This I Believe

Hey guys. You can listen to my This I Believe essay here. Thank you.

Legen- wait for it- dary

Sitcoms. We all watch them we all love them and they are always there to give us a laugh. But why are sitcoms so great? Isn’t reality TV taking over the market which has existed for many many years? I personally doubt that will ever happen. Sitcoms are great because of their rhetorical standing. There is an audience for them because people like to get away from their humdrum life and be entertained. Sitcoms fulfill this need and also do it in a very inexpensive way, which in turn creates another audience. An audience of people who would like the additive of cheap entertainment to their lives. If we focus more on specific sitcoms, we can see that there are different subgroups of this general audience. People want to laugh at nerdy jokes, and the Big Bang Theory is born. A different audience wants to laugh at the stupid things that happen at work, so The Office is created. Any successful sitcom has been created at a time where the exigence is perfect.

Furthermore, sitcoms either poke fun or support the common places we have in our society. In most family sitcoms there is the episode where x child actor/actress steals lies or cheats. This is something that our society finds wrong so x child gets punished, or reprimanded in some way. Or the sitcom includes the mischievous male child who gets into all sorts of crazy things. We find these situations amusing because they are common things that happen in society and we can each relate.

Then there are the sitcoms that are so general that anyone could love it at any point in life. Think about it; Golden Girls, Friends, and How I Met Your Mother are all just a group of friends in different adventures. You don’t have to be an elderly white woman to understand the jokes in Golden Girls, nor do you have you be a twenty-something year old living in New York to find the jokes in How I Met Your Mother funny. These are each pretty much the same concept the only difference is they were created at the right time for them to be successful.

Essentially, I do not see a world without sitcoms. As we continue to grow as a society, things change and we have more situations to poke fun at. No one would walk away from a good laugh and as long as that continues to be provided there will always be an audience for sitcoms.

Oh Westboro, just shutup.

This week, the little bubble of State College Pennsylvania was shaken up. We lost a legend this week and while I can go on about the many things he has done for the school, that is not what I wanted to focus on today. Being in this aforementioned bubble, I happened to run across the news that Westboro Baptist “Church” would once again be visiting the happiest of valleys. Even though I come from a big city, one abundant with homosexuality, sexual acts before marriage and many other forms of debauchery which this particular “church” would consider the devil’s work, I have never come in contact with this entity. Being as though they were returning to Penn State and have been pretty prevalent in the media I decided to get some background on this “church”.

Before I focus on WBC’s rhetoric- or lack thereof- I would like to first say that they disgust me.  How someone could follow the word “God” with “hates” is just incomprehensible to me. It makes me sick to think that they would bring their messages of hate to funerals or other places of mourning a fact which results in disgrace and sympathy for the future of the human race.

Ok. I know I went a bit over the edge there but I had to get that out. Now, for their attempt at rhetoric.

The thing that frustrates me most about this group of people is that their approach to persuasion is to yell hate slurs such as “God hates fags”, “You’re going to hell” “God hates America” essentially  God hates everyone. While these are good ethos (What God says is right seems to be an ethical truth) and pathos (emotional tug realizing God hates you) examples, they are not very good in convincing people. WBC’s tactics are judgmental and hurtful and makes you (or at least me) want to throw rocks at their heads. They also take a stab at logos by providing excerpts from scriptures that can be twisted in any way. This fails, however, because anyone who knows the slightest about any holy reading understands that the sole purpose is that God loves everyone and forgives sinners point blank.

 These people yell and scream instead of approaching the situation rationally then finish with laughing at your demise. How welcoming. I must say I can never understand how this brainwashed bunch can live a life full of hate, which is probably the one thing God actually hates.

Could You Pass the Artificial Cheese Flavoring?

Being a freshman and having the new found responsibility of buying all the food I intake; I must say this is a bit bombarding. All of the labels just attack with exclamation points and fancy terms. Made with 50% less plastic! No artificial colors or flavors! No preservatives! And my favorite : Made with REAL cheese!( … Oh.. well what was that on my cheezypuffs the other day?) This doesn’t even include the organic everything which is what should have been sold in the first place. You can only imagine my disbelief when I saw organic coconut water for sale in the grocery store.  I mean with all the coconuts in the world why there really inorganic coconut water for sale? Guess they really do find a way to add chemicals to everything.  

Anyway back to the labels. These marketing buffs really have the ethos logos and pathos thing down. They have the green foods which are supposedly making the world a better place appealing to ethos.  Every item must come with a heart-warming story about how families love our real, organic, naturally flavored, great-tasting food item with ingredients from family farms which covers pathos. They definitely hit the marketing goals out the park with logos based ads. This is natural/organic/made with real ingredients so clearly it must be better!

 As with any business, the main goal of these companies is to make the most profit. They have clearly found the way to do it. How many people buy that naturally flavored item without even reading the ingredients? Yeah I’m guilty too.  But even when I do read them I can barely understand or pronounce some of the words. First there’s words like Guanylate or Annatto which instantly gives me a headache. Then, after all the big words it just says “natural flavor”… Ok natural flavor of what? So since being ignorant to these things is not the way to go I decided to do a bit of research and it turns out that the Code of Federal Regulation defines “natural flavor” as “the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, which contains the flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or similar plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof, whose significant function in food is flavoring rather than nutritional” (21CFR101.22). That’s a lot of flavoring for my Vegetable Crisps. Food companies, as stated before, know how to make the most money for themselves. They take consumers down a path of big words and even bigger smiles hoping that no one will ask further questions. Furthermore, when questions are asked they just lead to more questions without specific answers and all you want is a snack to go with your movie. So you drop your thinking cap and go with the one that tastes the best.