I dont want to achieve immortality through my work, i want to achieve it through not dying.

So we have to do a project in class. My group: Me, garrett, robert, and caroline. Sounds like its gunna be a hard one. We have to do activities for our tale so we can become experts on every groups individual tale. We are doing a wide variety of activities from simple ones just to get to know to characters to more complex ones that compare two tales from the book or look into the deeper aspects of the tale. 

It has been pretty interesting looking deep into a tale such as the miller. you wouldnt think at first that a story so short and simple could mean very much, but really its got alotttt of information in it. The most interesting of which would be the clear conflicts in between the social classes. Analyzing it you really see the huge changes going on in the society at the time.

So im supposed to write about my tale again so here goes. The miller was basically a love square in which three different men were in love with one woman; alison. Alison was married to John but loved Nicholas. Absolam loved alison but she didnt love him. Nicholas tricks john into sleeping out of his house one night so he could sleep with alison. The trick works and after they sleep together absolam comes to the window looking for a kiss. Instead of a kiss alison tricked him into kissing her bare butt. To get back at her absolam went and got a brand and came back looking for a kiss and then branded nicholas’ butt when he tried to fart in absolams face.

This tale really portrays the social classes of the day which i believe is the most important aspect of the book. At the beginning the miller skips the whole upper class in order to tell his crude tale. The type of tale the miller is is a fabliau which we are researching right now for our project. It was a pretty cool story, i liked it because it was eventful and entertaining.

I genuinely liked the miller. i cant say this of many things we have read in class, but the miller was surprisingly funny and easy to read. It was short, and raunchy and those are two good qualities for a school reading. In the tale there are four important characters. Nicholas, allison, Absolam, and Alison’s wife John. In the tale all three men are in love with Alison but Alison only loves Nicholas.

The whole tale is basically a plot to get John out of the house so Alison and Nicholas can have some alone time. You know, the ole no pants dance, the dirty thang. So nicholas tells John that he has a vision from god telling him that there was a flood even bigger than Noahs coming. John believes him and puts a boat on top of the house for him, Alison, and Nicholas to sleep in. And of course when John falls asleep, Alison and Nicholas make their move.

This is where it gets really interesting. So nick and Alison are doing their thing and afterwards they are laying in bed, cuddling i guess, when absolam comes to the window hoping to get a kiss from Alison. She finds this amusing so she gets up from bed, naked, and heads over to the window. She tells him to close his eyes, so excitedly he did, waiting for a kiss when Alison stuck her bare butt out the window and he kissed it. Nicholas and Alison found this extremely amusing, because it is, but Absolam wanted revenge.

He went out and found a brand and heated it up. He headed back to Alisons and asked again for a kiss. This time Nicholas got up and moved towards the window naked. He stuck it out and ripped a fart in Absolam’s face. Just as he did this Absolam brands him square in the butt. It wraps up with John waking up and freaking out about it all, but Alison simply makes it look like hes crazy and they all laugh about it. 

As for the project, we havent really talked about it much but it seems pretty easy, and you also seem to be giving us alot of class time to work on it. I definitely think we need to try a wide variety of of activities from actual presentations and such, to activities that encourage discussion. I think if we work hard in class on it we should be able to do good.

The third quarter was rough on me i gotta say. I started off a new class, geology, which i thought would be easy but turned out to be a nightmare. In class we do absolutely nothing and yet the tests are extremely hard! I was hoping for an easy A but instead i’m fighting for a B. Physics got harder and even though i had As all last semester its not nearly as easy for me and again i’m fighting for a B. Government goes on as always. And needless to say english class is hard, stressful, but also i feel like im getting better about doing my work even if my grade doesnt reflect that…yet. 

Work aside there were worse things that happened between christmas and now. Alas we lost four good soldiers. Josh, max, patrick, and Sayer are no longer with us. This was really hard for me as those are some of my good friends. Not only that but i dont agree with the way some of them were treated as they were unceremoniously thrown out. Sayer i am just worried about as i havent heard from him. Drug tests hurt our student population badly i would have to say. While i passed, which is good i guess, too many suffered from the decision to target students and drug test them as if it were random. But i wont get into that.

And finally there was the exciting basketball season. It was fun while it lasted, and ive gotta say that the achievements they made are awesome. Semi finals as a school who is 99% based on school work and 1% athletics is really cool. Im happy i got to see it and all those involved should be proud. I’ve gotta hope that next quarter will be better for me, and with spring break, St. Patties day and summer coming up things are looking good. And my work ethic, which seemed to have disappeared yet again over the christmas holidays, is returning. Should be an interesting quarter, hopefully not quite as eventful in the negative way as the last one was though.

I missed this blog which was due on 2/9. I obviously cant do it on that week as i dont remember so im going to do it on this week of class.

This week we have been doing a lot of work on the canterbury tales. We dressed ourselves loosely as a character from the prologue, in which i was Pardoner. It was fun i put a yellow piece of paper on my head to represent Pardoners golden hair. Then we had to come up with one line that represented the character and take a picture. My line was “i love gold” which sums up Pardoner because he will go to any length to get money.

We then read our first tale. Mine was miller’s tale which i enjoyed because it was semi- raunchy humor. In the tale a wife tricks her husband with her lover in order to get a night with her lover. She also tricks another man in love with her into kissing her butt but he got back at her by branding her lovers butt. It was quite humorous.  We went to class and discussed everyone’s separate tales. 

We went over how each class is represented in a tale which was cool because it was easy to see how the different characters represented their separate classes. Then we had to record key lines for our character and say our line again so you could make a cool video/ slide show sort of thing. 

Its been a pretty productive week in class and its easy to see that The canterbury tales is gunna be an interesting in class discussion topic.

The fourteenth century was based on a time of major economic, social, and literature changes. These things were probably based on things that happened at the time that were devastating to the people of the day. These things include the Famine of 1315. The Famine was basically caused by bad bad weather. Weather i don’t ever want to be around. Because of the weather it caused terrible farming conditions leading to a lack of crops. At the same time the famine came around. Good couple years right? Well, it came around and killed more than twenty million people. It was a terrible thing, one of the many problems was how they didn’t even know why it was happening! It caused many changes, as it would considering a good part of the population was killed off, and the classes started changing. Specifically the lower and middle classes had the chance to rise.

Now, we have started the Canterbury tales which is a book i can actually read due to the fact that it is simply a bunch of revolutionary short stories, which i like. It is evident in the prologue that Chaucer was experiencing all the changes in the fourteenth century first hand. As a middle class person Chaucer wrote the tales from the point of view of people representing all three different classes. I think as a middle class person he definitely had the best chance of capturing the aspects of people from all classes, since his standpoint was from the middle.

In the prologue it is extremely easy to figure out who is where on the social ladder of the time. Such as the Knight, the highest on the ladder, and Pardoner and Summoner as the lowest. His narrator describes the different classes as they would have been described at the time. The lower class is described as a very low, dirty sort of people. In the Pardoner this is evident as he is a religious figure who is obviously a man of questionable morality, who sells religious artifacts to people going on their pilgrimage. The upper class people are described with beautiful clothes, and those characteristics that would have been considered noble at the time.

This book is easy to compare to other books we have read such as Perceval and Frankenstein because of the radical changes in the times they were written. For example Frankenstein had old english on the left side of the book while Canterbury Tales has middle english. As for Perceval i believe as we read further into the canterbury tales the differences in writing styles will be easier to distinguish, because as of now i see some similarities, such as the importance of classes.

As the time period changes the literature of the day changes, this is easy to see in the books we have read so far. With all the changes in the fourteenth century it is easy to see that that trend will continue. As far as the Canterbury Tales go i’m sure we will get a very well developed outlook on the time period as we read further into the book, and read from the position of all the people from different social classes. 

I recently obtained an iPhone. A fate i never would have foreseen. See, i have always been semi against iPhones due to the fact that everyone has one, they are a bit ridiculous, and ATT refuses to offer insurance for them. But my dad bought me one as a surprise and i thought i would try it out for a while before i decided i just couldnt be a part of the new iphone trend.

I’m a few weeks in and ive gotta say the phone in general is amazing. You can do more things with it than any other phone i have ever looked at. Not only is it worth the extra money, you are being stupid if you refuse to pay for it. This is coming from someone that used to be a part of that group. It is like having a computer in your pocket. Lost? Pull out your iphones map app. Want to know whats on tv? Use your Itv app and find out exactly what is on. Bored in class? choose from thousands and thousands of fun games available for download anywhere. This list could go on and on. Its like having a minimacbook in my pocket and i absolutely love it.

Now there is one down side. And that is if you get one you are falling into one of the biggest social trends in the history of time. No lie, when i got an iPhone no one even turned their heads. Its almost become expected for any person to have an iphone. And if not you have to have a blackberry or a blackjack or else i wouldnt even know how to work it. Its unbelievable if you actually watch and see how many people actually have them! If you just look around at any given time during the school day you are almost guarunteed to see atleast one iphone.

Overall i think the phone is great  but apple definitely needs to release some way to customize your phone, or atleast offer different colors because i personally think its getting sick how trendy it is.

I dont really play a lot of video games due to the fact that i broke my xbox like 3 years ago and never bothered to get it fixed. Well for christmas i got a new one and didnt really feel like getting any games, it was cool having one again but i didnt really try anything new. Then i got fable II. Its a RPG game which i love just because they are long and complicated, but its really fun because its soooo in depth. You have tons of different skills and you can get cool weapons and even get married.

Its a really cool game, where you can do anything from fight zombies, to get married to a bartender…which i think is really cool. Anyone who enjoys a good RPG should definitely rent or buy it.