TOW #17 - Mental Health Care Access vs. Gun Access by Nick Anderson

Firearms can be exceptionally deadly when placed in the wrong hands. This political cartoon reveals its solution to the gun violence problem in U.S. Source: politicalhumor.about.com

                                   

            Nick Anderson's single-panel cartoon shows a guy who looks a little like a nutcase and another man, who looks a bit more "civilized" than the guy mentioned before,  smoking calmly while sitting in an armchair. The crazy-looking guy is at the bottom of the stairs that is labeled as "ACCESS TO MENTAL HEALTH CARE" while the civilized man is on the very top of the stairs. Nearby the lunatic, there is a gun store that is covered with signs like "COME RIGHT IN", "WELCOME", "OPEN", and "GUNS!!" with a smiley face. Of course, the crazy-looking guy is googly-eyeing the gun store with a goofy grin on his face. Even though this cartoon does not have any kind of speech bubbles or elaborate pictures, the cartoonist manages to make his message very clear: With the increased level of difficulty of obtaining a mental health care, more and more mentally unstable people are getting their hands on deadly firearms. Cartoon readers and other members of the audience could easily see that the slope of the stairs is unbelievably steep while the gun shop is literally only a few steps away from the lunatic. The steepness of the stairs represents the overwhelming challenge people must face in order to get access to mental health care while the closeness of the gun store symbolizes the easy accessibility of guns, rifles, and other weapons. Also, compared to the boring looking white staircase, the gun store with all the fancy and welcoming signs makes the latter look more...well, welcoming. After Anderson makes a connection between  the two different topics, it becomes more clear to the audience members that in order to lessen all the gun violence in U.S. and possibly the whole world, they first need to lessen the number of mentally unstable people who might cause violence because of their lack of rational judgments.  And what better way to lessen the number of mentally unstable people is there than to lower the slope of the "ACCESS TO MENTAL HEALTH CARE" staircase? I think that Nick Anderson managed to get a clear message across by using very clever symbols.

TOW #16 - The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Review by Zaki Hasan

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is the second movie in The Hobbit trilogy. Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit, continues his journey with the Wizard Gandalf and thirteen Dwarves in order to reclaim the Dwarven Kingdom from the evil dragon Smaug. Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

                Zaki Hasan, a hardcore Lord of the Ring fan, gives his candid opinion of the movie The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug to his fellow audience of movie-lovers. At first, he writes his previous experience of the Lord of the Ring trilogy a little over eleven years ago when he "Could. Not. Wait" (Hasan 1) for the saga's continuation. Hasan claims to have "enjoyable enough experience" with the first movie of The Hobbit trilogy, An Unexpected Journey, but not enough for him to watch it "an embarrassingly high number of times in the theater, and a few more times on home vid" like he did with The Fellowship of the Ring, the first movie of the Lord of the Ring trilogy. However, the biggest letdown was the recent movie The Desolation of Smug which Hasan describes it as "a three hour story with no beginning and no end" with "lots of middle" (Hasan 2-3). Don't get him wrong, he loves how the cast returns, including the elf archer Legolas played by Orlando Bloom, but he believes the movie to be "simply too much time spent servicing too little". He explains how Tolkien's book is a "breezy 300-page confection" while the trilogy Peter Jackson is making is a "nine-hour behemoth" (Hasan 5) out of it. Hasan admits that he sees the concept "why make one flick, or even two, when you can just as well make three movies, and three times the coin? After all, there were three hugely-successful Lord of the Rings movies, right?" (Hasan 6) but argues that Lord of the Ring trilogy was each movie adapted on one book while The Hobbit is forcing one book to be three movies to the point that the movies almost are their own separate entities. Hasan makes his review credible and effective by juxtaposing one Tolkien's trilogy with another. I believe that little humorous comments he makes during the review - like when he references The Desolation of Smaug as "a desolate slog" (Hassan 8) - make the readers to easily share his views.

TOW #15 - The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir by Bill Bryson

A farm in Iowa. "About 95 percent of Iowa's landscape is still farmed. Iowa's farms produced more in value each year than all the diamond mines in the world put together. It remains number one in the nation for the production of corn, eggs, hogs, and soybeans, and is second in the nation in total agricultural wealth, exceeded only by California, which is three times the size. Iowa produces one-tenth of all America's food and one-tenth of all the world's corn" (Bryson 172-173). Source: www.secondshelters.com

                                                                                          

            In a chapter in The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Bill Bryson talks about Iowa and its last golden age of the family farm to get his readers to understand a bit more about his childhood world. Throughout the chapter, Bryson shows great pride in Iowa's farming by giving interesting facts such as that here were 215,361 farms in the state in 1930 and the absolute maximum  that was predicted was 223,000 farms. As a child, Bryson spent a lot of time in Winfield near where Bryson's father grew up and Bryson's grandparents lived. Bryson describes the Winfield he remembers as a perfect town for a little kid like him because of "its hansom Main Street, its imperturbable tranquility, its lapping cornfields, [and] the healthful smell of farming all around" (Bryson 173). Bryson reminisces about how his grandfather's barn and the fields of corn  looked like the most fun places in the world until he went in and realized that they were really scary places to be. Whether he was drinking Nehi brand pop, watching TV that had seven channels (more than what he had at home), having supper provided by a group of chuckling women all named Mabel, watching tornadoes from safe distance, sleeping under piles of blankets, overcoats, tarpaulins, and old carpets or viewing a town called Swedesburg  from the windows, Bryson remembers that there was always some sort of strange adventures waiting for him down on the farm. However, Bryson expresses his sorrow at the end when he informs the readers that the Winfield that he used to know "is barely alive" and that the best thing that he can say is that he "saw the last of something really special." Throughout the chapter, the author uses a lot of vivid details, metaphors, similes and hyperbole to get the readers to almost actively feel what he is feeling. I think that sentences such as "If you so much as flexed a finger or bent a knee, it was like plunging them into liquid nitrogen" (Bryson 184) are effective in captivating audiences.