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.