Kwanzaa Food and Decor

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3230/3078126677_1cd5d09873.jpg?v=0

As soon as we went down the escalator in the campus center, I knew that we had arrived at the right place for the Kwanzaa celebration.  By the door were a bunch of balloons of the colors green, red, and black; the Kwanzaa colors.  I wasn’t sure what to expect as I walked through the auditorium doors, but the
decor of the room encompassed what is viewed as traditional decorations for such a celebration.  Not only were their additional bunches of balloons set up in front of the stage, but there were also multiple tables set up around the room each with either a green, red, or black tablecloth.  Streamers of the appropriate colors were also draped along the front of the stage as well as across the podium.  There were eight different African tapestries hung up along the walls of the auditorium, with mainly orange and brown colors.  A main table was set up in the front of the room holding a Mishumaa Saba, seven candles representing the seven ideals by which the African people are urged to live by (www.officialkwanzaawebsite.org).  The table also contained multiple African dolls and statues and the symbols of Kwanzaa.

It wouldn’t be an authentic celebration without food of course.  I was expecting there to be a lot of ethnic African food, but was very much surprised to find that there was all typical American food.  The event was catered by UMass Catering, which is located upstairs in the campus center.  The selection included macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, corn, fried chicken, rice, collard greens, rolls, and cornbread.  I wouldn’t be able to accurately report on the food without tasting it myself of course.  I thought that it was decent,
but definitely not one of the greatest meals I have had.

The Kwanzaa celebration met some of my expectations but definitely surprised me in the food area.  It probably isn’t something that I would ever attend again or in my own free time, but it was interesting to experience something new and to observe the scenery that I was placed in.

A “Normal” Thanksgiving

Everyone does something different for Thanksgiving, but the most prominent similarity of each person’s holiday is spending it with family and/or friends.  Although my family is pretty disfunctional, I would like to think that every year we have a fairly typical American Thanksgiving, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.  We usually have a fairly large Thanksgiving with my Mom, Dad, three sisters, brother-in-law, and two nieces.  However, this year my Mom didn’t invite my Dad and my sister and her husband had Thanksgiving with his parents.  So it was a small Thanksgiving with just my mom, two of my sisters, and myself.  Although it was smaller than usual, it was still just as nice to be able to sit down and have a nice dinner with my family.  It ended up being a dual holiday for me.  It was also my niece Nora’s third birthday, so after we had dinner and played a couple of board games (we are extremely competitive) we went to celebrate with Nora.  I was able to see my Dad at my sister’s house which was nice.

A lot of family’s gather around the tv watching football before dinner, and then stay in afterwards.  They digest and then eat their apple or pumpkin pies and sit around the fire together.  My family however, ate their ice cream cake; and we liked it.  As I said before, everyone does something for Thanksgiving.  Having divorced parents, and a sister with her own family, it sometimes makes it difficult to be able to spend time with my entire family on Thanksgiving, but it was done in our own way.  Check out the photos from my Thanksgiving:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/32950360@N07/sets/

Youtube on the Tube

I have always found it amazing just how fast the news of certain things that are on the internet can travel.  Last summer my boyfriend showed me this extremely funny video.  Check it out:

A couple weeks ago on a recent episode of Family Guy, there is a scene wear Stewie is reinacting this same video.  I wasn’t aware that the video that I had been shown several months ago had such an effect that the makers of Family Guy found it worthy of making fun of.  I am happy they did though, because it really is a funny video.  I was watching this episode with a couple of friends and they didn’t understand what family guy was referencing.  I then showed them the original video from youtube and they passed it on to other people that they know.  Eventually all 40 people in my house were very aware of the video and talking about it.  It is crazy how the internet and its contents is so often the topic of conversation and that it is so easy for it to travel, especially when a popular television show references it.  Check out the Family Guy version:

My Local News

Since I live in such a small little farm town, it can sometimes be difficult to find a good source of local news.  One of the only sources available to us is through MetroWest Daily News.  The newspaper also has a website (http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/) with stories from the paper plus additional stories available.  I was actually surprised by the amount of local stories that it had, and that it definitely had a significant number more than the newspaper.  I was also surprised that it had a blog section, which seems to be a sort of new development for news sites, and I didn’t think that such a small source would also include a blog section.  The stories were listed with small blurbs underneath the titles explaining what the articles are about.  It is definitely easy to navigate around the site since it has tabs at the top of the page for different sections of the news.  Even though this local newspaper includes my town in its section, I often find that I am unable to find any stories about my town in the newspaper.  However, I was easily able to find a few on the website.  I definitely would have liked to see more photographs on the home page of the site.  It seemed a little boring just to look at and wasn’t very appealing to the eye.  The site definitely exceeded my expectations.  I thought that it wasn’t going to be as informative as the newspaper and that it wouldn’t be a real big part of my local news, but I definitely think that it was a fairly nice website and that they were probably working with a reasonable income.

Reality vs. Fiction

In high school, I used to have a number of television shows that I would religiously follow, and it would be a crime if I missed a single episode.  I just had to keep up with what was going on in The OC and One Tree Hill.  However, I have just realized that I now only have one show that I watch on a weekly basis, and it’s not because I am a busy college student (which is true anyhow), but because of the lack of good watchable shows on tv.  It seems as if every time I turn on the tv there always pops up a reality tv show.  A lot of these are contest shows or have some sort of incentive.  I feel like the success of these shows is because you don’t have to keep up with them.  It is definitely possible to miss one week of a reality show, and still tune in the follow week and be able to catch up and understand what is going on.  It might sound like I hate reality tv, but the truth is, I usually find myself being sucked into it.  I don’t have to religiously keep track of when they are on, because I can easily catch up and because they seem to constantly be replayed.  But the truth is, I miss following the drama of good fictional television.

Palin Can’t Escape

A vast number of people were relieved by the election of Barack Obama not only because they wanted him to win, but because this has been such a draining election.  Right when I thought I had escaped all McCain and Palin antics, on my comcast homepage that comes up everytime I use the internet that has some news stories, up pops a picture of Sarah Palin with the title “Sarah Palin Talks Turkey.”  Oh no, it’s not over yet.  Just the title alone makes Palin sound strange for being at a turkey farm.  It’s almost Thanksgiving, how is that weird at all?  The only thing that was remotely funny about the video was a man in the backround holding a dead turkey by the feet and looking back at the camera.  Palin mentions in the video that it was nice to be out of the light of the media and it’s criticism, but that even this visit to the farm would probably bring about criticism for her.  Well she was right!  Check out the video:

http://www.comcast.net/data/fan/html/popup.html?v=936098349&pl=936097011.xml&plc=936097011&launchpoint=Cover&cid=fancover&attr=default_headline&config=/config/common/fan/default.xml

The Big Picture

I feel that for a blog from Boston.com I expected it to be extremely professional and informative.  Although it was professional, it wasn’t exceptionally informative.  The blog posts were extremely short, and basically just talked about what the photo accompanying it was about.  A lot of the posts weren’t even about important news and wasn’t really anything that people need to be aware of.  One post was about how at the University of Michigan they made a set of electron microscope images of carbon nanotube structures depicting Barack Obama.  I really don’t think this qualifies as important news.  The name of the blog, The Big Picture, is definitely an appropriate name, seeing as how the pictures take up the majority of the news site.  Although the pictures are visually appealing and displays some really good photography, I don’t think it is necessary to make the photos so large that it barely fits on my entire computer screen.  I overall didn’t think this blog was anything special because I don’t learn anything from it and I’m really just not that interested in photos alone.

A Special Spirit

I wasn’t quite sure what kind of photo gallery or audio slide show would actually interest me.  I was thinking if I found something with some cool graphics or perhaps James Earl Jones as the voice over it would be pretty cool.  But I got to thinking what kind of topics might yield a cool photo gallery, and I thought about the Olympics and how I was glued to the television all of August watching them.  I had seen a couple cool photos from it but I thought a whole gallery would be even better.  During my search I found a bunch of fairly mediocre gallerie, but nothing I found worthy enough to share in class.  In my google listings I came across a photo gallery for the Special Olympics.  Having never watched the Special Olympics or really have never heard anything about them, it sparked my interest.  Here it is:

http://studiostatesboro.statesboroherald.com/special_olympics/

I noticed that this slide show focused on the people that participated in the Special Olympics rather than the sports themselves.  There was a lot of emotion captured in the photographs.  There was a lot of celebration, determination, and disappointment.  It revealed the true spirit of the Special Olympics and that this too is a competition just as the regular Olympics are, and it is something to take seriously and something that perhaps more people should pay attention to.

Election Night Coverage

The coverage of the Presidential election, was just how I had predicted: everywhere.  It seemed as though every website I went to and every television station I turned to (news related or not) had something about the election on it.  The major network tv stations were as always, repetitive yet thorough.  However, I must say I was fairly disappointed in some of the cable news programs.  CNN broadcasted the first hologram on television with news reporter Jessica Yellin.  Here is the video:

The guy news reporter repeats 3 times that this is the first time that this has ever been done on television and that we should watch carefully and how exciting this is blah blah blah.  The focus of this report was way more on how neat it is that there is a news reporter standing with him through a hologram, than it was on the election.  It’s election night!  Was then really the appropriate time to introduce this new type of technology to television?  I really just thought it was inappropriate to take the focus away from the election and to put it on holograms instead.  CNN.com also had the video up on it’s web page definitely distracting from what was truly important that night.

The WashingtonPost.com, CNN.com, and NYPost.com all offered a large amount of articles pertaining to the Presidential election.  However, on all the websites, as I clicked through the various articles, I noticed just how repetitive and redundant they all are.  I think that it was possible to have just a few articles about the election containing all the information that those 15 articles did, just without being so repetitive.  If you are looking for a basically strict democratic site, anyone of these will do.  I find it frustrating that these are major sites for important news sources, and they don’t even have the professionalism to be more neutral.  I can understand a blog or editorial piece being biased, but I think it is so ridiculous how easy it is to go to one of these sites and find a clearly pro-Obama article.

I would honestly rather watch the television for my election coverage than check websites or several reasons.  First of all, the coverage on tv is live and is constantly being updated every second as soon as information is received.  Websites on the other hand, take time to update, and even though they all pronounced Obama the winner shortly after it was announced, the tv coverage was capable of telling us right away as soon as it is known.  Because I have the attention span of five year old, it is also more appealing for me to be able to watch people cover it and for them to talk to me rather than me having to search for the information I am trying to find and then have to read through it.  It may sound like I am lazy, but no matter how the election standings were going, I definitely found it more enjoyable to lounge on my bed and watch the tv than sit at my desk and browse through websites.  The television coverage is also able to broadcast the acceptance speech and the music and celebrations leading up to it, whereas websites are unable to show the viewer such things.  For those rooting for Obama, I find that it must have been much more exciting to be watching the triumph on tv then attempting to follow it online.

I personally watched Fox News, probably like every other Republican in the United States.  Although I find that the way they covered it was quite boring, it was better than the reporters pretty much smiling and celebrating on tv with every news they received about Obama possibly being proclaimed the winner.  Fox News is clearly conservative, but I thought they had toned down the biasness a bit than what they are usually like on a daily basis and their coverage on the weeks leading up to the election, which definitely surprised me.

Overall, the coverage of the Presidential election was just what I had expected.  I am really not that into politics, and the coverage didn’t push me to become more into it, so I can’t say that I was impressed with anything; it was just the normal.

Celebrations

Due to an unfortunate drunkin mishap, I have lost my less than a year old camera and have no way to visually document my experience of the place I was in when the next President of the United States was officially announced.  I was in my sorority house, and people have definitely been tense the week leading up to it; being confident yet not cocky.  When it was announced that Barack Obama would be the next President, people were shouting cries of joy and relief.  However, my experience was definitely different from those who were rejoicing.  I had people jumping out at me yelling “Barack Attack!” and “Ohhhhh it looks like McCain lost.  Sucks for you!”  With them knowing that I vote Republican most of the time, people were not hesitant to rub the loss in my face.  I wasn’t so eager to watch the acceptance speech or any of the celebrations on the tv but everyone else in my house was glued to the television, countin down the minutes until Obama would take his place at the podium and make one of his speeches.  I heard stories of people in the center of Amherst celebrating til 3am in the streets.  I’m just glad I didn’t have to hear that all night.