Tuesday night I watch (or try to) Shark Tank on ABC and The Dragon''s Den on BBCAM. A couple of episodes ago Dana told her grandmother she had to do homework on "Beowulf." Many people want to paint Dana as the most annoying teenager on TV - but if that's true (we don't say necessarily that it is), this season of "Homeland" has definitively proved that she is simultaneously the most literary and annoying teenager on TV. The problem, as we see it, with the Dana scenes is not that they're inherently uninteresting; it's that the dialogue and storyboarding are so stagey and implausible. If you're a troubled teenager on the run with your verboten boyfriend, you don't go to a cemetery and quote Coleridge. We're not sure what you do - although surely there'd be sex involved at a fairly early stage - but you don't do that. Dana feels like a much older person's guess, filtered through the loose memory of high school poetry classes and clandestine drinking sessions, at what Teenagers Today are Actually Like.
Anyone who has been in a serious accident or life threatening situation has most probably experienced shock. I have experienced shock and it's weird. Nothing hurts at first, but then gradually (over the course of 20-30 minutes in my case), if one survives I suppose, feeling returns and things start hurting like Hell. Maybe shock is the condition one's body goes into while it is deciding if it's going to survive or not.
I really do appreciate cell phones. They give the wife and I a certain amount of freedom when we go to the mall. We only need to call each other to know where and when to meet. And I loved cell phones when the kids just got their drivers licenses. But with cell phones came texting. And with texting comes a less personal way of communicating. Texting dilutes the affect we express and receive when conversing with others. This makes our conversations less personal, less human. We don't have to be fully there with the people we are texting and we are certainly not fully there with the people we are with at the time. With texting, we exercise an absence while being present. And yet, we only need to ask young people how many times do they prefer to reach out and touch someone through texting than through talking in person to see its growing effects.
We can only attain cultural independence if we utilize our culture, etc to uplift and edify ourselves. We have everything we need to do just that, but we need to begin to learn and know what our cultures are all about. It is about time we stopped aping and emulating useless and different cultures foreign to us(although we should understand foreign cultures) but we cannot be the people of foreign cultures because they are not ours and they are not us.
In ancient Mesopotamia the growth of the first cities was directly related to the development of Mesopotamian religion. The temple complex serving a specific deity was located at the center of the urban area. The ziggurats became not only religious centers but also warehouses, where the year's grain crop was stored. Because they were visible for miles around, they were a continual reminder to the ancient Mesopotamians of the power of the gods.
It all comes back to mood management theory, a concept developed in the '70s and '80s which suggests that people consume media to regulate their emotions. For example, reading something upbeat can dispel a bad feeling or maintain a positive mood, leading people to reach for something happy when they feel their emotions slipping. This might explain why, among the seemingly infinite content the Internet has spawned, sites focusing on good news (like UpWorthy ) proliferate.
It's the first episode of Winter is Crappening, and there are a ton of characters to remember before we get going with the final season of Game of Thrones. Join Ben and Ronnie from Watch What Crappens to talk trash about the dead and living members of Westeros.
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