Arguementative Essay

This essay was very difficult for me to write, I do not watch very much reality television so I did not have an easy time coming up with material. The two shows I used were Friends, which I used to watch often, and CSI Miami, I have only seen about six episodes. After my peer conference I found I had made a few mistakes concerning CSI Miami but I was able to fix them and I think I did alright on the essay. Professor Donaghy was very helpful with the mistakes in my essay and I was able to find the CSI Miami website and fix the mistakes I made.

Dirty Jobs

This week on Dirty Jobs Mike Rowe was a cement truck cleaner and a geoduck farmer. As a cement truck cleaner Mike had to crawl into the back of a cement truck and clean out the cement. He was given a small air chisel and began to chip away all of the dried cement. This is a very important job because there are many different types of cement and they can not be mixed together. This also stops dried chunks of cement from falling into any wet cement which could cause imperfections. The company Mike is working for works at night so that the trucks can be cleaned out and ready for the morning. This saves companies a lot of money because their cement trucks are never out of commission during the day.
Mike was also a geoduck farmer on this week’s episode. Geoducks are a funny looking sea snail that is harvested on ocean shores. They are planted in the ocean beach and allowed to grow for about four years before they are harvested. They are a type of seafood that is very popular in the southern states. To harvest a geoduck, you take a hose and stick in into the sand and blast water into the hole. When all the sand is loose you stick your hand down the hole and pull out the geoduck. When they are first planted they are placed about 6 inches below the surface. During the 4 year period, the goeducks burrow to about a foot and a half below the beach surface.

Essay #2

I had my individual conference today with Professor Donaghy and I feel it went pretty well. I had a few mistakes in the characters that act in the drama CSI Miami but I have worked out the kinks and feel I should do well on the paper. This was a tough assignment for me because I do not watch very much reality television. The two shows I chose were CSI Miami and Friends. I have probably only watched 5 or 6 episodes of CSI Miami but I have seen almost all of the Friends episodes. In this paper I argue that reality television is not realistic and is used strictly as a source of entertainment. This is however what I feel the viewer is looking for, a short escape from their everyday lives to a world of humor or drama.
It is very difficult to write about a topic that you don’t know much about but I feel I was able to put together a decent paper and will hopefully do well. As I said before I have not seen many episodes of CSI Miami but it is the second most reality television program that I watch. I find the show interesting and I enjoy watching the characters solving complex murder cases. I also feel that the show is a bit excessive and very unrealistic.

Dirty Jobs

This week on Dirty Jobs Mike Rowe explored the world of wine making. He began his day in the vineyard picking the grapes to make the wine. Despite all of the technology we possess, wine grapes are still picked by hand. There are many workers in the vineyard and they are paid based on how many tons of grapes they are able to pick in one day. This is a very obscure job because it is still done the same way it was many years ago. The grapes then undergo a squashing process in a very large and dangerous looking machine. The skins from the grapes are then used as fertilizer for all of the grape trees in the vineyard. The grape juice is put into 50 gallon wooden barrels and placed in a cellar to ferment. There is actually a lot of work in making a bottle of wine and it takes a very long time for the fermentation process to complete. After the wine is aged, samples are taken from each barrel and are tested for acidity and quality. After the wine is given a seal of approval from the chemists, it is bottled and sold. Most people do not realize the amount of work put into the making of a single bottle of wine.
Mike also explored the world of cattle ranching. He went to a farm in Kansas and was shown the ropes of raising cattle. Before he was able to feed the cattle, he first had to help clean out the grain and corn silos, which was very messy. After cleaning out all of the leftover corn in the silo, he had to crawl in a pit underneath the silo and clean out the corn and grain that had fallen through the floor. This was done by removing the bottom tray of a very large excavating machine and scooping all of the corn out through a small hole. He then had to drive a large truck full of a mixture of corn, grain, alfalfa grass, and some special ingredients, to the cow troughs. Each cow on the ranch eats roughly 30 pounds of feed a day and there were about 200 cows on the ranch. After feeding the cows he had to round them up using a cattle prod and separate the males and females. There is a lot of work involved in raising live stock that will eventually be turned into hamburger for human consumption.