Have you seen it yet? New Spice: Study like a scholar, scholar

Coolest thing I have seen in a long time... All the stunts are real-time and in-camera, the crew are all students, the actors are all students. And it's all awesome.

Intelligent humor. Clean humor. Real skill and real people. Why don't more advertising companies realize that THIS is what makes a good flick?

Yeah, I'm a little biased because my fiance is on the crew and did the sound design, and I recruited extras and helped out on set.... but I think the bias is well-placed :D

If you haven't heard of it yet, look down, look up, and open your eyes to one of the funniest commercials ever made.

New Spice: Study like a scholar, scholar.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ArIj236UHs

And the companion video of Behind-the-scenes footage and Making-of:
http://newspicepromo.blogspot.com/

So much fun :)

Total props to Keira Knightley!!

I am thoroughly impressed with Keira Knightly's refusal to have her body image digitally enhanced!! THANK YOU and may I say "Finally"?? Props to her for being proud of her body the way it is, for not giving into pressure to be sexy and 'perfect', and I hope this starts a new trend of acceptance for girls and women everywhere.

I'm tired of being told by the media that our bodies, and hence ourselves, are never good enough because we're not airbrushed in real life. I'm tired of looking at twigs on magazine covers. Please just let us be healthy and happy! Life is hard enough as it is without being told girls have to look and act like sex objects to be accepted.

Thank you Keira Knightley!



I do have to say that I'm getting annoyed with the obsession Hollywood has with being perfect. Even as glamourous and Knightley is by herself, she still isn't "good enough" to stand on her own on her movie cover. Sure, I'm an artist and I understand about colour and sharpness, contrast and all that good jazz, but look at what they're doing-- they totally gave her a tummy tuck, changed her facial features to look more voluptuous, increased her bust from a size A to a size C, and beautified her hair. (Though I have to laugh, and I would probably do this too if I were an advertising designer, but they also took out the shadow underneath her armpit to avoid making it look like she hadn't shaved. That I find funny :) .)

I wish Hollywood would quit selling sex and start worrying about genius in their films instead. I cannot count the number of times I've left a movie feeling disgusted at the lack of imagination, and their total dependence on using sex allure as a crutch. Get a life, Hollywood, and quit telling us how to glamourously live ours.

FW: Zany lip syncing and plain all-around goofiness

Heh. My floor is doing a talent show this week, which is a little bit of a misnomer since it's less talent than how much you can make our floor laugh. My apartment decided we were going to imitate Meg from 'Hercules' in her love angst (which is ironic since at one time half of our apartment was dating other guys on our same floor and were all in denial). It's complete with the muses, bad singing, ugly hairstyles, even worse makeup and horrendous togas.

I love making fun of ourselves... we're going to have my roomie's boyfriend come on stage randomly, in regular street clothes and flirt with the muses. That doesn't sound too funny in and of itself, but I think we'll get a good response because he's notorious for shamelessly flirting with girls with his girlfriend standing right there (most commonly with the other roommates...) We're basically going to make it as random and obnoxious as possible. Should be amusing.

Technical Analysis

Race and Culture: I'm hoping my professor remembered that she said I could write on Deaf culture... I'm not terribly interested in racial profiling or affirmative action, (to be honest, I hate politics with a passion) but I am interested in deaf culture. So.

Culture and oppression: Ooh, I'd like to do a paper on Oralist oppression on Sign language and deaf culture. That, apart from anything, bugs me to no end that hearing people think they know best when the deaf keep trying to tell them it's not working.

Components of oppression:

* Attack on language itself:
France outlawed it until very recently-- like the mid 1900's
Teachers slapping their student's hands
Teachers physically tying student's hands so they can't move them
AGB influencing councils to ban sign language
British making the alphabet 2-handed to slow it down
SEE sign: Hearing invention based on a language of puns
Oralists refusing to teach kids sign because it's the "easy way out"


* Attack on culture:
More subtle:
Stigma of signing being "dirty" or "low" (both U.S. and France)
Phrase "deaf and dumb" widely used, though actual deafness does not affect brain function
Oralists insisting that the deaf should be treated like everyone else, and should blend in, despite the biological difference: deafness a social disease


* Political attacks:
Deaf man jailed until he could find his own interpreter
Judge yelling at the deaf man (see D-PAN video... actually, look up their slideshow.)
Account of police shooting a deaf man standing in his front yard with a shovel
DPN: school board passed up (3?) very qualified deaf candidates in favor of a hearing one.
Businesses and organizations' refusal to pay for interpreters


--probably can't use the experiments people used to do on deaf kids... something they were trying to cure, but not usually outright oppression. (Still, they ended up killing a bunch of little deaf kids or making them worse.)

FW: The Crazy Gene

So, I've officially decided my family is crazy. In a good, highly amusing way, but I think it's genetic. I just spent much of the night with my family at my aunt and uncle's house with my grandpa... we're so funny. We spent dinner making wisecracks and puns, joking about French and American culture (my uncle is full-blooded French, so it's totally legal), and scarfing mints and brownies in weird ways, after making faces out of the food.

We then proceeded to playing a card game called "Crazy Louie", where you make bets about how many tricks you can trump that round. The game was replete with sounds of "ohh-ing" and "doh-ing", and making loud obnoxious noises when someone got too cocky and bid a lot more than they actually got. The end round of Crazy Louis consists of passing just one card to each player, then betting whether or not you have the highest trump card... the catch is that you can't look at your card, but have to hold it on your forehead while the other players look at you and gauge if your card would possibly be higher than theirs. It looks absolutely ridiculous; therefore, perfect for my family. We polished off the night with a slideshow of my family's trip to St. George, and couldn't stop laughing as every single picture had something bizarre about it. We've decided that we should make a calendar, with the full 365 days, of the weird faces my little sister makes, because she probably has at least that many different goof faces, if not more. We have pictures of how contorted we can make our hands look, how long our tongues are (it seems to be genetic) and how wide my mom's side of the family can spread our toes.

We're so weird. I love it.

Rhet Analysis of Race

I was thinking about the different arguments that go along with rhetoric, primarily ethos-- and how it connects to the concept of race. I gave a presentation yesterday to my class on race itself, and came across a thought or two:

*Ethos and race: Race can either give you instant credibility or instant rejection. Ie. if a professor who teaches the German language gets up in front of class and was actually born and raised in Germany, that right there will give a certain amount of credibility to their name, even if their parents only spoke English and they went to an all-English school. If a hearing teacher gets up in front of a sign language class, they've already lost credibility with the Deaf community because they are not Deaf. Granted, they may have been a CODA or have a deaf spouse, but until those details are discovered, people will act based on their assumptions. (I know the Deaf are not usually recognized as a "race", but culturally, it has the same implications, and they're their own minority.)

*People will give more credibility to a news broadcast saying it's searching for "an islamic militant" with a picture of a guy with a black beard and native dress than a picture of a very white american in a button-up shirt with scholarly-looking glasses.

*People will give more credibility to leaders who are like them, or at least fit in the group; ie. a black leader would hold more sway in a black-rights movement gathering than a Chinese man.

It's funny how we put so much stock in appearances, and ignore the finer details... People are very funny creatures.

Fwee Wite

...Oy. My 2nd english paper. After my teacher explained to us that low grades are really not a bad thing, (sounds weird, I know, but you had to hear her entire spiel. Makes sense through speech,) I feel better about it, but I was at least hoping to have improved, if at least slightly, with my second paper. What's buggy is that I arranged my paper, took my time with it, sorted out all my arguments, wrote for my audience, and felt so good about it, and then I find out it's just as "bad" as the first paper I wrote that I had hurriedly put together because I still didn't know what I was doing. Add to that the fact that I got my paper back on one of the worst mornings of the week where I was already spazzing and stressed, and I was not a happy camper.

I admit, seeing a big blue C+ on my paper was not terribly encouraging, and I still have that perfectionist's complex that I grew up with. (The one I learned from coming home with a report card with all A's, and one A-, and getting asked, "Why wasn't this an A?") I worry doubly about it because I'm trying to keep this scholarship I worked so freakishly hard to get, and waited for for so long, and an overall low grade in my classes would kill me. I'm putting myself through school, and though I don't mind working, it's way stressful. I went broke one semester, and it scared me. ('course, that was paying for two schools' tuition and books, traveling between them and cost of living and all that jazz...) I'm also taking a rather uninteresting theory class that I'm not particularly fond of that I hope won't turn out badly, because it would do the same sort of damage.
/end vent.

Okay. I write that not for any "oh, you poor thing" sympathy, but kinda to get it out of my head, and to tell myself that it's not the end of the world if I get a C+ on one paper (well, two now, but, spppt.) I know why it makes me nervous, and that means I can address it and not send myself into a conniption. [Because conniptions are bad.]