Monthly Review

5. Find out about the author. How did they end up writing this particular book? Is the author's true life reflected in the book in any way(s)?
8. Pick a character that interested you and write about them in depth.
9. Describe your favorite part in the book?

In this novel Maximum Ride: School's Out Forever by James Patterson is about six mutant kids who tries to find out about their parents better at Washington DC. As they headed to Washington DC they get attack by new versions of erasers and one of the member of the flocks get attacked by Ari who is Jeb's only son. FBI agents come to the hospital to question them and one of the agents wants them to stay at her house to make sure they are safe. They are sent to school and they escape far away from the erasers. Max and the flocks are headed to Florida to the Itex to destroy their cooperation.

James Patterson is the bestselling author of his writing career and the Time magazine feature called him, "The Man Who Can't Miss." He also wrote about thriller, nonfiction, and romance novels. In the North America by itself he had sold over 16 million books. A few years ago, James Patterson sold more books than all of the other authors and the books that he sold all together was about 170 million copies in worldwide. With all that copies being sold, he must be wealthy. He is the very first author to receive the number 1 brand new titles simultaneously on The New York Times on books for adults and children. James Patterson is the number 1 best selling authors in the New York Times and holds the Guinness World Record for selling 46 most Hardcover Fiction titles. As a writer he did not have any reflection on his true life for this book.

The character who interested me in the second series of Maximum Ride is Agent Anne. She intelligent and nice. She works with the F.B.I. What seems suspicious about this character is that she kinda came out of nowhere. In the part when Fang had to go to the hospital because of Ari. Three F.B.I. agents appeared to the hospital to question the flocks. They all had to lie about their names and they were related. Max told them they were adopted and their parents are missionaries. The agents bring them to a private room to question them one on one. Agent Anne questions Max and held up a picture of Jeb. Max felt the betrayal from the picture of him. She showed a picture of an eraser and asked her if she ever saw one. Max pretends that she has not seen one in her life and describing how ugly it is. And how did she get those pictures of them. As Fang recovers from his injuries, Anne makes a nice offer to the flocks if they want to stay at her house. Since they had nowhere to go they took her offer. Anne would have to take care of six children and letting them stay in her barn house. Anne does a lot of work to take care of them and they can eat more than an average person can eat. Anne has to cook a lot of food or spend a lot of money on them. Anne takes good care of them and Max feels like Anne is her mom. Later she thinks she can trust Anne because she works for the FBI and can not be an eraser. Max tells her some information like at least that the flocks can fly. They were mutants with 98% human and 2% birds. She tells her that their parents are not missionaries. Later on Anne wants them to go to school. Some teachers were erasers and they bust out off school and try to tracked down the flocks. They head over to Anne's house to get supplies and it turns out that Anne is working with Jeb. I find that disappointing that Anne betrayed the flocks like that and I thought Anne was out to help them.

My favorite part in the book was when the flocks were being ambushed with lots of action. I was surprised how the enemy characters changed from the first series in Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment. In the setting as Max and her flocks are headed to Washington D.C. and they took a break from flying. As they continued their journey walking, Max randomly does a 360 she sees a dark cloud coming towards them. The flocks thought a storm is coming, erasers in a chopper, or birds. As it came closer it turns out they were erasers with wings! Also their leader of the erasers, Ari, he came back from the living dead. It could probably be Jeb and the other scientists who helped brought Ari backed to life along with the erasers being mobile in air. The scientists made the DNA transfer quickly to the erasers to make them fly. When the erasers were about to attack, Max ordered the flocks to split up in positions to get ready to fight. Max was feeling the adrenaline then she launched her foot at the biggest eraser to his chest. It was a bit weird when Fang clapped his hands against an eraser's ear making him scream and made him lose control in the air. Max and her flocks were kicking butt and the erasers just kept coming after them. Ari came lunging at Fang and manage to slice his jacket. The erasers started to retreat and it was Ari against the flocks. The flocks regrouped and Ari seemed a bit happy to see them again because he wants to keep beating them up. Ari left with his gang saying " We'll be back!" As they left the flocks waited a moment to see if there was going to be another attack but it was clear. Max notice Fang's critical hit from Ari. Max needed to get an ambulance quick and she had to risk choosing Fang's life or avoid strangers. If she did that, then Fang would die.

Crises of Faith

A time of crisis had occurred to me last week when my sister told me what she learned in her biology class at Berkeley City College. She was telling me how some factories are breading and treating cows badly. There are a few big companies that nurture cows these ways that are called battery cow farming.

I always thought all cows were raised in regular farm fields where they have a lot of space to run around and eat all the grass they wanted, until my sister told me otherwise. Sadly, they aren't. When cows are born, the people take the newborns right away or the next day from their mother. They are raised in the field for 6 months eating grass and this will be the last grass they will eat in their lives, then they are taken to the factories. The cows are in a confined space placed in a "cubical stable". A few companies are planning 16 new indoor dairy farms housing up to 18,000 cows in "cubicle stables" for 24 hours a day for eight months of the year. They don't even have enough room to walk around, they could probably take a few steps backwards, or stick their head out of the fence, and that's about it. The cows also have a poor diet. The farmers feed them corn, rather than grass, and antibiotics are added to the corn at every meal. They add antibiotics in their food to prevent the cows from getting sick, but later on they start to get immune to the antibiotics. If they do get sick the antibiotics will not affect them. Another issue with the cows is sanitation. The cows are crowded next to each other and they stand in their own feces, along with feces belonging to other cows. All the cows' feces are either put in a pile or leave it as it is. Why do they do that? Think about it. There are about four times more cows than the human population, so there is a lot of waste. The feces build up and are put into one large pile. The feces from sick cows also lead to diseases when it flows into the sewer lines and the water source becomes contaminated. My sister told me that a child most likely became handicap from drinking the contaminated water.

Companies feed their cows with corn and antibiotics, so they can grow faster and make more money. In fast food restaurants they sell their beef burgers fast and cheap. Since the cows can't use their muscles to move around in their confined spaces, it causes them to fatten and that's why the meat tastes so good. When the cows are sent to the slaughter house, factory workers cut the meat in pieces in fast assembly lines. The workers aren't very cautious when they cut the meat because the assembly line moves quickly and this gives a higher risk of not inspecting meat properly. Also, about 2 years ago someone had E. Coli from a burger at Jack In The Box. This was the first time they found E. Coli in a burger. The cows aren't even healthy or happy, but the advertisements on TV say that, "Happy cows come from California".

When my sister told me about all of this I felt a little disgusted and sad that the cows are kept in a confined space. When she mentioned how the cows were being raised way differently from what I expected, it makes me want to change my eating habits, but at the same time I don't want to because of the delicious beef out there. Now I'll try not to eat a lot of fast food because it's bad for your health. I need to be careful of what I am eating. It's so sad for the cows being they are so compacted in a small area and being tortured. It must feel like being in prison for the cows. These company owners probably don't care about the people and our health. All they want from us is to buy their beef, so that they could make loads amount of money. Why do this to cows when there is plenty of land filled with grass and good farmers who want to raise their cows in a healthy, clean and natural environment? These cows aren't even meant to be locked up for the rest of their lives. They should have some freedom running in the wide open spaces and eat all the green grass they want.

English Final

7. What have you learned from your struggles with writer's block? Why do you tend to get stuck? How do you tend to get unstuck? Notice any patterns?

I have struggles with writer's block. I'm not a very good writer and I make a lot of grammar mistakes. No one is perfect at writing; everyone makes mistakes too. A few months ago we were assigned in class to do quick writes on random and interesting topics for 10 minutes straight, and 5 minutes to discuss with people around us. Mr. Sutherland makes us practice with quick writes on speed for the SAT. Quick writes actually increased my speed of writing and I write up to about a page, which is not bad for 10 minutes. When I write my blogs it takes me about an hour and a half. Every time I have a writing assignment for any subject especially English essays, the least amount of time it takes me to complete it is an hour and a half. That only happens when I write in school, but at home it takes me about three hours to finish writing essays. At home I'm thinking, 'Oh I have plenty of time to finish this essay', but I get distracted playing on my xbox 360 or eating most of the time. When I think about writing a five-paragraph essay, I know that I get stuck from the start. I would stuck on spelling, get off topic, and not know what to write next. Also, I'm lazy. To get unstuck I try to ask myself some questions or find better ideas. I tend to get ideas once in a while, like every 10 minutes. For blogging I don't get stuck much because I just need to write down what I remember about the given topic. I have noticed that when I do my blog I finish it on the day before it's due like right now. The study patterns that I've noticed about myself is that I'm lazy, but most of the time I have other homework that I need to work on. I only write about topics that I know I'm going to get far on and I think about topics ahead of time, rather than starting on a topic that I will not get anywhere on it.

8. How do you like having a blog? How has blogging changed the way you write, the way you think, or the way you think about writing?

For English this year I thought we had to write a lot of essays and I do not like writing essays. Mr. Sutherland assigned us to make a blog for posting our writing each week. I thought this would be interesting. He said the requirements for the blog was to write up to about 300-400 words and I thought that was a lot. Some of my blogs are over 400 words and it wasn't bad for me getting up to that range. We get to write about any topic of our choice. I do not like to hand write an essay about any of the books we read in class because I get stuck easily and it takes me a while to finish it. It could be hard writing an in-class essay. Also, it can be frustrating for me because we are timed on finals and I keep looking at the clock. Time goes by fast and I get rushed. This English class is different and wasn't like the other English classes that I've taken. I enjoy having a blog. I could share my blog post about my topics. I like writing only if I'm comfortable on what the topics are about. When I type up my blogs it is better than writing by hand because typing is faster, and that's why I prefer to type rather than to hand write essays. Blogging has increased my writing and helps me with my spelling errors than writing by hand. The way I think about blogging hasn't changed the way I write. Blogging on a topic of my choice helps me on my writing; I don't really forget what to write about and I know what I want to write about. Writer's block is a cool way to express myself for people to read. It is like writing in a journal remembering my memories from what I wrote in the past. I would review other people's blog, including my friend's blogs, and see if they wrote about a certain day we hung out because it's probably a fun memory at the time. In the future, I will review my writer's block or when I'm bored on the computer to see how I have improve my writing in the past few weeks or months.

10. Where do you get your ideas for blog post topics? What inspires you to write?

Ideas for my blog post topics was easy in the beginning of the year. Before I was excited to reveal my thoughts for blog post, but later on I started to run out of ideas. Thinking of a blog post idea can be hard to come up with. I mostly get blog post topics from the Internet, from watching TV, and what I have done in my past life. If I run out of ideas to write about (which I have a few times), I write about what happened during the week. If I don't know what topic to blog about I would ask my friends to help me come up with an idea for me. I was watching some random videos on the Internet and browsing through videos, and I found some parkour videos. My first blog post was about parkour, which is a sport that more commonly takes place in England, France, and the UK. Parkour is the motion of your body contacting the obstacles ahead of you involving your hands. I was inspired to write about this topic because it's amazing the way people perform. They do flips along with vaults, which look impossible to attempt. I am inspired to write because of interesting topics such as parkour or stop motion. Once I blogged about stop motion, involving a camera taking pictures of subtle movements. All the pictures that are taken can be turned into a short video. I thought this was interesting, so I made one of my own stop motion videos and it's more interesting that Mr.Sutherland made one with his friends. Most of my blog post come from activities that I have done in the past with family and friends. I never thought of blogging about current events or issues happening around the world. In the future, I'm probably not going to blog about those topics and I'm just going to stick to blogging about my life or vacations. After I'm done with my blog for the week I check other people's blog post to see what they wrote about.