"Poking at the bear"

Today in professional writing, class began with Jason going over the final group project which is due at the end of the semester. He then informed us that he has finished writing his doctoral dissertation and for doing so received much applause.

After Jason's applause we selected groups for the final project. I gladly joined up with Chad and Cory St. Esprit for the project. I pointed out to Chad (The Dirt Water Fox) that he is wearing his favorite "I Care House" long sleeve t-shirt, which has "I Care about myself, I care about others, and I care about my community" written in a font that looks like a five year old wrote it. In response to this and my blog about him, he told me "you are poking at the bear". This really brought a rise out of Jake Moore and I. We next selected a name for our group. Staying with the bear theme, we named ourselves "manbearpig". After the groups had time to formulate all of their group names and become one with them, we presented our group names and did a brief introduction in front of the class. Here, Chad informed the class that our group name was "manbearpig and not manbearpigs because manbearpig is plural for manbearpig (like deer)." The name manbear pig has significance to our group, we are using it kind of as a parody of a parody. The term manbearpig was created by the makers of south park to make fun of Mr. Al Gore and his ideas on climate change. Since we are students of the sustainability field, we are in turn using manbearpig in an ironic fashion.


Group presentations finalized and Chad informed Jason that we were changing our group name to manbearpig, because he thought that the plural version of manbearpig was more appropriate for a group name than the singular version which is manbearpig.

Wayne Myers brought up the anti-technology society known as the LUDDITES, this was completely random and it really confused me. The luddites are hard to get a hold of because they have no phones or internet, which is what Wayne was trying to say. The conversation went on a bit of a tangent and we talked about the luddite compound likely being full of advanced technology weapons such as guns and the irony that is there.

We then entered a discussion on talking in Rhetoric. Karen Abrams brought up a good point about talking to people she works with about sustainable systems. She stated that if she tells people shes interested in sustainable systems people often do not know what she is talking about, but if she says she is interested in green technology then people have a better grasp on what she can contribute to them.

*This class has taken a strange turn. During the break session, Wayne taught me how to find food in the garbage that is still edible. I actually ate a cup of fruit that was thrown away, oddly enough I feel like I could do it again. I may never go to the vending machine again.

We then proceeded to do a role playing session where Chad and Tim Zeitler played characters from the movie Office Space. Chad's rendition of Peter Gibbons was five stars! somebody get chad a trophy. However, Chad's acting was incredibly inferior to Tim's. Tim's portrayal of Bill Lumberg was spot on, he definitely outshined Chad.

The class was wrapped up with by going over more examples of communication errors that have been published. We separated into the groups that we formed at the beginning of class, manbearpig was reunited. Manbearpig had a mach comic strip that was picking on youtube, facebook, and twitter. We were to analyze this and figure out who the author was, who it was intended for (the audience), the comics effectiveness, and the comics flaws. Chad took on the task of being manbearpig's spokes person, this is appropriate since he is the team leader (the self proclaimed bear). He did a nice job of summarizing this comic strip, getting the point across with out using any profanity! Chad is beginning to use more articulate language now that he is a graduate student.

Tonight's class was a great success with exception to a few awkward moments, namely eating out of the garbage and Chad telling me to rub his shoulders (not gunna happen Chad, nice try though). A few other awkward moments occurred due to the t-shirt that I am wearing tonight. It turns out that some people are sensitive to the phrase "my other ride is your mother"... Sorry Jason and Karen! I left home in a hurry today and forgot that I had this shirt on... Don't ask what I was doing at home.

cheers,

dan


p.s. James Stitt said concoughphoney (spelling??) hats off James, this is definitely a two dollar word.