Back With a Boom
Despite the ongoing Writer’s Guild strike, House was able to make a comeback, airing on Fox 25 immediately following American Idol on Tuesday.
The show did not lose a thing since its last airing on November 27th of last year. Doctor House remains juvenile yet devious while his three remaining employees are left in the dark to his inner thoughts of their importance to the team.
Doctor House schemes to receive gifts from every member of his team, as he only puts his name in the “secret Santa” raffle. Another brilliant idea by House that obviously is meant for more than receiving gifts. He wants to analyze their response to this. Once they realize House has pulled a fast one on them, what will they do?
House’s distrust of the human race, although sabotaging desperately needed relationships, serves prudent as his knack for delineating lies from truths has saved countless lives.
Leaving us on our toes, turning corners never wandered; secrets are coming to light in ways unimaginable. Take your prediction, turn upside down, mangle it, flip it inside out, you may be on to something.
Why being a junior is a bit like being Jon Krakauer
Hey guys, I’m Caroline D, and I’m co-layout editor for The Bradford. When I’m not buried under the mountains of work that come with junior year, I like to watch TV and movies, play my guitar, hang out with my friends and dog, Shanna, and read. Actually, I really don’t read anything by choice from September to June because I’m too busy reading required stuff for required classes so that I can fulfill annoying requirements to graduate and go to college.
If my regular obligatory work is Everest, I’m also struggling to get over a couple of other Kilimanjaros right know known as “junior history thesis” and “junior English IRP.” When did it become ok to assign massive amounts of additional reading and papers without giving students a break on the normal homework?
As you can probably tell, I’m not a big fan of school. I used to enjoy it, but that was back when school was only about learning, and grades didn’t actually matter.
As you can also probably tell, I’ll be ranting a lot in this blog. I don’t have a particular topic in mind, but you can expect a couple irritated tirades about the various problems I have with this school.
Of course, I could always talk about happy things too. I’m the kind of person who tries to see a glass as half full even when it’s filled with disgusting, sour milk, so I guess we’ll just have to see what my brain serves up in the future.
If It Ain’t Good…A Waste of Almost $3 Million
Jeremy G here again… As the mecca of TV commercials gets closer and closer, the Super Bowl looks to hopefully provide that extra “oomph” that commercials don’t really have nowadays. As I said last week, the “This is SportsCenter” commercials are part of a select breed of commercials that are really creative and original. Even last year, Super Bowl commercials weren’t anything that special, as the only good one was the Sierra Mist Combover ad featuring Jim Gaffigan, who only makes the commercial good because he is one of the funniest comedians around.
(One of Cindy Crawford’s classic Pepsi ads)
What ever happened to the days of amazing Super Bowl commercials? Well those days have long since past, as many Super Bowl commercials are awful Bud Light and Coors Light commercials that don’t make any sense (this isn’t a Super Bowl commercial, but the new Bud Light “DUDE” commercial isn’t remotely funny). If your commercial is awful, then why would you pay $2.6 million for 30 seconds of airtime to not get any message across, nor make your commercial funny? For another list of Top Ten Super Bowl commercials, click here. Hopefully this year will be a better year for Super Bowl commercials than last, or the year before, or the year before that…
(This picture from an old Apple commercial is perhaps one of the most famous Super Bowl ads, and was made in 1984)
How can children be invisible?
As I mentioned in my introduction, I am a member of the Invisible Children Club at my high school. This club was started by a friend of mine last year with inspiration from a video we saw on Seminar Day. In this seminar, a college student who volunteers with the non-profit organization Invisible Children came and showed their rough-cut video.
Invisible Children Organization was started by three college kids after they took a vacation trip to Uganda to film life in Africa. They went with the expectation that life there would be interesting, but they never expected to encounter the tragedy that they did in Uganda. They met child soldiers and documented their entire trip on camera. Upon their return to the United States, they decided to turn all their footage into a video to raise awareness for the injustice to these child soldiers, or “invisible children.” I’m the first to admit that I get really emotionally into videos and things like this, but watching that movie made me cry, and I really think it would be hard for anyone not to get emotional.
It’s a time consuming process, but if you have an extra hour, or want a break from homework, the video can be found here as a link from Google Video. I know most people probably won’t watch this, but I really can’t stress the importance of this organization as well as this video can. I promise that it will hold your attention for the entire 55 minutes…it’s not just another boring documentary.
I really like this organization because, since it was founded by three college age kids, it has a really young feel to it. Most of the volunteers are college students and all the projects they plan are geared toward kids. This makes the organization feel more accessible. Just exploring their Invisible Children website gives an insight into the kind of atmosphere they project. Just as an example, the band Fall Out Boy recently traveled to Uganda through Invisible Children to meet kids there and help bring supplies over. They also have many more promotional videos that they add as support for their organization grows. I don’t want to bore everyone to death with a long post, so I’ll stop here but this is a topic I’ll probably return to often in my later posts.
Exciting Oscar Candidates
We are approaching the eightieth ceremony in Oscar history. Historically, the ceremony has simply been an excuse to promote big-budget films in theaters. The Academy has never cared about choosing the best films of a given year. To be nominated, a film must at least have the pretense of being artistic. However, beyond that, the standards tend to be low. Shallow period pieces like Gladiator and Shakespeare in Love are congratulated for their ability to present lowbrow entertainment under the guise of challenging and enriching our culture.
The Academy still has financial success as their top priority. However, this year two of the most commercially successful Oscar-acceptable films have also been two of the most radical and invigorating movie experiences of the new millennium. The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men and PT Anderson’s There Will Be Blood are uncompromising portraits of America at foreboding crossroads in its industrial and societal evolution. With these films, Anderson and the Coens have refined and mastered the formal and philosophical tendencies presented in earlier works.
There are few films in theaters that are as exulting to simply look at. Both films are set in the desert but make such different formal interpretations of this environment. In No Country, the land is glowing and its light leaks through the windows of the cavernous interiors. In There Will Be Blood, the land is saturated and alien, creating an appropriate visual metaphor for the soul of the embittered protagonist.
The protagonist is an elegant oil minor (in an Oscar-worthy performance by Daniel Day Lewis), with a voice as smooth and thick as oozing cement. So much of our emotional response to the film hinges on a mystery at the core of this character. This is the mystery as to whether he has a wicked heart. He behaves with such cutthroat savagery that one cannot help but wonder what degree he is truly human. This question is never fully answered and the brutal ending opens a can of worms that some viewers might lack the stomach to explore.
No Country confronts us with an even greater savage named Anton Chigurh (Javier Barmen in another stellar performance). He is, by all accounts, pure evil and much of the film is centered around the other characters’ inability to come to terms with the existence of such an evil. The film lures the viewer in with the pretense of being a pulp entertainment and a rapturously skillful one at that. We are swiftly punished for our cheap thrills, however, as the Coens brilliantly throw us into an existential crisis regarding the future of American civilization. The film lacks any easy resolution but, in confronting the crisis, the film paradoxically is far more hopeful than Oscar-nominated social critiques like Crash and Babel.
Films like these rarely get Oscar attention. This could be a rare occasion in which I will actually care which film wins “Best Picture.”
Boys Hockey Staying Course
For our own Wellesley High boys hockey team, this season has been a big success so far. The team’s record currently stands at 9-1-3 with the lone loss coming last Wednesday Norwood. Saturday night the team clinched its second straight state tournament berth with a 4-1 win over Milton at Babson. The team has another home game tomorrow night at 8 pm against Brookline, also at Babson.
Personally I think that this team has a shot to do some great things in the Division 1 tournament which may include winning the state championship. Up until the loss to Norwood the team had been considered to have a chance at a possible Super 8 berth. The Super 8 for those who don’t know is the best 8 division 1 boys hockey teams as decided by a committee. Those teams play in a tournament against each other with the top two teams from the two brackets of the round robin part going to the semi-finals and then the winners of those games going to the finals.
The game that really sticks out to me this season is the Needham game. Not only was it a 2-2 tie but the crowd was amazing. The Wellesley fans all dressed in red and showed their school pride and spirit to the best of their ability. I have seen posts on different high school sports forums I visit who say that it was the best high school sporting event atmosphere that they have ever seen. Hopefully the team can keep their success going and possibly bring home that state title in March for not only the players, but the student body as well.
Look Out, Terrible Show
Friday night, after putting the kids I was babysitting to bed, I went into their den and discovered the greatest prize in their house. I moved forward and was standing in front of a plasma screen T.V. made by Sony that had as many HD channels as my T.V. at home has regular.
I began watching a rerun of CSI from 9-10, and then switched to NUMB3RS from 10-11. While I was watching NUMB3RS I saw that two channels ahead there was a marathon of Dog Whisperer episodes. As I began to watch I noticed that although it is an addicting show to watch, it is not a great show. He does help the dogs, but not to the level that you would expect from a “professional dog rehabilitater”. The dogs show a little improvement, but he leaves it up to the owners to do more.
It shows how the dogs are at the end, but doesn’t tell you how they end up in a later time frame. I think it was a waste of my time and next time I see it I will make sure to change the channel.
More to come next week,
~Anthony D.
The Most Telivised Event
Dan Schwarz
This Sunday is the biggest Sunday, of all Sundays, for a football fan. For this football fan, I will be glued to the television, as Super Bowl XLI, is being played. This year, my team, the New England Patriots are playing the New York Giants. Yes, it’s another New York vs. Boston game, as if the Red Sox-Yankees weren’t enough. The Super Bowl is the most televised sporting event in the country, and will attract even more viewers as the Patriots go for history and be the first team to win all 19 games in a season.
Every year fans watch the Super Bowl just to see the commercials. Advertisers are drawn to this day, because everyone is watching. The prices of the advertisements are raised, so the quality of the advertisement is also raised. The commercials are such a big deal that they even have post super bowl shows just to rate the commercials. Often, beer commercials are the most creative and usually win the commercial countdowns. Car commercials lose the audience because of the quantity of them. Every car brand plays its advertisement at least three times throughout the game, and always seems to have a close up on its truck. It’s time to get back to the past years of funny commercials that you watch over and over.
Disturbing Films, Drowning Shows
Hi my name is Miles B. I am a writer for The Bradford at Wellesley High School. In my spare time, my passion is watching a lot of TV; shows and films.
On this page, I will be expressing my opinions of films and shows. To get a taste of the kinds of films I will reflect on positively, I’ll tell you that I have recently enjoyed The Green Mile, Deer Hunter, and Donnie Darko. Films have been a big part of my life since I was a youngster. The first film that sincerely struck me was The Sixth Sense starring Bruce Willis. From there I began to spread my wings and developed into a more diverse moviegoer, as I started enjoying movies that are more disturbing than anything else. Deer Hunter is a prime example of a truly disturbing, yet brilliant, film.
In general, films being focused on here will be in a variety of categories, most prominently drama horrors.
Lately, network television has served as a supreme disappointment more than anything else. Writer’s Guild is striking, and once excellent shows are becoming obsolete. Shows like Prison Break and Lost are being bent, mangled and especially stretched just to continue their reign when putting an end to the series immediately wouldn’t disappoint me. I won’t be picking all the shows apart. Some have managed to keep their heads above the water.
American Idol and Two and a Half Men serve as two of the only shows that have maintained appeal for years. Despite old shows falling apart, America was just warming up to the newer shows before the writer’s strike put a damper of them.
These shows will be back eventually. Don’t give up on them. Many of them actually had potential.
The Common Principles for 21st Century Schools
My Twitter network came alive this weekend at the Educon 2.0 Conference in Philadelphia, PA. I met so many people that I have known virtually for a long time. We had amazing conversations about learning and technology (in that order). What was most powerful for me was the common vision that many of us share about what good teaching and learning looks like in the 21st century. Thank you so much to Chris Lehmann and everyone else who made this all possible.
In the spirit of Ted Sizer’s Common Principles for the Coalition of Essential Schools (Thanks to Thom Hoffman for his session on the topic), I list below my thoughts on the Common Principals for 21st Century Schooling. I do not believe these principles should take the place of Sizer’s vision. I use his model for inspiration and as the backbone for what I have begun to flesh out below and on a wiki.
I’ve created an Educon 2.0 group on the Classroom 2.0 Ning Website for attendees (both virtual and face to face) to continue the conversation.
The Common Principles for 21st Century Schools
This is a work in progress. Please join the wiki and help me to revise and refine these ideas.
Community is Essential – The school should bring learners and teachers together into a supportive community that nurtures both the individual and the group. The community should permeate all possible spaces, in the classroom, in the home and Online.
Critical Thinking – The school should actively encourage learners and teachers to think critically, continually asking the question, “Why do we teach what we teach?”
Risk Taking – The school should actively encourage learners and teachers to risk failure in the pursuit of understanding.
Learner Centered – The school should surround the learner with ideas and information, encouraging the learner to pursue a wide variety of paths to knowledge, and supporting the personal growth for all who inhabit the community.
Diversity – The school should actively encourage and pursue the input of those both inside and outside the community with a diversity of opinions. The school should consistently check that it is inclusive and supportive of learners and teachers from diverse backgrounds.
Nurture all learners – The school should provide opportunities and encouragement for all members of the community including teachers, students and parents to learn and grow.
Pursue Innovation – The school should actively explore, pursue and test new ideas and technologies, while always keeping the learner at the heart of the pursuit.
Good schools graduate good people – The school should actively and explicitly teach learners to think beyond themselves, encouraging students to value kindness and generosity.
Break down the walls – The school should provide access and opportunities for learners and teachers to reach outside the walls of the school to the neighboring, national and global community.
Image Citation: “Fitting In” assortedstuff’s Photostream on Flickr. 26 Jan 2008. [http://www.flickr.com/photos/assortedstuff/2220751752/] 28 Jan 2008 .
