Shrunken Heads

Thor and his friend Herman flew to the country where the balsa trees were that they needed for their boat.  To get to the trees they had to go into the jungle, but they couldn't because it was the rainy season.  Because of this they decided to fly to the opposite side of the jungle where there were mountains. 

The first day their pilot, Jorge, tried to find someone who would show them the way to the balsa trees. That night Thor, Herman and Jorge met to have dinner and to discuss what Jorge had found out.  Jorge did not have any encouraging news.  He told them that no one wanted to go because of the rainy season and also because of the head hunters. 

The head hunters were a group of uncivilized Indians who would kill their enemies and then take the heads and shrink them.  They would do this by cutting off the head then taking out the brain and the rest of the insides and filling the head with hot sand.  The men would then sell these heads to people who had lots of money.  This was outlawed by the Indian government, but the outlaws didn't care. 

Jorge told them a story of how once his friend had been killed by a head hunter.  Jorge had followed the trail of the head hunter and had eventually caught up with him.  He told the murderer that he would only spare his life if he gave his friend's head back.  The man did and Jorge brought it home and put it in a chest.  Later when he opened the chest he found green mold growing on his friends head so he brought it outside to dry in the sun.  It hung very well on a clothesline so he would hang it there. 

When his wife went outside to hang up the clothes, she saw the head and fainted.  Eventually a mouse chewed its way through the chest and made a mess of Jorge's friend.  Instead of keeping a chewed up friend Jorge decided to bury his friend, so he went outside to his airstrip and dug a tiny hole and buried his friend there.        

The Screwtape Letters

We need to be careful what friends we make, because they can influence us in good ways or bad ways.  In the Screwtape letters, Wormwood's patient became friends with two very rich, worldly people. Those people introduced the patient to their other friends.   Screwtape encouraged Wormwood to keep his patient as a friend to those people if he could.  The patient thought he was just as good as the people he hung out with and thought he was on their level.  (In his mind pretty high up.)

When the patient would hang out with those friends he would act a certain way while when he was at church he would act in a totally different way, as if he was two different people.  The patient would do a lot of laughing when he was with his worldly friends and Wormwood thought that it was all laughter that was bad.  Screwtape told him that there were different kinds of laughter, joy, fun, joke proper, and flippancy.  The last two are the bad ones, the first one is good, and the second one can be either good or bad.

Kon-Tiki chapter two cont.

Thor found men three more men who wanted to go on the voyage so now there are six men.  They have to work quickly because there are only three months left until they wanted to set off on the voyage.  Because of this fact, they have to hurry to get everything taken care of.

The American army gave them rations to test and a lot of other equipment all for free. Because of all the rushing from country to country, they ran out of money.  They sent to the man in New York who was sponsoring them for the trip, but he was sick and could not give them money at the time.  That meant they did not have any money to keep going and yet they had to keep going.  Some people who knew about their trip came and gave them money and said they could pay them back when they returned.  Now they could go and make the boat.

To make a boat they had to go to Peru to get the wood that the men who originally crossed would have used.  To make it easier for them in the long run they had to go to the United Nations headquarters to talk to the President of Peru.  For if they were to just come into Peru taking wood, people would become very suspicious and they could probably be thrown into jail.
They spoke to the president and also to the Ambassador of Ecuador and they said that they would help them as much as they could.  

The Irony in Ozymandias

In the poem Ozymandias, Shelly describes a very proud and haughty king.  This king had, in his day made a great name for himself by building many great structures.  He also had a statue built of himself standing near his buildings.  Shelly says that a man once told him a story about seeing the remains of Ozymandias' statue which was two legs with the sneering head broken off and lying on the ground in the desert.  On the ground next to these was a plaque, it read as follows, "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: look on my works ye mighty and despair."  Around the head and legs there was nothing else, no buildings.  Just a sandy desert for as far as the eye could see.

Whatever Happened to Justice?

In the constitution it says, "All men are created equal."  This means that no man should get punished unjustly while another man in the same circumstance wouldn't get punished at all.  It also means that no man is greater then others, and no one should have to bow to someone else.  Sometimes black people get punished unjustly or aren't treated like they should be, and sometimes it's the other way around with white people getting the short end of the stick.  This should not be! 

Kon-Tiki chapter two

Thor had the energy; he just needed supplies, money and about six people.  First he set out to find supplies.  He was part of an exclusive explorers club in New York where he went whenever he was in town.  That day there was someone giving a speech about the new army equipment that had been made.  The other members in his club didn't think they were good because they had tried things like the ones the man had brought before and had nearly died because of it.  The zipper had frozen in place on the tent and the man couldn't get into it and so on. 
 
The man who was advocating the new army equipment said that anyone could have any or all of the supplies if when he was done his trip he would say if it worked or not.  Thor needed supplies like that in case his boat sank or something, and because they would be free made it sound even better.  When most of the men in the club had left Thor asked the man if he could try out the supplies and the man let him.  On his way out, a man from the club asked him what he needed with the supplies.  When Thor told him, he said he wanted to come too.  Thor also knew someone else who wanted to come as well, so they were now up to three men in total. 

The next thing they needed was money.  Thankfully Thor knew someone who had been in the army before who had lots of money.  Thor went to see him.  When he told the man about his trip the man said he would sponsor the trip if Thor would come home and tell the newspaper reporters what he had done and what it was like.  Thor agreed.  So the last thing they needed to do was make the boat and then eventually get more men.

My Translation of Sonnet of 18

Shakespeare's Sonnet 18

Should I compare you to a summer day?
You are more beautiful and more self-controlled.
Harsh winds blow the early May buds,
and summer is too short.
Sometimes the sun is too hot,
and often it is too cloudy;
and every beautiful thing sometimes gets less beautiful,
by chance or the changing ways or nature.
But you will always be beautiful,
nor lose your beauty,
nor will you be forgotten in death,
for by this poem people will remember you.
So long as life remains you will be remembered by this poem.

I Promessi Sposi

Lorenzo had a girlfriend named Lucia.  He got betrothed to her, but a rich nobleman got between them and said they couldn't get married.  They tried to any way but it didn't work and they had to flee their village.
They went to a Nun who said she would help them stay safe until a time would come that they could get married.  She housed Lucia and Lucia's mother who had come with her, but she sent Lorenzo to a Monastery in Milan.  When Lorenzo arrived in Milan he found a riot going on and deciding to see what it was all about, set off for center city.  The present year  was not a good year for the crops and there was a large famine raging about the land.  The common people thought it was all the fault of the bakers and it just so happened that the day when Lorenzo arrived, they decided to attack all the bakeries and get as much flour and bread as they could.  At the days end Lorenzo went to an inn where he got a drink and some dinner.  He wasn't normally a big drinker, but that night he drank more and more until he was very drunk.  The innkeeper said that Lorenzo needed to give his name and where he was from, but Lorenzo didn't want to.  Lorenzo slept in the inn that night and in the morning he got a big surprise.  There were too police men and one other man that Lorenzo had seen the night before.  They said he needed to come with them to court.  They thought he was a ringleader of the riot that had occurred the day before.  On the way to the courthouse he was able to get away and he ran as fast as he could to get away.  That night he came to an inn where he ate and when he was done got on his way again.

The beggining

 Sitting there on the beach he had remembered one night before,

   

Thor sat on the deck of his boat, thinking.  How had this voyage started any way?  Before the voyage Thor and been a horticulturist, but he had decided to switch to South American history.  

   He remembered how ten years before he and his wife were sitting on the beach of a pacific island were he was doing horticultural research.  

  they had heard an old islander saying, "I am the only one left from the people who first came here.  There were men who taught us how to make statues and they were white men with beards."  That night he decided what he wanted to do.  When they returned home he did research about South America and its relation to the Pacific islands and found many books about it.  There were statues on some pacific islands and in South America that looked like they were made by the same people. 
   After years of research he finally decided to make a boat.  He would make one in the style that people going from South America to the Pacific islands would have made and then he would sail from South America to one of the Pacific islands.  

Screwtape Letters 1-3

   I

   My dear Wormwood, be careful what you let your victim read.  Make sure he reads only non-spiritual books with little or no values.  Do this not by argument, for that brings him into the enemies territory, but by trivial means.  For example, when I was younger I had a victim who was about to think about the enemy, so I reminded him that he was hungry.  His thoughts drifted away from the subject at hand and he got up and left.  Outside, I showed him a bus, which he boarded.  He was then safely away from any thoughts contrary to the ones I wanted him to have.   

II

My dear Wormwood, I am very disappointed to hear that your victim has become a Christian.  There are still ways that you can get at him though.  Don't get me wrong, you will still be punished according to the normal rule, but you still have things to do.  At this early stage we still have something on our side, his habits.  Be sure to keep him in them.

III

My dear Wormwood, I am very happy to hear of your victim's relationship with his mother.  They fight but both of them don't think it is there fault.  They think that they are guiltless and the other is at fault.  Keep them at it and when he prays for her at night be sure to have him pray for faults that aren't hers but he thinks she has.  I once had a victim who would pray at night for his wife and children but when he had finished would straight a way beat them and yell at them.