-Joseph Chapa
Iron Man (repost)
May 7th, 2010
Still alive
May 7th, 2010Hello! Is there anyone out there?
Sorry, folks. 2120 West is still very much alive, but with AP season heating up, it’s been back-burnered for the last few months. That’s just an explanation. Not an excuse.
We’re going to work hard to bring you some new content before the school year is out, and then a few additions over the summer, but rest assured that there is a new plan in the works to make sure that the 2010-2011 school year will see a regular flow of new fiction, poetry, and art.
Stay with us. We still love you. Don’t leave. We can change.
Dragons on Prairie Avenue
February 8th, 2010Wednesday September 09, 2009 at exactly 8:00 p.m. my little brother waited, patiently tucked in his bed for his birthday surprise from his sister. His gift was really no surprise at all; this mysterious gift began with the words “Once upon a time…”.
image from Wikipedia
Each year when the little one celebrates his birth anniversary I give him the gift of a fairy tale; fairy tales never cease to fulfill my little brother’s increasing appetite for literature. My decision of reading him a new fairy tale each year as a gift has a purpose of course. While I do believe that it’s imperative for my little brother to get hooked on literature at the tender age of four, my purpose goes beyond that as I could have easily chosen to read to him from Dr. Seuss.
My brother and I, like a lot of beings in this world, do not live in the most perfect household, and if we did, wouldn’t that be a miracle? I do not recall a time that my brother and I have seen much beyond our house, the school, and the doctor. We aren’t even allowed to go out and play; catching a cold or the air being heavily polluted are the biggest concerns of our parents. The fairy tales deliver to my little brother the portal to a world where the nonexistent exist and the grass really is is greener.
My brother is at an age when “playtime” is very meaningful. It is very painful to see my little brother stare with teary eyes through the glass back door. He stares and stares as if he stared long enough he could possibly unleash a hidden power from his eyes that would break the glass that keeps him from the wonders of our backyard. Whether it’s climbing the massive apple trees from Little Red Riding Hood or kicking a soccer ball through the long corridors of King Midas’s gold complex I am sure that my little brother has infinite imaginary fun.
My brother is quite young to understand a lot of situations, but his developing intelligence amazes me. He surely does not know what he wants to be when he grows up; that’s a decision that comes with time. Victor begins to develop an identity when exposed to fairy tales. He can either choose to join the dark forces and become Maleficent’s minion or be the heroic Prince Philip that makes the happily ever after possible. Being able to connect to a character makes my little brother able to decide in the real world what he is ready to be. This decision is heavily influenced by the case that evil characters dwell in doom while the hero/heroine indulges in the enticing riches that the happily ever after ending brings.
My brother is a pacifistic fellow and very courteous even for his age, an age in which kids are very dynamic. I dared him the other day to steal a cookie from mother’s cookie jar. For sure I thought he would, as the cookies were no ordinary store-bought Oreos. They were homemade pecan powdered angels, his favorite. He looked at me with an angry yet angelical facial expression. He was disappointed in me for trying to turn him into Ali Baba. In fact, he reminded me that I myself was doing something very evil as I tried to manipulate him like the Big Bad Wolf. He advised me to not ever let this occur again or I myself would end up in the streets like Cinderella’s ugly step-sisters.
Wednesday September 09, 2009 at exactly 8:30 p.m., Victor fell asleep as I finished reading Jack and the Bean Stalk. I was the first one to introduce to him the world where the Three Little Pigs, the Ugly Duckling, and sweet porridge come from; I do not regret it at all. I strongly believe that developing infants should have the pleasure of entering a world of fantasy galore. There are some individuals who insist that tales are stale and the only things that come from them are lies, which is true in some ways. Even children know that dragons do not storm down Prairie Ave., but when did it become a crime to have such an imagination? Learning is more than just mathematics and grammar; one has to learn how to drive the heart through personal choices.
“The recollection of such reading as had delighted him in his infancy, made him always persist in fancying that it was the only reading which could please an infant… ‘Babies do not want (said he) to hear about babies; they like to be told of giants and castles, and of somewhat which can stretch and stimulate their little minds.’”
Mrs. Thrale
Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson
1786
-Rosa Ramos
New and Awesome Forms of Transportation
January 27th, 2010
The above installment of Dinosaur Comics inspired me to ask the young people to think up some new and awesome forms of transportation.
The list below represents the best collaborative efforts of two class periods.
Heely-coptor – Shoes with retractable flying rotors.
Ziplinousine – A method by which people travel to prom together if they are on a mountain top or in a tall tree, and prom is not.
Donkaudi – Part beast of burden, part German luxury car. It comes in gray.
Mooped – In the same vein as the donkaudi but somehow less awesome all around.
The Carousub-Way – It goes around and around to to the sound of unsettling calliope music, but underground!
Paragondola – Ah, the convection currents over Venice.
Automoboat – I’m pretty sure this has been done, but the part car, part boat hybrid is still not commercially available. Maybe a new name will get interest rolling.
Camelevator -Either an elevator powered by camels, or an elevator for camels.
Beeferrari – This one is the most disgusting by far, but probably the fastest, too, so it’s got that going for it.
And my personal favorite: The Sled Zeppelin – Down the snowy hill, high above the snowy hill, take your pick, but rock all the way!
We wait anxiously for your new modes of transportation that are greater than or equal to the above level of rad. See you in the comment section.
Bison Bots Build Day
January 10th, 2010The Sunset High School Robotics Club spent the day Saturday, January 9, building a robot. It started as three boxes of lifeless plastic and metal, and transformed in to an (almost) working complete robot. That’s right, you heard me: IT TRANSFORMS!
Electric motors come out of the box and cause confusion.
The frame is definitely not just a big metal square.
Working the electronics is, as it turns out, a lot like brain surgery.
The field of combat; mechanized combat to the death!
That's how we roll.
One frame, plus one drive system equals one awesome!
The currently unnamed Bison Bot, and a tired, dirty, happy crew.
So this is the basic frame, drive and brain. The team is going to spend the next six weeks adding whatever our little friend needs so he/she/it will be able to play soccer on a team of three, on an obstacle course, against three other robots.
The first thing he/she/it needs is a name. Maybe you can help us out. Give us your suggestions in the comments below.
Haiku You!
December 18th, 2009Announcing the 2120 West Haiku Contest!
Do you feel an unsatisfied poetic impulse? Do you see beauty in the small moments of life, and feel a hunger to communicate that beauty?
Do you have a remarkably short attention span? If the answers to the above questions are “yes” then haiku is the poetry form for you.
What’s a haiku you ask? The answer is here.
What I’m looking for is correct form, concrete imagery, no wasted words, and simple beauty. Spend some time on your entry, go through a draft or two, and when you think you’ve got something good, post it in the comment section below.
A panel of poetry experts (Sunset High School English teachers) will select a top three. The writers of those poems will earn everlasting glory, an undisclosed tangible prize, and the winners’ haiku will be permanently displayed in Mr. Lindsey’s room.
Of course, nothing is truly permanent, least of all, Mr. Lindsey’s portable.
Purple chipboard walls.
Thieves rip through the soft paper.
Like a Christmas gift.
I hope yours are all better than that one. The contest closes at midnight on January 15.
Speak Now!
December 2nd, 2009Sunset’s Academic Decathlon team is under the gun. Their regional competition is in less than two months, and everyone on the team has to prepare a 4-minute speech on a topic of their choosing.
Here’s the thing: the speech judges have had it with all the usual stuff. No one wants to hear another “My Hero” speech or “A Time When I Was a Leader.”
We need creative ideas. In the past, Decathletes have given speeches about imaginary friends where they were regularly interrupted by their imaginary friends, and speeches in favor of global warming, because polar bears are evil and deserve to die.
We need more of that kind of gold. If you have exciting and creative ideas for speech topics, please post them in the comments below. If a Decathlete decides to prepare a speech on your topic, I’ll give you Honorable Mention credit at the end of the six weeks. If the Decathlete wins a medal at the regional competition with your speech idea, I’ll buy you a pony (or lunch).
GO!
The Gold Star
November 16th, 2009
There were some great comments on the blog last six weeks, but some stood out above the rest as particularly insightful, funny, well-considered, or otherwise interesting.
First, the Honorable Mentions:
Celinda Reyes, Tracey Chavez, Kristen Millsap, Kevin Pacheco, and Victoria Cadena all had fine things to say on the subject of MONSTERS!
Valerie Garcia and Ricky Rodriguez both had hilarious entries in the Lindsey Lit Limerick Extravaganza. And Ricky took the Gold Star award (brought to you by Carl’s Jr.) for the following limerick:
You teach but you constantly fail
Our brains you leave scrambled and frail
there are teachers quite few
that teach worse-r than you
Half your students end up in jail.
Fantastic work. Continue to check in with the blog and keep those amazing comments coming.
The Happy Button
November 5th, 2009
So the Happy Button Poll turned out a lot closer than I really expected.
I asked you guys to consider the hypothetical “happy button” that, once pushed, makes everyone everywhere completely happy forever, no matter what? The button pushers only lost by a narrow margin, with 43% of the vote, while 57% said they would not push the button.
The real questions seems to boil down to how we view happiness. Those who view the emotion in a mechanistic, bio-chemical sort of way tend to favor pushing the button. Those who view happiness as something emanating from the soul, or at any rate something deeper than brain chemistry tended to avoid the button.
There were of course exceptions. One teacher (guess which) didn’t want to push the button he claimed that other people’s happiness was just not that important to him.
Feel free to discuss your reasons for voting the way you did (or didn’t) below. And take a stab at out next poll, currently living on the sidebar, top right, of the page.
MONSTERS!
October 26th, 2009My favorite kind of monster is a zombie. I love zombie movies, stories, comics, video games, and just about anything else that features the 
walking dead. Over the years, I’ve put a lot of thought in to why these flesh-eaters interest me so much. I am, after all, a vegetarian.
Monsters, I think, represent some aspect of ourselves that we’re not happy with, or that we’re afraid of. They represent our shadow selves. Monsters of all kinds are symbols of what we hate most and are most afraid of in humanity.
Zombies, then, represent all of those things that we do mindlessly, as an idiot horde. Zombie movies set in a mall are really about how we human beings shop without thinking. Zombie movies with strong military themes often represent how we human beings engage in war mindlessly.
So I get it, now. I’m a teacher, so I take it as a personal mission to stop people from acting mindlessly. It is my job to make you think, to keep you from becoming a zombie. I’m a zombie hunter, in other words, which is exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up.
So what’s your favorite type of monster, and what troubling aspect of humanity do you think that monster represents? What does it say about you that you’re so attracted to that particular type of monster?
