Cats and Dogs Be Hugging Yo’

Note–This is a paper I wrote for my Principles of Visual Media class.

For my second analysis paper, I thought I would go in an opposite direction of my first analysis paper. The photo (shopped) image of Revolutionary War soldiers dueling with lightsabers underneath the imposing Death Star was enough to make a poor soul spit-take their coffee in child-like joy and amusement, as I’m sure you did when you read the paper. But this time around, I will make it easy and enjoyable to sip your drink while reading, as the image I have chosen is not so stupidly ridiculous. The image I chose deals not with war, strife, and death but love, tenderness, and brotherhood. It will warm your heart; make you believe in peace, and flat-out make your life better. I will guarantee this. It is a picture of a dog hugging a cat.

First thing you see when gazing upon this image is a bulldog giving a full-on body hug to a cat on a velvet couch in a darkened room, clearly caught in the act of god knows what. I have no clue what could possibly be going on between these two. It’s like catching Woody and Buzz talking around humans, a sort of a backroom, behind the scenes moment we are never meant to see. The composition of this image is a little shaky, as the photo was taken stealthily on the move. The image is in black and white, and the dark couch gives a nice contrast and depth compared to the white wall paper beyond it. There are no semiotic or metaphorical codes in this image. It is what it is, if we can even wrap our heads around what “it” is. Given the surprise in the eyes of the cat and the dog and the utter mystery in the set up of this photo, I believe the initial reaction of this audience may be a smirk followed by laughter proceeded by a profound sense of “what the”? As well as” how the”? I am still struggling to find a purpose for this image, but I believe it is an icon of world peace and aesthetically well done.

I mentioned earlier my initial impression, but even as I write this I have not moved past my sense of wonder and frank disbelief of what I have seen. The only thing I am certain of is that this triumphant image is one of the most hysterically funny photos in human existence. That will surely be its place in history, perhaps marking the beginning of a new enlightened age where beast has no predator or foe and all is one and forever peaceful in the animal kingdom. I cannot be certain, but I believe this image was sneakily taken by a human who, in the midst of this canine-feline love-fest, approached the couple in mid-friendship and took this once in a lifetime photo. Was it ethical to take advantage of these two animals, no doubt making the best out of their unprecedented situation? Yes, yes it was. Pets are constantly at the mercy of their human owners, who may dress them up and snap photos of them as superheroes, lobsters, or sci-fi characters at their will. We all know, from cartoons and life experiences, that the cat is the dog’s mortal enemy, and naturally the dogs of the world say “right back at you, pal” when a cat is spotted. A pulse-pounding, ram-shackle no holds-barred chase will ensure, and this is culturally understood. That is what makes the image interesting as it transcends the popular customs of our culture.

An image this bold and beautiful must be seen to be believed. I present this to you with caution, as you may see, for what may be the very first time, the sight of unseen, unabashed dog-on-cat action.

Karl Malone is Awesome

Note–This is a paper I did for my Principles of Visual Media class

For the last analysis paper, I thought I would switch it up from the photo shopped and hilarious images I have done for the past two papers. I wanted to do a vintage sports poster, one from an era where the superstar athlete would go and dress up for a fun and unique poster, rather than what most posters currently consist of which is a live action shot. Most of these vintage posters look really good, and fortunately for us, most have turned out to be unintentionally hilarious. The poster I chose for this final paper is one of the unintentionally funny types.  As I describe it to you, you will not believe that once upon a time it was okay for things like this to exist. This poster is just too ruggedly manly for today’s modern world. Karl Malone was one of the greatest basketball players of all time for the Utah Jazz, hooking up with John Stockton to bring the Jazz to two NBA Finals, winning two MVP awards, and starting at power forward for the best team ever assembled, the Dream Team. He was also an avid outdoorsman and he loved driving big rigs. This post capitalizes on his love of big trucks and the outdoors. As the poster simply puts, it is “awesome”.

This image shows the mighty Karl Malone standing smugly with his hands in his pants against his large, oversized pick-up truck. He has a cowboy hat and boots on, and a jeans and a jean vest with no shirt on beneath it. Did I mention the jeans are ripped? Surrounding Malone is the rugged wilderness from which he hails from in Louisiana. The poster has KARL MALONE up top in big maroon block letters and AWESOME on the bottom in big black block letters. It also features Malone’s autograph above his black pick-up truck. The composition of this image is typical for a poster of its time. It flows from top to bottom and is very simply designed and easy to understand, even from a distance. As for visual cues, most of the colors are blue, black, and shades of brown and yellow of the wilderness. There is no movement in this image, but a decent amount of depth with a patch of grass in front, the car and Malone in the middle and the trees in the background. There aren’t really any semiotic cues, everything stands for it what it means, in fact “awesome” pretty much spells it out for you. I think an audience would respond to this image as looking like a poster, and thus judge it by its silliness and the unique image it presents. The purpose of this image is to tell the NBA world, and the world at large, that Karl Malone is awesome. I think that aesthetically this image is carefully constructed and very well done.

My gut reaction to this Karl Malone poster was first a smirk, and then a rush of nogistalga because they really would never ever make a poster this insane in this era. No NBA player would just pose in a ripped jeans and a jean vest with no shirt underneath, at least non-ironically anyways, thus its place in history as a relic of the 1990s. It is nice to see a player show some personality, I feel most players would rather just be dunking with the word “swag” on their posters. This poster was created by Costacos Sports, a company that makes sports posters to this day but had an iconic run in the late 1980s and early 1990s with sports posters similar to the one in the paper. They are very rare and go for high prices on eBay.  There is a slight ethic dilemma on this poster, as it is a little bit scandalous for Karl Malone to be posing in a suggestive way with his shirt off and his hands in his pants because of an incident when he was in college where he was accused of having sex with a 13-year-old girl. Today this poster would absolutely not be made, but back 20 years ago it was much easier to avoid media scrutiny and sweep controversies under the rug. As for cultural perspective, what this image says is universal to all cultures: Karl Malone is Awesome. Trucks with monster wheels may be limited to certain parts of America however, and people from different countries might not get an understanding on who Karl Malone is and why he is so awesome. I think this is a great poster. I’d gladly hang it in my room as a relic of the 1990s. This poster doesn’t force you to make too much of a critical response, because it tells you as plain and simple as a Stockton to Malone pick-and-roll: Karl Malone is awesome.

Arctic Explorer Thorleif Thorleifsson Visits MSU

Only Minnesota stop on American tour with Norwegian Embassy

MANKATO, Minn. –A polar explorer and environmental witness from Norway ventured to the Minnesota State University, Mankato campus this Tuesday to tell of his 80-day adventure around the North Pole.

Thorleif Thorleifsson, a Norwegian Naval Academy graduate, sailor, navigator and explorer paid a visit to a capacity crowd at the Ostrander Auditorium on the Minnesota State University, Mankato campus on Feb. 28.

Thorleifsson’s presentation detailed the environmental changes occurring at the North Pole and traced his path as he traveled the same route as early 20^th century polar explorers Roald Amundsen and Fridtjof Nansen.

Arctic trip easier because of global climate change

While Amundsen’s and Nansen’s travels  took six and three years, respectively , Thorleifsson said he and his crew made the trip in only 80 days because of global climate change.

According to figures from Thorleifsson, the ice volume in the North Pole is 55 percent less than it was in 1979.

Donald Friend, chair of MSU’s geography department said in his introduction of Thorleifsson, “This trip could not have been done even five years ago, due to ice.”

Thorleifsson said “The Arctic used to be an impenetrable, lethal beauty. Now it has completely changed.”

Bare-essential boat gained speed advantage, left little environmental impact 

Thorleifsson’s navigated the Arctic in a small three-person boat to easily avoid ice and to make speed. The boat could sail in depths as little as three feet and could be raised to sit above ice in only 30 minutes.

Thorleifsson said he used a small boat to leave as little impact environmentally as possible.

The boat had no heating system, so Thorleifsson said he listened to salsa and tropical music on his iPhone to keep warm.

Thorleifsson breathlessly described the sights and sounds he saw on his trip to the audience, which included seals, polar bears and a brief trek with a passenger from Dubai.

Mankato is the only Minnesota stop on Thorleifsson’s tour of America, which is being sponsored by the Norwegian government.

Co-sponsors of the event included the Norwegian Embassy; University Advancement; the colleges of Arts and Humanities; Science, Engineering, and Technology; and Social and Behavioral Sciences; the Scandinavian studies program; and the departments of biological sciences, chemistry, geography, geology, government, history, and world languages and cultures.

Black Friday Has Earliest Start Ever in 2011

Walmart begins holiday sales at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day

The unofficial start of the Holiday season known as Black Friday began on Thanksgiving night when the consumer superstore Walmart ditched the traditional early Friday morning opening for a 10 p.m. start on Thursday the 24th. This marked the first time the seasonal deals began on Thanksgiving rather than the day after.

Consumer buzz for Black Friday 2011 had been building for over a month when ads for Walmart, Best Buy, and Target leaked in early November.

Walmart, which is based out of Bentonville, Ark., let its shoppers get the earliest deals when it started the savings at 10 p.m, followed by Best Buy,Target and Toys ‘R’ Us at midnight and numerous other stores like Radio Shack, Lowe’s and Office Max at 5 a.m.

Walmart was unavailable to comment on the new Black Friday store hours.

Target reacts to Walmart

Billy Hanlon is an Executive Team Leader at the River Hills Mall Target location, and he says that other stores are forced to react to the earlier Black Friday start.

“It enforces the fact that retail is all about competition. Prices, hours, products, etc.  There are sacred days that should be left for the employees and Walmart is part of the trend taking those days away slowly.”

Target opened it doors at midnight, it’s earliest start ever.

“The reason for opening earlier is to meet the needs for more consumers.” Hanlon said, “So, they expect more business for consumers who are more apt to wait until midnight to go and shop than consumers sleeping for a few hours and going in at 4 a.m.”

Families to change plans, shop earlier

Erin Connelly and her mom Lisa, of Eagan MN. are no strangers to Black Friday. Lisa has been Black Friday shopping for over 10 years, and Erin joined her in the shopping tradition four years ago. They will eat their Thanksgiving dinner early and head out to get in line at Walmart at 8:30  p.m.

“It’s a little sad we can’t lay around all day anymore after our Thanksgiving feast,” Erin, 22 said. “But the best deals are on Black Friday and we plan to get most of our Christmas shopping done that day.”

The Connelly’s went to Walmart, Best Buy, and Target on Black Friday, and said they have never seen so many shoppers.

Lisa said, “Walmart was easily the craziest, people were everywhere and it took over two hours just to get through the check-out line.”

2011 Black Friday Figures

The Connelly’s were two of a record 226 million shoppers who went Black Friday shopping this year,according to the National Retail Federation, just one of the many retail records set in 2011. Other record figures include:

• 52.4 billion dollars in total sales
• The average consumer spent $398.62
• 24.4% of consumers were at stores at midnight, compared to 9.2% in 2010 and 3.3% in 2009

This year’s sales represented a 6% increase from 2010.

Poynter News University: Language of the Image

I took an online class at the Poynter News University called Language of the Image. It was extremely fascinating and my girlfriend ended up doing it with me because we were both mesmerized by the photographs shown in the lecture. The Poynter Institute,which runs Poynter News University, is an organization dedicated to training and informing journalists, and publishes the soon to be renamed . It also preforms the role of ombudsmen for espn.com.
The course i did was entitled the Language of Image. It went over the numerous forms of image, the journalistic value of an image, and ways to use an image to create better story telling. I learned various types of shots, including juxtaposition, the rule of thirds, and sense of place. These forms and the nearly twenty they listed were all informative and helpful lessons learned in the process of using images to tell a story.
There is the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words”, and while not every photo shown was capable of that, there were a few that could not be forgotten. One of a war torn Palestinian town at dusk was an eerie portrait of the quiet menace of that occurs during the silence between battle. Another picture I really enjoyed was the picture of the person praying and holding a bible while a gun sat tucked into his waist. It was taken in the Bible Belt of America and reminded me of the recent Hank Williams Jr. comments and his subsequent firing from Monday Night Football.
An example of a story-telling image in recent news is this photo of college football superstar Andrew Luck. The photo shows many forms of images including quality of light, perspective, personality portrait, graphic and sense of place. This photograph looks amazing to me and it represents Luck’s place right now at the top of the college football world.

MLB Stadiums I Have Visited

Here is a Google Map of all the Major League Baseball Stadiums I have visited in my life. If I didn’t find baseball so boring now I’d try to visit them all! I went to most of these stadiums on family vacations, including Coors Field in Denver this summer. The weather was going back and forth from a blazing 95 degrees to a relieving rainstorm, and it made me miss the Metrodome.

View Larger Map

Linked In: Thoughts on Linking and Linking Strategies

In Mass Media 330 we are currently learning about linking, how to link, and what links are appropriate for use on a professional site or blog. The book Online Journalism: Principles and Practices of News For The Web written by James C. Foust is the foundation of what we are learning, and professor Ellen Mrja is also giving helpful tips to us about what is up in the wide world of linking.
There are four types of links that exist according to Foust:

• Deep Linking
• Inline Linking
• Associative Linking
• Linking to Illegal or Infringing Material

Foust considers the first three to be legal, and the last one as illegal.

Deep Linking is the practice of bypassing a website’s homepage or other introductory material by linking to a page “deep” within the sites structure.  People like to use them to look for specific information, such as a score to a game, while skipping unnessacery or extra pages that precede the wanted page. For example the box-score of the Vikings-Bears this Sunday night is considered to be a deep link. Users and visitors to a website may appreciate deep linking more than the website itself. Deep linking causes users to skip the home page, which in turn can lower advertising revenue, which can be based on home page views. Ticketmaster has sued in the past to restrict deep linking, but courts currently have no plans to limit the practice.

Inline Linking is the practice of placing a copy of an image that belongs to someone else on your web page without actually copying the file itself. Though it is considered legal, it can be problematic because the image is being reproduced without permission of its copyright holder. Inline Linking is different than just placing an image on your site, because it includes a source code to go with it.
This excellent image of Minnesota Vikings Running Back Adrian Peterson is an example of Inline Linking. Inline Linking is useful because it makes a lot of images available, but Foust maintains one should still try to gain permission before using an image. It is interesting to me that Inline Linking is widely accepted on the internet, yet doing this practice in print media is a very big no-no.

Associative Linking refers to linking whereby the site with the link can affect the reputation of the sites to which it links. Some businesses and organizations prohibit Associative Linking, and have sued to protect their reputation. The Archdiocese of St. Louis sued one site for linking their site on the same page as sexually explicit material. The church won, and its trademark was protected.  The Better Business Bureau is a site that does not allow Associative Linking by its non-members. It believes a link by a non-member would be considered an endorsement of said company. We used another example of Associative Linking in class when we discussed linking to the KKK’s website in a news article, and whether think link was an endorsement or a recruiting tool for the organization. For an Associative Link to be prohibited, a clear and close relationship must exist between the link and the offensive material. For example, since this blog was created in Mass Media 330 here at MSU-Mankato, I will link to the school’s website.

The last type of linking is linking to illegal or infringing material. In most cases the website operator does not possess or post illegal but merely links to a site that does. These links typically have material that infringes on other’s copyrights and trademarks. Currently U.S. courts believe that the First Amendment offers no protection for these links. In an example provided by Foust in our book, a website was ordered to remove it’s illegal link to Hacker Quarterly, which included the technology used to break digital copyright protection. The website substituted other links to Hacker’s Quarterly but was repeated served with injunctions. Obviously any respectable blogger or site operator should avoid illegal links at all costs if they want to maintain a safe and credible website.

My advice to those creating a link is to stop and ask themselves a few questions: Is this link legal or illegal? Is it appropriate for the story or page its linked from? Does the link say your view better than you can, or can you say it better in your own words? These questions can help one formulate and provide quality links to the visitors of your site. I would also advice searching out and finding exceptional links that aren’t just the first thing found on Google, but can help you paint a better picture of what you are trying to convey on your own site.

Mankato Auto Sales Hit Highest Peak Since 2008

SALES SHOWING RECOVERY FROM RECESSION, EXPANSION

Mankato area auto dealers made 1,050 auto sales this July, the highest monthly total since 2008. This is according to the local excise tax collections by the city of Mankato.

The previous high this year 814 autos sold in April, and the highest month in 2010 was 901, also in April. The auto dealers attribute the July sales to a strong farm economy, trade-in programs, and dealership expansion.

DEALERSHIP FINDS SUCCESS IN EXPANSION

Mankato Luther Honda recently moved to a new and expanded location on Madison Avenue, and the expansion allowed extra vehicles on the lot.

Kerry Lindsay, the general manager at Mankato Luther Honda, said, “Since July we’ve doubled our inventory and more than doubled our sales.”  The dealership especially saw a rise in the popularity of the Honda Pilot SUV, according to Lindsay.

YouTube Video Reflections

For my Mass Media 330 class with Professor Mrja, I watched two videos on YouTube, Did You Know 3.0 and Social Media Revolution.

First of all I really enjoyed the Did You Know 3.0 video. I love factoids and nuggets like the ones showed and I always leave watching videos like that with my mind both blown and racing with ideas.  The first two facts about China and India were eye-opening.  While I can believe that China is becoming more of a Western culture, it is impressive that a large number of citizens in the country are learning the English language. This fact shows me that English is still the language of business, but also that Chinese is very hard to learn and that’s why the Chinese are adapting to the English language.  The fact about India is amazing as well, but does India have the facilities to become a financial and industrial power like America? More importantly do they have the space?

The second part about the future youth learning technologies and solving  problems that don’t even exist yet is irrelevant. You can literally say that about every previous generation that has ever existed. My grandpa said he got that same speech off of his telegraph 70 years ago.

The information from 1:50 onward is all about how the internet, technology, information and knowledge is increasing exponentially. The information about the trade school was revealing, and makes this student wonder how he can keep eating up all this knowledge to remain relevant in his degree. My dad , for example, learned computers as early as he could. From the mid-80s until now he has been ahead of the curve on technology and its helped his career immensely. I wonder if he had graduated now, with the same exact knowledge, if he would still be able to gain an edge in his career developement?

The second video watched was called Social Media Revolution. It was similar to Did You Know 3.0 but it focused on facts from the social media world. The info was more up to date and relevant  (Myspace facts vs. Facebook facts) and dealt with subjects familiar to us in the Mass Media major.  I know earlier I said China was advancing to a more Western culture, but how advanced can you be if you don’t have Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Google?

I really don’t like the Darth Vader Volkswagon ad.

The most revealing fact in both of these videos was that social gamers will buy $6 billion in virtual goods by 2013, while movie-goers will only purchase $2.1 billion in real goods by the same date. This shows what a digital era we are in when we cannot even put our hands literally on most of the goods and services we buy.

I’m not in business school, but I assume a ROI (Return of Investment) of five years is a pretty good thing.

Mankato Area Restaurants in Tax Trouble

Many restaurants in the Mankato area appear on a September state list of bars and restaurants that havent paid their taxes. These restaurants and bars below can’t legally buy more alcohol until the taxes are paid.
-Charley’s
-China Buffet
-The Boat Landing
-George’s Fine Steaks & Spirits
-Jerry Dutler’s Bowl
-Hammer’s Bar
-Cedar’s Grille