Celebrities doing the Punking??

Tonite while channel surfing it said "Pop Piction" premiere on E! and i had never heard of the show so i decided to watch and i had rememeber in all the comercials they had been very descrete with giving the plot of the show away and so i wanted to know what it was about. Well now i know and its about celebrities turning the table on the medias outrageous rumors and the over-aggressive paparazzi and how celebrities play tricks on these people to see how gullable they are.

So when i started watching it was Paris Hilton and this guy dressed like a "guru" who was actually just some plain biker from San Francisco and she took him out shopping to a boutique and a bookstore and then to dinner and it was so funny how at the end of the night 20 paparazzi must've been around her and scoping out what this guys intentions were, and then the next day it was all over internet blogs, T.V. and magazines and what was funny is that while reading People last week i stumbled upon one of these pictures and it said Paris's new enlightener and i felt kinda stupid now for believeing it but how clever of what a huge reaction this was.

Then the next one was Avril Lavigne and her husband her husband have been rumored lately to be pregnant so finally once they were fed up; they decided to get in on the show too so Avril put on a fake baby-bump and her and her husband and their two friends and body guard went out shoping on Robertson Ave. which is where The Ivy is in hollywood and alot of other celebrity boutiques so they walked aorund shopping and all these paparazzi just sourrounded them right away and they went into this little childrens store and she was looking at cute mini-converse and boys clothes and they came out with a big and then of cource the next day again the headlines were all saying like Avril's Expecting a Skater Boy and just all these crazy ideas that they went on a shopping spree for baby clothes and everything and the clerk at the store said they just kept laughing and avril was just gowign and couldnt stop talking about the arrival of the baby. And it was just really funny how it was blown out of context when that was not what happnend. So props to E! for a good inovative show!

That number is tax?!

When talking with my mom today I learned that in Chicago the sales tax is going to go up to 10% from the pervious 8.75% and this just seems outreageous to me. Also that Chicago has the highest sales tax of any other large city in America! Paying 10% sales tax seems so high to me and i'm not even a full consumer of products. But just think if someone were to buy a $35,000 car just the tax on that would be $3,500!! I can't believe sales tax can be so high when other cities like Las Vegas don't have any sales tax at all. Just think as a kid i used to save up $3.00 to ride my bike to Walgreens and buy candy. And now if i kid were to do that and buy 3 candy bars at 99C the total would come to $3.30 not even a quarter could cover tax. Now i know i sound like a grandparent complaining about "these days" and it doesn't seem like that much but in the long one just one american is spending thousands of dollars a year on sales tax and for chicgago to have the highest sales tax today seems like a big con to living around here.

Abortion a thing of the Past?

On the travel channel there is a show called Living With the Tribes and it follows the Namal tribe who live on Tanna Island - a small island that is part of the Vanuatu Islands in the Pacific Ocean. These african people know of our modern would but like and feel stable with there practices from over a thousand years ago. Yet on the only episode i watched they were building a new canoe to go out in the ocean and fish and all the men in the tribe go and its a big deal but one man couldn't go because his wife was pregnant again with what would be their fourth child and they literally could not take care of this one child that they were about to have so the man went out deep into the jungle and cut down branches and squeezed this red juice out of its almost instinct bark and it would make the baby die and it was an old old method but to see that even a thousand years ago this tribe had a way for abortion and people still do that there and this couple had to keep it secret from the tribe because it was seen as bad luck to cut down these distinctive branches that grow in the forest. So it was interesting to me to see how it connects to our time and how if you get an abortion its all hush-hush but that a thousand years ago there was a way to get rid of a baby and it actually worked. SO i thought this realted to our class discussion recently on abortion and the media and just interesting of different contraceptive methods.

P.S. another american film where abortion is present is Dirty Dancing and when you think about it the film is almost centered around this girls need for an abortion.

And Best Director Goes to...

When watching the Oscar's tonite before they start the dragged on process of the award giving for each category before they go into a large process of seeing a movie with past works and past award winners. And during the Best Director one i could not see one female winnging ever. And as seen here the BEst Director Oscar has never gone to a woman. This ties back to our theme Woman and Children and i believe that this awards is second to last which gives it one of the most substantial positions and rank but then why has a woman never once in all 80 years of the Oscars never won and this raises the question if woman are alot more powerful in todays society can they still get any farther or for that matter are some things never going to change? Just liek the Agustun Golf Cource political cartoon that was brought up in presentations on thursday.

Age Limit for Kids in School

Something that I have been torn about since our childhood survey last week was the issue on what age kids should be allowed to legally quit school. And some people were saying 18 years old and some people were saying 12 years old and to be honest i almost agree with Joe's response of saying 12 years old because the less kids that are in school the more the kids who are in school will thrive. I mean think about it, if all kids were able to quit school when they were 12 first of all i believe that the majority of parents would have them stay in school but for the ones who did quit i would feel like i had so much more of a fighitng chance to be succesful. For example if there were less kids in a class we could get more attention on us and how we are progressing and there would be less competition for college and who is getting in and also later on in the job market if someone see's that you have a college degree or even a high school diploma you would be taken for that job over the kids who did quit school. So really i think the class was being kind of naiive when saying that kids should stay in school when even though if it is selfish i would let everyone drop out because i know my parents would make me stay in school and evidently i would in some ways be more succesful in life.

I know that i did neglect to think about if all these kids werean't in school would our crime rate go up or would college be even more expensive and all the cons of having kids drop out so i guess i will never find out if it would be a good thing or bad thing.

Are Pennies Needed???

Tonite when i was watching a little bit of "60 Minutes" there was a special with a biochemist at MIT and he has been fighting for getting rid of the penny and that 2 and 1/2 seconds are averagly wasted duirng american transactions becuse of pennies being handled. And on average EVERY person in america wastes on average $41 worth of pennies per year searching for pennies and putting them in a cup and with all the population we as america waste about 10 billion dollars a year on wasted time with pennies. And i would just like to know how everyone really feels about this and if we should get rid of the penny. I personally think its bogus and we would lose more money as an economy because of all the american jobs lost from people who made pennies and that getting rid of pennies just seems kind of ridiculous and i would like to know some of the long term affects on currency and just the price of things without the penny would be cheaper or more expensive.

Disney Tokenism...

During the SuperBowl while watching some Disney Channel with my little cousins i saw an add for Snow Buddies a new movie about a bunch of golden retriever puppies making a snow sled and racing it in Alaska and this is a sequel off of Air Buddies which is the same concept but the puppies play basketball and one of the charecters is called "B-Dawg" and he wears a "bling" chain around his kneck and has sunglasses. And i think that this obviously is making a charecter to be parralel with the omni-presenet "ghetto" society in our culture today. And i think this kind of parralels to the N word we have been discussing with Huckleberry fin and when i went on the website you can read each charecters profile and the terms used i think are really kind of crude and mocking and i think this gives kids a connotation of wanting to seem gangsta today which could lead them to bad things in their future and i believe it also gives kind of a secret message to the fact that it almost adds to an ongoing stero-type which i believe sumbitting this to a target audience of young impressionable kids is a really bad thing. For Example in B-Dawgs profile it lists his likes as "Basketball, bling, and rap" and in his snow buddies profile it says "B-Dawg is a hip-hop home pup, don't let it go around or it could ruin his street cred! and Yo, thats whats crack-a-lackin! (which apparently is his key phrase) BUt i just think this gives bad credit to black people in general when there being sterotyped as being only gangsta.

i tried to put the links in to these profiles

http://adisney.go.com/disneyvideos/animatedfilms/airbuddies/index.html (Air Buddies)

http://adisney.go.com/disneyvideos/liveaction/snowbuddies/ (Snow Buddies)