skills I have ever seen, as a middle aged man he was yet to build up enough courage to have a conversation with a girl. When he finally would, and eventually get a date or two, even if it was going good he would mess it up somehow. I couldn’t help but to feel sorry for the man. However, I really thought it was cool how you always heard what was going on inside his head; he was always talking to himself, going back and forth with ideas about his writings. Well eventually he and his brother followed this famous woman and her boyfriend, they caught him spying on her and the movie just went all downhill from there. The couple chased after him and his brother and eventually shot his brother. When they were making their escape they got into a head on collision and his brother flew through the windshield and died. It was definitely a bizarre movie but I guess it wasn’t too bad.

Poetry Slam

During class on Thursday we had our poetry slam! The place we were in I thought was very cool. There were all these weird sculptures of huge heads. And the inside of the building itself was very artsy looking. But pretty much the best part was all of the food on the table before we started. I was just making cheese quesadillas and housing um. But as far as the actual poetry slam, it went a lot better than expected. I am not a huge public speaker, especially when you have to read something you wrote and be loud and entertaining for others. Mine was short and sweet so it wasn’t too bad. I thought everyone else did a very good job, some were funny, some were serious, and others were based off of our activities we did in class on Tuesday. Personally I thought Roger’s was absolutely hilarious. I actually think it would be pretty fun going to something like that with professionals up on the stage. Not saying we’re all not professionals because obviously we are, but I think it would a good time listening to their work, especially the funny ones, but besides for the food, sleeping in an hour later was definitely legit.

once upon a mattress

On Thursday night I attended a play entitled “Once upon a Mattress”. I went into it not thinking I was going to like it. Surprisingly I enjoyed it quite a bit. It was a comedy/musical which is always good personally. It was a story about a prince who was ready to marry his princess but his mother would not allow it. She did not want him to get married because that meant that eventually his wife would take her place and she did not like the thought of that. The Queen always gave these potential wives a test to take to decide if they were good enough, and the questions were always impossible! Until finally a girl came along that was actually royalty and the price fell in love immediately. The story goes on and she passes the test and they live happily ever after. The part that I loved most about it was how funny all of the characters were. The price was this little tiny guy that was really shy and wore glasses and had a squeaky voice. The queen was a very controlling woman, the king had the funniest facial expressions, and he was always making faces behind the queens back to get the crowd going. Also another thing I noticed that was very obvious was everyone in the play had amazing voices. Overall I had a good time with the experience and I liked it a lot more than I expected.

Thursday's class

Tuesday during class after we read our poems we went to the computer lab to discuss our final project for the class. My group picked to do ours over the Harlem Renaissance. Today in class we went over a few more details and requirements for the project and then got to work. Starting off we had to come up with twenty pages of information over the Harlem Renaissance, which seemed pretty steep. I found some interesting stuff on the topic. There were many very interesting pieces of art work in the 1920’s, some still life, many photographs, some of the photographs were action shots and some were still shots. Another thing I came across was Jazz music. Jazz was huge and very popular in the 1920’s. There were a number of lyrical geniuses back in the day. Jazz eventually turned in to hip hop and rap, which many listen to in the present day. My favorite part about the Harlem Renaissance however is the way everyone dressed. All the pin striped suits the men wore were so cool; I wish that’s how people still dressed today. I’m actually looking forward to doing the project. And the best part of the Thursday’s class was that we got out an hour early, you can’t beat that!

60 minutes

The other day I was watching a re-run of the 60 minutes with Bill Romanowski. He played linebacker in the NFL for quite awhile for a number of teams. Now I always knew he was a mean dude, but not only that but he is one of the craziest guys to ever play the game of football. One question the man interviewing him asked him was what was your goal on every play? His answer was the most intense thing ever. I was expecting something like make the play in the backfield, or force a turnover, he said, my goal was to make the person I was hitting, there last play they played in the NFL. You could tell he was serious too, they talked about his steroid abuse and all of the supplements he has taken, and it was like in the thousands after they counted up everything he has taken. He would do just nasty things after the play was over to people. For instance, when he would be at the bottom of the pile, he would just start grabbing people’s fingers and start breaking them, or start yanking on their ankles, he literally wanted to end people’s careers. One time he spit in Jerry Rice’s face and told him he was going to kill him after the game. The dude was straight up crazy, but I loved watching him play and he had a pretty legit career, also he was fun to watch in the new “Longest Yard”.

The Red Wheelbarrow

During Class on Tuesday we were covering poetry. I decided to pick the poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow”. It wasn’t necessarily good and was quite short, but it reminded me of my childhood. It was about 6-7 lines, obviously it talked about a red wheelbarrow. The connection from the wheelbarrow and my childhood is that when I was a little kid I always used to be over at my buddy Aaron’s house. His old man would always have little random jobs for us, looking back on it now the jobs were pretty pointless but it made us feel like we were doing something productive and helping his dad out. He would always give us each five dollars and we thought it was the coolest thing ever. Anyway every time we had a job to do we would always go grab this old rusty red wheelbarrow and two shovels, even if we did not need to shovels, it made us feel like we were working hard haha. Another part in the poem it talks about the white chickens. The relationship between the chickens and my childhood is that my buddy Aaron lived on a farm, he had tons of animals and chickens were definitely one of them. I remember many times picking up trash or putting dirt in the wheelbarrow and having chickens all around his yard running around like crazy.