The Final Exam is TOMORROW (cue the ominous music)

Like I said last time, I already had two finals last week.  They weren't too bad, and only one (political science) had any essay questions.  I answered the one about systems and chose fascism to discuss, because I really remembered the class we spent on it.  The interesting thing about the English exam is that it's on two different days; we're doing the essay question tomorrow, and our study guide actually gave us the entire question that will be on the test.

The last unit of the course was on writing exam essays, so giving us the question made sense, but I'm thinking now that it was kind of diabolical, too.  All weekend long I was obsessing about it.  According to the prof, the verb in the question is the key to answering it, and the verb in our question is "analyze," which, as it turns out, is the most difficult one.  Actually, what we're going to do is sort of a mini version of a critical analysis.  She gave us a three-page handout by Bruno Bettelheim about what fairy tales do in terms of childhood development and showed us a couple of fairy tales on video.  We also read the Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella, which was a real surprise -- no fairy godmother, three balls, and her father is STILL ALIVE through the whole thing.  That was the thing that convinced me that Bettelheim was right when he said that it's a story about sibling rivalry.  The father goes along with whatever the stepmother and stepsisters choose to do to Cinderella.

The problem I'm having here, though, isn't with Cinderella, since that's not the story being used for the exam.  I never even heard of the story on the test.  It's The Three Ravens, and it's about a princess who swears not to speak for three years, three months, and three days in order to break the spell her evil stepmother put on her brothers (she turned them into ravens).  A lot of things happen during the three years that test her ability to keep to her vow, but she doesn't give up and eventually breaks the spell (just as she's about to be burned at the stake for being a witch!).  I can't make up my mind about what to do with this story, but I'll have to decide before noon tomorrow.

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Overcoming Finals Week Frenzy . . . by thinking about grammar?

Teenbeat Club, Las Vegas Nevada,
Concert Promotion Flyer
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I'll bet you're thinking that I didn't make my full quota of postings, and you'd be right if it weren't for Dr. Toffee.  I asked her if I could add the last four I was missing on the due date, and she said it was okay as long as I got them in by this Thursday, when we are finishing our final exam.  My problem was that two of my classes had both final exams and projects due last week (why they did this, I don't know), so I got behind.  This week I only have my English final, which is working out great for me.  Anyway, before last week I took some time to read a few things, including The Paris Lawyer by Sylvie Granotier.  My reaction doesn't have much to do with the plot, characters, or even the setting.  It's about grammar (I know-- I never thought I would react to grammar, of all things).

I don't know how other people feel about this, but I absolutely loathe fiction that is written in the present tense (for example, "Catherine can see a stand of trees behind the house").  I can't forget that I am reading and just lose myself in the story.  It feels to me as if I'm hearing somebody discuss the story rather than telling it, and this is even more true now, after writing my critical analysis paper where we had to use what Toffee calls "the literary present tense."  So, this was my problem with Granotier's book.  It seemed like a critique of what I would call a real novel.  All the way through I was debating whether or not I should give up on it, which doesn't make for a fun experience.

Strangely enough, the present-tense thing did not bother me much with The Hunger Games, once I started reading it.  It was kind of obvious that Collins was using it because Katniss is the narrator and that meant that telling it in the past tense would eliminate any suspense about whether or not she survives in the end, but I'm not so sure that it would have mattered to most of the people reading it if the book had been in the past tense.

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Say It Ain't So! Not Tom Cruise as Reacher!

Lee Child interview #04 (Photo credit: Fenris Oswin)

When I was in high school, one of my teachers mentioned Lee Child's Jack Reacher books during a class (I forget what he was actually talking about), and he did such a sales job that I went to the library and picked one up.  I was immediately hooked and read all of them over the next couple of months.  All of the covers say that the screen rights of all of the books have been sold, and I've been wondering how they could make a movie of any of them, since so much of them is what goes on in Reacher's head (he doesn't talk much).  And, then too, who could they cast?  He describes himself as "a gorilla," and a lot of what he does is intimidating bad guys just by his appearance as a huge, homely/scary-looking, unsmiling man (who is strangely attractive to women).  I always pictured him as a way-oversized version of Daniel Craig.

So, you can see why I'm so disgusted by Tom Cruise in the role, right?  You have a character who's really big, doesn't smile, doesn't talk, is supremely logical and self-deprecating, AND YOU CAST "Tiny" TOM CRUISE?  A guy who has got to be the smuggest, talkiest, smiliest, most gullible, illogical actor ever -- and that's both in his public persona and his performances.  I can't stand it.  I'll stick to the books, and it looks like I'm not alone (see the articles below).  One more thought:  Nobody ever calls him Jack, just Reacher (even his own mother!).  So why did the filmmakers, instead of using the title of the book, go with Jack Reacher for the title of the film?  Did any of them read the books?

4 more to go (and, yeah, I'm reading the assigned stuff.  It just isn't doing anything for me that I want to write about.  I checked with the prof, and it's okay.  So there.).

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What's Epic About That?

A pizza hut. The building is in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. It is on the corner of Ely Street and High Street (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was just checking my AOL email, and there was one from Pizza Hut, offering "Two Epic Boxes."  Basically, they're just boxes of carbs (pizza, breadsticks, and cinnamon sticks:  that's a lotta dough).  So why do they say "epic"?  I watched some TV yesterday (the MAC Championship game between NIU and Kent State; my brother went to NIU, so I watch their games if I'm not doing anything else.  NIU won in double overtime-- which is kind of epic.  Go Huskies!), and it seemed like half the commercials used epic to describe something -- and the other half used "ridiculously."  I don't get it. 

I was switching between the game and a Lifetime movie, and the commercials during the movie used "decadent" a lot.  Didn't the Roman Empire fall because of decadence?  I seem to remember that from Early World History when I was a sophomore in high school.  So if decadence is bad, why pay money for it?  Use these three words in a sentence, and you might get:  "Try our decadent epic boxes o' carbs, and fill out your ridiculously scrawny figure."  Maybe it's just me, but I wonder what words we'll have to use to communicate epic, ridiculously, and decadent, when that's what we mean.

Can you tell that I'm just trying to get all thirty of my entries done for my blog project in Eng 101?  I need five more by midnight next Friday.

Related articles

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Would You Care for Some Cheese with Your Whine?

:- Fred (Photo credit: Rob Warde)

There's a guy in my comp class who sits across the aisle from me, and spends half his time whining about everything, from how hard the assignments are to how the shades are pulled down on the windows.  He has not taken any notes all semester.  I did a peer review for him a while back, and I was really, really, really shocked by what he thought was a good paper.  It stank on ice, as my uncle Gus would put it, and the guy -- I'll call him Fred -- was pretty pleased with his work.  I'm not sure Fred ever reads anything he doesn't absolutely have to.  For one thing, he's the Fragment King.  Most of his "sentences" are missing either a subject or a verb, or they're just phrases. 

So why am I writing about him today?  Yesterday he was whining about his grade (finals are in 2 weeks) and how Toffee expects too much work (totally ignoring the fact that the school requires us to write a certain number of words for the course), and how she thinks we're actually going to revise stuff, and nobody does that for real, right? and HE WOULDN'T SHUT UP. 

Toffee's up at the front of the room explaining how to write answers to essay questions on exams, and Fred is muttering to himself non-stop.  I finally turned to him and shushed him like an old lady in church.  You would've thought I slapped him.  And, it turned out that I just made it worse.  Now he was muttering AT ME.  He got this kind of wounded look on his face, and said, "like any of this matters."  Well, it matters to me, and I'm not just whining, I'm venting (the difference is obvious, isn't it?). 

I should have changed my seat at the first whine, back in August.

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