BREW CREW '07!

For my first open post here, I think I’ll spend a little time writing about my favorite baseball team, the Milwaukee Brewers. I know they haven’t been the most successful team over the last few years/pretty much my entire life, but that doesn’t stop me from getting pumped about spring training being a measly two weeks away. Before getting into the potential of this season, I can’t help but mention the Brewers Classics games that are being shown on FSN North, especially the game that I came across tonight after the badgers basketball game. It was from the 1987 season on Easter Sunday when the crew pushed their record to 12-0 thanks to a three-run home run by the great Rob Deer (who had a killer mustache) to tie the game in the bottom of the ninth and then the game winning two-run home run by Dale Sveum, the current bench coach, to win the game. The atmosphere looked to be amazing that day and I can only hope that there will be some moments in the upcoming season which will match that sunny Sunday afternoon.

As for the upcoming season, I couldn’t be more excited. I’ve never been to an opening day game but I hope to change that this year. I was planning on skipping my classes last year to go to opening day but I was being told within minutes of the tickets going on sale that the game was sold out. I was pissed. But this year I firmly believe that things will work out better. First of all, opening day is on the Monday of our spring break. Secondly, my friends and I will be much more organized and prepared this year when tickets go on sale, so hopefully the disappointment from last year will not repeat itself. And if all else fails, I will buy a 9-game plan, which offers opening day for free. I may end up doing that anyways because with that plan, you also get a chance to buy playoff tickets before they go on sale to the general public, which I’m confident will be something I’ll be needing. That is especially the case if the pitching staff can stay healthy because you would be hard pressed to find a better starting rotation in the league. With any offensive consistency, the brew crew will be shocking the world this year and winning the world series. You heard it here first.

what's rhetoric?

Prior to reading James Herrick’s introduction, my knowledge and definition of what rhetoric is was very limited. My only real experience with rhetoric and my perception of it was limited to hearing political jargon on TV and listening to my friend try to describe her classes at the "University" of Minnesota, which are all named "Rhetorics..." Since I never understood what she was talking about my definition of rhetoric had to be based on the political jargon. So if someone would have asked me last week to define rhetoric, I would have told them something to the effect of "it’s basically saying something in order to be agreed with or seen as a sympathetic figure."

After reading Herrick’s introduction to rhetoric I learned that my definition wasn’t completely incorrect, because he mentions the "empty rhetoric" phrase sometimes used in politics, but there is so much more to it than I ever realized. After reading the introduction, it seems to me that rhetoric is in pretty much every aspect of communication, our words, actions, motions, pictures and so on. I learned how important rhetoric is and the many ways it can be used, especially in persuasion. I found an interesting aspect of rhetoric to be in the ethics of its use, and how that can change people’s opinion of the use of rhetoric.

Overall, the article really helped me understand how far the scope of rhetoric extends. If someone were to ask me what rhetoric is now, I would probably need a lot more time to explain it. I would make sure they understood that it is not just the sometimes empty words politicians use. In order to give them a very general sense of what it is I would probably give them the definition on page 2 of Herrick’s introduction where it says "rhetoric is, among other things, the study of how we organize and employ language effectively, and thus it becomes, the study of how we organize our thinking on a wide range of subjects."

Intro

Hi, my name is Keith and i am a senior studying political science. This is my fourth year here at the University of Wisconsin, but certainly not my last because, the way i see it, graduating is for quitters. I'm from Middleton, a suburb of Madison, so I was born and raised a badger.

This is my first ever blog so I'm not really sure what to expect here. In addition to the assigned English 201 topics I will probably end up writing about my main interests. Those being sports, music and boring political things. Hopefully this will end up being a fun experience, I'm sure it will.