Ghostwriting

I find Gregory Baruch's article, Artful Deception, to be quite funny. It's ridiculous how celebrities are so called the authors of whatever literature they published but they have no knowledge of what the book is about or even seen it. They have no contribution in it other than just promoting it.

It's quite hilarious when Gregory Baruch mentioned that ghostwriter, Mickey Herskowitz, of Lamar Alexander's presidential campaign tact "We know What to Do" was acknowledge as the 83rd person after his Aunt Sula. That's just ridiculous. Shouldn't Mickey get more credit for working late and sleepless nights on Alexander's campaign? Aunt Sula must have been a great inspiration.

Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, had no idea or has even touch the book that was written about him "BY" him. I'm curious if he ever had the chance to really read this book of him "BY" him now that he's no longer with us?

When it came to the money making and autographing the books, they are definitely up for it.
I wonder how these ghostwriters feel about not having any acknowledgements in the works that they've done. Or do they get a hugh chunk of money from it already that they could careless?

Wikipedia

I find the video clip of the Cobert Report to be humorous. It definitely got some laughs out of me. Cobert defines wikiality as "together we can create a reality that we can all agree on-the reality we just agreed on". It's interesting that possibly any kind of reality can be created with enough people agreeing to it and also to be published.

Though wikipedia is so covient and easy to access, it's not such a reliable source to use. Sometimes depending on what topic of your research there are some accurate facts, often times it isn't so. After reading the article "A Stand Against Wikipedia", I decided to do a little research of my own on what wikipedia is or what it means. My findings are quite interesting. "Wiki" is a website that can easily be edited by anyone who has access to it and it could be easily tampered with. And "wikipedia" is one of the well known website used by students. Wikipedia, itself, has agree that students should not use wikipedia as thier primary source.

Plagiarism

Coming from a culture that has no written language and only relied on oral traditions until the 1950s; everything before that was spoken through the mouth and kept in memorization and then passed on to future generations.

I've seen many foreign films that has been based on folktales that I grew up hearing from my father and grandfather. But then these stories were also told to my father/grandfather by their parents and/or grandparents. They would disagree to such scenes that they think has sabotage the "true" and "original" story. Their remarks would be "that's not how the story goes". But then what is the "original" story? Who was the first to tell the "original" story?

This notion of storytelling brings up the question that was asked in class the other day (about the famous children's fairy tales we grew up hearing), who is the first person to tell such story? Would it be considered plagiarism when there are so many books published or made into movies about the same story but failing to give credits to the author or the owner of the story?

My First Blog

Isn't this exciting?! My very first blog. With myspace, facebook. mywepspace, and many many other profiling pages, one more won't hurt. Who would have thought of taking a UW course that consist of BLOGGING as a part of your final grade?! Cosidering that this is my last semester, this just makes it a little less stressful on myself. Hopefully I won't fail my BLOGGING assignments. If I did, there would be no point of spending the past couple years of my college experiences at College Library with good intentions of making good use of time but actually only waisting countless hours serfing the net each day. Therefore, I conclude my first blog post saying thanks ENGLISH 201!