Cultural Rhetoric

I was recently surfing on the interwebs and decided to visit America's most trusted news source, The Onion . Out of all the different articles(all of which are completely true) that popped up, one in particular caught my interest the most. The article was titled 7-Year-Old Unable To Maintain Single Cohesive Storyline While Playing With Action Figures . The story grabbed my attention due to the fact that I love a good action figure showdown, and that this child could not tell a proper story with them somewhat bothered me. The author of this article is not stated, but the entire article consists of them criticizing the seven year old Brendan Milner, and describing how all onlookers did as well. Of course it is proper to critique someone who is not able to maintain a coherent storyline, especially while playing with action figures. This is especially true if those action figures are Iron Man and John Cena. However, Milner is only a child and therefore is likely to jump from ...

Magic is my passion and my art form.  As a magician I am constantly looking to improve my magic, and one way I do this is by watching and listening to other magicians.  This way I can expand my knowledge of how to deceive, astonish, and do what I love.  One of my favorite magicians in particular is a man named Francis Menotti. He has a very strange, but at the same time brilliant performing style and personality.  He also has profound insight into the realm of magic that I enjoy listening to. In the summer of last year Francis did a TEDx talk at the University of Penn titled, “The magician's secret: Why everyone should embrace child-like wonder”.  In his speech he talks about why exactly he does magic, which is to instil child-like wonder into the minds of his audiences.  He is an excellent speaker and conveys his thoughts and ideas very well.  He uses a total of three different effects (tricks) to help demonstrate his points.  For example, w...

At my church right now we are doing a series called “An Epic Life”. This past Sunday(1/17/16) my pastor preached a sermon titled “Epic Courage” about having courage modeled after that which David has in the Bible. In this sermon my pastor began by talking about how he was going to talk about a story that everyone knew, no matter if they were a Christian or not. In this way he was already relating to the audience. He then captured the audience by telling a story about three young men stopping a terrorist on a train and preventing him from killing dozens. He then went over the story of David & Goliath to talk about how little David rose up above all others and killed the giant with just a sling and a stone. His point here was that though we are small, God gives us his courage to go out and do things for him. That Jesus is our unshakable anchor and we are able to rely on him. I believe my pastor did a fantastic job of both making valid points and delivering his message. His p...

One time while I was surfing the internet I came across a commercial from the company Sandisk.  It was a commercial depicting a very pretty and photogenic wedding with very happy and music in the back round.  There were many photographers taking pictures of the wedding with beautiful smiles on their faces.  Then it showed one of the photographers taking a Sandisk SD card out of the camera and putting it in their computer to show the couple their photos.  It then unfocused on the people, and a picture of their products appeared with the caption, “Free up memory, to make more memories.” This commercial was trying to convince me(the audience) to buy their products.  There was nothing else important that they were trying to do other than for me to buy and use their product.  I think the argument presented wasn't very good, and was flawed in a few ways as well. The only thing they said was that if you buy their product, you can make memories which is not t...