http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15418659/
crazy crazy article. I got it off of dateline. I noticed that most of the stories that I read aren’t that new. I don’t know why I thought they were. I guess maybe that’s the point of the show? as long as it’s an interesting story?
Anyway, the article is about a student, and a father who was murdered. I won’t reveal who the killer was because it’s a really good story and you all should read it. Most of the stories that I pick are pretty long, I’ve noticed, but they don’t seem that long when you’re reading them, so don’t let the length catch you off guard. So basically, he’s shot to death over a bad marriage and a custody battle. There’s some pretty cruel people in the world. It amazes me, just like all the other current events articles that I’ve gotten that people actually have it in them to commit such horrible murders and things. This particular story talks about one family thinking the father isn’t good news for the daughter, and they want what’s best for her. It’s ironic because as you read on through the story you find out that the mothers actually been questioned by courts in the past and has plotted against the father, etc. Not working out for her in the long run. The father however was doing a really hard long PHD progam at a school in California, as well as driving 70 miles to see his daughter on supervised visits. I guess over all, the mother and family wasn’t particularly good for the little girl after all. Can’t forget the murder on top of everything. Sounds like a real safe environment for a little kid to be in. riiiight. People take things to such extremes, all the time. It’s sad but really you’re never going to stop hearing stories like these about innocent people being murdered, or people getting hurt over stupid little reasons, basically other peoples opinions.
The world is full of crazy people.
Read the article, it’s good. =)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15333880/page/6/
This was the craziest article i’ve read in a while. It’s appauling. The article is pretty long, but I posted the whole thing so people who want to can read it. It really keeps your attention through the entire thing.
The article is about a teenage girl who moves into a small town and meets a couple crazy friends. She doesn’t know that her friends are crazy, and in the end they ultimately kill her. The story itself is just horrifying. The way that the two teenagers handle the murder and what they do to the poor girl is just disgusting. After they kill her, they try to burn her body and then when they realize that they wont be able to, they ask a friend to chop up her body, and he does. The article describes how he does it and what they do with the body later- definitely worth reading.
As I was reading the article, I couldn’t help but cover my mouth and the only thing I could think the entire time was, “oh my god. This poor girl and her poor family.” It’s really, actually pretty scary. I’ve never experienced anything like this, obviously. But I’ve also never experienced such control that Sarah had over these poor teenagers. I can’t imagine letting someone control my life to such extremes. I guess you probably don’t realize it’s happening when it is, though. That’s also pretty scary. It’s nuts to think that someone can have so much control over someone they can talk them into doing such horrifying things. I come from a small town too, and while I was reading the article, I couldn’t help but think of home. I know plenty of people around my town that are bisexual or “bicurious” as the boy calls it, and I know plenty of people who are in crazy, silly, little love triangles. I can’t imagine hearing such a story like this happening around my home town because the two mix.
I can’t even get it through my head how two kids only a little younger then me, or my age even, could do such a thing. I can’t believe that they did such horrible things to her, and her body and then were able to keep it in for days. At the end, it seems as though the kids don’t even have any remorse for what they did. It’s absolutely unbelievable.
Good article, good story if you have a little time. Absolutely unbelievable.
“It amazed me- while I was on the phone with the California Department of Corrections and the Parol Board- how if I spoke with authority and big words, they’d give me the information I wanted. How language was the biggest con of all. “
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“You could tell virtually any lie and if you spoke properly, people didn’t pause to question. In the other language, it didn’t matter what I said because nobody ever looked beyond what my voice said about my social circumstances to try to make out my words.”
This was all one big quote towards the end of Love Letters, I just made it into two because I cut some of it out. This quote really stood out to me because it’s so true, unfortunately. Obviously, I agree 100% that there should be “proper” english, but there are some people in the world who are less fortunate and don’t get the education they need, or arent around people who know how, or even choose to speak properly. I don’t think that society as a whole should look down on certain individuals because of the way that they look or talk, or what they do for a living. I know I’m guilty of it too. It sucks to be able to say that, but I think that we all are. Every one of us is brought up to have some sort of racism against certain groups of people, maybe the way the look, or the jobs that they have- even the way that they speak, which is the main thing brought up in this quote and also in the story. It’s sad to me that even though it’s known that there are infact certain people who cant afford these things, we still downtalk them or treat them badly because they aren’t like us.
Another big thing is culture, or environment. There are people out there who do choose not to speak what we all know as “proper” english, and I guess maybe if they have the opportunity or the way of life to be able to learn, then they’re more at fault, but we still shouldn’t really look down on them. It’s like people who choose to dress differently than others. As long as they aren’t walking the streets with hardly any clothes, we don’t generally make too much of a deal about it. It shouldn’t really be any different with language.
To conclude, good story. I enjoyed reading it. There were a bunch of parts all through the reading that I did highlight. Parts at the beginning that I was going to comment on, but obviously as I read farther into it, I changed my mind and decided to pick this one. Good quote, very true.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/10/17/earlyshow/main2096721.shtml
Interesting article. I’m not really sure how I feel about it.
The article is about teachers getting guns for school protection. Some teachers are doing it, although only a few, and others are completely against it. I can see where both points are coming from. Although, personally, I’d say that I’m probably leaning more towards being against it. I suppose in some cases, probably very few, there’s a possibility that it might help. But either way, suppose that a teacher does at some point have to gun down one of their students. What if the student never shoots, or farstretched, but say that the student shoots, however, doesn’t hit anyone. The teacher fires anyway, which means that they’re the ones who will be in trouble, I think. I don’t know much about the law, but I think that that’d be how it worked, even if it was in self-defense, sort of. More importantly though, one of the teachers in the article brings up the fact that no matter where you put it, kids can find it. Kids can find anything. GOOD POINT. It seems to always work out that way. Plus, there’s not many places in a classroom that you can place a gun where it’s safe, and still be able to get to it if something were to happen.
On another level, I don’t think I’d want my teacher to carry a gun, or have a gun in the classroom. I think as a student, it would make me very uneasy. I’d think about it often, while in class, which in the long run would ultimately be a distraction for me.
Interesting voices about the article. I’d like to know what other people think about it all.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15209681/
This Current Event article mainly caught my attention because I was watching Maury on television and the show was entirely about these parents/families who had lost someone due to kidnapping or just strange disappearences. They all came on the show because they were desperate to find out where their loved ones were and what had happened to them. This article focuses on a model and her boyfriend who disappear while they’re out on a boating trip. When I first read the article, the main thing/ the first thing that had popped into my head was.. “How do two people just disappear in a body of water? If for some reason their boat sank, don’t we have special divers who are trained to specifically work with these kinds of cases, and dive to check?” and “Even if they did get off the boat somewhere, or for some reason they came into an encounter with someone else, how do all their belongings, and more importantly, their boat, just disappear without a trace?” I guess this stuff happens all the time though. It’s amazing to me that even with all the technology and testing that we can do today, people still disappear and are hurt, while others are never found and criminals actually get away with this stuff. I can’t imagine ever going through anything like this. I know from experience that it’s hard enough to lose a loved one, knowing what has happened to them and that obviously, they’re not ever coming back. I give so much credit to the people who have to deal with disappearences, and still can pull themselves out of bed every morning and continue to have hope. I can’t imagine (and hopefully I’ll never have to.)
The article is definitely a story/case that I’d like to keep up with. I know that I probably wont, I’ll either forget about it, or I just wont get the chance to actually pop online and check it out (plus I don’t watch the news much.) But if for some reason I find another article on it while doing one of these current events things, i’ll definitely have to do an update.
So far, I think my college experience has been okay. Interesting, to say the least. I’ve made some good friends and I’m having fun. I have friends that go to college all around as well, so it’s nice to be able to still keep in touch with them. (UAlbany, RPI, Albany Pharm.) We’ve made it somewhat official to go out every thursday night together, and my roomie is pretty cool as well. So as far as the social aspect goes, I won’t really complain.
I’m not taking that many classes, but the classes that I am taking are more than enough for my first year, I think. I always have plenty of work to do, and sometimes I even feel really weighed down by it all. I’m taking an online course as well as my regular courses, which seems hard for me to keep up with on top of my other lectures. I’m supposed to do about 8 hours of work, I think, for my online psych class a week, and I rarely fit it all in, but I’m trying. It’s definitely unlike highschool in the absence category. It seems really hard to catch back up on your work after missing a few classes, unless you want to sit infront of your computer for 3 hours at a rip. Not me. Plus, I don’t think I even have that much time. Thursdays are my long days on campus. I have classes from 9:25 until 8:30. Not all right in a row, of course, but scattered around in there. It seems that these days are the days I feel like I have the most to do, and cramming between classes is a real pain. Oh well, I guess. Life goes on.
In an overall view of things, I am enjoying my college experience so far. I think I’m still getting used to it all, but I’m enjoying it. I come from a really small town about 45 minutes from here, so as you can imagine, Albany is out of control for me. Either way, I plan on sticking around for a few more years, all things considered.
At an early page in the story, there was a quote that had caught my attention..
“The songs had stirred me, flooded me with memories and sensations to the point of bursting. I had to talk to someone. Not anyone close, not anyone who had been living through what I’d been experiencing the past three years in the West. A stranger’s ear would be better than a friend’s, a stranger who wouldn’t interrupt with questions, with alternate versions of events. I needed to do most of the talking. I wanted a listener, an intimate stranger…”
I just wanted to take the time to comment on the quote because when I read it I could relate. I can’t even count all the times i’ve had a bad day or a bad situation going on, and all you want is someone to just listen to you, and see things how you see them. Chances are if you’re going to go to a friend, they’re going to just be straight forward with you and tell you what they think about the entire thing. Sometimes it’s not what you want, but you don’t have another choice. Obviously we can’t all be like Forrest Gump and just sit down somewhere and tell our entire life story. Don’t get me wrong, it’d be really nice. The likelyhood, however, of it actually happening like that are very slim. The top part where John was talking about the songs that had caught him up also was easy for me to relate to. There’s always certain songs you hear on the radio or a cd, wherever you might be, that remind you of certain situations in your life, or certain people who have come and gone that have impacted you in some way. I love music, it’s a huge part of my life. I’m not exactly good at it myself, but I can strum a few chords on the guitar and I love to sing, scary or not. I’m always listening to it, while i’m writing or sitting on the computer, obviously always in the car, etc. So naturally, for me, it’s easy for me to relate.
I picked the quote because it was real to me. I could relate and I think that there’s alot of other people who have either read it, or if they have read it, would be able to relate to it as well. Coming from a story, most of the time you don’t exactly find quotes like that, that you can really really relate to. This one I could, so it really caught my attention.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/TV/09/18/tv.mexico.obit.santos.ap/index.html
Cnn had a bunch of interesting news articles up, I thought this one was a good one though. The article talks about a teenage actor (Pablo Santos) who’s killed in a plane crash. It’s pretty sad that stuff like this happens. It’s especially sad that he didn’t make it. If you read the article, at one point it tells you that his plane crashed during an emergency landing at an airport. That means that the plane was basically about to land. He was so close to surviving. Not only is it depressing that he was only 19 years of age, but another one of his friends who he was flying with, also 19 years old, passed away in the hospital. Pablo was flying to Acapulco with five other friends. The article doesn’t say why they were all going there, but I would assume it’d be just for some fun. What a let down for probably a pretty pumped up group of kids. I don’t recognize the name, or the picture of the actor, so I’m not sure I’ve ever watched him in any television shows or anything, but considering the list of shows that he has participated in, he was probably a pretty well known young star.
It seems like I’ve been reading or hearing about a lot of plane crashes lately. Maybe not. I guess I tend to pay more attention to plane related articles and news because I have an uncle who is a pilot and an old friend that is going to school now to be a pilot. It makes me fairly nervous to hear about plane crashes and people dying because of them.
So anyway, I read the article and it made me sad for a few minutes. That’s like me losing a friend of mine. (Although, I can’t say I have very many actors/actresses as friends) We all think that we have so much time ahead of us, but I guess some of us don’t get so lucky.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/TV/09/18/tv.mexico.obit.santos.ap/index.html
Cnn had a bunch of interesting news articles up, I thought this one was a good one though. The article talks about a teenage actor (Pablo Santos) who’s killed in a plane crash. It’s pretty sad that stuff like this happens. It’s especially sad that he didn’t make it. If you read the article, at one point it tells you that his plane crashed during an emergency landing at an airport. That means that the plane was basically about to land. He was so close to surviving. Not only is it depressing that he was only 19 years of age, but another one of his friends who he was flying with, also 19 years old, passed away in the hospital. Pablo was flying to Acapulco with five other friends. The article doesn’t say why they were all going there, but I would assume it’d be just for some fun. What a let down for probably a pretty pumped up group of kids. I don’t recognize the name, or the picture of the actor, so I’m not sure I’ve ever watched him in any television shows or anything, but considering the list of shows that he has participated in, he was probably a pretty well known young star.
It seems like I’ve been reading or hearing about a lot of plane crashes lately. Maybe not. I guess I tend to pay more attention to plane related articles and news because I have an uncle who is a pilot and an old friend that is going to school now to be a pilot. It makes me fairly nervous to hear about plane crashes and people dying because of them.
So anyway, I read the article and it made me sad for a few minutes. That’s like me losing a friend of mine. (Although, I can’t say I have very many actors/actresses as friends) We all think that we have so much time ahead of us, but I guess some of us don’t get so lucky.
Alright, so I just got done reading “live on death row.” What a reading, huh. It was definitely a story that I didn’t find very difficult to stay focused on. It held my attention through most of it, and I guess I can say that I actually found it to be pretty interesting. As I started reading it, I wrote down certain things that I found to be interesting, or that really caught my attention, but as I got to about the third or fourth page, I realized that almost everything I was reading was catching my attention. Funny. Anyway, I figure I’ll give my opinion on a few of the quotes I had written down.
The first thing that I had marked from the beginning of the story was just a certain fact that I found to be, crazy, for a lack of better words. “African Americans, a mere 11 percent of the national population, compose about 40 percent of the death row population.” It caught my attention because you find this sort of fact to be everywhere. Anything that has to do with criminals, or jailing, etc. you notice that the facts always state that African Americans make up most of the population. Now, I can’t say that I don’t agree, obviously, since it is a fact. However, the first thing I think about when I read something like this is, “why?.” Is it because of how they were raised, their bringing up, environment? Could it be because most racism is indeed directed towards their race itself? hmmm…
The next thing: “For several years now I have been assigned DC (disciplinary custody) status for daring to abide by my faith, the teachings of John Africa, and, in particular, for refusing to cut my hair. For this I have been denied family phone calls, and on occasion I have been shackled for refusing to violate my beliefs.” What?! I can’t even believe something like that. How is it even possible for someone to discipline you for not giving up your beliefs? Don’t we learn that (directed to those who do believe in religion) religion is the one thing that we will always have on our side? Aren’t we taught that we should turn to our religious beliefs in times of despair and need? yet again, hmmm..
Last but not least, before I sum this entry up, want to just comment on one other thing. It’s mentioned in the reading that television, radios, and sports are the only form of entertainment allowed. NO TYPEWRITERS ALLOWED DUE TO SECURITY RISKS. hahaha. Basically, I guess because these people are sentenced to death, they are not allowed to type up their thoughts or ideas because it’s far too dangerous. If you ask me, a pencil or a pen and a piece of paper can be just as dangerous.
So anyway, to conclude, really interesting reading. I wish I had the time to go through and comment on all of the things that caught my attention through the reading, but unfortunately, off to class I go…..
