DOLPHINS `07 - `08

This is a voice thread about who I want to be.

Today, is Halloween =O [boo] 

Mr. Vumbaco came into our classroom for an interview.

I thought this was a very good questions asked by the interviewers:

“What skills do you think people need to be employees in the 21st century?”

Mr. Vumbaco said:

I believe that technology is very important. I also believe that it is important for people to choose which way they want to go. If you want to go to a technical school, you should. If you want to be a plumber or carpenter those are also great professions.

I think this is a good thing to say because some people believe that you have to go to an advanced college to be sucessful. Yes, college is an important thing but you can be successful without going to college. Tech schools are also great options.

Today is October 29, 2007. On this day in 1890 Claire Goll was born. This is a history site that tells you who was born or what happened to the exact date. 

   <— Claire Goll

Claire Goll is a German - French writer and journalist. She wrote short stories, poems and novels. Some of the books she has written are; 10,000 Dawns, Diary of a Horse, The Jewel, and many french books such as; Die Antirose. This is the story of her life. She was a Jewish woman. Her husband, Yvan Goll, died in 1950 and from then on she dedicated all of her writing to him.

    <—- Yvan Goll

Her contribution to her time period was a large amount of beautiful writing peices.

Assignment: Email a company or organization a question and blog about why you picked the company, the question, and the response.

At first, I had NO idea who I was going to contact. Then, my friend gave me the idea to contact the PEZ company. I thought it was a great idea. The whole PEZ concept is amazing =]

So, I did. I wanted to ask them where they got the idea for PEZ and what PEZ stood for or symbolized. This is exactly what I said.

Hello, I am from a class in CT and my class is run in a cool way. We have blogs and wiki’s and for one of our assignments for the week we had to e-mail a company with a question. So I chose you, the PEZ company! My question is: How did you get the idea for PEZ? I mean really, popping a candy from a dispenser, BRILLIANT! Also, what does PEZ stand for or symbolize?

Response: PEZ was founded by Mr. Eduard Haas in 1927 in Vienna, Austria. The first PEZ candy was peppermint-flavored, and that is how PEZ got its name from the German word for peppermint, PfeffErminZ.

The original peppermint candy was packaged in a dispenser that looked like a lighter. In 1952 PEZ was introduced in the United States.
Market research was conducted in America and the product was repositioned towards children. Also the four famous fruit flavors- lemon, orange, grape and strawberry were introduced.
Since then hundreds of different characters were put on the original PEZ dispenser. The first character was either Popeye or Mickey Mouse.

PEZ is now a part of America’s pop culture and has invited some of the most famous characters such as Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Batman, Spiderman, and many more!

I chose this question just for this simple reason; I have always wondered! Here is a link to the PEZ official site.

Today, well right now, Mayor Dickinson is sitting in the classroom. If you do not know who Mayor Dickinson is, he is the mayor here in our hometown. He is here for an interview. Us, as students are playing major roles in this interview. We are feeding questions through our computers to the interviewers. The mayor is giving a lot of very descriptive answers and explaining things very in depth. We are all coming up with great questions.

One question I asked and got an answer for was: Do you believe working together or working independently is more productive?

His response basically was: “I believe that it depends on what kind of task it is.”

I decided to blog about this because I completely agree. If it is a large job, it would be better to have more people working together. On the other hand, if it is a small job you don’t want too many people working on it. It would be cramped and not every ones ideas would be acknowledged.  

As most of you know, I am deathly afraid of bugs, mostly ones that fly or spiders. So I found this blog on spiders. Before I came across this blog I searched; animal life, oceans, and dolphins. Nothing really interested me under those categories. Then all of a sudden I was reminded of my terrible fear of spiders! I read the extremely informative blog about the leaf curler spider! It’s scientifical ( =] ) name is Phonognatha graeffei. This blog had a lot of BIG, huge words that I didn’t understand such as: ubiquitous or kleptoparasitic. Most of the words scared me just as much as the spiders =] So, i opened dictionary.com and it helped! It is ubiquitous (ubiquitous: existing or being everywhere, especially at the same time) in the Sydney area. They have VERY distinct webs. It incorporates a leaf into each web (hence the name; leaf curlers.) The leaf works as a protection device. The leaf curler is known as an orb weaver!

When I went looking for these spiders in the small woodland area behind the lab, I came across a few Leaf Curlers that had build their webs such that the leaf was still attached to the plant. This was more akin to the retreats seen in other orb spiders, and which somehow lends weight to the protection hypothesis. But these individuals could be of a different species or very few in number in the population. Still if it’s the same species, it’s an interesting variation in web building pattern.

^^ That’s pretty cool, all of their webs are different.

I have NO idea why but my picture won’t go on here so here is the link to a picture of the Leaf Curler: click hereeee!

You should check out this blog. I didn’t like learning that there was ANOTHER spider for me to be scared of but it was cool to learn about!

The blog site I went to didn’t have a comment button so:
Comment I (would have) left:

Hi, I really enjoyed reading this blog. I don’t like spiders at all, but I wanted to learn more about them. This was very informative and I liked learning about the Leaf curling spider. I can’t believe that there are little spiders that steal the leaf curlers food. That would get really annoying. Does that ever lead to death of the leaf curler?

Too bad my question can’t be answered *sigh* =[

Assignment: The best way to participate is to post on your blog something that relates to the environment. Your post can be about anything to do with the environment. So you could write a post which is off topic for your blog OR relate the environment back to your topic in some way.

When I heard this assignment I had no idea what I was going to write about. I thought about global warming, but I thought that was too common. I decided to write about pollution in our oceans. Ocean pollution directly affects the ocean organisms and indirectly affects us as humans. Oil spills, toxic wastes, and dumping of other harmful materials are contributing to pollution. Boats also pollute the water when the engine is running. You probably know that your car pollutes the air but most people do not think that they are polluting the oceans too. The smoke that comes from the back of your car pollutes both the air and oceans. It doesn’t go directly into the ocean but it comes down as acid rain and drops into our oceans.

Oil pollution is very bad for our oceans and our environments. Thirty seven million gallons of oil are accidentally spilled into the ocean every year by tankers. More than that amount oil gets into the oceans by non-accidental sources. A total of sixty million gallons of oil gets into the ocean every year. Some effects of this are birds wings being “glued” together, gills on fish are clogged, and prevents sun from getting to under water plants.

Toxic waste is a poisonous material that not only harms the ocean, but humans too! It can harm us and plants and animals that live in the ocean. Toxic waste is bad because it can be passed along the food chain and when we eat a fish, there could be toxic waste in it. Toxic waste can get into the ocean by leaking off of land fills, mines, farms, etc. The most harmful is lead.

Carbon dioxide is also harmful to the ocean and its marine life. The ocean has taken in about half of the carbon dioxide that humans have made in the last 200 years. That’s about 118 billion metric tons. Carbon dioxide harms coral and free-swimming algae. Carbon dioxide makes it hard for coral to form their outer shells. Carbon dioxide is most harmful for the species that live on the surface of the ocean.

Take care of our planet and its oceans =]

Leave some comments <3

Well, basically all I know about snakes is that they have scales and some are REALLY huge. This post is about something I know nothing about, and snakes are just one of those things. I went to this site first and found some cool facts. Like, There are over 3000 kinds of snakes in the world. I like this fact, “some don’t grow over the length of a pencil,” that way, I’m not scared of them =] The king cobra is the largest poisonous snake, also, it is strong enough to kill an elephant! King cobras can also defend themselves at birth/hatching.

^^ king cobra!!!!!

Then I tried the wikipedia and this site came up. I looked under ‘venom’ and found some interesting information. Venom is basically modified saliva delivered through the fangs. It either kills or paralyzes its prey. Something I found VERY interesting is that poisonous is not the way to describe these snakes. They are venomous and venom is injected. Poison is inhaled or ingested. A snake I have always wanted to learn about is the boa constrictor. I found thiswebsite. The boa lives mostly in the rain-forest, but has also been found in the semiarid savannah. I also found it amazing that snakes can be different sizes due to where they live. A young snake will eat mice, small birds, lizards, and frogs. As the gets larger, so does the size of its prey. This site is about the large snakes of the world (a.k.a. the ones I’m afraid of. =]) The largest known snake in the world is the Anaconda, or Eunectes murinus, of South America. The anaconda can live on land or in fresh water. All snakes are carnivorous.

I learned alot about snakes today =]

Food / Drink Survey =]

1. McDonalds or Burger king?

A : MCDONALDS =]]

2. Pepsi or Coke?

A : hmm.. hard one.. have to say coke.

3. Root Beer or Sprite?

A : Root Beer all the way!

4. Dominoes or Pizza Hut?

A : Dominoes

5. Fridays or Chili’s?

A : Chili’s is the bestt =P

6. Cocolate chip pancakes or buttermilk?

A : Chocolate chip, you should know my obsession with chocolate =]

7. Burger or Hot dog?

A : Burger… yummy.

8. Fries or Potato chips?

A : Fries =]

9. Chocolate or Vanilla?

A : Chocolate… DUHHH!

10. Carrots or apples?

A : apples please!

11. Grapes or blueberry’s?

A : grapes — only the purples =]

12. Breakfast : Muffin or cereal

A : it depends. weekends : muffins, school morning : cereal.

13. Italian or Chinese?

A : AHHH! too hard =O

14. Caramel or Hot fudge?

A : Hot fudge, hello, CHOCOLATE OBSESSION!!!

15. Ice cream or cake?

A : CHOCOLATE ice cream =]

What are some of your answers. Leave somee <3

OK, this is a tough blog. Well, I went onto podomatic.com and clicked education since this podcast has to be about something educational. There was an error on the page so, I went back and scrolled down a little bit and saw “Society & Culture” and clicked it. And well, nothing good there either =[ So, I kept clicking random categories, here and there, and i honestly couldn’t find anything of my interest. I felt like I’d NEVER find ANYTHING!! Then I came across “Arts” at the top. I liked the very first one “Classic Poetry Aloud.” It was short but deep. I really liked the poetry in it. Alot of people would think it was boring but its educational =] (I was on the podomatic site by the way!) This was a poem called, “What is life?” by John Clare. He was really smart. Basically the whole time he is using metaphors and similes describing things such as life, death and hope.

The comment I left is as follows:

“Hello, I really liked this podcast. The poetry was really deep and meaningful. I loved the part when you said, “An hour glass on the run,” in the beginning. And, “What is death? Still a cause un-found?” I also liked this podcast because many people forget about the poetry of the past.”

I learned a lot while listening to this podcast. I learned how people wrote classical poetry. I learned how to use metaphors to compare things. I really likd this podcast and I like the arts so that is why this grabbed my attention.

http://www.classicpoetryaloud.podomatic.com/
^^ this is the link for the podcast =]

Watch it and tell me if you agree with me or disagree!