Finally

At the beginning of this semester the category of reader that I fell into was... not a reader. I would say that I was very independent in my reading my reading choices, it's just that I chose not to read.The only things that I found myself reading on my own were short news articles or rage comics. Even then if the rage comic were to look like a wall of text, I would instantly be dissuaded from reading it. As this semester has gone on, I have begun to move into the category of "guy who reads when he is super bored or super frustrated with his video games" readers. I like to think that this is a massive improvement in my reading tendencies. I went from reading no books in several years, to almost 3 books in a single semester. That may be a promising rise in my desire to read or a sad realization about how bored and frustrated I am with video games, either way my reading habits have significantly improved. I have found that I pretty much like reading anything, it's all entertaining to me. So after this class I think I am much more likely to read during next semester and the summer, and I believe I will keep moving through the rest of the Artemis Fowl series.

This Week So Far

This week has been really good for me so far. Not too much homework, and that's pretty cool because I have been sleeping over 12 hours everyday. Also out of what homework I have gotten, I have done it. It's so crazy that when someone actually does homework they can understand the lesson 90000000000x better. Oh yeah, and today I happened to become #1 cool cat when my poem analysis was voted a winner. Felt really good to actually get recognized for something I put work into. Besides all that stuff I've read roughly 30 pages of my Artemis Fowl book. I think I can attribute most of this lack of reading to the fact that I'm never awake. The book is still good, it switches around the perspective a lot in order to cover all the facets of the story, and I enjoy when books do that. It makes it feel like I'm not missing anything going on in the story, plus it's so cool when all the separate stories are about to converge on each other and they are all unaware of it.

This weekend

Wow, this weekend was extremely unproductive. Since 3pm Friday I have honestly been awake for a grand total of 8 hours. However, in these 8 hours I have read for about an hour total. So using a bit of mathematics I have discovered that I spent 12.5% of the waking hours of my weekend reading, which if I'm not mistake, is LEGENDARY. Mr. Hill I can just see the tears of pride forming in your eyes right now. Anyway, I've basically just been reading more of that Artemis Fowl book that I found in my room.

TL;DR: Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II is a fantastic movie and I read exponentially more than my classmates did based on the ratio of time awake to time reading.

Reading

This week I decided to start reading a book that is a part of a series I used to read in 7th grade. I used to really enjoy the first two Artemis Fowl books, then this weekend I was cleaning out my room and I found the third installment in my room. I decided to start reading it, and to my surprise it is actually pretty cool. If you're not familiar it is about a 15 year old genius (12 in the first book) who is the son of an extremely wealthy crime lord. He gets in these ridiculous fiascoes with this group of magical underground people named Fairies. They can become stealthed on command, heal themselves and others with magic, and do all other sorts of awesome stuff. In past books he fought against them, then along side them, and in this one it looks like he will be once again fighting along side them. It starts off with him trying to seal a deal with a major Mobster with his "eternity code". Things turn sour and Artemis's bodyguard who is also his best friend ends up taking a bullet for him. The only way for him to save him is going to be with the assistance of the fairies, however the fairies believe that they successfully wiped his memory of their encounters. So getting in contact is going to be a little problematic. Well, that's about it so far. TOOTALOO

Close-reading Bingo

1. This student said "this" without putting a noun or a noun phrase after it. "This suggests that the day to come might be a little overwhelming and bleak. Sunlight is shining onto the handrails “formed by intersections of the lobby’s towering volumes of marble and glass.” http://kellylee25.blogspot.com/2011/10/practice-diction-analysis.html

2.This guy who likes peanut butter had a little bit of a blunder by using the past tense: "With the use of his realistic descriptions, the promt was easily visualized."
http://addie-line.blogspot.com/2011/10/practice-diction-analysis-mezzanine.html

3. The horse lover who wrote this slipped up by using common mistake number 6, the fatal use of "use."
"Salinger also uses the character's brother to enhance this "run-down" life with describing how his brother has nice things, like a Jaguar automobile."
http://livelaughloveridehorses.blogspot.com/2011/10/practice-diction-analysis.html

4. Finally this notorious Fulla of Moes exhibited one of the nine deadly weaknesses by being vague. "He compares the way view from the escalator on sunny days, and on dark days."
http://notoriouslymofulla.blogspot.com/2011/10/mezzanine.html

Practice Diction Analysis

The colloquial, coarse, and somewhat unmannerly diction in "Catcher in the Rye" exemplifies the narrator's down-to-earth, pissed off at the world personality. His defiant and thick skinned nature jumps out when he explains that all the background information about his life is just "David Copperfield kind of crap" that bores him. As the passage goes on, the author uses phrases like "He's got a lot of dough" and "they're also touchy as hell" to make it feel as though the narrator is just another regular kid who is telling you a story. The terse and all together informal nature of the narrator echoes through the entire passage in this excerpt from "Catcher in the Rye."

My reading

So far the past couple weeks (all of them except the first two) I have really been slacking on my reading. However, this weekend I kicked my reading skills into overdrive. My problem with reading before was that i just read painstakingly slow. Like 3rd grade level slow. Like "Ahh that was quite a nice hour long read, how much land have we covered Jim Jam.... 10 whole pages, golley gee what an achievement. So in search of a way to fix this issue I did what any man in my shoes would do, sit on the internet and browse through silly pictures of cats until all of my problems go away. Then suddenly, there was something that was not a cat, it was a post about reading faster.I was like AWWW YEAH, and then the wonderful power of the internet directed me to this website called http://www.spreeder.com/ where i learned how to read SUPER FAST. If you go there, you should click on the "Click here to speed read this introduction" to check out how pro you can be at reading. After that you should click the "The Application" button at the top of the screen and paste in any text from a book you want to read. What I did was download a book and then paste a giant section of it into the speed reader thing, and then BAM Jim Jam is reading like a boss at 300 words per minute. I read for an hour today, but the bad part is that my shamefully downloaded book does not contain the page numbers written in the corners. To quell this issue, I used my extra special skills with the google machine to discover that the average number of words per page in a book is 250. So then using my proficiency with the calculator program on my computer I was able to find out that I read SEVENTY TWO WORDS IN ONE SITTING. I then proceeded to fist pump triumphantly in a manner reminiscent of the "Nintendo sixty four kid" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFlcqWQVVuU).
So yeah Mr. Hill, prepare yourself because I'm fittin to overtake those reading leader boards with my all new secret speed reading weapon.

Other People's Sentences

This week I went a little light on the reading
35pgs

Style Mappers, Top 5


-"In contrast to Stardust, the narrator of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian demonstrates a thorough understanding of sophisticated, picturesque language." http://estella-havisham.blogspot.com/

-"The common language doesn't detract from the poetic melody of the sergeants thoughts" http://thinking-anonymous.blogspot.com/2011/10/style-mapping.html


-"In this passage from Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian," he uses common familiarity and suggestive language mixed with a harmonious and sweet sound. In the passage from Neil Gaiman's "Stardust," Gaiman uses formal elegance and straight-forward language." http://twilightlover2.blogspot.com/2011/10/style-mapping.html

-In Neil Gaiman's Stardust, Gaiman writes poetically with colloquial language, using words that are neither dissonant nor melodious, in order to describe the setting." http://academiczengerine.blogspot.com/2011/10/style-mapping.html 

 - Similarly, in Sarah Dessen’s Dreamland, the story is told with a rather low energy, and the inferred emotions are depression, grief, and loneliness http://kaylaepicblogger.blogspot.com/2011/10/style-mapping.html

The twilight lover post was my favorite because she/he used the word harmonious which is one of the greatest words ever. The other sentences were all good, it's just that HARMONIOUS is an instant win for best sentence.

Getting Free Stuff

This week, I was playing the video game League of Legends when I decided I really wanted a new "skin" (an in game add-on for characters that make them look cool so you can boast to all your friends). The problem is that they cost money and I was a few dollars short of purchasing it. So, being the crafty aka cheap person that I am I wrote their company an email about why they should just give me the skin. Except since the skin is cowboy themed, I wrote quite a phenomenal little story about cowboys. Here it is...

I realize that with great power comes great Spiderman quotes, but please consider the following.

Ever since I was a young boy I have dreamed of becoming a Cowboy. Yes I know, this is a common fantasy among boys growing up in the 1950's, but I believe my situation is a little bit different. You see I was not born in the 1950's where it was widely accepted to aspire to become one of these heroes of the Wild Wild West. I was in fact born in the 1990s, where the only desperado was Will Smith in the movie Wild Wild West. However, I can easily say that this movie single handedly triggered my fascination with cowboys. I began dressing up as a cowboy EVERY DAY after my mother bought me a cowboy costume for Halloween 1999 (the year Wild WIld West came out). But everything came to a screeching halt when I awoke on New Years day 2000.My mother told me that we had been robbed and the only thing taken was my cowboy costume. In shambles, I accepted the news and was forced to settle with solely playing with cowboy toys. For the next five years I often would exclaim to everyone that I LOVED cowboys and i dreamed of becoming one.... Until that fateful day in 2005 when Brokeback Mountain came out. I was in the fifth grade, and upon hearing there was a new cowboy movie coming out I instantly ran down to the movie theater. I knew it was rated R because it was gonna be so awesome and full of cowboys, so i sneakily bought a ticket to The incredibles, then snuck into the room that was showing Brokeback Mountain. The things I saw... my god... the things they did... I screamed in fright, sprinting out of the theater I exclaimed at the top of my lungs "I HATE COWBOYS". For the next six years I emotionally torn because I couldn't tell anyone that I did in fact still like the cowboys of the west. I was forced to forever hide my aspiration of becoming a cowboy, a REAL cowboy.
As the years went by, my friend introduced me to League of Legends and I discovered there was a cow champion. I instantly began to play Alistar round the clock. Finally, I was able to live up my dream of being a man who controls the movement of a cow. And now, in 2011 after seeing the success of the game Red Dead Redemption and the fact that people only remember Heath Ledger for his performance in The Dark Knight, it is socially acceptable to love cowboys again. In the past week I have spent all of my income buying cowboy costumes, posters, and action figures. Then, this morning when I discovered that Alistar has a skin in which he is dressed up as a cowboy I decided that I would need to buy it instantly. The problem I ran into is that I possess a measly 325 RP, which is not quite enough to purchase this glorious skin. Under normal circumstances I would just go out and buy more RP, but I have already spent all of my money on the other forms of cowboy swag. So I beg of you Mr. Rioter, please use your divine powers to grant me the remaining 195 RP I need to make my life long dream come true.

AND HE GAVE ME THE SKIN!

Quarterly Post

This quarter I read an entire book and part of two other books. I am fairly impressed with myself because I haven't read anything since I was in 5th or 6th grade. I have pretty much enjoyed everything I have read this year the only real difficulty I've had is that reading make my brain tired and then I end up falling asleep. This can become quite problematic if I am reading at 5 in the afternoon because that means I'm going to wake up at 8pm and then I have to pull an all nighter because my sleep cycle just got thrown out the window. Besides that, I have really liked reading, especially around 11-ish. I fall asleep in the middle of the read then wake up in the morning with a book on my face, confused as to what happened, like there was some sort of crazy 1 man reading party going on and I got totally hammered off literature.

End of the Quarter Goodies

Since I did my currently post after school yesterday, I guess I'll just dive straight into the sentences of the quarter that I liked.

1. "We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe its our job to invent something better."
Definatly an awesome series of sentences there. Its so cool because it makes me feel like its eff the world no rules.

2. "I drive Abbie’s mint-green Ford Taurus to Fat Tuesday, one of those days-of-the-week restaurant chains: T.G.I. Friday’s, Ruby Tuesday, Ash Wednesday’s, Holy Thursday’s. Fat Tuesday wasn’t as much a comedy club as it was a bar that had a comedy night."
Even though i posted this one very recently, it is still one of my favorites because of the phrase "days-of-the-week restaurant."

3. "It's funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than with the artwork itself."
This is a quote from way back in the beginning of the quarter and it remains legendary because it is a perfect metaphor.

"Sleepwalk with me" update

I am growing to like this book quite a bit. Something is just so great about reading a book that isn't taking its book-ness so seriously. The book is fairly autobiographical, but instead of being super serious it's just sharing the funniest stories that have occurred over the course of his life. His stories about his childhood make me lol out of control. Some of the highlights have been his childhood experiances have been his stories about not being part of the not-makeout club in middle school and finding out he is not jump-out-of-a-tree guy.

The weekly stuff from friday

Pages

This week: 105 pgs
Total: 499

Sentences:
"I drive Abbie’s mint-green Ford Taurus to Fat Tuesday, one of those days-of-the-week restaurant chains: T.G.I. Friday’s, Ruby Tuesday, Ash Wednesday’s, Holy Thursday’s. Fat Tuesday wasn’t as much a comedy club as it was a bar that had a comedy night."
This sentence has officially caused me to integrate the phrase day-of-the-week restaurant into my vocabulary.

"My professional basketball plans may have been cut short by the reality of opposing players, but as long as sharks still rhymed with parks, no one could convince me that I couldn’t be a professional poet or rapper. And when the Shrewsbury police department visited St. Mary’s School to conduct their “DARE to Keep Kids Off Drugs” program, I saw the opportunity to launch my career as a rap star who also happened to hate drugs."
Mike Birbiglia is just showing off how much of a boss he was in second grade.

New Book

Mike Birbiglia is one of my favorite comedians, and last night I discovered that he has written a book. I immediately began reading it, and this thing is pure gold. The way he wrote it makes it sound like he is just speaking to the reader. You know what i mean, its just like he is saying this stuff live on stage except its written down and its a full book length rather than 30 minutes. The title is "Sleepwalk With Me" because he sleep walks and it leads to some good bits of hilarity.

Anyway here's a video of him in case you're interested in who he is
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ5GXPg_gD8&t=0m39s

The weekend that changed my life [Part 1]

It was a breezy Friday afternoon in early autumn, I had just gotten home from school and I was beginning to tear into the nutty bars in the pantry. Shearing the cellophane that encased the delicious after school snack, I begin to do a Tyrannosaurus-esq dance with my hands to rid them of the static charged material. Just as I set the delectable treat free there was an intense buzzing coming from my left pocket. I knew it had to be one of two things: I had not completely washed out the honey in my pocket from the night before and a large colony of bees was commandeering my pants, or it was my phone. I stuck my hand into the potential battlefield blind, my heart racing I let out a sigh of relief as the tips of my fingers grasped the cool plastic edges of my five year old LG Chocolate. Sliding open the menu I discovered a text message from my dear friend Angelo
-"Do0d3 we3 pLayyyyinnnn dis sik game uh volleeebawl goin' on tonite. U in? thar fittin tah be sum seck-see lay-dees dare."

Startled by his impressive display of grammatical prowess, I decide to retort with an ivy-league level response.
-"AwW H33eE3lLzZzZ YeAh BoiiIiIi"

I passed the hours before the coming event by reading a debate between some of the world's wisest minds. I am of course speaking about the breathtakingly brilliant discussions in the comment section of an "Xbox is Totally better than Playstation" youtube video. After the opposing sides of the argument exchanged blows back and forth in their incredible bout of intensified verbal retorts, they both came to the same conclusion: the opposition was a "no life fanboy." I admit, I was quite taken aback by such a unifying theorem, however when I let that golden claim wash over me, something magical happened. It seemed in a bleak moment of clarity everything made sense to me, string theory was all clear, Einstein's theory of relativity was all reaffirmed, and the plot to kill Rachel and Harvey Dent in "The Dark Knight" didn't seem stupidly over elaborate.

-To be continued

Panda Attack

Finished Choke

For the first time in a long time, I actually finished a book. To my surprise, its actually not that hard to do. The best part might have been the story, however the sheer accomplishment I felt completing it probably out did the book itself. On top of that, the fact that I have had your book checked out for over 5 weeks has sort of been weighing on my conscience and it felt good to get that weight off my chest. "Choke" was awesome, and he raps up the story very well. There were plenty of plot twists and "ah-ha" moments towards the end, but it was an appropriate amount. One of the coolest things was seeing how all the loose ends throughout the story all got tied up at the end. As the novel came to a close, it didn't leave me with a cliche cliffhanger to make me beg for a sequel, it just ended. I got to feel like I had completed something. The type of "AWW YEAH I JUST DID THAT" moment that makes me wanna go waltz around town like I recently conquered a small Mediterranean island. So without giving away any spoilers to the book, I can summarize the book as awesome, and worth reading.

End of The Week Stuff

This week: 82 pages
Total: 394 pages

Sentences

"What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction."

This is a very cool quote, however it hits a little too close to home for me. /foreveralone

"We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe its our job to invent something better."

Very cool way to rap up the book and it was pretty thought provoking.

Claims of The Day

1. In Gene Kelly's "Good Morning" [an elegantly exquisite setting and excitingly exuberant style is] conveyed [through the delicate, and brisk attire and the frantic yet hysterical emotion of the actors.] (Docor Von Brown)
2. Proenza Schouler's somber color scheme, seductive shape, and aggravated music choice, conveys a creepy and polished look for their fall 2010 collection.(To Kill A Mokingjay)
3. In Todrick Hall's "I Wanna Be On Glee," Hall's plea to Glee creator Ryan Murphy shows Hall's inventiveness and artistic talents through the music video's cleverly pariodistic lyrics, assertive instrumentals, and effervescent choreography. (Zengerine)
4. Leonid Afremov's vibrant use of color, flowing appearance, and realistic, silky texture illustrates a feeling of whimsical relaxation and majestic euphoria.(Bud In The Garden)
5. In the album art for United Paper People‘s Kisschasy, the foreboding colors, overwhelming space, and perilous actions reflect a sense of destructive loneliness and irrational wonder

The one that I liked the most was BudInTheGarden mostly for its artwork and for the fact that it was the best claim..   

 

Solo Claim

The art that I am going to write about is Walton Ford's "Dying Words."

Observe:


Color: bright on characters, dark environment, selective

Movement: Focal Point bottom right, circular

Texture: Gritty, Detailed

Use Of Space: balanced evenly on edges, very open in middle

Tone: Dark

Infer:


Sad
Final
Climactic
Serious

Claim:


The painting's gritty texture, balanced use of space, selective use of colour, and dark tone leave the viewer a sense of depressing realization leading to a climactic finish.

Favorite Poem

My favorite poem was "Scheherazade" by Richard Siken. This poem was awesome because of its unique outlook on circumstances. It has a feel like it is apathetic, romantic, and optimistic, all at the same time. The line "tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us" is definitely a top tier quotable for me. For some reason, the weird flow of the poem just makes me dig this one more than all of the others.

Sentences Of The Week

Choke: 30 pages


Favorite Quotes:

1. "And the woman says, 'Victor? Victor Mancini. Oh, my God'
     She must've saved my life, because I don't know who the hell she is."
    I like this quote because of the immense amount of irony, and usually your life is not saved often enough that you repeatedly forget the people who have saved it."
 2. "Just keep asking yourself: 'What would Jesus NOT do?"
     This one is pretty awesome because he is having such a hard time being a d-bag that he's constantly gotta remind himself to be one.

Week 2

This week I took somewhat of a break from the original book I was reading (although I still shred through 50 pages or so) and switched it up a little bit. My brother has been nagging me about reading "Game of Thrones" for some time now, so I decided I would pick it up. The plot of the novel seems to be pretty vast and large in scope, but the problem is that reading it takes so much attention and it feels like work just to read a single page. The pages in my brother's giant God-sized edition book were 14 inch walls of size ten font that were very, very discouraging for a novice novel reader like myself. I also noticed how much of a big switch up it was from "Choke" which is much more relaxing to read because of its short concise chapter, common vocabulary, and familiarity to reality. "Game of Thrones" is a medieval-ish era story with far, far more characters than I'm used to keeping track of in a story. However, the story is fairly interesting. It's got a little bit of everything you'd expect from your average medieval fantasy story; people descended from dragons, expectations of chivalrous conduct, fantasy creatures, mystery surrounding the outside world, and the fan favorite... incest. For some reason these medieval stories seem to always have that incest aspect. I don't know why this recurring theme, I assume there's got to be a significant amount of research regarding their target audience how a significant portion of their readers have some sort of repressed oedipal complex. While reading, I could not help but feel like this story was the love child of "The Lord of The Rings" and "The Village." In fact "The Village" is an extremely similar plot except for the whole M. Night Shyamalan-ing at the end that makes the audience completely love or hate what they just watched.

From what I have continued to read in "Choke", I am really liking it. This is certainly one of my favorite books of all time. The way the author tells the story just makes the already awesome plot even more awesome. It is making me strongly consider stopping my excessive video game playing just so I can tear through all of Chuck Palahniuk's bibliography. This story is just getting more and more epic, the main character goes through his life being such a legendary anti-hero. While getting into shenanigans that make him seem like a simple minded college prankster, he is conflicted with deep emotional struggles and uses nearly everything as a metaphor for something else. For example, he has a deep conflict with strong women and he has felt like his mom's hostage for his whole life. Now he concocts a plan to finally become the hero he always wanted to save him. Since his mother is on the verge of dying, he does not want to make her completely better, so he keeps her near death so he can be her "savior" everyday. Also, when he goes to a strip club he says one of my favorite quotes of all time. Referring to the way the strippers look under the black lights, red lights, and the fact that she's on a stage he says "It's funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than with the artwork itself." This quote instantly reached legendary status for me because of how awesomely true it is in the literal sense, and the fact that it is shown through other mediums every day.

To rap up, the book "Choke" has left me with a strange feeling. It's caused me to become all riled up about reading. I feel kind of dumb because I have been treating reading as the entertainment leper since middle school, but now I'm more psyched about reading more novels than I am about seeing new movies or playing new games.

Sentences

While explaining the chocking con, Victor says "It's okay to cry as long as you're faking it." I just love that he is saying the entire point of the trick is to ACT helpless and weak, but if you're legitimately crying because you almost died, thats not okay. Along with the tone and context it just makes it seem like he's gonna hunt you down and revoke your privilege to do the con if you're gonna be a pansy about it.

Choke #1

This week I started the book "Choke" by Chuck Palahniuk. I have wanted to read this book ever since I heard he was the guy who wrote Fight Club, which is one of the most "bro" movies of all time. So with my expectations of quality set to messianic levels, I began my reading. Right off the bat he started the book with one of my biggest pet peeves, the infamous "HERP DERP YOU SHOULD TOTALLY NOT READ THIS BOOK HERP DERP" line that is supposed to further arouse my interest in reading this piece of literature. The problem I have with this approach is that it has been so overused, it makes me believe that the author read one R.L. Stine book when he was nine years old and got it imprinted in his brain that this is the only way an author can introduce a story to his audience. However, once I painstakingly read through this embarrassing display of the author's lack of imagination and introductory prowess, there was actually quite an interesting novel underneath. The story is told in a very interesting manner as well. It begins in a 3rd person omniscient point of view, but once it starts getting into the first real chapters it is told from a first person point of view. On top of this, the author is not afraid to take the risk of jumping into a new setting at the beginning of a chapter without introducing the setting first. He does it in such a way that it feels much like a movie segueing into a new scene by being zoomed in on the character's face and giving a short monologue before zooming out to reveal the character's new location. I can see why this effect was used so many times in the "Fight Club" movie, the director must have also gotten the same feel from Palahniuk's style while reading that book. Enough about the writing style, the characters in this are very well developed and very interesting. The main character, Victor  Mancini, is a very interesting man. It turns out he is a recovering sex addict trying to make his way through his twelve step program. In addition, he is trying to hold a minimum wage job as an 18th century indentured servant in one of those colonial american re-creation towns. You know, the kind that middle schools force kids to go to on their 5th grade field trips or else the students have to stay back and do some ridiculous homework packet. To make his life even better he is currently forking over $3000 a month to a mental hospital that is holding his mother. Oh, I forgot to mention that his mother has gone to prison countless times over the years and habitually broken out, just to find Victor and essentially kidnap him. However those days are done, and she is now a deathly ill $3000 a month burden for Victor. As you can imagine, its somewhat difficult to come up with $3000 when you make minimum wage, so Victor acquires money through a strategy that gives the book its name. He goes into restaurants and causes himself to choke and simultaneously creates a big scene out of it. Then,he waits for some guy to emerge from the crowd to come to his rescue. When these "heroes" dislodge the ball of semi digested food from his throat, they feel like a God. This is a feeling that they never want to end, they console Victor afterwards, and then often pay for his meal because he made them feel so heroic. After the whole fiasco is finished and everyone parts ways, the "hero" will feel the needs to take care of Victor because he has saved his life. They administer this care giving by sending Victor cards regularly and around Christmas time that usually contain checks or cash, just to make sure he is on his on two feet again.

Finally, I'd like to rap this post up with one of my favorite quotes from this book. While explaining the chocking con, Victor says "It's okay to cry as long as you're faking it." I just love that he is saying the entire point of the trick is to ACT helpless and weak, but if you're legitimately crying because you almost died, thats not okay. Along with the tone and context it just makes it seem like he's gonna hunt you down and revoke your privilege to do the con if you're gonna be a pansy about it.