Crucible 3

We are now about to finish the crucible as we are getting close to the end of it. Nothing is really resolving in the book right now its still in constant conflict and it seems that nothing is going to be resolved before the ending. I am realizing that this book has been relevant for a long time, and its outstanding. Only things that are very successfull stay around for as long the crucible has.

The reason why I bring that up is because I was thinking about music that has stuck around for decades, but I cant think of any music today that will actually stick around for a long period of time. It’s kind of sad as all of this music just seems like it will disappear in the next decade or so. This is unlike music from the past like the 70’s which in my opinion were the golden years of music. They had bands and artists that everybody has heard of including: Led Zepplin, Earth Wind & Fire, Beatles, Queen, Bee Gees, The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Elton John, Jackson 5, Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, The Who, Barry White, Aerosmith, and many others that I dont have the time to add, but you get the point. To be fair not many other 16 year olds could name that as I generally only listen to this music, as I have what you people call an “Old Soul”.

However I may be wrong as the people who lived in the 70’s might not have thought that there music would stay around for decades. Maybe people like Bruno Mars will be icons. It’s really hard to actually predict what is going to be around in 40 years and realisticly anything can happen. Who knows if 70’s music will still be relevant, it might not be but I think that there msuic will be and it’s legacy will stay around forever.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2NzFz7JnxAo

Crucible 2

We are still reading that play in humanities. The tension is slowly rising people are starting to go crazy in the play with constant conflict. People are constantly turning on each other as people are accused of being witches when there is little to no proof that they are a witch. Some people see it as a good thing  others are trying to rebel against it. This is creating a story with conflict that is always happening which makes it very interesting.

As you know with these posts I have to answer some sort of question, and the question I am going to answer is “Can you name a time when you have ever felt wrongly accused?”. In fact, I am able to name a time when I was wrongly accused. It wasn’t as big of a deal as a witch trial as they could end up dead or their reputation could be completely ruined. The worse thing that happened to me was that a glass table broke and my reputation was slightly dented. Now let me tell you the stupid story of the time I was wrongly accused. It was in the middle of last summer and I was about to take my dogs out for a walk. I had just placed the harnesses on the dogs and one of them got too close to a glass table and the harness then got hooked on a part of the table and he panicked and backed up and the table came falling over and it snapped a half inch thick piece of glass into 3 pieces. My mom later came home and blamed the whole thing on me even though I wasn’t involved in it, but my parents didn’t believe me. Still to this day if I bring it up they still blame me. I guess I was responsible for the dogs at the time but, I DIDN’T DO IT!

The Crucible

Lately in school we have been reading through a play called The Crucible. I have noticed that it hasn’t been any normal story with happyness throghout, the general mood is very grey and kind of depressing. To keep you interested there is a lot of conflict, the easiest thing to connect it to would be a soap opera.

At the begininng of the book I was pretty bored unitl I started to actually understand what was going on, like I said there is constant conflict going on. The book is about the Salem Witch Trials, and for some reason I keep connecting the play to different movies like Footloose and Meangirls, you’d have to read the book to acutally understand why. Anyways the reason why we are reading it is because in some sort of way it relates to the Cold War which is the base of our current unit. Im still trying to figure out why exactly this connects to it except for the fact the puritans way of life reminds me a lot of how I think of communism.

For this post I have decided to add another part to it where I write about what I beleive heaven and hell is. I don’t think beleive is the right word as I don’t really bleive in it I just have an opinion on what it would be like. I have gained this opinion by learning about differnet cultures and reliogions as a lot of different people believe in Heaven and Hell. I think it’s actually is a good thing, as it is a way of making people afraid doing something wrong or commiting a sin. The first idea I got hell from was christianity which is the basic one that everybody knows. The other one that has influenced me a lot aswell is the Greek Mythology side of it which is where Hadeus controls the underworold where the only one who gets to do what they want down there is him and everybody who has died and gone there is depressed and sad. Heaven is more just an area where the rest the gods live from what I have read about.

My opinon is a little different from the those ideas. I think heaven is your favourite place, with all of your favourite people around with anything you want at your beckon call, and nothing around you is depressing, that is filled with joy and happyness. Most importantly you are given freedom, as much freedom as you want.

Now onto the more sad and scary side of things. Hell in my opinion is the complete opposite, it is a dark place that is sad, depressing and filled with hate. You can’t get anything you want at anytime, you are in constant pain and distress. The worst part in my opinion about this is the fact that you have no opinion and you are stuck doing an awful job forever.

Now on that sad and scary note, I am going to finish the blog post and return later talking about The Crucible again.

Oregon Returns

Recently my class and I went on a field trip to learn about the Manhattan Project. To do that we had to go to a few different places in the states just south of the Canadian US border. We drove from Vancouver all the way to Portland then back up to Washington stopping in Hanford then coming back to Vancouver this was a three day trip that we took as a whole class. On this trip we learned very important information that we needed for our projects as 70 some odd years ago this is where it all took place.

Like I said we first stopped in Portland. We first stopped in Powells book store. If you don’t know what that is, it is an extremely large book store that basically takes up one square block in the middle of a city. It is absolutely gigantic the book store has absolutely every kind of book you could possibly ask for, it has some books that are quite old and others that are brand new. I’m not a huge fan of reading as I only do it from time to time, but this place blew my mind. While we were there we were given two assignments one was to find a book with a cool title the other was to find a title that me and few friends could act out.  Sadly the photos of both have been lost but, I did end up making a purchase at Powell’s, besides the coffee that I had at the Café. Besides that I also bought I book that is about one of my biggest inspirations and my favourite athlete of all time. I bought a book about Bo Jackson as it is one of the few books that actually made me interested and also it was under $10.

We then went to a restraunt called Fire on the Mountain. Fire on the Mountain is a wing place, they have a variety of flavours that I was very excited for as soon as I found out that we were going here. I had so many different flavours I don’t know if I can remember all of them, for starts there was the mild wings which were pretty basic. Then there was the medium hot wings which had nice kick to them but pretty similar to the mild wings, there was then hot wings which had a bigger kick to them, but that is not where the fun ends it is where it begins as there are flavours even hotter that only a select few in the class decided to try. If just straight hot flavours wasn’t your thing they had other flavours such as my favourite which was some sort of peanut sauce that was quite lovely, and if none of these appeal to you, you can stand up put down your device and walk away. Everybody else can continue to read.

The next day we made more stops as we spent a lot less time traveling. The first thing we had to do was go to the Reed Reactor which is Reed College. We stopped there first because it is in Portland aswell, but the reason on the other hand is that Reed College also happens to have a working nuclear reactor. It is also a reactor that uses water to cover it which is different than most as they are generally covered by metal. That doesn’t sound too special until you think about it because having water covering it means that you can look right at the actual reactor. It was a really cool thing to see, and I probably wont see anything like it ever again.


Later that day we went to Maryhill Museum, your probably thinking that it was just some boring museum you walk through, nod your head at the art, yawn, and repeat. This was a little bit different as it had some of the coolest and weirdest art collections in the world. They have the largest chess set collecition in the world, they have really creepy dolls that almost gave me nightmares, on top fo that they have an amazing are devoted to indegenous art. Lastly they have a very large collection August Rodins’ sculptures and if you don’t know who that is, he is the guy who made the famous statue called “The Thinker”.

 

While we were at teh museum we were given the task of talking about a piece of art and give your opinion on what the message of it is.

 

That night was one night I may never forget. It was the first time I ever went to Red Lobster, you may be thinking that that isn’t a very big deal but you are very wrong, as it was during the time of endless shrimp. Every year that PLP goes on this FIeld Study they stop at Red Lobster and students challenge themselves to see how many shrimp they can eat. Our teachers had been preparing us for this night for about a month like we were about to go to war. I made sure I came prepared. I did my best to take down as many shirmp as possible, it took a very long but I was able to cram 142 shrimp into my stomach which was the best in the class by 2.  I was proud of myself even though my body hated me so much at the time.

The next day I was surprisingly fine and ready to tackle the day even though we woke up pretty early for a tour of the B-Reactor. The B-Reactor was one of the main reasons we went down to the US as it is at one of the sites the Americans used for the Manhattan Project.  It was vital to the manhattan project as they needed it to create the Nuclear Bombs. It was a very interesting tour and it was a good way to wrap up our field trip as it made it so we got information consistently throughout each day right to the end. After the tour was over we got back on the bus for a long bus ride home, which I ended up sleeping and watching movies most of the way. This field study was one of my favourite as it truly opened my eyes to what actually went on during and after the war involving Nuclear Sciences.

The Manhattan Project Project

In humanities lately we have been learning about the end of WWII, more specifically the Manhattan Project. We started off with learning about the first Nuclear Bomb being dropped in Japan. It was a huge deal as it had never been seen or heard of before. What the Americans did revolutionized war, and how it would be fought. We actually did a small project on how the news would tell the world.

After that, we started to delve deeper into the Manhattan Project and what it was all about. We first learned the basics which was about how the Manhattan Project started out as the idea that would end the war if they did it before the Germans. One of the first things the Americans did was secretly buy areas of land that were isolated and in the middle of nowhere, as they needed this to be a secret. They even told people that they had 30 days before they had to be out of their house, of course they gave them money for their house but many would say it was way below market value.

We then started talking about what they were doing with these areas. The main thing was uranium and plutonium production for the nuclear bomb, and one of them was built for a test site. We discussed how they got the plutonium and uranium as it is not something you can buy from you closest  supermarket.  They essentially just had to mine it but it was really hard to find, and they got Canada involved in it as Canada had a lot of useful uranium that they could use.

Lastly before we started working on the end project we learned about the science behind the Atomic Bomb, we learned about you could do it through Fission and Fusion. Essentially one way was to split an atom  and the other was to force two atoms together. The end goal of both processes is to create a chain reaction, which is what happens when a nuclear bomb is detonated.

After we had learned the basics of everything we then were told we were going to have to do a large project on the Manhattan Project. We had to essentially make a video that included 5 facts about the manhattan project, relating to Hanford which is where the first Nuclear Reactor was built and where we were going on a field study. We were put into groups of three and told that the first thing we had to do was think of a topic to base the video off of. We thought that we should base it around every day life at Hanford. That was specific enough to the point where we could go into enough detail that after the video the people who watched it would actaully learn something but at the same time it wasn’t too specific that we didn’t cover very many topics.

At first we essentially made a script and planned out what we were going to do while we were in Hanford and what we thought was the most important things to cover while we were down there.