"So Long And Thanks For All The Fish"!

Well, since this is probably among the last posts I'll ever make on my blog, I'll take this chance to say good-bye to all the friends and family who ever bothered to read what I wrote. I'd also like to wish the worst of luck to anyone who didn' t read what I wrote! OK, I'm just kidding there! I'll probably still post on my blog every once and a while, but I doubt I'll ever write a 500 word post again! Phew!

Literary Comparison

Literary Comparison: To Kill A Mockingbird and Walk Two Moons

Scout and Salamanca are two very interesting, girl characters from two different books. Scout is the main character from To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Salamanca is the main character from Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech. Both girls, however, have lots of similarities and differences between them. Both characters are brave, but while Scout is a tomboy and close to her father, Salamanca is a normal girl who is distanced from her father.

One of the ways in which the two characters are different is in their views of their fathers. In To Kill A Mockingbird, Atticus, the father, is someone who Scout admires a lot. This is a quote that I thought brought this point together really well. “It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.”(Scout’s thoughts from Chapter 11, pg. 105). In this passage, Scout is admiring her father because he acted nobly in shooting the rabid dog. Salamanca, from Walk Two Moons, on the other hand, seemed to think that her dad was good, but not the best. This is done more with a regretful tone rather than outrightly stating it. A quote that sort of shows this is as follows. “I wish my father had not been such a good man so I could have had someone to blame for my mother’s leaving.” (Salamanca’s thoughts from chapter 18, pg. 113). All throughout the chapter, you get hints such as this one which pretty much say that Salamanca thinks he’s a respectable guy, but not an outstanding character. As you can see, Scout worships her father, while Salamanca only respects hers.

Another difference between the two characters, Scout and Salamanca, is their upbringing. Scout was raised as a tomboy. She beat up people she didn’t like, wore overalls, and hated dresses. A quote that illustrates this from To Kill aA Mockingbird states, “She seemed glad to see me when I appeared in the kitchen, and by watching her I began to think there was some skill involved in being a girl.” (Scout’s thoughts from Chapter 12, pg. 124) Scout knows that she is a girl, but she hasn’t been brought up to act like it. Salamanca, on the other hand, never had that problem and grew up as a normal girl. Sal has long hair, so in Walk Two Moons, Salamanca thought, “Everyone kept touching my hair...”(Salamanca’s thoughts from Chapter 3, pg. 12) If Sal had been like Scout, she would never have tolerated that.

These two different characters do have some similarities though. For example, both were were expected to be brave. Scout was expected to be brave by her family. In To Kill A Mockingbird, Scout’s father said, "It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do." (Atticus from Chapter 11, pg. 106) In this excerpt, Atticus is telling Scout that sometimes you have to be brave and do dangerous things. Likewise, for Salamanca, everybody seemed to look to her for bravery. A quote that illustrates this from Walk Two Moons follows. “All around the room, people were acting as if I had single-handedly taken on a fire-breathing dragon.” (Salamanca’s thought’s from Chapter 3, pg. 14) In this passage, Salamanca takes care of a bug that is terrorizing the class. Salamanca doesn’t let fear get in the way of common sense, which makes her brave. Both Scout and Salamanca are very brave characters.


While both Scout and Salamanca are brave, both of these characters have their differences. Scout and Salamanca are different in how they feel about their fathers and in the style of their upbringing as girls. Even though they are different, they are still both really strong, stoic girls raised by their fathers. I liked the books, Walk Two Moons and To Kill A Mockingbird.

Factory Teens: The Thinking Dilemma

Most of us have by now heard the opinion that the current generation of kids are becoming a mindless generation. We act and think like we're off an assembly line. We all do virtually the same types of things, eat the same types of food, wear the same types of clothes, etc. But what about the people responsible for the creation of these factory-kids? In today's factories (in the U.S.), who is it that usually makes the goods? Normally, it's a machine, programmed to do only a couple of things. In fact, the number of machines in a factory usually outnumber the human beings by a vast majority. This is the world that adults have created for us. So lets, as factory teens, take a good look at our creators...the robot adults. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be disrespectful to adults, I'm just simply pointing out that the reason that we aren't being individual is because the adults in our lives aren't acting any differently. Recently at school, with all the End Of Level testing going on, I'm seeing more and more examples to support this theory. For example, this year in my English class, we have just started the Romeo and Juliet unit. As a part of the unit, we were supposed to learn a dance. It was a dance that was actually created a couple hundred years AFTER Shakespeare's time. While we were in the circle learning the dance, I asked the teacher,"Why are we doing this? Is there any point behind it?" My teacher then rounds on me and says curtly,"I don't know, just do it." I doubt very much that my teacher even thought for a couple of seconds about what to say to me when I asked her that, and that is exactly the problem that I have with adults these days. I'm not even going to pretend to have an idea on how the adults ended up this way, but it has happened.

You don't believe me that adults are responsible for the mindless teen generation? Well, take a look outside and tell me how many kids over the age of 5-6 you see actually playing. Think back to the stories that all the senior citizens tell you about how when they were 9 years old, they'd build tree houses and act out Robin Hood or something else like that. Now you don't even see very many 9 year olds doing that kind of thing, let alone teens. The reason that kids are like this is because adults are like this. With mass media and instant communication, impressionable kids are given the example of how to go through life like a mindless drone. Kids try to mimic the adult world of being overscheduled and no time to think for themselves. It's a well known fact that kids try to do the things their parents do, and if you're a mindless drone, chances are the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

In my geography class, we are learning about South Africa and the Apartheid. We recently watched and learned about Stephen Biko, a revolutionary black man who helped changed South Africa. While watching a the movie called Cry Freedom, a quote that Steve Biko said jumped out at me. It was,"Change the way people think and things will never be the same." This bit of wisdom is like a two-edged sword; it can move to cut down your enemies, or it can cut you down. If you change the way people think, which in this case is by turning people into mindless drones, then you come out with a braindead population and a easily manipulated society. Is this what we, as Americans, want?

Night at the Museum

My trip to the Museum of Natural History was a fun, little adventure. When I had been in elementary school I had gone there on a field trip. So basically, the entire time I was there this time, I was trying to remember things from the last time I had been there. It didn’t work, which is okay because if I had, I probably would have rushed the trip and not learned what I did learned.

The reason that I chose to go to the Museum of Natural History was because my family had an annual membership there. My sister had her birthday party there and my parents bought a membership to save money. This means that we can all get in there for free and in the effort of saving money, I decided to do my field trip for free.

As I walked into the Museum of Natural History, I immediately noticed the glass cases at the front of the museum. Some of the artifacts were interesting and I looked at them for a little while, but I never read the little plaques that they held. I then went into the room on the left hand side of the front desk. This was the area of the museum where they had their ancient man and Native American exhibits. Of all the areas in the entire museum, this was probably my least favorite. I’ve always respected my forebearers and I think it is really amazing and cool that they could survive the rough conditions of the untamed world. At the same time however, I find the exact details of how and why they were able to do this a bit dull. That’s why I rarely read any of the plaques in this section of the museum.

My next stop in the museum was the animal life section. This area was slightly more interesting and I read a lot of the plaques. This area also partly extended upstairs and to the right. However, because my preschool sister, Silly(name has been changed), was there, she found this spot to be the least interesting and put a time restraint on being there. Outside of that display is where I found my favorite exhibit on the first floor. It was a little, old-fashioned telephone booth which you could go into, pick up the telephone, and hear nature sounds through the phone. My sister and I enjoyed it a lot.

Next we went upstairs to where my favorite part of the museum was. In the Rocks and Minerals section they had a gigantic, glass case in which there must have been a million billion rocks and minerals. They then explained the formation of rocks, what minerals were, and how to tell a rock from a mineral. They even showed you the atomic patterns of the different rocks and minerals. My all time favorite part of the museum was the decay meter where you pressed a button over different rocks and it spat out a static sound. The static sound would tell you the decay rate of a rock!

The next section that I went to had all the prehistoric dinosaur stuff, along with the creation of the world and Earth’s history. This was especially interesting because of the fact that we just learned most of this in science class. After looking through this section, I decided that I had seen enough and after a brief stop at the gift shop (where I bought nothing whatsoever) I decided to go home. Even though I enjoyed this museum, I probably won’t enjoy going there again until I forget everything about it for the second time.

Utah House

I decided that I was going to do the field trip project for my term project. So I went to the Utah House. The Utah House is an ecology safe modern marvel. It is a really expensive and modernized house that keeps up with all the modern trends, yet it’s still environmentally friendly and energy conservant.

The Utah House was built by Utah State University as the forerunner to their big botanical gardens project. The location of the Utah House, Kaysville, was chosen because it is a nice, little, town smack dab in the middle of Ogden and Salt Lake City. USU decided to build this $600,000+ house because they wanted to show the people of Utah that you can have everything from a normal, not so eco-friendly house put in an eco-friendly house. However, USU does not expect you to upgrade everything in your house. This would cost untold amounts of money which the average Joe doesn’t have. They do encourage you to take advantage of various features- some are inexpensive features. These range from innovative shading of windows, to underground pipe AC systems.

Since the Utah House is so eco-friendly, how does it get its power? Well, that’s a split answer. The Utah House is mostly powered by solar energy. Solar energy is a very clean, abundant energy source. Solar energy is energy that is projected from the sun. The two biggest problems with solar energy are, one, the inconsistency of it, and two, the inability of storing it. Even though one second of its energy is enough to power the entire U.S. for 90,000 years, only a small fraction of that energy gets to Earth’s troposphere. So on a really cloudy day, the solar panels, which are the devices which convert sun energy into electrical energy, pick up next to no usable energy from the sun. Second, even though solar energy is extremely useful, it cannot be stored. If the sun’s energy is not directed somewhere immediately, it is lost. For these reasons, the Utah House is also hooked up to the Davis County Electrical system, so that it can receive extra help if necessary. Because it must sometimes use this kind of energy, the Utah House uses only low power items, like fluorescent bulbs. These, while expensive, have a really long lifetime expectancy and flood the house with as much light as possible.

Now I’ll tell about my personal favorite feature in the house, the underground AC system. Because the surface of the crust reflects most of the thermal energy that it comes in contact with, the sub-levels of earth stay pretty much the same temperature all year round. So, knowing this, some genius inventor decided to stick some pipes underground. Then, all he had to do was get the air pumping through, where it would enter the ground and be either cooled or heated by the surrounding ground. This reliable AC system would keep your house at the same range of temperatures throughout the year. Best of all about this amazing contraption is that it is actually cheaper and more cost effective than a regular AC system.

Personally, I liked touring the Utah House. It has also given me more options to consider when I get old enough to build my own house. I probably wouldn’t go there in my free time or bring my date there for a tour, but it was still good enough to get a decent recommendation from me.