But more importantly

MacBeth

            I hate to be a critic, but the MacBeth performance wasn’t dramatically different from any other performance that I’ve seen. I honestly think the use of props would have helped people understand what’s going on. The reason Shakespeare didn’t have props is because a) they didn’t have money to buy props and b) it was extremely difficult to make anything in the 17^th century. I’m sure if he could he would. In fact, if he could produce a movie with an entire CGI company at his disposal, he would happily use it to its fullest.

            People should use props and environments while acting. Seriously. It’s an art form too.

            Also, I had idea what was going on for the entire time. I studied Hamlet and not MacBeth.

            It’s pretty funny how in the 17^th century, all actors were men. Now the majority of the actors are female. Shakespeare should have hired female actors because, statistically, he would have found more enthusiastic actors.

            I also wonder if the reason they had bamboo sticks in the performance were for artic measures or because swords and even fake swords are not allowed on campus, even for a logical reason.

            I found the black ninja-like attire very fitting. Some of the background actors wearing them obviously really enjoyed them too because some of them went above and beyond when having to make cool posses. They obviously were thinking, “damn, I’m like a ninja assassin; lemme show off to the audience.”

           

                        My brothers, J, BJ, and Stan say hello.

Appel and the EAP

Last Tuesday’s presentation by Mr. Appel was very interesting. Having done theater in high school (I was in the play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and the musical, “Bye Bye Birdie”), I could relate to much of what he said.  I also can make a well informed decision that I do not want to be involved in theater any more. From my experience, although there will be a few smart, congenial, and neat people, there will be an equally if not larger amount of people who will generally behave pretty odd.  The entire process of rehearsing, setting up, and performing a musical dramatic production in high school is fun out of context, but the long hours that you have to spend in dark, close quarters backstage with the odd people who say that they love all things music and dramatic but don’t play a single instrument or sing can VERY tedious.

On the other hand, college likely has filtered out those people and left only the intelligent, sociable, and able people within theater. Even so, I probably would not want to join because I spend all my hobby time recording rock n roll and synthesizing dance music. I definitely hope to see some of the performances during my stay here.

As far as travel abroad, I probably will want to try to go somewhere, but I likely won’t if I can’t get some sort of scholarship because out of state tuition is very expensive. It even cost around a thousand dollars to fly home and back. I just don’t want to know what Edozie’s fairs are to and from London.


  He we see George Bush shaking the hand of a Genghis Khan impersonator.


                        America.

Dr. Lubach and the Librarian

I thought Dr. Lubach’s presentation was pretty funny. I mean this because when he talked about getting relatives to stop pestering a student, the student should just say that they want to be an actuary because no one really knows what an actuary does. My girlfriend Jessica does exactly that, and when you ask her what an actuary does, she just says, “I don’t really know, you calculate risks.” Dr. Lubach said that too. Adding to that, we also were signed up for sailing.

            His story about DJ Milkman was pretty inspiring too. I’m not into disk jockeying that much as I am into actually producing music both recorded and electronic. I’m not sure as well if I want to include that into my education, but I definitely will do it for my entire life because I love it.

            Jessica and I also have a running joke about when you’re supposed to apply the “critical thinking” skills he mentioned as opposed to “comfortable thinking.”

            His story about how the scientific community used “comfortable thinking” to dismiss the man’s discovery about bee behavior and how they don’t actually dance to communicate was very interesting.

            I was surprised how similar the librarian’s speech was to the speech our high school librarian would give us each year. Both would show us very similar searching techniques and in fact both favored using the EBSCO search engine.

            However, the search engine for finding books in the UC system is far superior to anything that I’ve ever seen and I can’t wait to use it.

This is a picture I made in 9^th grade of a Dictator Patrick Star.

Week 4 on Plagiarism

            

          These two articles were very resourceful and can serve as a fallback reference for any questions I may have in the future. Thankfully, my English teachers in high school were very thorough in enforcing citing etiquette into tedium. I’ve been taught to put a reference to a source’s citation in parenthesis after anything containing information not from myself. I’m also familiar with the weaknesses, dangers, and possible lack of integrity in paraphrasing and especially in creating mosaics. Generally, I will cite my sources as I gather information from them. This way, no matter if I decide not to use a source or decide to use one late into a project, I will always have my laundry already done. I had previously put the author’s name or something else easily identifiable in parenthesis after a group of information that I used which a reader can use to find the citation listed in the last page of a paper (myself). However, I think I might start using superscript numbers¹ as it seems like a cleaner approach.

           I was surprised that the articles did not emphasize professors’ ability to run papers through plagiarism detection programs that search the web and then tell to what percent and in what parts does a paper resemble other works. This can be problematic of someone actually does say something in their own words very similar to another work which they have never seen before. They could be accused without any real intention or even negligence. I won’t worry too much about it though.

Week 4 on Librarian and Career Resources

I expected the librarian’s lecture to be very monotonous, however I was surprised when her lecture was very energetic, dynamic, and legitimately informative. I was unaware that the University of California system has the second largest library in the nation under the library of congress. Since the world’s two largest libraries are the library of congress and the British equivalent, ours must be way up there in the world rankings. Also, I found the diagram describing the reach of engines such as Google, Yahoo, etc. within the Internet’s “sea” of knowledge very clarifying. I’m glad that the UC system’s electronic resources match its physical ones, and I look forward to using them. 

            I didn’t learn much from the lecture at the career resources building simply because I was already told everything in a career and major planning class that I’m currently taking. The class, INT 64, is helping me very much in understanding the values I want to get out of a career. It confirmed my belief that I would need an environment that is always changing from day to day in which I could be creative and versatile. I would also need a tangible result at the end of the job. This seems pretty far from the law and business careers taken by the rest of my family. I plan to visit the center several times this year to research various paths in industries such as film, music, and videogames. I think that I’d really enjoy working on things like these, and if I enjoy my work, I won’t be working.