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Two and a half Men

editorial review

I do not agree with Roy Disney who wrote about the NBC building at the Universal City site. The article can be found here.

My mother worked for NBC years ago, and I am a member of their credit union. They have always been a great company and broadcasting center. They did what was best for them and Universal by joining together. They had to have known that by merging together they would have to move somewhere. Those things are thought of ahead of time. Los Angeles is lucky that they stayed in the area.

Disney talks that the area will be filled with more cars and traffic. In reality, everywhere is full of traffic and cars. Nothing can be done about that. If the NBC building was not put there, something else would be. He focused more on cars and the tight area the building will be on. The whole improvement is merging the companies together and making it one big company in the city.

Editorial

Mattel and Fisher Price have been recalling many toys in the last couple months from China due to lead paint and other substances on the toys. America has been importing over nine million toys from China. Barbie, Batman, and Polly Pocket are some of the toys that have been recalled because of a lead paint issue.
American officials are saying they are tired of waiting for China to crack down on the recalls. Rep. Mike Ferguson is saying China needs to meet the standards of America. They stopped selling the toys and began investigating the toys. Officials began investigating in July when they found out toys may be hazardous. They finally began pulling toys off the shelves of toy stores.
Instead of just pulling the toys off the shelves, American officials need to go into further investigations. These Chinese manufactures need to be told what to do. The toys in their country contain some lead paint. So for them to use lead should have been expected. The toys should have been properly inspected before being put on the shelves. I would like to know these toys are looked at before my children were to play with them.
A California attorney general agrees with me that the toys need to be better inspected. There is a law suit saying the manufacturers sold the toys containing lead paint. If won, the manufactures would have to change their procedures to selling toys and inspect them to the fullest.
If the manufactures properly inspected all the toys, the situation would have been taken care of a long time ago. America assumed everything was fine and when it comes to children, the strictest rules should be enforced. Making more rules for manufacturing companies to follow would be beneficial along with better inspecting policies instead of just taking toys off the shelves.

Dramatic Narrative

This news link is about the life of author Norman Mailer who recently passed away. David Ulin discussed his books and life.

I met Norman Mailer in the early 1990s, during a party at the New York
Athletic Club. The party was for Mailer's friend Richard Stratton, who had a
novel out, and Mailer was the host, holding court at the bar, a flushed grin on
his face.
Knowing almost no one, I kept to the corners, avoiding Mailer altogether.
Still, I couldn't help looking at him periodically, and at one point, I caught
his eye.For a moment, the two of us watched each other, until I turned away. I
hadn't taken more than a step or two, though, when I felt a tap on my shoulder,
and there was Mailer, hand extended, having come over to introduce
himself.
That story illustrates everything one needs to know about Norman Mailer,
casting the two essential, contradictory threads of his personality, the ego and
the insecurity, in sharp relief.Mailer, after all, was the sort of author who
could both dazzle and infuriate, often within the space of a single paragraph.
He was a major talent who could not keep himself from reminding you that he was
a major talent, an astute observer of his moment, who tended to operate as if
that moment were entirely his.He was equally famous for his writing and his
exploits: the precocious 25-year-old whose 1948 debut, "The Naked and the Dead,"
is considered by many the greatest American war novel ever written; the
provocateur who co-founded the Village Voice in 1955 and, 14 years later, ran
for mayor of New York on a secession ticket (Jimmy Breslin was his running
mate), with a slogan urging, "Vote the scoundrels in."Although he liked to
dismiss journalism as less than artful -- "generally speaking," he told the St.
Petersburg Times in 2004, "journalism is sloppy writing, and unless you have a
real talent, it can injure you to write too quickly" -- his legacy rests on "The
Armies of the Night" and "The Executioner's Song," the book-length works of
reportage for which he won Pulitzer prizes in 1969 and 1980,
respectively.Mailer, for his part, preferred to think of himself as a
"novelist," which he saw as the writer's highest calling, even though his own
fiction was often sprawling and flawed. In his final book, "On God: An Uncommon
Conversation" (published only 3 1/2 weeks ago), he referred to God as a supreme
artist, the novelist at the heart of the universe. This tells us more than a
little about where his sensibilities stood.And yet, the fascinating thing about
Mailer was that he remained so, well, fascinating, so much at the center of our
cultural life.Partly, it was his prose style, which even at its most
self-promotional, was scalpel-sharp and piercing, the expression of a mind that
seemed to notice everything.Even more, it had to do with Mailer's sense of
engagement, of the writer as a public figure, the idea that art had a connection
to the world.That's a notion Mailer took from the French writers of the 1940s
and 1950s, people like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, for whom literature
was a form of confrontation, a way of wrestling with the times.Mailer explored
this in both nonfiction and fiction: a 1967 novel was called "Why Are We in
Vietnam?" At times, he failed, maddeningly; his 1957 essay, "The White Negro,"
now reads as a bit of pseudo-hipster posturing, while his infamous stance on the
women's movement came off as shockingly uninformed.Perhaps his greatest misstep
had to do with Jack Henry Abbott, an ex-convict he championed for his writing;
six weeks after his parole, amid a swelter of publicity for his book of prison
letters, "In the Belly of the Beast," Abbott killed a waiter in a Manhattan
eatery. Years later, Mailer would call the experience "another episode in my
life in which I can find nothing to cheer about or nothing to take pride
in."Mailer's critics saw the Abbott saga as yet another symbol of the author's
ego: He so loved the idea of discovering this writer that he overlooked the
danger in the man he'd helped unleash.Abbott, though, was emblematic of Mailer
in another way -- his attraction to iconic individuals, people he might frame as
metaphors. His work is dotted with such figures: Gary Gilmore, Lee Harvey
Oswald, Adolf Hitler, Jesus Christ.On the one hand, this, too, has everything to
do with ego, but on the other, there's something more profound at stake. What
Mailer was after was a mythology of the modern era, an era bounded by war,
celebrity and religion, and played out across a vast social divide.It's been
said that no other major American author wrote so many bad books, and especially
in the 1970s, when he produced glorified works-for-hire like "Marilyn" and "The
Fight" while duking it out with Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett Show. He drifted
into caricature in those years. But what makes Mailer remarkable is that he
never disavowed any of it; instead, he saw it all as part of his writing life.In
1998, to commemorate his 75th birthday and the 50th anniversary of "The Naked
and the Dead," he published a retrospective volume, "The Time of Our Time." It's
a revealing book for a variety of reasons, not least because Mailer left nothing
out. There it all is: the brilliant reportage and the inconsistent fiction, the
literature and the hack work side by side.Ego? Perhaps. Insecurity? Maybe. Yet
more to the point, what Mailer put on display is what, for better and for worse,
his whole career was about: one man's struggle to come to terms with himself and
the times he'd been born into, a portrait of the artist as he really was.

Investigative story

The story of women in Cairo, Egypt are becoming more picky when it comes to marrying men. Elders do not always choose the mate anymore. Women are more educated and focused on work then just getting married. It is still a goal for them, but a career is important too. The reporter starts off with an anecdote of a single woman and what it is like. Then the story gets more in depth about the traditional women and the women now, who are more educated and taking time in choosing a mate. The reporter talked to many women on how things are changing in their city and what the women today go through. The link to the story is here.

Public Documents

1. To look for a staff report from the Los Angeles City Council I went to the Los Angeles City Council website and clicked on their reports. Every report they post has blue links which go to further information whether it's email or another website. The City Council website is here.

2. I started out by going to the GAO website, the General Accountability Office. I clicked on the reports and testimonials tab. That brought me to a list of reports created. An interesting report is on the characteristics of kidney transplants.

3. The California Public Records Act can be found anywhere on the internet. It is found on leginfo website.

Free Blog

I was looking up information on the fires by my house and one of the fires that forced me out of my home was on the Los Angeles Fire Dept. Blog Spot! I found that to be very interesting. I did not even think they would have one. These fires have been so stressful on my family and me. I'm glad I stumbled on their blogspot because I trust what they have been saying. They give a map and phone numbers and information on what to do if you evacuate. If I only saw it before I wasn't allowed to go home...