Tis’ the Season
In Columbia South Carolina a mother had her 12 year-old son arrested for for allegedly rummaging through his Christmas presents early………..Are you kidding me? The mother called the police Sunday morning after finding out that her son had snooped through his great-grandmothers gifts to play with a Game Boy. He was arrested on petty larceny charges, taken to the police station in handcuffs and held until his mother picked him up after church. The mother stated “It was only to teach my son a lesson. He’s been going through life doing things … and getting away with it.” The boy seems to have been diagnosed with ADHD and his mother believes the medicine is not working. The boy was aslo suspended from school for punching a police officer. The boys case will be sent to the Department of Juvenile Justice, who will decide what happens to him. His mother hopes he can attend a program that will finally scare him straight…….Something is wrong with this picture. A mother who sends her 12 year old son to jail for opening a gift early really needs to revaluate her parenting skills. Poor kid…..hope you enjoy your Christmas in jail.
3 comments December 6, 2006 meggieann
“Indulge a little”
Hunger as Ideology by Susan Bordo was an interesting piece. Quite ironic that I had just wrote about Nicole Richie a few days ago. Susan writes about eating disorders and distorted body images. In society women are encouraged to indulge in small amounts to demostrate a lack of all desire even about the basic need to eat. Media plays an important role in women’s lives. Women aspire to be in a state- a state beyond appetite, beyond desire. Commercials, posters, ad’s, you name it there is a skinny girl wearing next to nothing looking gorgeous. One line i found really interesting and very ironic was “Almost all of us who can afford to be eating well are dieting- and hungry almost all of the time.” As a female it is hard to keep that perfect figure every girl wants. I want to be able to fit into those size 2′s but at the same time i want that piece of pizza. However, in society we have to choose one or the other. This piece of work also explained that food and love fall hand in hand. In some ways i can see how this statement may be true. Women are “the cooks of the household” and “have dinner on the table when the husband arrives home”. Honestly thats bull……..i do not cook, and if i do i burn it. My boyfriend knows this, and is fine with me not cooking. But at the same time he has never made the effort to try to cook for me. A line that fits this example is “Cooking for a woman does not mean that she won’t respect you in the morning. She will still recognize your authority to fix her bike.” Women do sometimes use food to satisfy emotional needs. Of course you hear the stereotypical statement of a woman eating ice cream because shes sad. But food and sex…..i dont know if these two go together. I mean food during sex…..maybe? Food that makes you want sex….i have heard of. The best line during this passage was “To eat it (ice cream) in a business suit is like having ‘quickie’ sex in the office, irregular and naughty.” I think ice cream is the last thing that comes to my mind when i think of irregular and naughty. But society has to get off this kick off slimming down to nothing. People need some meat on their bones especially Nicole Richie. Maybe if the media can make food sexy people will start to eat more?……time will tell.
2 comments November 7, 2006 meggieann
Shopping or Rehab?
Nicole Richie seemed to have the same thought. Richie recently checked herself into the Beau Monde, a swank $80,000-a-month treatment center in Newport Beach, Calif. The reason for checking herself in was for a suspected eating disorder…..no way!!! Not Nicole Richie. But once again Richie didn’t seem to fail us……72 hours later she checked herself OUT of rehab because she well wanted to go shopping. And we once again run into Lindsey Lohan and Richie partying it up the same night. This society is so wrapped up in materialistic things and looks. I just hope little girls are not looking up to some of these figures in hollywood. Yes i can imagine some girls would like to be a couple pounds slimmer……but that is not hot. Where is she, theres nothing to her. Everyone has issues with their bodies and their lives but get help. To Richie i guess shopping is more important than her own life.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15066221/
7 comments November 3, 2006 meggieann
Your trusty old local bar….
Who would have thought that someone would write a story/essay on discussions in bars. First off i think this women Julie is a little out of her mind. Who would bartend to listen to what people converse about. Half the time they get drinks in them and not make sense anyways. But throughout the story she made it very clear that the middle-class or “blue-collar” people really do have a say and really do care about their country. Jack one of the overly voiceturious regulars made that clear towards the end of the story. Ranting and raving about Ross Perot, and his political antics. A line from the story which pratically sums up the whole thing is “It is a way of establishing and maintaining a connection to the people in one’s community and reaffirming that one shares the values and ways of thinking of that community.” The Smokehouse Inn was a restaurant-lounge in a suburban middle class part of Chicago. I thought one line in particular was interesting, “Historians have documented the important role taverns have played in the culutral life and social organization of working-class communities in Chicago.” Julie’s routine was to serve the blue-collar men and listen to their thoughts while holding her thoughts back. Jack was the powerful regular who was not afraid to speak his mind. “When Jack speaks, he commands an audience.” Jack seemed so powerful because he wouldn’t allow anyone else to talk. He never explained himself and never elaborated. Simply just said “no you don’t understand my point.” Maybe it was the beers that got to Jack and thats why he couldnt explain himself. Who knows?……But i guess now when you dont do your homework assignment you can say you went to the bar and had a intellictual conversation instead…Never know it may just work…
4 comments November 1, 2006 meggieann
Crazy cures…do they really work?
Crazy Cures that work…..Johanna Brandt, she discovered a cure for cancer roughly 80 years ago while living in South Africa. The remedy: grapes. Bunches of them. In fact, all you can eat, because, well, grapes are all you can eat for 1 to 2 weeks, if you follow the plan outlined in Brandt’s 1928 book The Grape Cure. Proof? She claims to have conquered her stomach cancer with the power of purple.
Sounds a little crazy…..but some of these crazy remedies may truely work. They seem to think that they have even treated certain tumors in mice. Some other remedies are when you have a back pain to plug in your headphones and if you have bad breath screw in a lightbulb. Who knows they may work?
4 comments October 26, 2006 meggieann
Richard Rodriguez
This passage was really interesting. Very ironic, which i believe Richard was trying to show us. Richard was the son on Mexican immigrants and also had a brother and a sister. Richard and his siblings attended Catholic schooling when they were younger. Richard and his family were bilingual speaking both Spanish and English. However, Richard was very eager to succed in school and english. Richard had more barriors than just language, his family was one. The story took us through the early years of Richards life in Catholic schools, you could see Richards devotion to school. “I devoted myself to my studies. I became bookish, puzzling to all my family. Ambition set me apart.” His family was confused about his infatuation with school. His siblings and parents would crack jokes and make Richard feel isolated from the rest. His parents always encouraged Richard but were very upset over the fact Richard was losing his spanish heritage and maybe even his family. Richard had mentioned being a scholarship boy. It was interesting the way he described himself as being a scholarship boy. “Scholarship boy: good student, troubled son.” Richard found himself intending to try to hurt his mother and father, by showing them that he was educated and was very fluent in english. “I remembered too well that education had changed my family’s life.” Richard makes some good points in this passage allowing us to see the relationship with his family. Richard’s parents seemed to be proud of him, but he was never proud of his parents. He was embarrassed at the lack of his parents education. Throughout story Richard seemed to grow and tried to balance education and his family.
2 comments October 25, 2006 meggieann
America’s population reaches 300,000,000
America’s population tops 300,000,000 Tuesday morning
At approximately 6:46a.m. Tuesday, Americal reached a milestone. Someone unkowingly moved into history as the 300 millionth American. In 1915, the United States population hit 100 million. More and more the population keeps exceding to new heights. According to the U.S. Census Burear, the population grows by one American every 11 seconds. Can you honestly imagine that? Although the number is just an educated guess its still unbelievable to think. The Census Burear doesn’t keep track of every single person who is born or every single person who crosses the boarder, but its still amazing to think that there really could be 300 million people living in the United States.
4 comments October 18, 2006 meggieann
Love Letters
This was a great story abodut Megan Foss. Her trimuph from being a heroin-addicated who prostituted herslef to a honest, and real writer/teacher. I liked the line that said “Foss refuses to leave behind the contexts that have made her”. She is true, and thats what makes a reading more interesting. She found writing to be theraphy. “And as long as I kept writing them I could pretend he was still here”. That was a powerful sentence but was so true. Sometimes people keep telling themselves something in hopes it will eventually come true. When Mickey (Megan) was in jail she was taking two classes: art and english. She became interested in English, but even more so when she heard her time would be cut in jail for attending. She then goes on to talk about her relationship with Darryl and his visit. He came to visit the second month she was in there, at this point she had understood the how to con people with words. Once she got out of jail she wrote a letter that attempted to envision a future without Darryl and all the things he had represented in the past. One line that somewhat wrapped up the whole story/excerpt was “Writing that story helped me to bury the past until it was safe to resurrect it.” She learned early on that people are judged by their use of language- you could define people as trailer-park trash or country club people. Mickey/Megan stated that she missed her language, however, she has learned to incoporate her language into her writings to show her feel of the writing. I really enjoyed reading this passage.
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2 comments October 4, 2006 meggieann
News Article
Most of you don not know but i work at a local restaurants in my hometown. All i have heard in the past two weeks is ” Are you using any spinach in your meals?” This seems to be an ongoing problem with grocery stores and restaurants. I began to read E. Coli and Spinach: On the Trail of an Outbreak to somewhat answer some of my questions.I had never really thought about how much money grocery stores and restaurants lost. The problem dealing with spinach is the potential breakout of E.coli. Another problem is scientists don’t know exactly where the outbreak occured. They seem to believe it was somewheres in California. Hopefully, scientists can find the outbreak soon so restaurants and people can begin to stop worrying.
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7 comments September 19, 2006 meggieann
Blog Assignment # 3…….(hopefully)
In my Child Development class today we spoke about families physically being able to pick out the gender of their babies. Scientists have found a way to take seperate eggs and sperm to develop the baby’s sex. Scientists take a fluorescent dye to determine the male or female DNA. Then the ethical question comes to play, whether it is right or wrong.
http://www.stnews.org/News-2908.htm
Picking pink or blue
Techniques for sex selection offer options for balancing families but raise ethical issues
By John A. Robertson
(July 17, 2006)
LOOKING FOR THE RIGHT GENDER: Science can help parents pick their baby’s gender, but it can’t answer if that’s ethically right or wrong.
(Source: Clara Natoli/Morguefile)
Developments
in assisted reproduction and genetic screening have led some people to
speculate that we are on the verge of routinely choosing the traits of
our children before they are born. This is highly unlikely.
Most nonmedical traits are genetically complex and influenced by
environmental and developmental factors. Because of that, the option of
picking children in advance for their intelligence, height, beauty or
other characteristics may not be possible for many years — if it ever
is.
The one exception is selection of a baby’s sex. Sex selection by
infanticide or abortion of females has occurred in India and China for
many years, leading to much higher birth rates for males than females.
Only recently have less harsh methods of choosing a baby’s sex become
available — a development that could greatly expand the demand for
these types of techniques.
One technique is to sort out the X- and Y-bearing sperm by flow
cytometry. A sperm sample is labeled with fluorescent dye that adheres
to chromosomal DNA. A laser beam separates the heavier X-bearing, or
female, sperm from the lighter Y-bearing, or male, sperm, allowing the
sperm to be sorted into one group for male babies and another for
female babies. The prospective mother is then inseminated with
whichever sperm is likely to combine with the X of the egg to form
either a girl or a boy.
A second technique — called preimplantation genetic diagnosis or PGD
— has a high accuracy rate for males or females but requires a cycle of
in vitro fertilization to produce several embryos needed in the
process. In PGD, a cell is removed from the four- or eight-cell stage
of an embryo, and its chromosomes are analyzed to determine whether it
is an XX or XY embryo. One or more embryos of the desired sex are then
placed in the uterus.
As expected, preconception or preimplantation sex selection raises
ethical hackles. Most opponents of sex selection accept its use for
medical indications — for example, to prevent the birth of a child with
X-linked diseases. But they draw the line at using the technique for
nonmedical reasons. A main concern is that it is sexist and will
reinforce the oppression of women. Another is that it will undermine
the welfare of children by forcing them into rigidly conceived sex
roles. A much larger population of males could also lead to major
social problems.
The easy fix is to allow parents to use sperm and embryo screening
for nonmedical reasons only when they already have children and they
want a child of the opposite sex to create gender variety or balance in
the family. Creating gender variety or balance in a family can be
important because it offers a different experience for parents and
siblings without elevating the worth of one sex over the other.
What should public policy be on this issue?
There should not be legal constraints on people who want to use
either sperm separation or PGD to vary the gender of children in their
families. Although Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and other
countries ban the practice, imposing restrictions would raise serious
questions of constitutionality in the United States. Reproductive
rights are not limited to the decision of whether or not to have a
child and could extend to some control over offspring genes.
Medical professionals should be free to offer these techniques when
they are shown to be safe and effective. Practices should also be put
in place to ensure that parents are informed of the risks and benefits
of particular procedures and counseled about the need for children of
the chosen sex to develop as individuals.
John A. Robertson holds the Vinson & Elkins Chair in Law at the University of Texas Law School in Austin, Texas.
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3 comments September 14, 2006 meggieann
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