Written around December 2001
Introduction
The Vietnam War is the longest military conflict that the United States has participated in. It cost the US $150 billion and 58,000 American lives and estimates on North Vietnamese losses range up to a million[1]. The Republic of Vietnam lies entirely within the Tropics. Saigon is halfway around the world from Washington, D.C. and there is a 12-hour difference in time between the two cities. The nearest off-shore U.S. hospital is almost 1,000 miles away at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, The nearest logistical support base is about 1,800 miles away in Okinawa. The nearest complete hospital center is in Japan, some 2,700 miles distant. Patients being evacuated to the United States must travel, some 7,800 miles to reach Travis Air Force Base in California, or almost 9,000 miles to reach Andrews Air Force Base, near Washington, D.C[2]. When considering the nature of the Vietnam War, it is surprising that there were not many more fatalities on the American side. With staggering casualty rates, but high survival rates, one can begin to understand the success of the medical operations in during the war. During the 18 years of conflict the medical units of the army, navy and air force continued to provide exceptional care under extremely difficult circumstances. (more…)
Written around March 2001
Edgar Alan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” is a confession by a man called Montresor to a murder that he committed fifty years previously, in an un-named European city. In the confession, Montresor explains how he killed his “friend” (192), Fortunato, over a “thousand injuries” (191) and a final unspecified insult.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines dramatic irony as ”the effect achieved by leading an audience to understand an incongruity between a situation and the accompanying speeches, while the characters in the play remain unaware of the incongruity.” Poe employs this kind of irony to emphasize his character’s carefully thought-out plan to maximize the pain of his friend’s demise. He uses ironic layers of perception to lead the reader though Fortunato’s final realization of how a double layer of possible interpretation of meaning underlies the events that take place over the period leading up to his death. (more…)
So not that I don’t have enough to do already, I’ve started another blog called MyMasks.org – it’s basically a place for me to write a little more narrowly on something that I find interesting and that maybe one day can be useful to other folks out there who are interested in masks or collecting masks. I don’t plan to sell anything or start anything amazing… and I think that 90% of people will find it absolutly useless and dull… but, if you like masks, it might be fun.
Written around March 2001
Existentialism is “a philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe, regards human existence as unexplainable, and stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one’s acts.” It was a philosophy that was followed by great writers like Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and T.S Eliot, and which is seen extensively in the work of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway’s beliefs concerning existentialism are the driving force behind his short story, ”A Clean Well Lighted Place”. The story centers on issues such as depression, loneliness, aging and despair, but all are set around the theme of existentialism. (more…)
We came up with a new scale for how good or bad anything is. English has words like “fantastic”, “great”, “poor”, “awful” etc. Now these are all fine and good, but there is still not enough of a set subtly that would be widely understood. So this is our new scale. Number one is perfect and number 10 is as bad as something could possibly be.
- Seven Samurai (simply perfect)
- Pulp Fiction (game changing, brilliant)
- The Last Crusade (really good, entertaining, feel-good)
- Rocky (Good, will see anytime I’m sick)
- Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (pretty fair, like it, not really good, but you can’t not like it)
- Office Space (you want to like it, but you can’t, a lot of people say it’s good, but you know it’s really not)
- Anaconda (good-bad, but you still like it because it’s bad)
- The Transporter (Simply terrible. There is no way you would watch this again sober)
- Plan 9 from Outer Space (So bad that it’s almost good again, but you know that it’s not)
- Manos hands of fate (Nothing could be worse without involving testicles and razor blades)
Now this may look like it would be difficult to work into conversation, but it really works quite well after you’ve gotten it down. You can actually FEEL the difference between the films. For example:
“How’re you feeling man?”
“Well I just ate a burrito from that Transporter looking place down the road, and it was totally much more Rocky than the Office Space I was expecting – taste wise that is… because now my stomach is feeling a little Anaconda-ish”
“Dude… you should of had some of my Pulp Fiction Publix sub!”
Easy right?
Terribly written in February of 2001
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, portrays the life of a young woman who is suffering from a “temporary nervous depression” (Gilman 153) with “a slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman 153). Trapped in a “colonial mansion” (Gilman 152) by her physician husband, who believes that the house will be therapeutic, her mental state begins to deteriorate to the point of hallucinations and chronic paranoid delusions. Her grip on reality seems to be made worse though the story by her husband and his parental-like treatment of her. If we use modern psychological diagnostic techniques to asses the young lady’s situation, we can get a much better idea of what is ailing her than a “temporary nervous depression”. Appling these techniques gives a picture of someone suffering from a personality disorder, “a continuing pattern of perceiving and relating to the world that is maladaptive across a variety of contexts and results in a notable impairment or distress” (Kendall and Hammen 407). (more…)
