Daughter of the Dragon is a very interesting book. There are many plots. In the prologue, a man named "C" was sent to assassinate the Bounty Hunter. However, he was instead killed by a man pretending to be the Bounty Hunter. Then, there was an excerpt from a girl's (Katana's) diary. She was writing about her father. One day, she was watching a strange ritual. Her father and two other people were standing around her father's friend, Uncle Kan. Then, Uncle Kan cut his own stomach open, and her father cut his head off. Katana screamed. Then, her father left. Katana didn't see him again until seven years later, when her mother died in a hovercar accident.
I liked the mysterious prologue. It grabbed my attention. Also, the journal entry made me wonder why Uncle Kan had to die. I think that the person who killed C will later try to kill Katana, or try to save her.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Chew On This #3
Chew On This, by Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson, explains in great detail what junk food does to your body. It described obesity very well, explaining both the cause and effects of obesity.
Obesity is being extremely overweight. Two thirds of all adults and one sixth of all children in the US are overweight or obese. That's 50 million obese adults, along with 6 or 7 morbidly obese people. "Morbidly obese" people are about 100 pounds overweight than the standard weight. Since the 1970's, the obesity rate among adults has increased by 50%, the obesity rate among preschoolers has doubled, and the obesity rate among 6-11 year olds has tripled. Obesity is caused by many factors, including what you eat, how much you eat, how much you exercise, your genes, and even familial traits or racial traits. However, the familial and racial traits in the US have not changed very much in the last 30 years. So why has the obesity rate increased so much? It's really quite simple. In the past thirty years, Americans have begun to eat more, especially fatty, salty, and sugary foods. Also more and more people begun to get office jobs, so they exercise less. For thousands of years, humans had to hunt, fish and farm to get food. That took a great deal of effort and forced them to exercise. Early humans' worried about not having enough to eat, let alone to worry about getting fat. Fat cells were probably developed to store energy for periods of little food. In normal amounts, they are good for the body, signaling to the brain how much energy was stored and when it was time to eat. They even help the immune system, preventing cancer and disease. Typical people have 25 to 35 billion fat cells. Obese people have nearly eight times that amount: 275 billion fat cells! These fat cells require new blood vessels, place new demands on vital organs, create chemicals imbalances, and actually make the body more susceptible to disease. Fast food is one of the main causes of the obesity epidemic. It is usually not very nutritious, but high in salt, starch, sugar, fat, and calories. This is why sometimes fast food is also referred to as junk food.
Junk food does not only make you obese. It also affects other parts of the body. Foods that are high in sugar and bad fats such as cholesterol, trans fat, and saturated fat cause higher than normal amount of fat molecules in the blood which leads to blood vessels narrowing. If these blood vessels lead to the brain, they may not be able to carry all the blood that the brain needs, causing a stroke. That causes permanent severe brain damage or even death. If a piece of the fatty plaque that blocks the blood vessels suddenly breaks off, it may block the flow of blood to the heart, causing a heart attack. The liver, which processes all the fat, can also be damaged by junk food. If it gets full of fat, it begins to malfunction. Heart disease and stoke are the top killers in the US. With the growing popularity of fast food, heart disease is beginning to become more common among young people, probably due to junk food. We should try to avoid fast food and exercise more.
Obesity is being extremely overweight. Two thirds of all adults and one sixth of all children in the US are overweight or obese. That's 50 million obese adults, along with 6 or 7 morbidly obese people. "Morbidly obese" people are about 100 pounds overweight than the standard weight. Since the 1970's, the obesity rate among adults has increased by 50%, the obesity rate among preschoolers has doubled, and the obesity rate among 6-11 year olds has tripled. Obesity is caused by many factors, including what you eat, how much you eat, how much you exercise, your genes, and even familial traits or racial traits. However, the familial and racial traits in the US have not changed very much in the last 30 years. So why has the obesity rate increased so much? It's really quite simple. In the past thirty years, Americans have begun to eat more, especially fatty, salty, and sugary foods. Also more and more people begun to get office jobs, so they exercise less. For thousands of years, humans had to hunt, fish and farm to get food. That took a great deal of effort and forced them to exercise. Early humans' worried about not having enough to eat, let alone to worry about getting fat. Fat cells were probably developed to store energy for periods of little food. In normal amounts, they are good for the body, signaling to the brain how much energy was stored and when it was time to eat. They even help the immune system, preventing cancer and disease. Typical people have 25 to 35 billion fat cells. Obese people have nearly eight times that amount: 275 billion fat cells! These fat cells require new blood vessels, place new demands on vital organs, create chemicals imbalances, and actually make the body more susceptible to disease. Fast food is one of the main causes of the obesity epidemic. It is usually not very nutritious, but high in salt, starch, sugar, fat, and calories. This is why sometimes fast food is also referred to as junk food.
Junk food does not only make you obese. It also affects other parts of the body. Foods that are high in sugar and bad fats such as cholesterol, trans fat, and saturated fat cause higher than normal amount of fat molecules in the blood which leads to blood vessels narrowing. If these blood vessels lead to the brain, they may not be able to carry all the blood that the brain needs, causing a stroke. That causes permanent severe brain damage or even death. If a piece of the fatty plaque that blocks the blood vessels suddenly breaks off, it may block the flow of blood to the heart, causing a heart attack. The liver, which processes all the fat, can also be damaged by junk food. If it gets full of fat, it begins to malfunction. Heart disease and stoke are the top killers in the US. With the growing popularity of fast food, heart disease is beginning to become more common among young people, probably due to junk food. We should try to avoid fast food and exercise more.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Chew On This #2
Chew On This is an excellent book about fast food. It combines startling facts with humorous opinions. The sections I recently read are written in stunning detail about the ingredients in modern fast food. A good example is the section about artificial flavorings and artificial colorings. The co-authors, Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson, explain exactly what goes into the mysterious "natural and artificial flavorings and colorings" that are present in almost everything a fast food restaurant sells.
Flavorings began to be widely used in the mid-1900's. They were used to replace the flavors lost during processing. For example, cooking and heating large amounts of food and the process of canning, freezing, or dehydrating food destroyed most of the good natural taste. The natural taste of food is extremely complex. For example, the taste of coffee is made up of thousands of chemicals. The chemicals used as artificial flavors that go into most foods are supposed to mimic nature as closely as possible and should not present any danger to peoples' health. The book described an example of the way artificial flavors are used in fast food. To make a strawberry milkshake at home, all you would need is ice cream, strawberries, sugar, and vanilla. However, a strawberry flavored milkshake from a fast food restaurant would contain extracted milkfat and preserved milk, sugar, sweet whey, high fructose corn syrup, guar gum, mono- and diglycerides, cellulose gum, sodium phosphate, carageenan, citric acid, red food coloring, and artificial strawberry flavor. But what is in the artificial strawberry flavor? Let's just name a few chemicals, such as amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl ketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanoate, ethyl heptylate, ethyl lactate, ethyl methylphenylglycidate, ethyl nitrate, ethyl propionate, ethyl valerate, heliotropin, and many more. These chemicals may be safe to be consumed alone in the short term. However, little is known about their long term accumulative effects when all ingested together. Studies suggest that artificial chemicals may cause hyperactivity in children. These chemicals should simply be avoided if possible.
Artificial coloring is used to mimic the natural color of food. These artificial colorings have many chemicals, which may have long term side effects to health. However, manufacturers now go beyond natural food colors, and use colors like bright blue and purple. This has led to accidental poisonings because young children drink liquid laundry detergents that are the same color as many popular sports drinks. Surely, I don't want to turn my skin blue because I drank too much Gatorade!
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Chew On This #1
Chew On This, by Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson, is a book with an in-depth look at fast food's history, the evolving process of fast food production, and its impacts on our daily life. It contains many interesting and little known facts. For example, I was surprised to learn from this book that the hamburger was invented by a fifteen year old boy named Charlie Nagreen.
Charlie was selling meatballs at a county fair in 1885 to make some extra money. However, the meatballs were difficult to eat while walking. Seeing this, Charlie flattened the meatballs and put them between two slices of bread, thus creating the first hamburger. However, many people from the early 1900's believed that the ground beef used to make hamburgers was made from unfresh or low quality meat. This made hamburgers very unpopular during that period of time. It was considered a food for the poor. In 1925, when New Yorkers were asked what their favorite food was, hamburgers were nineteenth. Hamburgers even lost to cow tongue and spinach! However, a man named Walt Anderson loved hamburgers and set out to change the idea that hamburgers were unhealthy. He started a small restaurant devoted to selling hamburgers. He grilled the burgers right in front of his customers so that they could see that the meat was fresh and the equipment was clean. With the success of his first restaurant, he opened more restaurants in the shape of white medieval forts and named them White Castles. This name suggested that the food was pure and fresh. He even sponsored an unusual experiment. For ten days, a medical student at the University of Minnesota ate nothing but White Castle hamburgers and water. At the end of ten days, the student seemed quite healthy. From then on, people viewed hamburgers in a new way. It was no longer called a food for the poor, and workingmen finally could afford to eat at a restaurant.
However, White Castles didn't attract many women or children. Walt Anderson didn't turn hamburgers into America's favorite fast food. Richard and Maurice McDonald, with help from a traveling salesman who had failed at everything for years, changed history with a new concept of restaurants that marked the beginning of the era of modern fast food.
Charlie was selling meatballs at a county fair in 1885 to make some extra money. However, the meatballs were difficult to eat while walking. Seeing this, Charlie flattened the meatballs and put them between two slices of bread, thus creating the first hamburger. However, many people from the early 1900's believed that the ground beef used to make hamburgers was made from unfresh or low quality meat. This made hamburgers very unpopular during that period of time. It was considered a food for the poor. In 1925, when New Yorkers were asked what their favorite food was, hamburgers were nineteenth. Hamburgers even lost to cow tongue and spinach! However, a man named Walt Anderson loved hamburgers and set out to change the idea that hamburgers were unhealthy. He started a small restaurant devoted to selling hamburgers. He grilled the burgers right in front of his customers so that they could see that the meat was fresh and the equipment was clean. With the success of his first restaurant, he opened more restaurants in the shape of white medieval forts and named them White Castles. This name suggested that the food was pure and fresh. He even sponsored an unusual experiment. For ten days, a medical student at the University of Minnesota ate nothing but White Castle hamburgers and water. At the end of ten days, the student seemed quite healthy. From then on, people viewed hamburgers in a new way. It was no longer called a food for the poor, and workingmen finally could afford to eat at a restaurant.
However, White Castles didn't attract many women or children. Walt Anderson didn't turn hamburgers into America's favorite fast food. Richard and Maurice McDonald, with help from a traveling salesman who had failed at everything for years, changed history with a new concept of restaurants that marked the beginning of the era of modern fast food.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Rakkety Tam (1)
Rakkety Tam, by Brian Jacques, is the thrilling story of two squirrels named Rakkety Tam Macburl and Wild Doogy Plum and their adventures. They were wandering around and looking for a home. One day, these two adventurers found the land ruled by the Squirrelking Aaraltum and Queen Idga. The Squirrelking and queen were recruiting soldiers in order to take over the lands surrounding their kingdom. Rakkety and Doogy decided to join the army because it seemed like an easy life as a soldier: There was lots of food and the homes were good. However, the Squirrelking and Queen were weak, pompous, and self centered. When the royal banner was stolen, the squirrel mercenaries were offered freedom if they could retrieve the banner. Rakkety and Doogy went out to search for the stolen banner. The banner were stolen by Gulo the Savage and his band of evil foxes. In the mean time, Gulo was searching for his brother, Askor who held a symbol of power: the Walking Stone. Gulo's army was heading to Redwall Abbey. It seemed that Rakkety and Doogy were on a collision course to Gulo's army. The two squirrels did not seem to have a chance to defeat Gulo's band of evil foxes even though Rakkety and Doogy were excellent fighters.
At this point of reading, I believe that somehow, the mercenaries will receive help to fight Gulo's army. Brian Jacques built the plot very well. There were multiple events happening at once, so that the reader could understand what was happening in every place: Gulo's armies camp, Redwall Abbey, and what the two squirrels were doing. All the books in this series (the Redwall series) end with a final confrontation, usually ending with the Redwallers winning. However, I think that this book may end up with lots of smaller battles.
There is an amazing variety of vivid characters: honest squirrels, fighting hares, caring mice, warlike otters, and evil foxes. There are even a few monks!
This book is full of suspense, partly due to the multiple events. When one important event is about to occur, Brian Jacques switches to another one. Overall, I believe this is an excellent book to read.
At this point of reading, I believe that somehow, the mercenaries will receive help to fight Gulo's army. Brian Jacques built the plot very well. There were multiple events happening at once, so that the reader could understand what was happening in every place: Gulo's armies camp, Redwall Abbey, and what the two squirrels were doing. All the books in this series (the Redwall series) end with a final confrontation, usually ending with the Redwallers winning. However, I think that this book may end up with lots of smaller battles.
There is an amazing variety of vivid characters: honest squirrels, fighting hares, caring mice, warlike otters, and evil foxes. There are even a few monks!
This book is full of suspense, partly due to the multiple events. When one important event is about to occur, Brian Jacques switches to another one. Overall, I believe this is an excellent book to read.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Sea of Trolls (theme)
Sea of Trolls has many important themes. The brave young Jack did not give up after he and his sister were captured by the berserkers. He tried every possible way to protect his sister and himself under dangerous conditions. He knew he needed to build a strong relationship with his captors. Eventually, he became good friends with his captors, especially Olaf, who was the leader of the berserkers. Jack was also trying to protect Thorgil, a young female berserker. In return, Olaf and Thorgil saved Jack from the attack of the troll-bear and dragon while they were searching for Mimir's Well.
I also learned that we should believe in ourselves. In the beginning, Jack thought that he couldn't do anything. Of course, that caused some of the berserkers to think that he really was useless. However, he proved that he was a very good bard. Eventually, another bard showed him that it was very important to believe in yourself. If you have confidence, you will find a way out, even during a messy or dangerous situation.
We should be optimistic as well. In the beginning, Jack thought that he would be killed. When he decided to try and save himself and his sister, Lucy, things started to get better. He and Lucy successfully returned home.
I also learned that we should believe in ourselves. In the beginning, Jack thought that he couldn't do anything. Of course, that caused some of the berserkers to think that he really was useless. However, he proved that he was a very good bard. Eventually, another bard showed him that it was very important to believe in yourself. If you have confidence, you will find a way out, even during a messy or dangerous situation.
We should be optimistic as well. In the beginning, Jack thought that he would be killed. When he decided to try and save himself and his sister, Lucy, things started to get better. He and Lucy successfully returned home.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Sea of Trolls (Plot)
In the exposition of Sea of Trolls, the characters were introduced. Jack was an 11 year old kid who worked on a farm. He was also taking lessons from the village Bard. He learned to sing, dance, and do magic. He had a sister named Lucy who was only 5 years old. Lucy believed that she was a princess who had gotten lost in the woods one day. It was a very peaceful setting in a village. The villagers had food, drink, houses, and peace-until the berserkers attacked them. The berserkers were fierce warriors who robbed and killed people for fun.
One day Jack and Lucy were captured by the berserkers. They had to think of a way to escape, but Lucy didn't help. She thought that someone from a palace would come to save her. They were almost sold as slaves, but Jack's skill as a bard saved them. The leader of the berserkers, Olaf One-Brow, was very impressed by Jack. He decided to keep the kids.
At the climax, Jack had to live in Olaf One-Brow's house. Although his title, bard, showed that he was better than a slave, the berserkers still treated him like a slave. The other slaves made him do a very dangerous task: cleaning out a troll-boar's pen. He almost got killed, but when he sang to the troll-boar, he calmed it down. The other slaves stopped mistreating him at that point. He also gained respect from the berserkers. When he accidentally caused Queen Frith's hair to fall out, he and two berserkers went on a quest to find a cure. One berserker was Olaf. The other was a girl named Thorgil.
Jack realized that if he wanted to escape, he would have to complete the quest. It was very dangerous: He had to fight off a troll-bear, a dragon, and a giant spider. Still, he became friends with the berserkers, and they were willing to sacrifice their lives for each other. Olaf died while protecting Jack from the attack of the troll-bear. Torgil also killed the dragon to save Jack. Jack managed to put the fearsome giant spider to sleep so that they could escape back to the queen.
Jack restored Queen Frith's hair, but she had overdone it. The hair covered her body, and she turned into a wild animal. Still, King Ivar allowed Jack and Lucy to return to their village, which they had been away from for more than a year. When they returned to the village, Jack gained respect from the villagers, since he had become a true bard. This book ended very well, as the Bard listened with great interest about the adventures Jack had gone through.
One day Jack and Lucy were captured by the berserkers. They had to think of a way to escape, but Lucy didn't help. She thought that someone from a palace would come to save her. They were almost sold as slaves, but Jack's skill as a bard saved them. The leader of the berserkers, Olaf One-Brow, was very impressed by Jack. He decided to keep the kids.
At the climax, Jack had to live in Olaf One-Brow's house. Although his title, bard, showed that he was better than a slave, the berserkers still treated him like a slave. The other slaves made him do a very dangerous task: cleaning out a troll-boar's pen. He almost got killed, but when he sang to the troll-boar, he calmed it down. The other slaves stopped mistreating him at that point. He also gained respect from the berserkers. When he accidentally caused Queen Frith's hair to fall out, he and two berserkers went on a quest to find a cure. One berserker was Olaf. The other was a girl named Thorgil.
Jack realized that if he wanted to escape, he would have to complete the quest. It was very dangerous: He had to fight off a troll-bear, a dragon, and a giant spider. Still, he became friends with the berserkers, and they were willing to sacrifice their lives for each other. Olaf died while protecting Jack from the attack of the troll-bear. Torgil also killed the dragon to save Jack. Jack managed to put the fearsome giant spider to sleep so that they could escape back to the queen.
Jack restored Queen Frith's hair, but she had overdone it. The hair covered her body, and she turned into a wild animal. Still, King Ivar allowed Jack and Lucy to return to their village, which they had been away from for more than a year. When they returned to the village, Jack gained respect from the villagers, since he had become a true bard. This book ended very well, as the Bard listened with great interest about the adventures Jack had gone through.
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