Slice of Life # 23 / 5

     Last night I over heard my mom talking to my step dad about getting another cat so our current one, Roscoe, would have someone to play with other than our two Silky Terriers, Pookie and Page. While he said no, I still took it upon myself to look online at the cats in shelters and it dawned on me just how many animals are left without a home for whatever reason. Over 3,500 cats within just 100 miles of Anderson are in shelters and it breaks my heart thinking about what it's like for them and what it'd be like if my pets were confined to a metal cage for a majority of the day. Things like that make me want to house tons of animals but then I remember shows like Animal Hoarders and decide I probably shouldn't do that.

Slice of Life # 22 / 4

    I recently read an article where  British lawmaker, Richard Graham, essentially blamed rape victims for what happened to them. He said, 'If you are a young woman on her own trying to walk back home through a park early in the morning in a tight, short skirt and high shoes, and there's a predator . . . if you are blind drunk wearing those clothes how are you to get away? It's not about the impact of your clothes on a potential predator in my view - it's about whether the clothes you're wearing make it harder to get away from a predator.' (Dailymail.co.uk) He later goes on to say that he didn't mean women were "asking for it" but still, that comment was totally unnecessary. Trustee of Rape Crisis England and Wales, Jo Wood, agrees that Graham was blaming the victim rather than the predator and says, "These comments have set us back about 100 years. It doesn't matter if you are off your face and lying naked on a beach - that man takes it upon himself to rape you. This should be about putting the blame back on perpetrators."
     Graham makes it sound as if most rapes occur by strangers in dark alleys whereas, after doing research, that only counts for 9% of the rapes that happen, most rapists are actually well known by the victims. There never is nor ever will be an excuse for taking advantage of someone, especially in such a demeaning and awful way. I simply can't wrap my mind around how someone can be in the mindset that rape is basically fine and dandy and the rapist isn't to blame.

Slice of Life # 21 / 3

     Lately I've been obsessed with the 90's show Freaks and Geeks. It stars James Franco, Seth Rogen, Jason Segal, Martin Starr (Adventureland), and Linda Cardellini (Scooby-Doo.) The show's simply about the lives of normal teenagers as they venture through high school and discover themselves. Linda's character, Lindsay Weir, joins a group of "freaks" and goes from being known as a good girl to being a burnout, whereas her brother, Sam (played by John Francis Daley), couldn't be closer to being a geek. The characters in the show are extremely relatable, unlike many of the shows nowadays where they portray high school to be a magical place where nothing bad or awkward ever happens. Unfortunately, the show was canceled after just one fantastic season but it will always be one of my favorites.

Slice of Life # 20 / 2

    Not often do you stumble upon such a strange commercial that you question everything you once believed in. However, this commercial for Little Baby's Ice Cream has probably changed the way I see ice cream commercials in that I'll never see a better advertisement for frozen milk. After seeing these, I wondered if this was even real seeing as though I've never seen these ads on t.v. nor seeing the ice cream in stores, however it is! Also after viewing these lovely videos and finding out they were real, I thought that this had to be some weird foreign treat because I pictured it to be too weird for Americans but boy was I wrong; it comes from Philly! Oh, the things you'll see on the internet.

Slice of Life #19 / 1

Cut for Bieber?

     Does this mass amount of ignorance even need to be posted? Well, if you have yet to hear about the "cut for Bieber" thing, it all started because of some pictures of Justin Bieber smoking marijuana and eventually the troll-some users of 4chan took these pictures and posted them on twitter along with pictures of themselves cutting their wrists with the hashtag: #cut4bieber. Since then, many prepubescent girls have been cutting their wrists thinking that because of this they'll get Justin Bieber to stop going down this road of self destruction. I can't even decide which I think is dumber, the fact that these little girls have this idealistic view of a celebrity or that they're actually cutting themselves because of a "joke" that started on a website that fouses on upsetting any and everyone.
   

Below is a video from Tristan Barker (my hero) about his views on the subject.

Slice of Life #18

     With the idea that it's people killing people rather than guns killing people, I'd like to bring up a name no one probably knows: Timothy McVeigh. In 1995, this 27 year-old man walked away from the Alfred P. Murrah Building and set off a 4000-pound bomb. He claimed to have done it in order to save the constitution. This man killed  168 innocent people and 19 of them were children under six. Why is it that we can still go out and buy materials used in bombs and yet we try to outlaw guns? 

 
   With the recent school shooting in Connecticut, gun control laws have been a huge topic of conversation. Personally, I think outlawing guns is unbelievably ignorant. Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Cars aren't outlawed and yet 3,000 people die daily because of those. Tobacco isn't outlawed and it kills daily as well. Besides, I think that if someone was going to kill people, a gun control law wouldn't stop them.

Slice of Life #17

What Can Happen In A Second:

1. The difference between perfect toast and charcoal

2. A smile

3. Catching someone's eye

4. The changing of someone's mind

5. A lifetime of regret

6. Making a life altering decision

7. Falling over your own feet

8. Hiccuping