Category: Others

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty starts out with a war time story. It tells about a commander in a helicopter or plane on a cold night. The end of the war story it says, “‘The Old Man will get us through,’ they said to one another. ‘The Old Man ain’t afraid of Hell!'” I thought it was a very interesting beginning. The other short stories started right away, but this one had a slow start. The rest of the book was a little confusing to me. It doesn’t directly say where the characters are or what the character’s occupation is. The reader has to guess. The character’s backstory are hidden and the author doesn’t tell the reader. I did not like this short story. There is some mention about how the characters did a book about streptothorics, and it sounds like they are doctors but I am not 100% sure. At the end, I just didn’t feel like this book was anything special. I did not like it. I am sure a few of you probably liked it, but I did not.

The COVID-19 has been going on for quite a while, and we tend to think about the effects. Everybody has a setback: the children have to do remote-learning in school and the parents have to work from home. A survey was made about how adults were feeling. The results during pandemic compared to the results 2 years ago were staggering. The adults were 8 times as likely to screen positive for mental illness. Parents are being impacted a lot. Not only do they have to work from home, but they also have to help their children. This is a lot of work as parents need a lot of focus and concentration to work, but they also have to help their children.

James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is about the protagonist, Walter Mitty and a day in his life. In this story we find out that after almost every action he does in his day to day life, he will suddenly daydream. His daydreams mostly focus on him being the leader and war hero. His dreams also portrays him as a innocent who died of a noble or injustice cause. Unfortunately the stories you hear from Walter’s dreams is exactly what’s not happening in Walter’s life. Walter is a very timid man and is definitely not a war hero, leader, or a innocent thats been wronged. He’s just a normal man with a normal job but with a huge imagination. In my opinion, I feel like he shouldn’t be daydreaming, since this wouldn’t get anybody anywhere. If he really wants to become somebody important or famous, he should really work towards it and actually do it.

First of all, if Walter daydreams everyday and he desperately wants to be somebody important and noticable, but instead he can’t, so he daydreams. That is a big flaw and Walter should instead, be working towards his goal. By daydreaming and just hoping one of his daydreams will become real is a waste of time and “effort”. Its like waiting to ace a final exam without actually studying and working. Walter Mitty is doing basically just that, hoping he could be famous by waiting. The future isn’t going to wait or stop for you. It will keep going and sooner or later you will have no future in your path. You have to make your actions quick and if Walter really wants fame and power, he should be working everyday for his fame and wealth, he should be trying to get promoted in his job, raise money to become somebody he dreamt off. Right now, he’s just wasting his life away.

Walter Mitty’s life has no problems, he’s perfectly fine and has a decent life, but Walter wants to be famous. There’s no problem in wanting to be famous, but he’s doing literally nothing. He isn’t trying to get fame, he’s not trying to do anything to acheive his goals. Instead he’s just dreaming and hoping. Hope and dreams aren’t going to get a person anywhere, you need to work for your greatness yourself. You can’t rely on gods or somebody else to get you what you want. You need to be a self-starter and work hard for your success. Never sit there and wish, go out to the world and announce your wish, and make your wish come true.

When the piece of fake news, two explosions at the White House, President Obama is injured got tweeted on Twitter, it was retweeted over 1000 times. (This is what I remember from the Ted Talk, forgive me if I am wrong) In that short amount of time, 53 hours worth of YouTube was watched. But why is that?
What I think is that it is a novelty. People respond quicker to surprising and new pieces of new then the daily newspaper. If the news was something like traffic jam on west 180, the only people that needed to know that was the people on west 180. If it says something like car crash on west 180, people would be more surprised and tell it to others. If there was explosions at the White House and Obama was injured, everybody would panic. The entire nation would need to know, unlike the west 180 news.
The impact of the White House news was very serious. The Dow Jones average fell over 153 billion dollars. Large companies like Disney lost big money, all to that 1 or 2 sentences. They panicked because it was the president. What if Joe Biden had to take over? Like I said, I the news was just sky is blue at White House, cook trips on plate, not too much people would mind.
This why I think that false news travels faster the real life news.

There’s this man named Walter Mitty who daydreams all the time instead of facing real life.

Usually, his dreams would be about him, being a hero. First, he dreamed that he was the commander of a plane. Then, he dreamed that he was a person who was about to fix a machine that no one knows how to fix in the hospital. when he was going to get a check-up for himself.

He heard that a newspaper boy was selling papers about the Waterbury trial, he dreamed that he was in a trial and that when a gun was shoved at him, he said the gun was his.

When they said that his right hand was in a sling on the day the guy was killed, he simply said that he could have killed the guy three hundred feet away with his left hand.

After that, he went shopping for puppy buscuits. Then he sat in the lobby of a hotel and grabbed a book.

the book was about how Germany might conquer the world in the air. Slowly, he drifted into another dream.

He was the captain of a plane. (Again) and he was about to fly alone in a plane when.. he got interupted again.

His wife was standing there and they went to the drugstore. Where Walter had a daydream again…

“A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift is a proposal by the author to set the children of Ireland to good use. As most of the children are starving and in poverty, they wouldn’t help Ireland get out of the slump they were in. But the author had a solution. His proposal, in effect, is to fatten up these children and feed them to Ireland’s rich land-owners. Children of the poor could be sold into a meat market at the age of one, he argues, thus combating overpopulation and unemployment, sparing families the expense of child-bearing while providing them with a little extra income, improving the culinary experience of the wealthy, and contributing to the overall economic well-being of the nation.

The author gives specific data about the number of children to be sold, their weight and price, and the projected consumption patterns. He suggests some recipes for preparing this delicious new meat, and he feels sure that innovative cooks will be quick to generate more. He also anticipates that the practice of selling and eating children will have positive effects on family morality: husbands will treat their wives with more respect, and parents will value their children even more. His concludes by saying this project will do more to solve Ireland’s problems than any other measure that has been proposed.

I felt this proposal wouldn’t have worked because they would eat children, which was cannibalism, and would probably make them sick. Also, then there wouldn’t be any children to grow up, and maybe change the world. Parents would also want to protect their kids, as that is natural in parentage, and so they wouldn’t agree to this proposal. Otherwise, this was an interesting proposal.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, scientists have begun making robots to do our dirty work. Because of the virus, there are jobs that are too dangerous for humans to do, such as disinfecting hospitals, which is what we are looking at here.

In the Robotics and Innovation Lab at Trinity College Dublin, scientists are building a robot, nicknamed Violet, to disinfect hospital rooms with reduced chances of spreading the virus. The idea started from Stevie, one of their products, which is a robot made to help people feel less lonely. When the pandemic started, they started making changes to the existing model to help in hospitals. Violet uses ultraviolet radiation to kill viruses, which damages DNA, but only enough to kill the virus and not enough to severely damage complex organisms. In testing, Violet is shown to be around four times faster than an average person with disinfectant at cleaning a room, and because its a robot, it is also more thorough.

Violet is only one out of many robots made to combat the pandemic, and they may prove to be a safe and effective way of dealing with the virus. All this research can also hopefully help humanity the next time we find ourselves in this situation.

Today’s TED talk speaker, Kimber Lybbert, she stood on children’s side to tell adults how exactly children want grown-ups to treat them. So today I want to talk about it.

We need our parents to take care of us when we were young babies but we want them to trust us that we have the ability to take care of ourselves when we’ve grown up. We have our own thoughts and personality, we want to make our own decisions. So we want them to treat us like adults. But most parents still think we are kids and always plan everything for us. My parents also do that when I was 12 or 13 years old. I was thinking, I stayed in a residential school since I was in kindergarten, I had the ability to handle myself. So I always argued with them at that time. After a half year, they might think it was the time to be hands-off on somethings so I was being treated as a young adult. As time goes by, I do really think I can make some big decisions so I live in America by myself now. My parents more can’t interfere with my affairs since I came here.

The outside world is wonderful but loneness and helplessness are not. I didn’t think that was a big deal until I got a phone fraud and almost gave my money to them, I begin to be scared. I felt so helpless that didn’t know what to do. I called my parents and cried loudly. They finally realized I was still a teenager. And I also realized I still couldn’t handle all the problems, I still need them.

As teenagers, I totally agree parents trust us and give our own power but we always should remember parents will always be the people who we can depend on, no matter how old we are.

COVID-19 has been a serious outbreak lately. Luckily a group of creators has made a robot called Violet. Violet can help people in a lot of ways. 

The best way for the virus is to be sanitary. Violet does just that. Ultraviolet Light helps kill the virus on any of the objects. It also has a programmed way of if someone walks in front of Violet it stops the light. This is because LED light is bad for the human eye and skin. 

Why the creators made this is so that the virus won’t be scarier and also won’t be and risky for the doctors and patients to get infected. 

So the robot violet is very helpful because she helps kill the germ in the hospital and other places with the chemical. My thinking in this robot is that this may help because it is somewhat helpful and will cooperate to fight this virus.

In A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift in 1729, in which he describes the poor condition of starving beggars in Ireland, and then proposes to people that poor people should sell their children as food to rich people.

The one of the main questions was who was responsible for putting Ireland in this situation. Swift argued that both the Irish and English governments and the people of Ireland were responsible for their situation. In my opinion, the English landlords who owned land in Ireland and the British government should be blamed for the situation in Ireland. The landlords who owned the land lived mostly in England, and some would only visit their Irish estates once or twice in their lifetimes. The agents who collect rent for the landlords were terrible. They were described as “land sharks”, and they did anything to gain more money from the tenants renting the land. The landlords also encouraged the Irish to live on potatoes, because they wanted the tenants to eat food that they would be able to grow themselves. This led to there being no other food in Ireland when the potato crops failed in 1845 and led to the Great Famine. The British government also knew about the situation in Ireland, and established over 114 commissions and 61 special committees to try and find a solution to the problems that Ireland faced. Many sympathetic Prime Ministers did try to pass laws that would help Ireland, but Parliament voted them down. Being pro-Irish wasn’t a popular thing in England, and several Prime Ministers lost elections due to their support of the Irish.

In the end of the proposal, Swift wrote two actual proposals for how to improve the situation in Ireland, and here is the analysis for how the proposals might have changed Ireland. The first proposal was that Ireland should buy more goods produced at home than important. In 1815, when Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the British parliament passed the Corn Laws, which were meant to protect British products. Because of the Corn Laws, Ireland was unable to import much food from other countries when the Great Famine struck. Over a million people died in the Great Famine.

The second proposal was for Ireland to become more independent from England. There had always been anti-English(and later anti-British) sentiments in Ireland due to the difference in religion, as the British were Protestant and treated the predominantly Catholic population of Ireland as second class citizens. In 1800, Ireland lost some of its autonomy, and became part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Later, after the Great Famine, there was a great surge in support for Irish home rule. In 1886 and in 1893, British Prime Ministers in support of home rule put a Irish home rule bill before Parliament, but neither passed. In World War I, the Germans, who were at war with the British, supported the Easter Uprising. When the British government militarily suppressed the uprising, anti-British sentiments in Ireland reached a new height.In 1919, the Irish War of Independence broke out, and lasted until 1921, when the British and Irish reached an agreement for home rule in Ireland as the Irish Free State.