Blog post #4

Blog article #1 - Take your vacation, or die?
Also, here is a video for people who don't feel like reading at this hour...


This article was written by a former attorney and comedian. The article is about, what the name suggests, that taking a vacation is directly related to your health and is essential for your mental well-being. The story is current and calls for the reader to take a summer vacation immediately. Oh and 4 day weekends that revolve around a national holiday DO NOT COUNT. Hey, who could argue with that? The major rhetorical strategies that I found from this article would be a sarcastic tone, simple diction, a horizontal comparison, statistics and a bit of pathos in there somewhere. The opening of the article is great icebreaker, "I guess you want to have a heart attack?", a bit sarcastic wouldn't you say? There's also a great use of sarcasm in the last couple lines where he prods "Or, you can choose to keep working non-stop like a hamster running on a wheel that keeps going faster and faster. Until, finally, one day, you collapse, are carried off on a stretcher, and replaced by a similar looking creature." The horizontal comparison is of other industrial countries, such as: The United Kingdom, France, Greece, Germany, Japan, Mexico and China. Plus, we lose to all of them in all the categories we are compared, that's pretty convincing. The statistics are used to explain the health downsides of not taking a vacation and specifically revolve around heart disease - this is not by accident. Finally, the pathos is given by showing us some insight into the background of the author, whose father died at an early age from going through his third open heart surgery. This surgery, as we are lead to believe, was caused by his "workaholic" mentality through life. Guess it pays in more way than one to be a comedian/political commentator than it does to be an attorney these days...Well, I have to say, it's hard to not agree that we should be taking more vacations. I don't think there is a rebuttal in this piece because anyone who has an American mentality,  like me, would overexpose it and just come out to say "This a such a crock!" (I wanted to call him a nincompoop but this  will have to do). I think that we all are workaholics in this class. Exhibit A: Every one of you sacrificed most of their summer to take an accelerated English course at a community college. So it would be good for the class to read an article like this. Plus, I LOVE to travel, especially internationally. I honestly think that great way to get a better perspective and be more tolerant of other people in general (Need to work on these tangents). Anyway, long story short, good article, written simple for a simple reader and much needed for us. I think that everyone here is probably thinking it's a bad time to go on vacation. Hell, Romney is calling his campaign "Americas comeback team", but we need to make time or we will just keel over and have our hamster running labor outsourced to a hamster in another country with 25+ days of mandatory vacation. 


Blog article #2 - Iraq-Iran Ties Grow Stronger As Iraq Rises From The Ashes.


This article is stark when comparing it to my first. Although I have read skimmed many articles over the weekend, nothing really evoked an emotional response that I would be willing to easily write four pages on. This is one of the more serious and lengthy of the said articles. The entire article is more or less about how the U.S. occupation and eventual troop pullout of Iraq has caused an alliance with Iran, a country  that was once it's bitter enemy. An enemy so great, Iraq waged a six year, one million troop costing war in the 80's. The subject is looked at from a liberal standpoint (My friends at Huff Post). The reader is given allot of background and variance in the details, but still has a constant stance. The rhetorical analysis is a bit hard for this article, I've only really identified the tone and that's not going to do. It reads a little like a formal report rather than a columnists opinion. My stance this piece was biased before even before I read the title. Having a military background I always thought that baby Bush acted right on the intelligence given to him at the time. After leaving the military and learning about the  the downing street memo and, more importantly, the unverified MI6 origins of curve-ball, I couldn't help but have a chance to look on the matter critically and just say "over 850 BILLION taxpayer dollars - WTF?!?" It's almost like Murphys' law. The US-middle east relations reads like a tale of two cities - It was the best of times it was the worst of times. Syria, Iraq and now Iran; Better buckle up, because if things keep like they are it's gonna be a bumpy ride.Oh and somebody reading this please help me on the rhetoric, I feel kinda stupid for not easily identifying them.




UPDATE: Hopefully this new formating makes this look more down to earth rather than big, bright and incorrectly spaced. The post was started on my cell phone over dinner and it changed some settings on it's own...damn possessed technology.