Fantasy Football Fanatics

My roommate is an avid fantasy sports fan. He's the GM of a fantasy baseball league in the summer, has multiple fantasy football teams, and even talked me into joining a fantasy hockey league so that there would be be enough teams. He lives for his fantasy sports, and during the fall months it is nothing but football. He takes his fantasy football league very seriously (if his fantasy football team has a bad week it seems to effect his mood all week),and so do the other people in his league, he receives countless calls from other members of the league every Sunday, either to brag about how they're team is doing, or to ask if he had seen a certain play. Recently his brother and a few of his brother's friends have been coming over to our house on Sundays to watch football because we have the NFL Red zone channel, which airs nothing but football for eight straight hours. A fantasy football players dream. Each Sunday my roommate and his friends gather around the TV in time to catch the kick off of the early games, each with a laptop resting in their laps ready to start clicking away so that they won't miss a single play and so they can follow all of their players simultaneously. The next eight hours are spent relatively devoid of any real conversation, mainly just screams or groans in reaction to a play. What few conversations there are are all very brief, and not much attention is given to the conversation, most of the attention is still lost glancing up and down between television and computer, as if there were a tennis match being carried out between the two screens. An entire room full of people seem to be completely oblivious of each other as they focus intently on the games and stats as they flash across the multiple screens in the room. When the games have finished they finally find time to talk, and the conversation that has been pent up for hours comes bursting out. Some are ecstatic about winning their match up for the weeks, other distraught and cursing their team, or the refs, or their own poor roster decisions. When everything is finalized and there are no more games for the week my roommate immediately begins to look ahead to the next week. He'll look to see who he plays next week, who his players are matched up with, and beginning to decide who he will start in his next match up, and the cycle begins again.

Voice thread

Here is my voice thread. I decided to talk about the stereotypes surrounding Irish people, and how Irish people themselves seem to be encouraging these stereotypes, almost embracing them as a part of their cultural identity.

Here's the link http://voicethread.com/share/671215/

Hey I can finally post videos. Awesome.

Natural Born KIllers Analysis

The clip I analyzed was from the film "Natural Born Killers". I analyzed the scene using the rhetorical/audience approach, and the postmodernist approach. The scene is a satirical sitcom meant to comment on a number of different things including the repetitive narrative of sitcoms, as well as modern society's desensitization to abuse and violence. The scene opens with a knock off of the beginning of "I Love Lucy" and introduces the scene as "I Love Mallory". Rodney Dangerfield is then introduced as her father and from his first line he is very rude to his daughter, and the studio audience laughs each time he insults Mallory. Later Mallory and her father get into an argument, Rodney Dangerfield then begins threaten Mallory telling her that he'll beat her, as he's threatening her some "Leave it to Beaver" sounding music begins to chime in and creates a contrast, or even a disconnect between the music and what is actually happening in the scene. Rodney then precedes to sexually abuse her verbally and physically in a truly disturbing scene. When Mallory final breaks away from her father and runs up stairs, the audience begins applauding Rodney Dangerfield as if they had truly enjoyed the scene. It is very reminiscent of scenes from Married With Children when the audience applauds Al. Later in the scene Woody Harrelson shows up and receives a roaring applause from the audience, much like any beloved regular from a sitcom. This satirical scene calls our attention to how sitcoms use in-studio audiences to help position their viewers, and almost creating a mob type mentality to reinforce their position . Rodney Dangerfield is doing these horrible, uncomfortable things, and in direct opposition to what the real audience is feeling the in-studio audience loves the unbearable scene, laughing and applauding the whole time. The scene almost forces the viewer think about the scene critically by including the studio audience and their bizarre reactions to the scene. It encourages the viewer to think for themselves, rather than simply going along with the studio audience's reactions.

Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed0Y3D2F-ow