The Ill fate of Professor Belot

Ok, if you’re reading this essay, which you obviously are, we first have to set up some ground rules. I’ll agree not to get mad when I’m writing this if you agree not to consider this piece an angry rant. It’s not a rant, it’s just a ‘hey, come on now.’ Now that that’s clear, on to the fun stuff. For this entry, I read a story from the Omaha World Herald about a UNL professor who ‘agreed to resign’ because of an incident that occurred involving some explosives that got passed around class one day. At first thought, you may be thinking, “Uh, duh? He could have like blown up UNL with those things. He better have gotten canned.” But I dare to take the opposite position. I believe this story falls into the rapidly expanding category of “little things that got blown out of proportion and extreme action was taken to save the big man’s buttocks.” This is the kind of category where a third grader gets expelled for carrying a finger nail clipper in their back pack or parents press sexual assault charges against a kindergartener who kissed his classmate. Back to the story about the professor… Let’s think of this logically.
Professor John Belot Jr. was a Professor of Chemistry at a major university. That means he had a pretty good amount of Education under his belt. A lot of teachers pass around visuals in class; it keeps the interest of the students. If professor Belot was sober when he made his judgment that the explosives were not volatile enough to be dangerous to decently cautious students. The story never actually said what the explosives were, and many are not actually dangerous unless put under extreme conditions. One example of this is nitrogen, a substance that can usually be put through a tractor to fertilize crops without exploding, yet if put under extremely high temperatures and pressure can result in explosions such as the one that produce the Oklahoma City bombing. Professor Belot should have been able to tell the difference between a volatile and nonvolatile explosive.

A Visit to the National Museum of Roller Skating

I've always had a passionate hatred for roller skating. Maybe it's because my ankles always hurt after a bout of skating, or maybe it's because I just really suck at it, I don’t know. Regardless, for reasons out of my control, I was sitting at the international museum of roller skating this last Thursday. I was staring at 190 years of the most boring history imaginable, that is, other than the history of spoons as a musical instrument. But I’ll suck up the bitterness and try to tell you about my monotonously educational roller skating experience.
Our lovely local skating museum (also some kind of competitive skating office or something of that sort…) is full of surprises. The first exhibit one sees when he walks in is a shelf filled with the most eccentric rolling contraptions I’ve ever seen. I’ve found some online examples that you can find here. In my opinion, most look like spoons tied to wooden balls by leather straps. But I guess, according to the exhibitions at the museum, they were quite the fashion item in their day. Social skating was up there in the glamorous categories of operas and ball room dancing. Personally, I have no idea why, but old people will be old people.
The museum also had a large collection of skating history. The walls were covered in posters of skating legends, and I do use that word loosely… Trophy cases were overfilled with golden mementos of tournaments won. The trophies and posters are from local, state, regional, national, and even international events. I never knew that this activity had such a following.
The competitive events that are based on roller skating are similar to several winter sports such as ice skating and skiing. There are competitions in figure skating, speed skating, off road skating, and several more which I don‘t care to mention here. However, if you would wish to find out more, you can visit the National Museum of Roller Skating. Not feeling ambitious but still yearn for more skating knowledge? Check out this link to Encarta for more skating information.

Post I: Discourse Surrounding the Essay

“That doesn’t mean that there isn’t art and artifice involved in the writing of an essay. But it does mean that the art is in revealing the voice of the writer, as opposed to trying to suit the requirements of a fictional character or narrator. Essay writing is about transforming the often convoluted process of thought, leaving your own brand of bread crumbs in the forest so that those who want to can find their way to your door.”
-Lauren Slater in “Why essays confuse people”

Slater’s vision of the relationship of art and essays is a very respectable one in my eyes. The word ‘essay’ is often thrown around when the speaker actually means ‘article.’ Slater, coming to the rescue of the essayist, points out that there are fundamental differences between the two.
Articles are projects written principally for the short cut information that comprises them. The author of an article will not ‘bother’ his audience with ‘burdensome’ style and artistic expression in his writing. In this particular style, there is no time for frivolities. Rather, he will choose to trim the fat and flavor off of his writing and give all the clean-cut information that the reader will want if they are reading the paper at seven o’clock in the morning for their news or checking 40 high school papers at 11 o’clock at night. The article is a project that delivers information; it is all about what is said.
Essays, however, are projects that intertwine relevant information with a stylized technique. In the passage before the one that I quoted above, the author mentions that she is trying to bring order to the pieces of thought floating around in her mind. This is where an essay is similar to an article, in that one objective is to organize significant information from its original randomized state into a form that is comprehensible to the reader. However, there is more, personality is instilled into an essay. Personally, the best way I could describe an essay is as the result of a collision of an article and poetry. It has the hard information backing it up that is carried in an article, but says it with the feeling that is conveyed in a poem. As is said by Slater in not so many words, when writing an essay, one has to express information that is relevant to the established topic while using their own style and methods to keep it fluid and interesting. Its not only what is said, but how it is said.

Test Post

First post for Eng001, Sec 07.