Sport Mascots Flash Fiction

Brian Roller had walked into the gym to see if he could get enrolled to the football team from his school. He walked through the place and went to talk to Mr. Rogers the coach of the 'Scarlet Feathers' the school's team. Brian showed the coach his skills and immediately he got accepted.

Brian told his mother everything that had happened to him that day, he was really excited about the idea of playing for that team, he told her about the players, the coach... and the name of the team.

'Is it a football team formed with only Native American people? if not you won't play!' asked his mother in an accusing tone; you see, Brian's family descended from a line of the Wenatchi tribe from Washington. Sandra Roller was probably one of the people who had suffered from racial discrimination the most, she experienced some degrading situations when she was  younger and thus she got marked in her heart.  

Sandra told her son not to get enrolled to that team, Brian tried to convince her mother that it wasn't something to worry about, they were only using an emblem and a name... so what? it wasn't a big deal plus he was really good at that sport, but his mother wouldn't accept it. Brian wanted to play so badly and he couldn't help it, he went to the 'Scarlet Feathers' coach and got into the team.

Brian played as the quarterback from his team and he was the best doing it. Everything was pretty fine and dandy until his first match. The 'scarlet feathers' played against the 'Silver Falcons', it was a beautiful sunny day and Brian was going to make his debut as quarterback. The game was about to begin and then he saw Hokee. Hokee was the Feather's mascot and was portrayed by a big, overweight white guy wearing just a set of ochre torn pants tied by a red rope as a belt, he had some kind of dulled axe hanging from the red rope. He was wearing a black wig combed into two braids placed in a funny way over his head, at the top of the wig there was a long red feather.

Brian wasn't aware of Hokee and the portrayal that it represented in every game, Hokee meant 'Abandoned' in Navajo dialect, he knew that. 'Hokee' started jumping and dancing in circles, the guy was trying to imitate, in a mocking way, some Native American dance but he looked more like a limping drunk. Brian felt like he had done wrong, he knew that he had abandoned his beliefs, he abandoned his traditions, he turned his back to his blood roots and what was worse, he felt like abandoning his mother.  Brian took his helmet off and he abandoned the field... he went to hug his mother. 

Short Opinion Review about Plagiarism

I just read this article about plagiarism and the way this issue has been handled for some time. I believe that this is an important topic that we certainly have to have in mind. This matter is committed very often by students and in my conception it attempts against the originality and creativity from the people that have been plagiarized.

It is true that nowadays students tend to copy texts they find more suitable for their assignments and then paste them along with other texts and create some kind of scrap quilt.

For me it's really important to make students be concerned about being original, respecting other people's work by not stealing ideas and creating innovative things. The following link leads to the New York Times article that I'm talking about.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/opinion/13tue4.html?_r=0

Visual Rhetorical Essay. Rhetorical, Cultural Analysis.

Visual Rhetorical Analysis – Range Rover classic 1986 and Smart For-Two advertisements – by Fabian González.

Smart Automobile car and Land Rover are two car brands that use advertisements to persuade their audiences of the suitability of their products. This essay will analyze the effectiveness of their rhetorical appeals, the cultural context of each advertisement and it´s effect on their intended audience.

The first analyzed advertisement that we have is an ad from the Smart Automobile car brand, which is a division of the Daimler AG automobile manufacturer. The advertisement video starts showing a dried, sandy and deserted view that’s seems to be pretty much quite and still; there’s a fast, hard and redundant music playing in the background quite similar to a hard rock music’s beat. The music increases as an approaching car appears and turns out to be a small coupé vehicle. The Smart For Two coupé car rides on a sandy marked road, and stops suddenly because the road becomes uphill in a steep slope. The car’s engine sounds challenging and makes the sound as if it was accelerating in order to gain speed, then the car rushes towards the slope and tries to go uphill, but when it gets to the middle of the slope it can’t keep going ahead due to the pronounced angle; it seems to be giving its best try to climb it, but finally the car lets itself be carried away to the foot of the hill.

The Smart For-Two coupé car keeps riding on the deserted road and decides to deviate from it. It descends a subtle slope and heads to a puddle of standing water. The car tries to cross the pond but the water level is too high for it. The car gets stuck and sinks a little bit becoming unable to keep going forward, then the camera angle changes to the front of the car and the windshield wipers activate in an ironic and funny way.

A message stating ‘As good off road as an off roader in the city’ appears and introduces the next scene, which is an urban view. A serene and peaceful music starts to play as we see an off roader SUV car stopping at the side of the parking spot of a sidewalk as trying to measure if it fits in between the two cars that create that space, since the SUV is too large for the spot the driver decides to keep driving and gives up on the spot. The previous hard and redundant music beat disrupts the atmosphere and the small coupé car appears, swiftly and skillfully the tiny car parks into the small spot created in between the other two cars in a victorious pose.

Finally a second message appears stating ‘the smart for two, the ultimate city car’, followed by the slogan and emblem of the Smart Automobile brand.

The second advertisement is a 1986 ad from the Land Rover car brand promoting their then latest Range Rover off roader vehicle; the advertisement starts with the Land Rover and the Range Rover logos. A random vehicle is riding on a road outdoors the city and gets to a Y bifurcation, one of the roads is still paved and seems to be pretty easy to drive on, but the other one looks harsh, stony and full of obstacles, there’s actually a sign indicating that that particular road is not suitable for motors. The vehicle’s driver roots for the easy and un-obstructed road. The scene changes and we are in the interior of the Range Rover vehicle while a dynamic, encouraging and instigating music starts beating. The determined driver choses the difficult road and the music’s beat increases.  The Range Rover crosses easily the rocky road; it crosses deep ponds of water and rivers at a stable speed. Unpaved roads full of stones seem not to be a problem for the Range Rover as it passes over them really quickly and simply. Finally the Range Rover vehicle drives uphill a prominent slope and gets to the border of a cliff, the camera shows the magnificent view beneath the cliff giving to the Range Rover an epic and powerful moment, from the nowhere a warm and peaceful male voice says ‘now you know what people see in a Range Rover’ and the ad finishes with the Range Rover logo.

Even though the advertisements are dealing with the same issue, which is convincing the audience of their vehicles advantages, their products are aimed to reach different audience’s attention. While the Range Rover is a vehicle for people who like to drive outside the city, on the countryside or on unpaved roads, the ‘Smart for Two’ car is intended for people who spend their driving time mostly at city paved roads.

The Smart For Two ad shows the disadvantages of the small car and establishes that it is not a suitable car to drive off road, but it also shows that an off roader car is not suitable for the city because it was meant to be out from it exposing that the SFT coupé car is the best option for you if you want to ride in the city,

This advertisement starts by showing the product’s weaknesses in one context to specify its strengths in another context.

The Range Rover ad uses a similar technique of persuasion at the beginning of the video, which is to portray other car’s weaknesses to make its features look as strengths.   

The different time context of the ads is pretty noticeable when comparing the background music and the visual quality of the video. Both music and visuals are more contemporary in the Smart For Two advertisement, which is an important thing to determine the effectiveness of the ad on their intended audiences, in other words, the time context of an advertisement determines the effectiveness of persuasion on a specific audience in a specific time.

Both advertisements have cultural contexts and appeal to different elements such as Nationality, Social Classes, Gender and Music. For example, talking about nationality the Smart For Two car aims to people for almost every country due to the fact that almost every nation is urbanized, and thus, suitable for this kind of car. On the other hand, the Land Rover is shown to be more suitable for countries with rural, mountainous and urbanized areas where driving with regular cars is almost impossible.

Talking about social classes, both advertisements seem to be aimed for regular people, besides, they don’t look too fancy or expensive to be catalogued as cars for an exclusive or wealthy audience. If we talk about gender, the Range Rover would be more accepted by male audiences thanks to its rough shape and look, while women would root for the Smart For Two car better because it’s neater and cuter to the eyes; culturally, male population mostly does intrepid and dangerous things what are precisely the kind of things that the Land Rover advertisement wants to highlight from its product.  

When it comes to the type of music sounding, the Range Rover uses a more calmed music compared to the hard redundant music of the Smart For Two ad, and its kind of suitable for the ambient showed on the clip, which is mountainous, wooden and green the whole time. On the other hand the SFT ad’s background music is harder but is also convenient for its environment, which is a deserted area; it gives the audience a hard, independent and strong look even when the car is too tiny.

Visual Rhetoric Analysis

Today's entry is going to be about the visual rhetoric in this One Life's advertisement that I found by browsing on the web.

'One Life' is an awareness campaign against HIV, created by the Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) pharmaceutical company.

Bristol-Myers Squibb/One life couch. Advertisement. Creative Ad Awards. Web. June 2009 

The intended message that this particular ad is offering is to make people be aware of the danger of practicing sexual relations with different people and without protection. It also persuades its audience to take the HIV test in order to know if they're in danger or not of suffering the disease.

Since the object of this ad aims to an adult audience, we can infer that the visual strategies that it uses include explicit material. For me, the context of the image is very convenient for the purpose of the campaign and it's pretty much effective on grabbing people's attention, which certainly happened to me. I find its use of rhetoric very straight forward, I can't think of it as subtle because of the direct content that it's utilizing. 

I believe that it's really easy for the audience to figure out the ad's intention thanks to the sentence that it is using in the image: 'Each time you sleep with someone, you also sleep with his past', which means that whenever you have relations with someone else you are also having relations with the people that that person has had relations with. All of the arms coming from the man's torso and embracing the woman make you think that this man has slept with several people and for that the woman is being in danger of getting infected of some sexually transmitted disease.

My Genome, My Self By Steven Prinker (Summary and Rhetorical response)

My Genome, My Self By Steven Prinker

Summary By Fabian Gonzalez

‘My Genome, My Self’ is an argumentative opinion article that emphasizes the importance of genes in people’s lives and how do they influence our actions, thoughts and decisions.  

Prinker brings up different postures about the source (genes or environment context in people’s childhood) of our behavior, our susceptibility of suffering a specific disease and our way of choosing our likes and dislikes. He also makes a comparison between these postures in order to state that neither of them is the source despite they have certain influence in the mentioned aspects.

Rhetorical Response

In the article, the author appeals several times to ethos by being reliable and credible with the amount of information that he explores and studies. He also gives his own analysis on the behavioral gene-source and how people should understand that there are lots of aspects that influence, in some certain way, the traits and makeups of the human being. With this he is appealing to logos. 

In a specific part of the article's introduction, Prinker states that employment discrimination and advantageous inequalities coming from some companies could be the outcomes for our society depending on the people who could have access to the genetic information of any person. This is his appeal to Pathos. 

When There became Here

When There became Here

-Can I have another glass of water please?- said Sergio to the stewardess. He had been flying on that plane for two hours and twenty minutes and he had drank only water during the flight, his bladder was about to reach its limit but he asked for another glass of water anyway.
  - Do you want me to put ice in it again?- asked the stewardess gently.
  - If you don't mind, please.- He replied with a shy smile.
  - Of course not, it's always my pleasure. - she said.

Sergio turned his head towards to the window's side, he wanted to get his sight lost into the greatness of the sea, it was amazingly blue, just like the way he felt. The closer Sergio got to his destination the more worried he was. He had never been that far from what he knew and he felt like there was nothing meant for him at the place he was heading to.
  -Here's your water sweetie - said the stewardess who had come back from the plane's kitchen, Sergio didn't answer, he just gave her a smile and received the glass promptly.

It was a year-long stay, and he thought he was not prepared for it, but he had no other choice. His whole year had been all about that trip, his father wanted him to go and had done all the possible  arrangements to make him do that...and he did.

Suddenly Sergio felt a sting within his belly, he had to go to the restroom.

A year or maybe more than that, maybe a year and a half, he wanted to come back right at that instant, but it had only been two hours and thirty minutes since he left, two hours and thirty minutes from a year!. Time was against him, it pronounced itself like an ocean of seconds, an hourglass filled up with grains of sand from a whole desert, and every grain represented one of those choking seconds.

His teardrops where salty, just like the ocean should be- he thought.
The plane had almost arrived, Sergio filled up and sign the papers of migration and customs, then stood still until the light of the fasten your seat belt sign was lit. Sergio got off the plane after the landing.
As he approached at the airport's exit he felt like he was trapped in some kind of dream, the situation felt unreal to him, he had thought of that moment like a far future only, he never realized that the day of this travel would certainly come and he'd had to say goodbye... at that moment he knew that the place that had been so distant from his home and seemed to be so far far away to be called present, stopped being there and started being here. 
An anguish feeling shadowed his face, his sight blurred and his knees started to crumble, he could not resist longer and offloaded his bladder.

My story as a writer...

I've always thought that writing is a pretty difficult thing to do, it's not easy to be looking at a blank piece of paper in order to put letters in it, and it takes a lot of time to begin thinking of what would be better to write down, your pencil is the only friend you have to create your work and it doesn't come to you with ideas, it is just an extension of your body that your brain uses to project things.

 It was not long ago that I started reading novels and tales as a hobby, before that, I used to read them only if I had assignments or some kind of homework to do about them. Everything begun when my cousin wanted me to buy the Bram Stoker's novel: Dracula, she said that reading that novel caused her some serious nightmares, and as a fan of intense experiences I wanted to know how it was to read the book. So I bought it. It wasn't as scary as I thought but I had some gloomy dreams after I read it. It was a little bit annoying that I had to read it with a dictionary on my other hand due to the words that the author used, but despite that it's one of the bests books I've read. After reading Dracula I realized that reading was really fun and it was a lot rewarding because it teaches you a whole world of new words.

 I read three more books that year: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Patrick Süskind's Perfume and Tolkien's The Hobbit, that is a good number considering that the previous year I had read zero books.

 The next year I read seven books, and next of it I read eleven, last year I read fifteen, all of them novels or tales. The more I read stories, the more I became greedy for them. I had to write papers and laboratory reports almost for every subject in my career back at Colombia, but I enjoyed more to write my own stories in a more opened way so I could express myself and recreate, in my own way, what I had read. Last year's fall I took an elective subject called Literature. They made me write some works, but those weren't like the rest, they were the kind of opened-form writings that I wanted to write, so I enjoyed a lot.

There were two of the works that I made that I really liked, the first one was a made-up chronicle that had to be some kind of lost manuscript written by any person within the crew of Christopher Columbus at any of his voyages to the recently discovered american continent. The second one was the sequel of one of the twelve tales in 'Strange Pilgrims' from our Colombian Nobel Prize: Gabriel García Márquez, the name of the tale was 'The Ghosts of August'. I really enjoyed writing that last one because it was a suspense tale, so I liked the fact that I gave it a cool ending with a horror content.

 I won't say that my knowledge about different books is great, because I believe that you have to read several amounts of books in a life to say so, but I've read enough authors to say how I'd like to build my own writing style. I like to  use sophisticated words and to place them into a simple context so it's easy to figure out their meaning and to memorize them, I don't like to overuse them because it can be tedious to read, I've adopted this aspect from some writers of yesteryear who have influenced me not just on the structure they use, but also on the words and expressions they tend to put on their works. I also like to enquire in different genres of literature so I can gather a bigger amount of stories every time. Herbert George Wells, Doris Lessing, José Saramago, Gabriel García Márquez, Stephen King, J.R.R Tolkien, Franz Kafka, Howard Lovecraft and even the Marquis of Sade, they could may be very different and have nothing in common, but they have inspired me with their novels and their stories really deeply.

 Nowadays I've been working on a thriller novel in spanish, it's been a project that I started last year, encouraged by my father and my sister, they have supported me with this since I told them that one of my biggest dreams would be being the second Nobel Prize for Colombia some day. I'd like people to see me as a great writer of the near future years, I want them to recognize me for my writing and my style.

 I expect from this course to help me to improve my writing because, unfortunately, I haven’t written anything in english, just on my native language. I know that, due to my career, most of times I’ll have to write some closed-form writings but I’m also hapily willing to learn how to write them.

About Me...
My name is Fabian González Bonilla, I'm Colombian. I studied at Sergio Arboleda University at my country and I came here to finish my career in a Dual External Program, my major is Computer Engineering. I like reading novels and tales, my favorite food is pasta, watching movies is one of the things I enjoy most . I love playing volleyball, because even I'm not a tall person I can manage quite good jumps. I really like writing but I've never written anything important in English, that's why I expect to improve by taking this subject.