Is it clear which is strong and which is beautiful--the truck or the model?

It is generally simple to tell which object signifies which word based on the audience they are targetting, younger women. According to their audience, also signified by the magazine that this ad appears in, the truck is the strong one, and the model is the beautiful one. They show the truck in glossy all black paint and seems to hang ominously in the background. The truck is bold and ridged and it has square beaming lights. It has huge bolts in the sides of its massive grill. It is what is considered a man's truck. It signifies power, strength, boldness, and dominence. This massive truck more of the target than the woman is because of what it signifies, the bold and strong in the deoderant that the ad is advertising and it reminds me of a train. The woman, according to the audience the ad is targeting, would be the "beautiful". The woman is there to bring the interest of the young girl audience to this ad as she handles the pipe she has behind her shoulder and wears her trucker hat says she is the driver of this truck. The ad want its audience to say "Oh this woman is using this deoderant because its strong and truckers sweat alot". The woman is further pushed on the audience with her feminine features, especially with her girlish skirt and pink outfit. The star of this ad is the truck however, as it does most of the work, the model is just there for her female audience to associate beauty with this deoderant. Take out the woman and the deoderant and it is very well possible to catch the eyes of many vehicle enthusiasts.

1983

1. What was most interesting about this article was when the author is speaking of Lauper's video. In the scene where he talks about the mother asking her daughter about living her life right, she considers "right" as being the housewife role. It is most interesting to me because personally, my mother always wanted me to play what I would consider a very feminine role, not necessarily the way this mother was wanting for her daughter though. I can relate somewhat to how the daughter feels.
2. I feel that Lauper's video had a stronger message. It felt alittle more personal to me and was alittle simpler than the other video.
3.My video, "Holiday" by Vampire Weekend is also about just having fun and doing what you want no matter what anyone else says. The video has a light hearted comical feeling about it, this is easiest portrayed at the end of the song where one of the band elbow-drops a guy they just got finished fighting. I do not feel that these videos will help me as much with my assignment becasue in my opinion, my video may have a slightly serious undertone in it , but it is not nearly as serious as these other videos.

TV vs MTV

I do not watch very much television, but when I do I always look for the show, "Smoking Gun's Top 20 World's Dumbest..." When I watch this show, and the commercial's for TruTv come one, they are always advertising for other shows. I always catch commercial about a newer series called "Bear Swamp Recovery" and it has opera in the background. There are commercials about "Top Twenty Most Shocking...", and there is alot of promoting for other shows like "Hard Core Pawn", pretty much reality tv in a slightly different form than normal. I think that they are trying to capture the attention of people who like reality tv, or exciting situations, and also trying to branch out for comedy with World's Dumbest. I love Worlds Dumbest becasue it has videos of stupid people doing stupid things and comedians basically tearing them down for it and making well-deserved jokes at their expense. Its more of a show that should be aired on comedy central. MTV and tv are both for entertainment purposes. Entertainment comes in many different forms and though one particularly focuses on alot of music, MTV, they still have their own shows like "Rob and Big" that goes with the Tv part of the entertainment.

Befriending Barbie

I had strong feelings against Barbie before and even after reading this essay, I still feel the same way. I do not feel Barbie is a good influence on young girls. It gives them a false sense of what beauty and perfection is. I did not learn anything that caught my eye, however, I did learn elsewhere that if Barbie were a real woman with all her proportions, she would be a horror story. Opposite of me, the author found something important and interesting about Barbie after going to the convention and getting exposed to the other people and their ideas about Barbie. She was able to have a wonderful experience with the people and develop a new found love for Barbie and her convention. The essay however, was written very nicely and was easy to read, it helped reinforce how my writing style should be.

The Last Stop

In the beginning of the essay Cable has the same impression on the funeral home as most people would. Quickly into his visit as he speaks to the owner, Howard, he realizes hes just like any other man and he is simply running a business. A sentence that really caught my eye was when Cable said "We provide services for the dead, not counseling for the living." That sentence, though very true, also points out that the funeral home is a business, businesses do not care for the people, but for the money. Also fortifying this believe, ironically, a sign that said "Visa and Master Charge Welcome Here", was spotted by Cable. The varying coffins that regardless of the fact that someone is dead were reported as being beautiful and quite expensive, what would one need a 14 karat gold coffin for? To show how much money that person and/or their family had. Towards the end of his visit, Cable begins to realize that the funeral home is not really what people make it seem like, and felt as though he would see a body up close and personal, which to his dismay felt like clay.

My impression of the funeral home is and was not a scary place, a building is a building is a building, whether they cut people up in them or serve food in them. Their practice is not odd or scary to me either as I have disected plenty of body parts in human anatomy in highschool. The point that stood out to me most in this essay is the fact that businesses are not "honest" and never were. Id rather someon just come out and say they only care about the money and go about their lives, Deception.

Myself as a Text

I love studying Japanese language. When I decided to take the language in highschool, I fell in love with it and took the class three years in a row. I joined our school Japanese club and I participated in the school's Foriegn Language Cafe, where all the language classes grouped together and performed or cooked something from their language's culture to get people interested and educated. I was a rajio taiso performer and I wore a kimono and I was able to help make our posters and wrote in Japanese. I also use anime to study Japanese. When I watch them, I always try and watch them in Japanese with english subtitles. The purpose of that is to get used to the speeds at which the actors are speaking and to pick out words or phrases that I can understand and even every once in a while, learn new phrases and words. I try and study every night for the Japanese class I was lucky enough to get into this semester of college and I hope to do a foriegn exchange program to Japan to learn more of their culture and language.

Death of a Moth

In "Death of a Moth", Virginia Woolf's fasination and interest in this dying moth is interesting to me. How she pity's the moth and then switches and admires the moths struggle with death make me feel as though she almost envy's the moth. She calls the moth a pure bead of life, yet also calls it an insignificant creature is what made me feel the envy. Virginia also twice mentions wanting to help the moth, twice picking up a pencil and attempting, though failing to help, it is almost as if shes putting her own struggle with life into the moth, though as death is claiming its victim, she realizes there can be no hope for it. Her last sentence of acceptance of the power of death seems to only strengthen my opinion of how she may have felt when she committed suicide. Her technique at explaining the minute details of her surrounding made it very easy to visualize what Virginia herself was seeing.