Writing Blog Post 4: Star Trek

I decided to watch another episode from the second season of Star Trek titled “Bread and Circuses.” As you could guess from the name, this episode referenced the Roman Empire and actually was a very entertaining and interesting episode. The writers toyed with the idea of the crew finding a planet that was identical to Earth if basically everyway imaginable except the shape of the landmasses. The catch was, on this planet, the Roman Empire (or pseudo version of it) never fell from power into the 20^th century. The background of this story is that a former spaceship captain from Star Fleet, Captain Merrick, who arrived on this planet and took complete control. This is against the oath that captains have to take when they prepare to explore the universe. When Kirk, Spock, and Dr. Bones arrived, slaves who wanted to kill them immediately captured them. Kirk convinced them to bring them to Merrick. Merrick had an assistant who kept trying to convince Kirk to surrender his ship to their planet and used the claim that if he interfered and harmed this planet, even if it dealt with escaping, it would go against his oath as a captain. Kirk cleverly declines to surrender and gives a secret code to Scotty saying that the crew was okay when, in fact, it was a call for help. The ship found a loophole and decided to scare the planet instead of directly interfering through killings. In the meantime, Spock and Dr. Bones fight gladiators to save their lives and Kirk keeps getting tested by this assistant guy. I was personally happy that I got see the “Vulcan death grip” in action twice in this episode. The final battle happens when Kirk revolts against the gladiators and Scotty cuts the power to the planet for a few seconds so Kirk can escape, find a gun, and rescue Spock and Dr. Bones. Before they are beamed back up aboard, Merrick is killed by his assistant. An interesting sup-plot is the whole sun worshipers thing. At the end, the one girl on the ship makes a claim that the sun is really their “Christ” and is just coming in the 20^th century as opposed to the 1^st century like on Earth. Another thing that caught my attention was how this Earth had no war in 40 years. We learn during this time from Spock that Earth had 3 world wars, the third one doubling the amount of deaths of the second one. This was sneaking of the writers to sneak in a warning of a third world war.

Right, now actually to the prompt part. I would say Star Trek is way more into the whole aliens and other life forms then the other series that we watched. The point of the Enterprise is to “go where no man has gone before,” and in this show, they do just that. The whole concept is flying this ship around to foreign planets and exploring the life forms there while being put into life threatening situations. The writers did a great job of exercising many cool futuristic concepts. It seemed to be that the other series that we watched, such as BSG, Firefly, and BTVS all used sex as a primary pull-in method. Not so much Buffy, but the other two series added sex scenes and things of that nature to try and keep the viewers entertained. Star Trek rarely used sex in its episodes, but Kirk was caught kissing a female slave in this episode. The other series most likely have to use sex appeal because Star Trek covered just about every possibility of futuristic encounter in their many series and seasons on the air. If these series did the same thing as Star Trek, then it wouldn’t be anything new. The sex appeal adds to those series because it honestly has no other alternative. Some people may like that, as for me, I’ll stick to Captain Kirk and Spock exploring the galaxy and conquering every challenge thrown at them.

BSG minseries

All right, I figured I’d get this blog out while this episode was still sort of fresh in my mind. This mini-series/tv movie thing of Battlestar Galactica was very long and, in my opinion, slow moving. It took 45 minutes for the commander to declare war on the cylons when all the things leading up to the commander’s speech could of happened in about 15 minutes. Needless to say, the multiple random sex scenes I could have done without. I understand that they were trying to show how “6” is a manipulative robot to human men, but scenes where two ship workers rip of their suits and get it on are unnecessary. Also, the scene where “6” kills the innocent baby is just disturbing. I think they could have shown how the cylons are heartless killers in a different way.

When I heard we were watching an episode of BSG, I was expecting it to be similar to Leslie’s paper. I was expecting space ships and crazy science things to happen like crystal imaging and things of that nature. I couldn’t believe that some of the plot took place on a home planet and other’s in a spaceship. What I thought was interesting was how BSG portrayed some of the same concepts or ideas that other sci-fi movies had. It seemed like they almost copied Star Wars idea of the death star formation when they had their ships lined up ready to attack the cylon's ship. All together I felt BSG was an okay series. I felt lost watching this miniseries thing, but if you look at the time it was created, it was made after the first few seasons so I think this miniseries was supposed to explain to the true fans the beginning of BSG, with the fact in mind, that the viewer should know what’s going on and doesn’t need as much of an explanation.

poem blog

All My Greatest Excuses

By: Kenn Nesbitt

I started on my homework,

but my pen ran out of ink…

My hamster ate my homework…

My computer’s on the blink….

I tripped and dropped my homework 
in the soup my mom was cooking…


My brother flushed it down the toilet
 when I wasn’t looking…

My mother ran my homework 
through the washer and the dryer…


An airplane crashed into our house…


My homework caught on fire…

Tornadoes blew my notes away…


Volcanoes rocked our town…


My books were taken hostage 
by an evil killer clown…

Some aliens abducted me…


I had a shark attack…


A pirate swiped my homework
 and refused to give it back…

I worked on these excuses
 so darned long my teacher said,


“I think you’ll find it’s easier
 to do the work instead.”

I have never been a big fan of poetry especially the poetry that is supposed to have this hidden meaning somewhere in it that I can never find. When I was searching for a poem to blog about I decided to pick a funny one that used rhymes to entertain the reader. This poem is more geared toward upper elementary to middle school kids in the sense that it deals with excuses for not doing a homework assignment. When I read this poem, it brought me back to my days when I was that age and was always thinking of ways to get around not doing my homework. Not that I didn’t do it then, because it was always on my kitchen counter, but I would always just forget it right ;). Anyway I liked this poem because of how the excuses start out normal and keep going until they become completely unbelievable. I guess this could show how maybe the first few times you forgot your homework, you could use a normal excuse and get away with it, but the more it would occur, the more creative you would have to get with your excuses. Overall I enjoyed this poem because it made me laugh and brought me back to some memories of my childhood where making excuses for not doing homework was fun. In today’s light, there should be NO excuses for not blogging!!!

Normal Again

This episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was very interesting, yet I felt like it was a very slow moving episode. The idea of Buffy being split between realities was a cool concept, but it was also scary at the same time because the audience was not given a clear clue on which reality was real. The doctor did a very good job of explaining how Buffy could just be schizophrenic and how she created her alternate reality of being a hero and having a sister. I often found myself torn between which realities to sympathize with. Part of me wanted for Buffy to be healthy and reunite with her parents and to stop hurting her friends, and the other part of me wanted her to snap out of her state of mind and go back to the way things were during the entire series. Some people might think that since those 3 nerds in the beginning seemed to have caused Buffy to go crazy, then her vision of her being in a mental home was a fake. This could be disproven by the fact that her schizophrenic mind could have made up that part about the nerds unleashing a monster to explain why she acted like that. This debate definitely made the episode interesting, but I thought the episode dragged for the most part. It seemed like nothing really got accomplished and they could of done the whole thing in 20 minutes, instead of 50.

Favorite Movie

In this year of 2009, I have seen more movies in theatres then I think I ever had in previous years, especially this summer. Out of all these movies I had watched and reviewed to my peers, my favorite had to be the movie Star Trek. I enjoyed this movie so much that I willingly paid to see it 3 times in theatres: once with my family, and twice with some of my best friends. Every time I watched it, it kept getting better and was really the inspiration as to why I chose Star Trek as my primary source for my analytical research paper. Sadly enough, the movie is way better than the series and here’s why.

First off, the actors did a superb job in this film. Even though I love William Shatner, actor Chris Pine did an amazing job of playing a young, fearless Captain Kirk, who was entertaining to watch at all times. Zack Quinto also did just as good of a job playing Spock who made everyone else look like a total idiot every time he spoke. These two men made the entire movie with their acting ability and it made the movie entertaining for every scene they were in (which was just about all of them). What also made the movie so good were the actors who played the minor roles. The actors who played Dr. Bones, Chekov, Sulu, and Scotty all deserved awards for best sporting cast. They kept the movie humorous while keeping the seriousness of the story line. Another thing I loved about the movie was how the story never had a dull spot and the movie never dragged. The plot had enough twists to keep it interesting while still being able to comprehend what was going on. Nobody likes to sit through a movie where you are completely lost for 75% of it. Finally, I would have to say the special effects were amazing. If you watch the series back in the 1960’s, I’m pretty sure I could make better effects in my basement than that, but this movie had it all and truly was the best film of the year so far.

problemi con la mia carta

This time I decided to take an Italian approach to my problems haha. Okay but seriously there actually is a few problems that I am facing with writing this Common Place paper. The main one I feel is expressing my arguments in a way that is acceptable for Common Place. I feel like I have really good arguments, but I'm not using enough appeal to pathos, logos, and ethos to deliver these statements. I feel like I'm just delivering common sense facts. Here's an example of what I'm talking about...

"The reality of the situation is that the talent level of the majority of the world has been closing in on the elites and the best are more subject to falling no more than ever it seems."

I feel like this sentence needs to be here to establish my point that there isn't that much separation between the best and the middle of the pack. I also feel like it's boring is more of just an opinion by the author. Let me know what you think!

Commplace Proposal

For my commonplace paper, I am proposing to go in the direction of talking about how even the greatest and the most unlikely of people are still vulnerable to downfalls. From my analytical research paper, I will use my example with Spock and crimes of passion. Spock is based purely on logic and is in total control of his emotions. Actually it is said that he doesn't have any. In this episode, he loses complete control, due to pon farr, and tries to kill his best friend. Other examples of how the best or most unlikely fall could be the University of Georgia professor who killed his wife and two others, a very unlikely upset in sports such as the Boston Red Sox ralling from down three games to zero against the New York Yankees in the ALCS (can't believe I just brought that up), or even how supposedly the best built cruize ship ever, the Titanic, was said to be impossible to sink, but unfortunatly did anyway. These are just some ideas that came to mind but I'm sure if I researched a bit, I could find more examples and then possibly be able to explain why the best can fall.

More problems...

This weekend, I have been doing a lot of work on my paper and have basically covered just about every argument and point that I would like to talk about in my paper. The main problem I'm having is length. My paper is currently 6 full pages, which is one page short of the minimum requirement. I feel like I could bring up maybe another argument that branches from a different one, but I'm afraid of it becoming irrelevant. I am going to the writing center tomorrow so I hope that they can help me out on that one. As for you at home, here's a sentence from my paper that possibly could be confusing:

The fact that such a logical person like Spock, who prides himself on his ability to think logically and use reasoning to conclude the best decision, can still fight his blood fever and try to do the right thing, is something that should be considered when dealing with humans.

This sentence sounds alright to me, but then again I wrote it in the midst of my paper and to someone else it could sound confusing. Let me know what you think of it and how (if needed) I could re-word it.