Blog Responses #1

Ski Cross brings excitement, danger to Olympics

This story features all natural sounds, even in the background during the reporter’s narration, which gives it a much  more realistic feeling in listening to the blurb about a sport which is getting much attention lately. Melissa Block speaks clearly and with an enthusiastic voice wihch adds to the stories ability to keep the listener engaged. She has a tendancy to narrate a bit too much though, instead of keeping it “short and sweet.”

Texting Underground Can Save Lives And Caves

Leanne Hayes sound much more like an evening newscaster than narrator Brad Horn does from the field. There is again the background sound of being “in a cave” wihch gets across further sound of the story. Alexander Kendrick is well ahead of his age bracket having come up with such a development at the age of sixteen. Brad’s supporting details of what the project entails and oberserver’s perspective of what he sees gives the listener more of a feeling that they are there. The interviews underground are crucial, just knowing where Kendrick and his father are at the time they are giving the details of the texting. Brad closes out with a humorous bit about global warming, which I think gives the story a lighter context.

Act One Tornado Prom

David sounds like a kid very much in tune with his age bracket. The title of the story is fitting, while the real tornado goes on outside, “tornado” of their highschool years culminates in one night. 

The natural sound to this story is amazing, it captures the setting and feeling of the night from the onlookers perspective, and the interviews that go with it through the eyes of highschooler’s perspective. The sound of “Survivor” by Destiny’s Child is an eerie indication of the night that would forever change the small Kansas town in which those kids lived and grew up together. Its interesting to hear the priorities of the kids while their lives are in doubt on the evening. Getting alcohol and drugs, smoking, inability to get out of the prom and hit up whatever evening juvenile delinquency awaited them. Later the interviews with them culminate the saddness they undoubtedly felt wondering what their homes would look like when they returned to their addresses.

Violin version of “Stairway to Heaven” is clutch

Why Being Born in the late 80′s is a Big Deal

Okay.. so aside from the fact that I haven’t posted in here in like a good six months, I will preface this by saying I still feel very much like a kid, despite being on the cusp of graduating from college. I am a child of the late 80′s, a time when Reagan was President, the first syndicated re-runs of Punky Brewster were being aired, Michael Jordan was having his first MVP season and “Just Say No” was a household phrase.

Myself like many in my age bracket are descendants of the middle or at least the tail end of the Baby Boom, a time when GOOD music was in it’s infancy, LSD was still a legal high, and modern suberbias had yet to be developed. While the Baby Boom itself is considered by many to have taken place over the course of about eighteen years (1946-1964) one thing is for certain: our parents have learned just as much as us about worldly things as we have of them.

We grew up fast, faster than perhaps those Baby Boomers would have liked us to have, but not fast enough where we didn’t enjoy things along the way. From the rise of “fourth generation” video game systems we each begged for that special occasion (be it birthday or holiday) to the self dispensing coupon machines we each took needlessly at the grocery store (and I know many people like myself are guilty of this), to flashlight tag, fruit rollups, and eventually afternoon Nickelodeon, if you were born around the time I was (1987 to be exact) this should strike a chord.

I say this because practically no one’s parents from this time had as much available to them as we did growing up as kids, yet the now early retirees of that same Baby Boom had the distinct pleasure of watching their offspring grow up amidst a generation “Y” of highly materialistic advertising, subliminal messages in cartoons, unhealthy snack foods and the Dot Com era. When I stop and think of how many advertisements I am bombarded with on a daily basis (the numbers vary, but I’m sure it is a lot) I am perplexed to the extent that I know better than to pay attention to most of them, but I also was not pressured by advertisements as much as children these days are.

And the fact is, as early as most kids of the late eighties have grown up, the youth of today will soon become the adults of tomorrow, all the while with less time on their ticker’s than even people my own age have lived through.  I am thankful (and certainly my parents are) that we didn’t buy in too much to what was shown on TV, and it’s probably to myself and many others benefit that the internet was introduced to us as a novelty in the late 90′s, NOT having grown up on it since birth.

This being said, I loved and miss that decade of enormous social, economic and cultural growth that was the 90′s. I can claim to have been born and lived through some of the now ancient decade of the 80′s but I’d be kidding if I said I remembered a second of them. It was just early enough to appreciate the time when being a kid was not such a pressure cooker, but rather “wicked cool.”

For a trip down memory lane, Check out Children of the 90′s

Greetings

So this is it, my first attempt at joining the blogging world. I’m sitting in my room and could really use an air conditioner right now. This blog had to be made, not just for other left-handed people, not just for scorpios. I needed a way to rant at, inform and hopefully enlighten people, all the while distinguishing myself in some way. Creativity has been sorely lacking in my life, so this will hopefully help dispell that. I’m going to try and keep this updated around once a week.

I’m a journalism major, an aspiring writer going into my senior year at the University of New Hampshire amidst a time that jobs are scarce and journalists are even scarcer. Needless to say, I’m somehwat perplexed at where the future will take me after next year, so if your in college and about to graduate, we already have something in common.

I work for a local New England supermarket chain called Market Basket. I work produce specifically, and have maintained a hate/hate relationship with my job for seven years. I simply wouldn’t be there, like most people, if I didn’t need the money. I have to be at work at 6 a.m. so I’m going to bed.