Final Blogtastic Reflection (#4)

For my final blog reflection for 4th quarter, I chose "Blagojevich on 'Celebrity Apprentice'" as my favorite blog post. The reason I like this one so much is because I feel very strongly about the subject. This usually characterizes my favorite posts. When you're really passionate about what you're writing about, it just makes it a lot more fun to write. And when I saw that Blagojevich was on a reality t.v. show and not in jail, I was just outraged. I was also able to incorporate a bunch of sources in this post, which I think adds depth and more credibility to a post. And from those sources, I used direct quotes and dissected them to prove my point even more. It just had more substance than some of my other posts.
This year I have really developed as a blogger. Not that I blogged before this class, but my style has changed since the beginning of the year. I started my blogging career by mostly writing about certain issues that I encountered in my everyday life, but didn't necessarily connect to class. But as the year continued, my posts started to become extensions of class discussions, which is what I think Mr. Bolos and Mr. O'Connor intended them to be. And when I could not extend the discussion to my blogging, I wrote about prominent issues in the news. Not always, but I tried to.
I have really enjoyed blogging this year because I do like to write, but essays can often times be laborious and they take a long time to do. On the other hand, a blog post doesn't have to be long. You can write a little about a lot, and that's what I've really liked about blogging this year.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

A Change of Scenery

     Over the weekend I ventured past the boundaries of the North Shore, and keeping in mind last week's discussion of the physical differences between towns even within 30 minutes of us, I noticed these differences almost immediately. I remember Mr. Bolos saying how there was nowhere to quickly buy a sandwhich near New Trier. I hadn't really though about this before, but I realized that he was right. There are no fast food restaurants near New Trier. You would have to drive all the way to downtown Winnetka to the one McDonald's there, or a mall to get to the food court. So driving down the main road through this unknown town, I saw that the entire road was almost virtually composed of fast food restaurants. Any fast food restaurant that you could possibly think of was on this road. The nicest sit-down restaurant I saw was Chili's. And the stores that lined the street were all discount type of stores like Old Navy and Nordstrom Rack. And with these simple observations, I think I finally realized how incredibly different the North Shore was from everywhere else; it is a place where sit-down restaurants are the norm and Old Navy is a 30 minute drive away. It's not like I had never seen places like this before, but I had just never fully taken into account these differences and made something of it. It was like I was looking at the same thing only with different eyes.
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1 comment:

  1. Sam HMarch 9, 2010 at 11:39 AM

    The reason that there aren't as many fast food restaurants in the North Shore isn't solely for the reason that those in the North Shore are seen as less likely to go to a place with a drive through (that isn't Starbucks) but also because land here is quite expensive. In the far western suburbs, for a Mcdonalds to be profitable it needs far less business than in the North Shore. In the North Shore, where the median home price is over a million dollars and taxes are very high (I don't know how much commercial space goes for, but I will assume it is comparably high) a restaurant needs one of two things to survive: either higher prices or a large piece of the market share.

    In Wisconsin, there are two gas stations on the lake that my family uses. Both usually charge about 80% more than what gas is going for. At first thought, this seems like they are charging for the convenience of being on the lake. Actually, there are lots of costs that the marinas have to pay; taxes and property values on the lake are much higher than those even across the street.

    So, what I guess I'm saying with all this is that a lot of the 'constructions' are not even made intentionally, but just appear as a byproduct of other constructions (ie the value of land).

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