This Tuesday, February 21, 2012 marks the end of an annual festival
that has been held for hundreds of years, this event is called Mardi Gras or
Carnival. I want to talk mainly about Mardi Gras in New Orleans, because I was
recently down in the bayou, but first some history about Carnival. Countries
around the world celebrate Mardi Gras as a celebration before the Catholic
holiday of Lent, which is a period of sacrifice from Ash Wednesday until Easter
Sunday. In a nutshell Lent is a period of 40 days in which members of certain
branches of Christianity give up some aspect of their lives be it a type of
food, alcohol, driving, watching television, the possible sacrifices for Lent
are infinite. So of course in preparation for this “fasting” as some call it,
there is typically some form of celebration in major cities, that have a large
percentage Catholic or Anglican Christians. So how does New Orleans play in all
this jazz? Punny right? Well the Big Easy is host to arguably the largest Mardi
Gras celebration in North America. In a tradition that has continued officially
since 1833, New Orleans hosts around a week of celebration for locals and
visitors either out of state or even out of country. Mardi Gras in New Orleans
typically kicks off on Thursday night the week before Lent and continues until
Fat Tuesday. Oh you’ve never heard of Fat Tuesday before, let me explain. Fat Tuesday
is “the day” to celebrate Mardi Gras at midnight on Fat Tuesday the celebration
is over and everyone goes home. The day gets its name from a tradition of
enjoying fatty foods the night before the 40 days of fasting begin aka Lent,
and the name has stuck. The celebration itself consists of parades, live music,
dressing in flashy costumes and collecting souvenirs, the most common are
beads. The parades are put on by the different krewes of the city; a krewe is
simply an organization that puts on a parade and sometimes a corresponding ball.
The krewes are a board of sorts who decide amongst themselves and the local
government how and when the major parades and celebrations will be held. One each
day there are typically parades on the major streets put on by krewes and at
night there are parties on the streets in the French Quarter, the old section
of New Orleans for those who are “of age,” the most popular of which is Bourbon
Street. This continues every day until Fat Tuesday on which there are balls and
some historic symbolic mumbo jumbo in addition to the parades and partying. All
in all Mardi Gras in New Orleans is a celebration that is as historic as it is
fun. These days many of the people who go to Mardi Gras in New Orleans have no
intention of fasting for Lent and are only looking for a good time. So on Tuesday
when you are bored in class on Tuesday just remember that you could be down in
New Orleans eating a Po’boy and enjoying a hurricane, if you are of age of
course.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Reddit is like quicksand
Today I Learned(TIL) is an interesting sub-Reddit on the
popular blogging website Reddit.com. Without going into too much detail, Reddit
is a blogging website where as a member one can blog about anything they want,
usually it is to spark a conversation within the blog. Depending on how well
the blog is writing or how interesting the blog is, a blog may be “upvoted” and
depending on how many upvotes a blog has depends on the order of the list of
blogs on the main page of Reddit. The more upvotes a blog has the higher the
blog goes on the list with the ultimate goal of being a blog on the front page
of Reddit. A sub-Reddit is simply a smaller form of Reddit within Reddit with the
purpose of categorizing blogs based on the topic of the blog. So Today I
Learned is a sub-Reddit where Redditors can post interesting links to websites
where the poster found something that is not common knowledge, hence the name
Today I Learned. So today I learned that no one can actually drown from
quicksand, interesting right. Hollywood among other factors has skewed the
public’s idea of how quicksand works. Quicksand is a mixture of sand, water,
clay and salt, which when in the right concentration creates an amorphous
solid. When the mixture is not disturbed, the quicksand has a solid form, but
when something such as a foot is placed on the quicksand, it snaps out of equilibrium.
The sand falls to the bottom of the mixture and the water stays on top, this is
why when you fight the quicksand you sink. If the motion stops, the mixture
starts to become solid again, the whole process is similar to the corn starch
and water solution that you may or may not have seen growing up. Anyways many
people think that this is the end of the road for them, that they will sink
into the ground never to be seen again. This is false, because quicksand is
roughly twice as dense as humans are so according to Chase Smith, you would
only sink half way.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Super Bowl Ads
Since we are in the middle of an advertisement project I
thought that it would be appropriate to blog about one of the biggest if not
the biggest events for advertisements, the Super Bowl. Ever since the first
official Super Bowl in 1966, the event has been the “world championship” of professional
football. The game originally started as an end of season tournament between
the NFL and the AFL before the two organizations merged to form the NFL. Today
the game is an annual event in early February, and holds the distinction of
drawing more than 100,000,000 viewers every year. This large number of viewers
is enticing for companies, as they can reach an immensely large number of
viewers with one advertisement. The NFL knows this and charges big bucks for
air time, for example, in 2010 it cost 2.5 million dollars for a 30 second
commercial. With all of the money flying around for air time, companies usually
invest heavily in commercials creating unique gems that appeal to a large
viewing audience. This provides another aspect to Super Bowl viewership; some
viewers that may not normally watch football are drawn to watch the game
because of the high volume of entertaining, quality commercials. Many popular
commercials come out of these games, many of which create unintended results
that did not exist before the game. You may remember the phase “whassup” from
the early 2000’s, this was a phrase from a popular Budweiser commercial or the 2010
Snickers commercial that is attributed to rekindling the career of ageing
actress Betty White. While there have been no end to clever commercials created
by large companies, some of the most popular are coming from a new trend in advertising,
letting consumers create their own ads and let the internet vote on the ad that
they would like to see the most. Doritos has been doing this quite frequently
in the past few years, allowing them to only have to purchase air time, and
submit a popular ad without having to spend a dime on creating it. In
conclusion, the “big game” draws people from all over the world to take a break
from their busy lives to watch grown men run into each other, and enjoy the
annual apex of commercial advertising.
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