SRH

This is podcast number two from the Mark Pod.

This is the first podcast by the Mark Pod.

Today I watched the video entitled Child Artist Dreams of Return Iraq on Alive in Baghdad. This video told a story about a child who is a prodigy at art. His father is also an artist and has been his main mentor throughout his life. The child started painting when he was only 4 years old. This story is such an inspiring story because a child in a country where there is so much tension around is usually not to focused and faces problems with education and daily life, yet this child is facing this oppression and succeeding. He dreams of one day returning to his home country of Iraq and having the freedom of his people. This story is just inspirational in so many ways, showing that the Iraqi people still have a future in their children and they are teaching their children to be loyal and faithful to their country and heritage.

On page 58, Riverbend describes a situation where an 11 year old child heard a loud noise outside of his house. The boy, named Mohammed Al-Kubeisi, was a native living in Baghdad. One day he heard a noise outside his house and ran to his second floor balcony to see what was going on. As he reached the porch he was gunned down. The people that shot him were Americans during a raid. His house was raided and nothing that was suspiscious was found. So why did Americans raid the innocent house? Thats the question that many Iraqi citizens have been asking.

Riverbend. Girl Blog From Iraq. New York: The Feminist P At the City University of New York, 2005. 58.

As I was reading your blog entries from August 19 to August 30th, I thought that your views were altered and your ideas were dumb. I maintained strong faith in my American heritage, but as I read on I became sympathetic. I realized that I am spoiled seeing that my home land is not getting bombed. I cannot imagine to be able to here bombs and no matter how oppressed people like me were, I do not know how well I would take another country invading my homeland. Children getting killed and innocent people getting their homes invaded would anger me also. I am sorry for the atmosphere you lived in but I have to stay loyal to the U.S. I feel like I’m being ignorant but I can’t help how I feel. Reading your blog did give me a brutal realization of what was going on in the Iraqi conflict and from an actual Iraqi civilian point of view and I thank you for giving me that insight.

Riverbend. Baghdad Burning: a Girl Blog From Iraq. New York: The Feminist Press At the City University of New York, 2005.

This Book was written by a young woman in Iraq during the war. She focuses on the oppression she faces and how scared she becomes throughout the conflict. She offers great insight to what it would be like if us Americans were put on the other side. She lived in Baghdad, right in the middle of the warzone. This book started off as a blog online and acheived an audience of millions. It shed a light on the terror of the war. This relates to our class because Riverbend was a woman who was opressed in Iraq just for being a woman. Women at this point were losing their rights left and right because of the regime changes and the rise of fundamentalists.

In Chapter 5 of A Room of One Own, Virginia Woolf explains to us that women are writing more and more at the time she was writing. She believes that women can write in a certain way where they are just writing to form a “woman’s sentence.” She makes a statement which lets us know how much she enjoys the natural voice of women in writing; “The natural simplicity, the epic age of women’s writing may have gone.” (Woolf 93) She identifies the voice of women as being a great writer of fiction. I believe that she would want me to find some form of art or study that will keep me happy and occupied. She loves freedom as a writer in her case, but she would want everyone to have freedom to explore which of that they loved. “The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace. Not a wheel must grate, not a light glimmer.” (Woolf) So i guess i need to find what i would call my room, life is not so simple as it was back then. I’ll find what I love and make that my life so overall it would be the same idea of freedom to do what I want and the peace of mind to accomplish it.

With Apologies to Virginia WoolfOLED’s are the future of efficient lighting and are the smallest way to brighten up a room. On TreeHugger, the people at Osram have had another breakthrough using polymer-OLED lights. OLED lights are organic light emitting diodes. They are a great alternative to CFL’s or Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs. They work great and do not have the mercury like the CFL’s. This provides a much more healthy and environmentally friendly bulb. In 2005 they came out with an OLED that had an efficiency of lumens-per-watt, and today they have created a light with an efficiency of 46 lumens-per-minute with a life of 5000 hours and a brightness more than twice that of a regular incandescent light. And since this comes in such a small, flexible package it will be very useful for designers who design lights for our homes and work places.

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is what has inspired feminists throughout the 20th century and has shaped the way that women have taken a hold of the blogosphere. She writes in a very ironic and sarcastic manner. She thinks that it is funny that men study women so much and try to figure them out, when women in her time were not allowed to participate in any form of study, including writing. In chapter 2 of A Room of One’s Own, Woolf makes a very sarcastic comment, “the aloe that flowers once in a hundred years would flower twice before I could set a pen to paper.” This is saying that because of how society was, how society treated women, Woolf would face many difficulties in writing anything especially a feminist manifesto. Another exampe of her wit about how men are stupid is when she talks about Professor von X. This man wrote a work entitled The Mental, Moral, and Physcal Inferiority of the Female Sex. Woolf describes how Professor von X was not an attractive man so probably received little attention from women. This explains why he would write such a paper.

Wonkette is a blog that brings entertainment and comedy to a world of pristine reputations in Washington DC and the more affluent political figures in the United States. Ana Marie Cox writes about sex scandals and all the gossip that takes place among the leading poiticians. This blog is basically a tabloid with celebrities replaced with politicians. The DailyKos blog is a much more news-like blog. In fact they get more visits during the few weeks before elections then Fox news does. They provide insight and huge forums into the world of politics. Articles are debated and prove to be great influences on voters, making them more aware of pressing issues.  

If anyone basis there vote solely on the information they get on Wonkette, they are sad. To make an educated vote, one has to learn about the issues and how candidates will deal with them, not find out who they are dating or who they slept with last week. Come on people, these websites are not comparable for legitimacy, they have two different purposes, use them for just that