Picture this: you're watching one of Disney's classic animated films. You take in the beautifully rendered animation, the stirring music, the unrealistic-yet-irresistible romance. As the credits roll, you (just play along here) wonder what adventures your favorite characters could have next. After all, if Disney could make such a well-written, well-animated film, surely they could make an equally good follow-up, right? RIGHT?
When you pop in the DVD for the second installment of your childhood favorite, you soon realize how tragically wrong you are. The once-funny comic relief has his quirks turned up far past 11 to the point where his presence makes you want to destroy things. The music is uninspiring at best. The animation, at least compared to the original film, looks like it was drawn by an orangutan on shrooms. What the hell happened? The sequel, my friend. The sequel.
To truly understand the tragedy of Sequelitis, as it is known on TVTropes, we must analyze what makes a sequel so terrible. Is it the fact that most of them are purely made to make five year olds scream and hold their breath in Wal-Mart until their moms give in and get them another princess movie? Partly yes, but as a humanities major I'm obliged to tell you that there is so much more beneath the surface. And it involves creating a culture of otherness. Well, no, not really, but here we go: The Top 5 Reasons (In No Particular Order) Why Disney Sequels Suck So Hard.
The plot is resolved and there's no real story to make a movie out of.
The villain has fallen from a precipice (in pure Disney Villain Death fashion), the princess and the prince are forever joined in perfect heteronormative love, and all is well. Now what? The writers are stuck with no loose ends to explore, no villain that can top the original, and execs breathing down their necks about writing the movie on a deadline. I think the movie most guilty of continuing an already resolved plot is The Hunchback of Notre Dame 2; let's face it: after Frollo, where do you go? The guy had a whole musical number about his desire to rape and murder a girl and died by falling into a lake of molten lead. Hard to top that villainy/death. And they didn't. Instead, they gave us a half-assed villain whom Frollo could chew up and spit out (if he wasn't all dead from falling into a lake of molten lead). Laaaaame. But more on lame villains later. Anyway, when there's no further conflict, there's no further movie. When the townspeople decide that they like the ugly dude, the hot guy gets the hot girl, and the villain is dead, there's really nothing more you can do with it. Read »
Aaron Forbath Soup! With butter....
This winter break, I started cooking soup. I had a lot of time on my hands and wanted to learn a new set of techniques and recipes that would serve me well back at school. Soup is simple, comforting, inexpensive, and always tastes better the next day. It’s perfect for simple meals on snowy nights like these. Its almost magical—you throw a bunch of ordinary ingredients into a pot and something beautiful and delicious comes out.
I adapted this recipe from a similar one in the Vegetarian Epicure, which takes roasted tomatillos.
I’ve cooked it with and without tomatoes and have added black beans, parmesan, and spinach. The spices can be changed or omitted entirely if you’d like. If you don’t have a blender of food processor you could mash it by hand or just serve it as is. Peeling a butternut squash can be pretty exhausting, so I usually remove the thick layer of skin with a paring knife then use a vegetable peeler to take of the rest; there really shouldn’t be any whitish looking rind left. If you’re tired of butternut squash you could try this recipe for sweet potato soup, although I’d cut down the amount of cinnamon and ginger. Read »
images.google.com @THE_REAL ARGUS has befriended @RealKaka
On his Twitter page (@RealKaka), Brazilian (and Real Madrid) superstar Kaká criticized his countryman Neymar for using a common technique to score a goal via penalty kick--the “paradinha”: “Essa paradinha so no Brasil!!” he exclaimed, followed by “A paradinha e uma ventagem para o cobrador, e qual a vantagem do goleiro??” As far as my (extremely limited) Portuguese and Google Translate lead me to believe, these two statements are roughly translated to “You would only see the ‘paradinha’ in Brazil!!” and “The ‘paradinha’ is an advantage for the striker. Where’s the advantage for the keeper?”
It would be easy to write off Kaká’s criticisms of the “paradinha” as bad sportsmanship, as Neymar used it against his old team, São Paolo FC. And maybe it was my own bad sportsmanship (I’m a huge fan of Kaká’s, especially since his move to Madrid) that made me think that he was on to something: I’ve seen hundreds of penalty kicks over the years, and there has always been something illegal about the way the Brazilians used the “paradinha.”
So I looked it up: weirdly, but perhaps understandably, the results were mixed. At no point in the FIFA Referee handbook does it say that the kick-taker cannot stop, though many other sources suggest that a player may slow down but not stop. The FIFA handbook is very vague, so one has to wonder about whether this kind of thing would ever be enforced at all… Read »
My fascination with sex and sexuality all started when I was three. My Communist Manifesto-reading, motorcycle-riding mother took me to see a drag queen show at the Holiday Inn near our apartment. I remember being slightly confused yet fascinated by how these men were able to transform from being scruffy, beer bellied males to fabulous ladies of the night. Ever since then, I have always been skeptical of the gender binary and the definition of what really makes a man, a man, or a woman, a woman. I do not have the answer to this, but in writing this column I hope to learn more about sexuality through my retelling of my experiences and thoughts on sexuality and sex.
So what makes me so qualified to dirty the Blargus with my and other people’s sexcapades? It is because my sex life has been anything but your typical suburban teenager’s. It is probably because I ate out a girl before my first kiss, or that I gave one of my best friend’s boyfriend road head on Valentines Day. I mean don’t take my word for it, take the CollegeACB’s, where I have been dubbed, “controversial queer” and “ridiculous man whore,” my personal favorites.
If you are curious, I’m bisexual, which definitely gives me perspective on sex with girls, boys and both at the same exact time.
So my first sexual experience all went down (pun intended) when I was in third grade. Tanaynay (not her real name) was one of my best friends and she was adopted, so she was very curious about where she came from. She finally learned on one fated day about sex (probably on Cinemax’s Night Passions) and she told me all about it. Thirty seconds later, I learned about the clit and eating out. Five minutes later in the very backseat of bus 91, I was eating Tanaynay out until a 5th grader, whose only comment was, “sexy,” walked in on us. Ever since then, eating out has been one of my favorite hobbies in the world.
Yet, as much I would want like to divulge more in my very first column, the sex bell has been rung, so I must depart.
Stay sexcellent,
Dylan
wesleyanargus.com
Largely thanks to my “Jew-hat”, I have had people throughout the campus’ agnostic majority contending with me about the existence of a Divinity. While the reasons for their disbelief vary, there is one argument against the existence of a Divinity that, regardless of its merit, pulls many away from belief.
This notion is the idea that G-d must not exist because He allows disasters to happen and ecologies to fall into ruin. Clearly, the all-knowing and all-loving G-d will not allow anything short of Utopia and/or Kallipolis to exist in the world, if He is indeed the hallmark of all perfection. Could He have not created a race far more pristine than the humanity that we know, and therefore truly allowed His divinity to manifest in it?
The answer can be found in a primary rule of creation: balance must exist. If there is a great positive aspect in the world, then a negative aspect in the world must exist to balance it. Even in science, the primary of element of creation—the basic hydrogen atom—denotes the positive and the negative forces in tandem, and without the two of them combined, creation cannot be.
If righteousness existed and wickedness did not, the Jewish Rabbinic tradition equates the presence of righteousness to a candle in broad daylight—an image that is far less perfect and much far less meaningful in purpose when compared to the candle in the darkness.
So therefore, if goodness is to exist (and G-d is indeed the source of all goodness), then wickedness—by necessity of this law of creation—must also exist. Read »
It's happened again! A brand new episode of Argus News Radio.
Kicking off the show, it's new ANR host Piers Gelly '13 with headlines. Piers has a great radio voice, even on the internet.
This week we feature an exclusive interview with Dr. Doug Green '77, who spent several days in Haiti after the earthquake in January. ANR correspondent Laignee Barron '13 talks with Green about the conditions on the ground, and what people in the Wes community can do to help.
Also in store is our regular senior thesis spotlight segment. This week, ANR contributor Ben Soloway '13 sits down with Ezra Silk '10 to discuss his project on journalism and the changing media landscape.
Thanks to the two new ANR producers, Cora Engelbrecht '12 and Amy Block '13. Mary Longley '10 also contributed production help.
(This is an addendum to my Wespeak, "Congratulations, Vol. 2: Demerits")
1. The act of theorizing a sexual act or fetish creates a website dedicated to that sexual act or fetish.
a. If it is possible to theorize a sexual act or fetish, then said sexual act or fetish exists on the Internet
2. It need not be possible to theorize a sexual act or fetish for an anime porn site to exist that is dedicated to it.
3. There is a porn film dedicated to any blockbuster movie.
a. The closer the blockbuster movie moves towards the anime/sci-fi/fantasy genres, the more porn films will be dedicated to it.
4. The act of theorizing an object being inserted into a vagina/anus creates a website dedicated tyo the insertion of said object into a vagina/anus.
a. If an object can be theorized going into a vagina/anus, then a website exists wherein said object is then inserted into a mouth.
5. The act of theorizing two animals having sex creates a website wherein two humans dressed as said animals engage in sexual acts.
wikipedia The Original
I’d like to use my first post of the new year to draw some attention to a momentous event that passed mostly unnoticed this week: on February 2, Fall Out Boy announced to little fanfare that they had broken up. Let’s not cry too hard, now: the band’s fifteen minutes were decidedly up, and, as I’ll discuss below, some good is likely to come out of this. I come to bury Fall Out Boy, not to praise them; but they deserve to be interred solemnly, not dumped in a ditch.
Now, my attitudes on the subject have changed remarkably in last half decade. When the Chicago quartet hit the big time with 2005’s From Under the Cork Tree I fucking despised Fall Out Boy. But like most fifteen-year-old quasi-punk nerds trying to prove their hipness by talking up Gang Of Four and The Replacements, I had stupid reasons. Sell-outs, I called them; inauthentic, whiney, emo pretty boys who dressed up shallow pop music with a thin veneer of fake punk attitude. That’s all one hundred percent accurate and equally beside the point.
House Lions is Wesleyan's resident poetry podcast. To hear featured poets read their poems live and talk about their work, check out the House Lions weekly featured reader. Look for information about live recording sessions in the Shapiro Creative Writing Center, and a new featured poet every week. For more information, or to express interest in being on the show, shoot an email to sknittle@wesleyan.edu.
Note: On Monday, February 8th, House Lions will have its first live recording of the semester in the Shapiro Writing Center at 9 PM. Poets Alana Perino '11, Sarah Ashkin '11 and Camara Awkward-Rich '11 will be featured.
This Week's Poet: Josh Smith '11
Although Josh Smith's poetry bears obvious homage to hip-hop, it is distinguished by the degree to which it begets its origins in the work of poets such as Yusuf Komunyakaa and Thomas Sayers Ellis through careful attention to activity within the body of line and to an effort to echo both the emotional and rhythmic cores of the post-soul aesthetic. Smith's work is both explosive in its pacing and its careful deployment of fireworks of consonants wrought by a density of sonic repetition, and excruciatingly beautiful in its astute attention to the usage of visual detail through which it builds a series of singular atmospheres.
blog.pentagram.com The Grey Lady investigates the Kannam case.
In a 1,200 word piece in today's edition of the Times, education reporter Lisa Federaro delves into the increasingly nasty battle between Wesleyan and Tom Kannam (et al.).The story, which ran on page A14, doesn't break much new ground, though there are new and aggressive quotes from some of the defense attorneys. Federaro has an interesting analysis, highlighting sections of the lengthy complaint that the Argus and other publications chose to ignore. Overall, she found Wesleyan's case to be "an unusual airing of alleged ivory tower impropriety" that sought "to portray [Kannam] as a money-obsessed bureaucrat who exploited Wesleyan’s prestige and resources to boost his personal wealth." Though we were not as analytical in our own story, I personally found Federaro's characterization of the complaint to ring true. No summary can really do justice to the full panoply of sordid details that Wesleyan outlines in it's lawsuit--though most news outlets seem to agree that the story of the "Taj" is worth telling.
Mostly, the article confirms that the defense will be taking the basic position first elaborated by co-defendant Ralph Gill in an extended comment on our original story. Gill made a number of claims, but his main argument seemed to be that Michael Roth was using the lawsuit to deflect blame for the falling endowment onto Kannam. Gill claimed to have inside information that Roth was not fundraising to the satisfaction of the Board of Trustees, though he provides no evidence or sources for that assertion.
In Federaro's story, the Belstar Group's attorney, Martin Stein, makes a similar argument.
But Mr. Stein, the lawyer for Belstar, said that he believes that Wesleyan was “looking for a scapegoat” for its recent endowment losses.“There’s no claim that because Kannam was spending so much time on Belstar and others, that he did not do his job properly and or that Wesleyan lost money because of that,” he said. “Wesleyan’s silence on these things speaks very, very loudly. It’s a real hatchet job.”
Basically, the defense appears to be acknowledging that Kannam was spending time working on his outside entrepreneurial ventures, a fact that seems to be conclusively proved by the emails in the complaint. But they are challenging Wesleyan's accusation that spending time on these ventures detracted from Kannam's work for the University, or that it constituted a violation of the conflict of interest clause in his contract. Stein's argument that Wesleyan never directly connects Kannam's outside ventures to a decline in the endowment is interesting. Consider this line from the complaint: Read »
Thanks for your submission!
Thanks for your submission!