If any of you have questions, clarifications, uncertanties or doubts concerning any area of the subject, please post them as comments and I will do my best to reply to them asap.

These are my thousand to you.

For now!

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Go here for a bookish message!

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After just tantalizing morsels of information about a fascinating subject, here are some sites to provide you with background knowledge.

Something easy to start you off, a site by an American teacher.

Then, trek on down to egyptonline, for more information.

The American channel PBS, is one which provides quality broadcasts, and their site mirrors their focus on great graphics and writing.

PBS Nova has an earlier site on Egypt, just as good and worthwhile visiting.

Finally, National Geographic will never fail to disappoint.

Go here for some insights on pyramids while King Tut waits here.

Enjoy and learn.

The quotes that I did not, for some reason or another, share with you last term.

My sincerest apologies.

Without courage, wisdom bears no fruit.
Baltasar Gracian

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All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why. James Thurber

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I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.
Marie Curie:

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The purpose of life is a life of purpose.

Robert Byrne

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Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.
Vaclav Havel

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Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
Henry David Thoreau

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Do something every day that you don’t want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
Mark Twain

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Strong reasons make strong actions.
William Shakespeare

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Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Pablo Picasso

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A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

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Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.
Albert Einstein

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The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.
Ben Stein

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Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
Mark Twain

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We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.
Abigail Adams

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To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
Joseph Chilton Pearce

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We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?
Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451, 1953

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Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.
Joseph Conrad

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When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.
Anais Nin

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All things are difficult before they are easy.
Dr. Thomas Fuller

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If you believe everything you read, better not read.
Japanese Proverb

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We must learn our limits. We are all something, but none of us are everything.
Blaise Pascal

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Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.
Buckminister Fuller

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Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
Carl Jung

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It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.
Epictetus

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Three passions have governed my life:
The longings for love, the search for knowledge,
And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].

Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.
In the union of love I have seen
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of [people].
I have wished to know why the stars shine.

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,
But always pity brought me back to earth;
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart
Of children in famine, of victims tortured
And of old people left helpless.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,
And I too suffer.

This has been my life; I found it worth living.
(adapted)
Bertrand Russell

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My friend, if I could give you one thing, I would give you the ability to see yourself as others see you… then you would realize what a truly special person you are.
Barbara A. Billings

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Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is to not stop questioning.

~ Albert Einstein

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Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
- James Joyce

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One who has health has hope, and one who has hope has everything.

~ Arabic proverb

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Experience is the worst teacher; it gives the test before presenting the lesson.
- Vernon Law

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We did not change as we grew older; we just became more clearly ourselves.
Lynn Hall,

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If A is success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.
Albert Einstein

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I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
Bill Cosby

A site that caters to online presentations held a competition for best presentation. A panel of judges chose the 3 best entries.
[slideshare id=33834&doc=shift-happens-33834-906&w=425]

This won first prize for best presentation.

[slideshare id=32915&doc=sustainable-food-lab-6679&w=425]

This won third prize.

What do you think?

These are some notes on writing that will hopefully provide insight and information as to how to make your writing better and more effective and make all of you more knowledgeable and creative writers.

Some of the points are repeated (though written/expressed in a different way) to reinforce some important/salient aspects. Bear with them!
Please feel free, as always to post comments, questions and points of clarification; or better still, try out some of the ideas here.

POV

First Person
This is the “I” story.
The broken shutter in the window creaked a warning. I flung myself across the table, covering as best I could my neat piles of papers, as a draft of cold wind scoured into the room…
The benefit of first person is its immediacy and intimacy. You are really inside the head of the person telling the story. This is good for character stories, but not as good for certain kinds of tension stories. You can therefore say that first person’s focus might not be on what happens so much as how it happens. In other words, we know a first person protagonist lives; we just don’t know what that means.
A first person narrator can therefore be what is called an Unreliable Narrator. This means that what the person says about a situation, character, or action, might not be true. Readers can sometimes enjoy discovering that the narrator is unreliable–discovering, for example, that in spite of the fervent dislike of the narrator for a certain young duke, he’s really not a bad guy after all.

FIRST PERSON “I” “me”

*Narrator as major participant

*Narrator as observer and major participant

*Non-participant narrator or reporter (less common)

Advantages of First Person

*Eyewitness account gives immediacy, realism

*Author can create dramatic irony

Disadvantages of First Person 

*No direct interpretation by the author

*Bias or limited knowledge of narrator

*Danger that narrator may transcend her knowledge

The First Person
A story written in the first person is told by an “I,” where “I” can be the main character, a less important character witnessing events, or a person retelling a story they were told by someone else. This point of view is often effective in giving a sense of closeness to the character. It can be very easy to get the reader to identify or sympathize with your main character when the reader is seeing everything through that character’s eyes.
There are some important things to consider when writing in first person, though. First of all, you need to decide how this story is being told. Is the character writing it down? Telling it out loud? Thinking it to their self? And if they are writing it down, is it something meant to be read by the public? Or is it a private diary? A story meant for one other person? The way the first person narrator is relating the story will affect how you write it, the language you choose, the length of your sentences, your tone of voice and many other things. The reader should have at least some sense of this as well. The way they interpret a story could be very different if it is told as a secret diary or if it is a public statement.
Another aspect to think about is how much time has elapsed between when the character experienced the events of the story and when they decided to tell them. If only a few days have passed, the story could be related very differently than if the character was reflecting on events of the distant past. Also think about why the character is telling the story. What is their motivation? Are they just trying to clear up events for their own peace of mind? Make a confession about a wrong they did? Or tell a good adventure tale to their beer-guzzling friends? The reason why a story is told will also affect how it is written, and you at least should know the answer, even if it never makes its way into the text. And not only Why? but Why now?
A first person narrative is often more effective when it is a first person narrator telling someone else’s story (in other words, when the narrator is not the main character). This allows a certain distance between the narrator and the events which is impossible for the main character. On the other hand, the inability to see the bigger picture can sometimes be exploited to good effect. Whether or not your narrator is actually telling the truth is another big question (and one your readers will ask, so you’d best think about it, too).
First Person Protagonist:

For this point of view, a character relates events that occurred to them; the “I” is the main character, telling her or his own story.
I missed the bus that morning because I couldn’t convince myself to get out of bed. It was just too cosy under the comforter, with the cat curled up next to me. I was going to have to walk all the way to work.
First Person Witness:

The story of the main character is told by another character observing the events.
She missed the bus. She’d probably spent an hour arguing with herself that she really should get up. I could picture her there, curled up in bed with the cat next to her. Now she was going to have to walk to work.

First Person Re-teller:

The story is told, not by a witness to the events, but by someone who has heard the story from yet another person.
She missed the bus. I don’t know why; probably couldn’t get out of bed. You know how warm it gets when you’re all curled up in the blankets. She had a cat, too, and somehow a cat makes it harder to get up in the morning. So she missed the bus, and would have to walk all the way to work

Point Of View–

By Carolyn Miller
When a person wishes to write a story, one of the first things he must do is choose how he wants the narrative voice to sound. In a story, the author is not the one who tells it, but the voice that has been created. The writer can decide which choice will best make his story come alive and stamp an impression on the reader. These choices, called point of view, are really not hard to understand or recognize. They are person, number, and tense.

The point of view, person, is divided into three choices: First Person, Second Person, and Third Person.

The First Person is when the narrative voice refers to itself, as I. An example would be: “Will we move away from here?” I ask, the thought of leaving disturbing me. (Taken from “I am Regina”)

The Second Person is more of a rare one that the others. This one refers to the reader as you, thereby putting the reader in the story. An example of this is: “You are walking down the street on a wet and cold night, when you suddenly hear a low growl behind you.”

The Third Person, most commonly used, is when the narrative voice refers to the other characters. For instance, “Ye got no call to be afeared,” he said roughly. “I ain’t aimin’ to hurt ye none.” (Taken from “Across Five Aprils”)

The next point of view, tense, is also divided into three parts: past, present, and future. The following are examples for each of these starting with past. She saw the expression on his face, but ignored it. Present: “Perhaps you would be surprised to hear, Dr. Carter, that Mr. Taylor went deaf very suddenly last week?” Anne sat back, having thrown her bomb. (Taken from “Anne of Windy Poplars”)  And last of all, “I will never blot out his name from the book of life…”

The last point of view is Number. Number is either singular or plural. There is one of each for First Person and Third Person. Singular First Person would be the narrator referring to himself, and is not part of a group, as in: “I watched the thunderstorm.” Plural First Person is when the narrative voice constantly refers to itself as part of the group. We watched the thunderstorm. Third Person Singular is when the narrative voice is observing one individual character. An example is He glared at his captor with intense hate. Or She watched her kitten play with the mouse. Third Person plural refers to a group of two or more people, as in, They watched the barn go up in flames. Or strange things always seemed to happen to them.

Perhaps now the choices of point of view are more clear and recognizable; this is my deepest hope. The three elements are what an author has to create a narrative voice for his story. Using just these three, authors have been able to create thousands of interesting stories. And thousands more are still out there to be created!

Narrative Voice

Someone in your story has to tell us that Jeff pulled out his gun, that Samantha smiled at the tall stranger, that daylight was breaking over the valley. That someone is the narrator or “author’s persona.”
The author’s persona of a fictional narrative can help or hinder the success of the story. Which persona you adopt depends on what kind of story you are trying to tell, and what kind of emotional atmosphere works best for the story.
The persona develops from the personality and attitude of the narrator, which are expressed by the narrator’s choice of words and incidents. These in turn depend on the point of view of the story.
First-person point of view is usually subjective: we learn the narrator’s thoughts, feelings, and reactions to events. In first-person objective, however, the narrator tells us only what people said and did, without comment.
Other first-person modes include:
¶the observer-narrator, outside the main story (examples: Mr. Lockwood in Wuthering Heights, Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby)
¶detached autobiography (narrator looking back on long-past events)
¶multiple narrators (first-person accounts by several characters)
¶interior monologue (narrator recounts the story as a memory; stream of consciousness is an extreme form of this narrative)
¶dramatic monologue (narrator tells story out loud without major interruption)
¶letters or diary (narrator writes down events as they happen; narrative told through letters is also known as the epistolary novel)
If the point of view is first-person, questions about the persona are simple: the character narrating the story has a particular personality and attitude, which is plausibly expressed by the way he or she describes events.
The second-person mode is rare: You knocked on the door. You went inside. Very few writers feel the need for it, and still fewer use it effectively.
If the point of view is third-person limited, persona again depends on the single character through whose eyes we witness the story. You may go inside the character’s mind and tell us how that character thinks and feels, or you may describe outside events in terms the character would use. Readers like this point of view because they know whom to “invest” in or identify with.
In third-person objective, we have no entry to anyone’s thoughts or feelings. The author simply describes, without emotion or editorializing, what the characters say and do. The author’s persona here is almost non-existent. Readers may be unsure whose fate they should care about, but it can be very powerful precisely because it invites the reader to supply the emotion that the persona does not. This is the persona of Icelandic sagas, which inspired not only Ernest Hemingway but a whole generation of “hard-boiled” writers.
If the point of view is third-person omniscient, however, the author’s persona can develop in any of several directions.
1. “Episodically limited.” Whoever is the point of view for a particular scene determines the persona. An archbishop sees and describes events from his particular point of view, while a pickpocket does so quite differently. So the narrator, in a scene from the archbishop’s point of view, has a persona quite different from that of the pickpocket: a different vocabulary, a different set of values, a different set of priorities. (As a general rule, point of view should not change during a scene. So if an archbishop is the point of view in a scene involving him and a pickpocket, we shouldn’t suddenly switch to the pickpocket’s point of view until we’ve resolved the scene and moved on to another scene.)
2. “Occasional interruptor.” The author intervenes from time to time to supply necessary information, but otherwise stays in the background. The dialogue, thoughts and behavior of the characters supply all other information the reader needs.
3. “Editorial commentator.” The author’s persona has a distinct attitude toward the story’s characters and events, and frequently comments on them. The editorial commentator may be a character in the story, often with a name, but is usually at some distance from the main events; in some cases, we may even have an editorial commentator reporting the narrative of someone else about events involving still other people. The editorial commentator is not always reliable; he or she may lie to us, or misunderstand the true significance of events.
Third-person omniscient gives you the most freedom to develop the story, and it works especially well in stories with complex plots or large settings where we must use multiple viewpoints to tell the story. It can, however, cause the reader to feel uncertain about whom to identify with in the story. If you are going to skip from one point of view to another, start doing so early in the story, before the reader has fully identified with the original point of view.
The author’s persona can influence the reader’s reaction by helping the reader to feel close to or distant from the characters. Three major hazards arise from careless use of the persona:
1. Sentimentality. The author’s editorial rhetoric tries to evoke an emotional response that the story’s events cannot evoke by themselves—something like a cheerleader trying to win applause for a team that doesn’t deserve it. A particular problem for the “editorial commentator.”
2. Mannerism. The author’s persona seems more important than the story itself, and the author keeps reminding us of his or her presence through stylistic flamboyance, quirks of diction, or outright editorializing about the characters and events of the story. Also a problem for the editorial commentator. However, if the point of view is first person, and the narrator is a person given to stylistic flamboyance, quirks of diction, and so on, then the problem disappears; the persona is simply that of a rather egotistical individual who likes to show off.
3. Frigidity. The persona’s excessive objectivity trivializes the events of the story, suggesting that the characters’ problems need not be taken seriously: a particular hazard for “hardboiled” fiction in the objective mode, whether first person or third person.
Verb tense can also affect the narrative style of the story. Most stories use the past tense:
I knocked on the door. She pulled out her gun.
This is usually quite adequate although flashbacks can cause awkwardness:
I had knocked on the door. She had pulled out her gun.
A little of that goes a long way.
Be careful to stay consistently in one verb tense unless your narrator is a person who might switch tenses:
So I went to see my probation officer, and she tells me I can’t hang out with my old buddies no more.
Some writers achieve a kind of immediacy through use of the present tense:
I knock on the door. She pulls out her gun.
We don’t feel anyone knows the outcome of events because they are occurring as we read, in “real time.” Some writers also enjoy the present tense because it seems “arty” or experimental.
But most readers of genre fiction don’t enjoy the present tense, so editors are often reluctant to let their authors use it.

NARRATIVE VOICE

An important decision an author must make before writing a story is who will ‘tell’ it to the reader. This ‘person’ supplies the story’s narrative voice and is called the story’s narrator. There are two main choices: a story can be told either through one of its characters (usually the protagonist – using the first person pronoun, ‘I’) or by a person outside the story itself (which seems often to be that of the author and which uses the third person pronouns ‘he’, ’she’ or ‘they’). Most importantly, it is the narrative voice that creates a particular kind of relationship with the reader that mediates all that the reader can understand about other characters and the events and ideas of the story.
Working out and considering the effects of the author’s particular choice of narrative voice adds to your understanding of the characters, the story and the themes. How obvious is this voice? What are its qualities – its effects on you, the reader? Does it seem entirely trustworthy? Is it reliable? Is it educated? Is it biased towards a particular character or way of viewing society? Working out how the narrative voice mediates what you come to know and understand about the characters, events and themes is a key exam and coursework skill – and is highly rewarded as it is classed as a high level skill.

First Person Narrative
The important thing to remember here is the limitations of this choice of narrator: a first person narrator is limited by time and place, by who they are, by what they know and what other characters tell them. But this choice of narrator is able to create a close relationship with the reader – indeed, it is highly possible for the reader to feel as if they are the narrator in this kind of narrative, so close is the relationship that develops.
Third Person Narrative
A third person narrator can ’see’ and ‘tell’ everything about each character, and be anywhere at any time, able to judge and comment upon events and characters at will; however, third person narrators are usually not neutral and are given limited and biased viewpoints by the writer such that the narrative voice leads the reader to support the ‘hero’ and criticise the ‘villain’. A third person narrator is sometimes referred to as an omniscient narrator when the viewpoint is more neutral and ‘all-knowing’.

Third person dramatic or objective
•    Like a camera, narrator reports only what can be seen and heard; no thoughts of characters are given except as spoken.

Advantages of Dramatic or Objective

*Impartial report
*Offers most speed, action
*Reader must interpret

Disadvantages of Dramatic

*Author cannot interpret
*Relies heavily on action and dialogue

Third Person Omniscient

*The all-knowing narrator (like God) gives thoughts of and judgments about the characters as well as details of action and dialogue.

Advantages of Omniscient

*God-like narrator gives thoughts of character, dimension to story

*Most flexible; author can control omniscience

Disadvantages of Omniscient

*Author can come between reader and story

*Shifting from character to character may destroy unity

Third Person Limited Omniscient

*Narrator focuses on actions, thoughts, feelings of a single major character.

Point of View Character

*In third limited point of view, the narrator stands by the elbow of this character and we experience the story as this person does. We only know the thoughts of this character.

Advantages of Limited Omniscient

*Realistic, we see world through one person
*Ready-made unifying element
*Useful characterization of point-of-view character
Disadvantages of Limited Omniscient

*Limited field of observation
*Difficulty having character aware of all important events

The Meaning of Life: Theme

Don’t confuse the theme with the topic; the former is a broad statement about reality; the latter, the subject of the narrative. A theme might be “War is hell”; the subject, World War II.
Effective narratives do more than entertain; they often suggest a truth about life, a theme. This observation touches a cord within your readers and makes your story memorable. It can even help lift your writing to the level of Art.
Here are some sample themes:
•    People are capable of great heroism when put to the test.
•    Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
•    The world is a lonely and bitter place.
•    You can’t recapture the past.
•    It’s a dog-eat-dog world.

Some notes to help you prepare your ’sales pitch’ for your novels.

The Basic Principles of Persuasive Writing

Persuasive writing is writing that sets out to influence or change an audience’s thoughts or actions.

We are subjected to persuasion everyday from the time we wake up until the time we go to bed. When you turn on and listen to the radio, read the papers or watch the television. different groups of people are trying to persuade you about something.

Whenever you buy a product or use a service, your choice has likely been influenced by a persuasive marketing ad. There are, of course, many occupations where persuasion is a skill used on an everyday basis. Lawyers, teachers, clergy members, and journalists are just a few.

The point is that understanding persuasive strategies can help you in two very important ways:

1) Knowing the strategies helps you analyse the strategies other people are using to persuade you. This way you can protect yourself when, for example, unethical marketers are trying to take advantage of you.

2) Knowing the strategies helps you to choose which is the most effective way to persuade an audience.

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How do we get others to accept our point of view?

1. by appealing to their reason
2. by appealing to their emotions
3. by the appeal of our good character

1) Appealing to Reason:

Remember that an argument is an appeal to a person’s sense of reason; it is not a violent fight, dispute, or disagreement. It is a measured, logical way of trying to persuade others to agree with you.

One critical thing to remember that there are at least two sides to every issue. If you take the attitude that there is only one side–your side–you will quite likely alienate your reader.

You need, then, to choose one side of an issue clearly in an effort to persuade others. If you’re unsure of your own stance, how can you expect other people to assess, understand, and be convinced by your position?

Example:

Issue: Should my father stop smoking?

Position: Yes

Questions you may ask (Your reasoning skills often depend on what we call “common sense”):

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Do I have enough evidence? (Is it sufficient?)
• Will my audience believe my evidence? (Is it trustworthy?)
• What are the assumptions built into my argument, and are those assumptions fair? (Is it verifiable?)
• Does my conclusion follow logically from the claims I make?

There are two basic types of reasoning processes: Deduction and Induction

DEDUCTION: begins with a general principle or premise and draws a specific conclusion from it.

ex. All people who smoke endanger their health. (major premise)

My father smokes. (minor premise)

Therefore, my father is endangering her health. (conclusion)

Is this a strong argument?

• you need to offer evidence in support of your claims
• it may be impossible to prove a cause-effect link between my father’s smoking and his declining health

Other issues you may bring in to support your argument:

• 2nd hand smoke / impact on family and friends
• the staggering number of people over 60 years old who die from lung cancer

INDUCTION: supports a general conclusion by examining specific facts or cases.

Ex. If I was to argue that my father was endangering his health, I might cite specific symptoms:

• His teeth are yellowish and he’s lost a considerable amount of weight.
• He’s no longer able to cycle his 25km every morning.
• Whenever he exerts himself physically, he ends up coughing extremely hard.

Other Logical Appeals?

You could cite smoking/cancer statistics, authority in the form of the Surgeon General, financial costs etc…

2) Appealing to Emotion:

The logical appeal is certainly an extremely persuasive tool. However, our human nature also lets us be influenced by our emotions.

One way of evoking emotion in your reader is to use vivid images.

Ex. (to my father who smokes): “I remember when Grandma died of lung cancer. It was the first time I had ever seen you cry Dad. I remember that you also made me promise not to start smoking.”

You could also offer vivid examples in support of your argument. Use language and/or images that are emotionally charged:

• You might detail the pain of going through chemo therapy.
• You could use Xrays of diseased lungs, or photos of cancerous gums.

Be careful, however, that when you use emotional appeal, you use it “legitimately.” You should not use it as a substitute for logical and/or ethical appeals. Don’t use emotional appeals to draw on stereotypes or manipulate our emotional fears. Don’t use emotional appeal to get an automatic, knee-jerk reaction from someone. If you use emotionally charged language or examples simply to upset or anger an audience, you are using emotion illegitimately. Your use of emotional appeal shouldn’t oversimplify a complicated issue.

3) Appealing to our good character:

The appeal of your ethics can occur on one or more of the following levels in any given argument:

1. Are you a reasonable person? (That is, are you willing to listen, compromise, concede points?)
2. Are you authoritative? (Are you experienced and/or knowledgeable in the field you are arguing in?)
3. Are you an ethical/moral person (Is what you’re arguing for ethically sound/morally right)
4. Are you concerned for the well-being of your audience? (To what extent will you benefit as a result of arguing from your particular position?)

The ethical appeal is based on the audience’s perception of the speaker. Therefore, the audience must trust the speaker in order to accept the arguments. Don’t overlook ethical appeal, as it can be the most effective of the three.

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Elements of a Good Argument:

Remember to identify any unfamiliar or uniquely used terms in your argument.

If you forget to define your terms (or choose not to define them) you run the risk of alienating your audience, confusing them, or causing them to come to inappropriate conclusions.

For example, before making the argument that teachers should “monitor” their students, the word monitor should be defined. Does “monitor” include eavesdropping on their group discussions? Does it include accessing their registrar’s files to see how well (or how poorly) the students are doing in their other classes? Does it mean reading their e-mail in an online course without their knowledge? You would want to be clear about such a term so that someone wouldn’t misinterpret its usage in a particular context.

You Must Ensure that Your Evidence is Convincing:

Convincing evidence will satisfy the following questions:

• Is the evidence sufficient in volume? That is, is there is enough evidence to present a strong, indisputable case.
• Is the evidence trustworthy? Does it come from reliable, informed sources.
• Is the evidence verifiable? That is, can you corroborate it through other sources. Is the evidence factual, or does it rest solely on opinion?

Appeal to authority:

If you are drawing on an authoritative, expert figure to back up what you say, is the authority actually reliable? When trying to determine whether someone is an authority, consider the following elements:

1. Is your expert a current authority on the specific subject in question?
2. Is your expert up-to-date on the most current procedures, statistics, testing programmes etc.
3. Is your expert viewed favourably by their peers? Is he/she respected in the field?
4. Is your expert associated with reputable organizations?
5. Is your expert as free of bias as possible?

Remember that when quoting a source you must be careful that you don’t accidentally (or intentionally) take the quote out of context, changing the original meaning.

Keep in mind, as well, that your authority should be knowledgeable about the subject; he/she should not simply be someone famous. A celebrity endorsement is not quite the same as expert opinion (unless the celebrity is endorsing a product that she/he uses.)

Canadian Olympic snowboarder Ross Rebagliati may be an expert when it comes to endorsing snowboard wax, but he’s not necessarily an expert when asked about the national unity debate. Bryan Adams’ celebrity status does not make his an expert authority on the national economy, but he would be a reliable, trustworthy source if you asked him about building recording studios.

In addition, you want to ensure that the authority you are using is still current in the field. For example, you might not want to use a long-retired politician like Pierre Trudeau as your focus expert on the state of the unity issue in Canada today.

Remember that the most successful arguments often combine the three appeals. With that in mind, be very careful about relying solely on logic in an argument. Use a combination of appeals to allow for a more balanced argument. An audience may readily become resistant to your argument if you rest solely on a particular line of reasoning that they fundamentally disagree with.

Improper Evaluation of Statistics:

Using statistics, studies and surveys can be very persuasive if they are used ethically and accurately.

Ask yourself the following questions before using this kind of evidence:

1. Were the survey questions as objective as possible?
2. Was the sample pool representative or biased?
3. Are the statistics accurately tabulated?
4. Have the statistics been taken out of context?
5. Is there enough context provided so that the reader gets a clear view of any pre-existing bias?

Another way of looking at it

Bringing About Change

Persuasive speakers plan to secure behavioural changes in their listeners by influencing thinking and motivating action. Persuasive speakers attempt to modify their listeners’ attitudes and values, and alter their listeners’ beliefs. Attitudes, values, and beliefs are interconnected, but differ in their meanings.

Organizing for Persuasive Speaking

Choosing a Topic

Students should keep the following three guidelines in mind when they are selecting a topic for their persuasive speech. Good topics are:

• controversial
• clear
• supported by evidence.

Stating the Proposition

Your proposition must be in the form of a declarative sentence which states a claim. There are four general types of propositions: propositions of fact, value, policy, and definition.

A fact claim is a statement about how things were in the past, how they are in the present, or how they will be in the future. A fact claim is not a fact; it only claims to be a fact. What makes it arguable is that the speaker has no direct way of establishing the truth of the claim. For example, “The Earth is round” is a proven fact. “In our right-handed world, left-handed people are discriminated against” is a fact claim. A persuasive speaker must provide arguments which build a case in favour of the claim, showing that the claim is probably true, or at least is more likely true than false.

Value claims are arguable statements concerning the relative merits of something which is measured subjectively (e.g., “Victoria is a better place to go for summer vacation than Calgary”). What makes a value claim arguable is that different people may disagree on the criteria used to evaluate something (e.g., weather, live entertainment, water sports). Differing value claims may be used to argue the value of a variety of topics (e.g., movies, styles of living, community organizations). Defending a value claim involves offering a set of criteria for consideration, defending the set of criteria as legitimate, and showing how applying the criteria justifies the claim.

A policy claim is a statement regarding the merits of one course of action as opposed to other courses of action. What makes a policy claim arguable is that, even though people and institutions may not be totally certain about the proper course of action to take, they still must act. To argue in defence of a policy claim is to state that, given the knowledge we have at the present time, it is best to act in the manner proposed rather than in some alternative way.

A definition claim is a statement telling how a particular word or phrase should be defined in a certain context. A definition claim is arguable because different people use the same word in contradictory ways. Therefore, the claims made by different people may also be contradictory, when these claims are based on their own special interpretations of word usage and meaning.

Principles of Persuasion

Students should keep the following principles in mind when they are preparing persuasive speeches:

• People are more likely to change their behaviour if the proposition asks for a small change rather than a large change in their lives (e.g., trying one vegetarian meal rather than becoming total vegetarians).
• People are more likely to consider changing their behaviour if the change will benefit them more than it will cost them. Consider the costs to the audience in terms of money, time commitment, energy, and skill.
• People are more likely to change their behaviour if the change meets their needs. Needs vary in different communities, in different schools, and in different individuals.
• People are more likely to change their behaviour if suggested change is approached gradually in the talk. Move from arguments which the audience will find most acceptable to those which the audience will find more difficult to accept.

Using Persuasive Strategies

Three basic strategies used in persuasion are appeal to reason, appeal to audience emotion, and appeal to audience needs. Speakers should remember their ethical responsibilities and not use dishonest or misleading persuasive appeals.

Listening Critically to Persuasive Speaking

The critical listener raises certain questions concerning the meaning of what is said and the intention of the speaker. The critical listener analyzes the persuasive speech, yet withholds judgement until there is enough data for drawing conclusions. Some questions the critical listener might ask include:

• What is this speaker’s goal?
• Is the problem as important as this speaker says it is?
• Is there enough evidence presented to justify an acceptance of the speaker’s claim?
• Are there pieces of evidence or arguments which have not been introduced?
• Has the speaker provided sources for the data which is presented?
• Does the speaker cover up the main issue through the use of less important examples or details?
• Is the speaker sincere?
• Are the speaker’s arguments logical?
• Has the speaker tried to manipulate me by appealing to certain emotions or needs that I have?

Listeners will add questions or change them to suit their own purposes and needs, depending on the uniqueness of each persuasive talk.

I welcome an overload of your comments.

You may have seen the movie. Tthis is the whale that was in the movie and what happened to it after.

Respond to these  articles with your personal thought, opinions and comments.

Which article did you like best or least? Why?

Can you make any connections?

December 12, 2003: Keiko died today.

    Can a killer whale, born in the ocean near Iceland but raised in aquariums in Iceland, Canada, Mexico and the United States, be returned to Iceland to live free in the ocean? Despite enormous concerns for his well-being, Keiko, star of three “Free Willy” movies, appears to be making the slow transition well.

    Born near Iceland in 1977 or 1978, Keiko was captured by Jon Gunnarson in 1979 and taken to Saedyrasfnid, an aquarium in Iceland. Three years later, he was purchased by the Marineland Theme Park in Niagara Falls, Ontario.

    At Marineland, Keiko was trained to perform for the public, but also began to get sick, with skin lesions forming. In 1985, they sold him to Reino Aventura, an amusement park in Mexico City, for $350,000.

    In 1992, Warner Bros. entered Keiko’s life when they went to Reino Aventura to film “Free Willy”, in which a killer whale is freed from an evil marine park owner. Publicity from the film eventually resulted in a feature in Life (November 1993) about the terrible conditions at Reino Aventura – Keiko was clearly dying, and efforts began to find him a new home. The work of the Earth Island Institute, an environmental advocacy group for marine animals, was instrumental in the eventual success of these efforts.

    In November 1994, with $4 million donated by Warner Bros., New Regency productions and the McCaw Foundation, the Free Willy Foundation was formed. Later called the Free Willy Keiko Foundation, in March 1999 it merged with the Jean-Michel Cousteau Institute to become Ocean Futures. It is this new organization that is now in charge of taking care of Keiko.

    Within 4 months of the formation of the Free Willy Foundation, Reino Aventura agreed to donate Keiko to the organization, and the foundation and the Oregon Coast Aquarium partnered to build a $7.3 million pool to house him. It was completed in December 1995, and shortly after, United Parcel Service (UPS) delivered Keiko to Newport, Oregon, using a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft. Keiko thrived at the new facility, gaining 1,900 pounds in his first 18 months there.

    There have now been 3 “Free Willy” movies, and each one resulted in increased pressure to get Keiko a better life. That initially meant getting him out of Mexico, but the focus soon turned to the possibility of actually setting him free, as in the movies. The movies are “Free Willy”, “Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home” and “Free Willy 3: The Rescue”. As well, there is a documentary film available, The Free Willy Story: Keiko’s Journey Home.

    In 1997, it was decided to attempt to reintroduce Keiko to the ocean. The location eventually chosen was Klettsvik Bay, Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland. It offered a fairly sheltered location close to his place of birth, and one that would be possible to enclose with a net while ‘training’ Keiko to live on his own.

    Vestmannaeyjar (the Westmann Islands) is an archipelago, made up of 15 larger islands and at least 30 islets, located just off the south coast of Iceland. In 1967, the eruption of the Surtsey volcano, and in 1973, of Eldfell, on Heimaey, the largest of the islands, brought Vestmannaeyjar to the world’s attention. Now, interest in Keiko has again focussed a great deal of attention on Heimaey in particular

    Moving Keiko to Vestmannaeyjar was not an easy task. The only aircraft in the world capable of hauling a 35,000-pound load and landing on a 3,900-foot airstrip is the C-17 Globemaster . The Free Willy Keiko Foundation hired the US Air Force, at a cost of about $300,000, to make the flight. On September 9, 1998, Keiko was transferred back to Iceland.

    A crucial component of Keiko’s care since arriving in Iceland has been the pen he lives in. Designed by Fathom23 in Washington State, it is 250 feet long, 100 feet wide and 24 feet deep, making it the largest of its type ever built. This enclosure, now termed the baypen, has every feature that could be thought of for Keiko’s welfare, from a huge cradle lift for medical exams, to a zippered door that would make his release into the bay easy.

    In January 2000, the whole of Klettsvik Bay was cordoned off with a net, to give Keiko about 800,000 square feet to explore. The net, 925 feet long, was specially designed for the extreme conditions found at the mouth of the bay. Extreme tidal currents and surges are common, but it has also withstood winds of up to 130 miles per hour since Keiko’s arrival.

    On March 3, 2000, Keiko had his first swim in the open bay.

    Keiko is still dependent upon humans for his food, and therefore his life. He still clearly enjoys the company of humans. Will he ever make the transition back to his real home? Only time will tell.

    Around the world, zoos and aquariums are coming under increasing pressure for their treatment of animals. While they provide wonderful educational opportunities that cannot be duplicated any other way, is the cost to the animals acceptable? From zoo volunteers to animal rights militants, the range of opinions is enormous.

 

 

 

Keiko’s Big Swim from Iceland
September 2002

After three years in the North Atlantic waters off of Iceland, Keiko made a historic swim to Norway in the summer of 2002. While in Iceland, Keiko was trained to eat live fish and to follow a research boat into areas where wild orca whales feed. Each summer he became more comfortable with swimming on his own and with spending time in the company of wild whales.

Keiko’s crossing of the North Atlantic began in late July when he was last observed with a group of wild whales and began swimming in an easterly direction away from Iceland. Over the next several weeks he covered more than 1,000 miles. His satellite tag provided data on his daily location and also recorded his frequent dives to depths greater than 50 meters. Over a 60-day period, Project staff continued to monitor both his position and diving behavior and sought opportunities to obtain visual observations of Keiko. Fixed wing aircraft and helicopters were deployed from Iceland and the Faeroe Islands.

On August 29th, Keiko Project staff were able to locate and observe Keiko near the Norwegian coast, and obtain close-range photos and video documenting his physical condition. It became clear that Keiko was fit and thriving! After 60 days at sea and traveling more than one thousand miles, Keiko did not appear to have lost any weight whatsoever. Measurements taken several days later confirmed that Keiko had not lost any girth.

Shortly after Keiko’s arrival in Norwegian waters, Keiko – still curious about people and boats — followed a Norwegian fishing vessel and entered a small harbor in the Halsa Community in Norway. Keiko Project staff were able to locate Keiko, but not before he had interacted with several vessels and members of the public, some of whom jumped in the water and swam with him. Our staff worked quickly and diligently with Norwegian local and federal governmental agencies over the next week to put in place regulations ensuring that people give Keiko the space he needs to continue to reintroduction effort. Keiko’s veterinarian Dr. Lanny Cornell came to Norway and expressed great confidence in Keiko’s condition, stating: “Keiko looks fantastic. I don’t believe he has lost a pound and is in great shape.”

Dave Phillips, Director of the Free Willy – Keiko Foundation stated:

“By all accounts, Keiko has made phenomenal progress this year. He’s proving he has the skills to be a wild whale, but it is critical that he not be encouraged to come to boats or people.”

Paul Irwin, President of the Humane Society of the US, the partner organization managing the Keiko Project, stated:

“We are appealing to all boaters to avoid Keiko and give him all the space he needs to be fully self-sufficient.” He continued: “Our efforts in moving Keiko from captivity to the wild have always been directed by Keiko’s best interests. We will continue to do exactly what is best for him.”

Many people still come to see Keiko, and Project staff have been pleased with the welcome Keiko continues to receive. The Halsa community is thrilled that the most famous whale in the world chose their fjord for his current stopping point.

 

 

WHERE’S WILLY?
By SUSAN ORLEAN

The New Yorker
Issue of 2002-09-23

It was a hell of a time to be in Iceland, although by most accounts it is always a hell of a time to be in Iceland, where the wind never huffs or puffs but simply blows your house down. This was early in August, and it was stormy, as usual, but the summer sun did shine a little, and the geysers burped blue steam and scalding water, and the glaciers groaned as they shoved tons of silt a few centimetres closer to the sea. On the water, the puffins frolicked, the hermit crabs frolicked, and young people bloated with salmon jerky and warm beer barfed politely into motion-sickness buckets on the ferry sailing across Klettsvik Bay. The young people were on their way to an annual songfest and drinkathon on the Westman Islands, a string of volcanic outbreaks off Iceland’s southern coast. During the trip, they spoke in Icelandic about Icelandic things, like whether they had remembered bottle openers and bandannas, and then they turned greenish and stopped talking as the boat lurched up and down the huge cold waves. After two hours or so, the waves settled and the boat slowed and glided into Heimaey Harbor, which is ringed by cliffs of old lava as holey as Swiss cheese. Dozens of trawlers and knockabouts bobbed at their moorings, nudging the docks and making that clanging sound that is supposed to make you feel lonely.

A few of the young people, gummy-mouthed and bleary-eyed, roused themselves and gazed out the portholes. We sailed past a row of white buoys strung across the mouth of a small bay.

“Hey! Keiko!” one girl exclaimed, pointing at the buoys.

“Huh?” another mumbled, looking where the first one was pointing. “Keiko?”

“Willy! Free Willy!”

“Oh, Keiko!” the others said, pushing up to the window, yanking each other’s sleeves and gawking at nothing but the empty inlet, the glassy water, the blank, looming cliffs. “Keiko! Oh, yeah! Oh, wow!”

The whale was gone, of course; he left in early July, after taking a watery journey with his human overseers to look at other whales—his kin, if not his kith—who had stopped near the Westman Islands for a midsummer feast. Keiko had seen wild whales before, having originally been one himself, and he had been reintroduced to them two years ago, after twenty years of captivity. He watched the visiting whales from a shy distance at first and a bolder one later, but he always returned to the boat that had led him out to open water. Back at his private pen in the harbor, an international staff of humans would massage his fin, scratch his tongue, and compose press releases detailing his experiences at sea. This July, however, Keiko ventured closer to the whales than ever, and then followed them when they headed off past Lousy Bank, past the Faeroe Islands, onward to—well, honestly, who knows? Whales keep their own counsel. The truth about them is that they come and go, and you can’t really know where they’ve gone—unless you’ve already fished them out of the water, drilled holes in their dorsal fins, and hung radio tags on them. Only a madman would suggest that drilling a hole in a whale’s dorsal fin is easy. This is why no one is sure where the creatures that visit Iceland every summer spend the winter—and where, presumably, they were heading late in July.

But Keiko—which means “lucky one” in Japanese—is the most watched whale in the world. He has a satellite tag and a VHF transmitter and three nonprofit organizations vested in him, along with millions of spectators, waiting to see if this famous, accomplished, celebrated whale, who has lived most of his life as a pet, will take to the wild. Every day that Keiko is on his own, his location is tracked by satellite, relayed over the Internet, and then plotted on a marine chart in the Free Willy/Keiko Foundation offices in the Westman Islands, a row of neatly pencilled “X”s tracing his arcing route through the sea.

What is known about Keiko is this: he is an Orcinus orca, commonly called the orca or killer whale; weighing as much as ten thousand pounds, the orca is the largest member of the dolphin family—big mouth, big teeth, big appetite. Like humans, orcas can kill and eat almost anything they choose. What they usually choose is herring, salmon, or cod, but some orcas prefer to eat sea lions, walruses, and other whales. They have been known to neatly skin a full-grown minke whale, bite off its dorsal fin, and eat only its tongue, a behavior that has been construed as either a tendency toward ostentatious epicurean wastefulness or a cross-species reënactment of an Aztec virgin sacrifice. Orcas seem to have no taste for humans. Only two people have ever been killed by captive killer whales, and both deaths involved the same whale, Sea World’s Tillikum, who held his victims underwater to drown them but did not eat them afterward. Orcas are found in every ocean on the planet and have enjoyed relative invulnerability from hunting; they are twenty times less blubbery than sperm whales and have therefore been less valued for oil, and their meat is far less tender and flavorful than that of minke whales. They are, on the other hand, fiercely smart and remarkably educable. They are also handsomely outfitted in black and white with a grayish saddle-patch—more appealing by far than, say, the transcendent horribleness, the blank ghastliness, the strange and awful portentousness of a gigantic white whale. Therein lies the killer whale’s real weakness: its suitability for being displayed and taught to perform silly tricks, made all the more marvellous by its reputation as a ruthless assassin.

In 1964, the Vancouver Aquarium commissioned a sculptor to kill an orca to use as a model for an artificial one. An orca was harpooned, but it managed to survive, so the aquarium decided to make the best of the sculptor’s ineptitude and display the live whale rather than build the plastic one. The whale was named Moby Doll. She was the first orca in captivity. She died after eighty-seven days, but had been observed enough to demonstrate the species’s considerable intelligence. More than a hundred and thirty orcas have been captured for display since Moby Doll’s misadventures. Many of them came from Iceland, until all whaling in the country was halted in 1989. Currently, there are about fifty orcas in aquariums and amusement parks around the world, and their scarcity has made them each worth a million dollars or more.

Keiko’s beginnings, however, were humble. He was born near Iceland, in 1977 or 1978, and was captured in 1979. For a few years, he lived in a down-in-the-mouth aquarium outside Reykjavik, which raised most of its money by catching and selling killer whales to other aquariums. In 1982, Keiko was sold to Marineland, a park in Niagara Falls, Ontario. There he was bullied by older whales, and in 1985 Marineland sold him to Reino Aventura, an amusement park in Mexico City.

The whale facility at Reino Aventura was too small, too shallow, and too warm for an orca. There were also no other whales to keep Keiko company. He developed an unsightly pimply condition around his armpits and had the muscle tone of a wet noodle. He could hold his breath for only three minutes, and wore down his teeth by gnawing the concrete around his tank. He spent much of his time swimming in nihilistic little circles and had a lethargy that some saw as foretokening an early death. In spite of this, and in spite of his droopy dorsal fin (which is symptomatic of nothing, but made him look sad), he was much adored. He, in turn, was fond of children and cameras.

After Dino De Laurentiis’s 1977 disaster epic “Orca,” Hollywood had shown little interest in cetacean films. Into this void, a writer named Keith Walker submitted to the producer Richard Donner a script about a mute orphan boy who lives with nuns and befriends a whale at an amusement park. In Walker’s original script, the boy is silent until the end of the movie, when he releases the whale into the ocean and cries out, “Free Willy!” Donner, an environmentalist and an animal lover, liked the script’s intentions and passed it to his wife, the producer Lauren Shuler Donner, and her partner, Jennie Lew Tugend, for development. Tugend and Shuler Donner thought that the story was too sugary. They rewrote the boy as a juvenile delinquent, the whale as a petulant malcontent, and the amusement-park operator as a penny-pinching crook, but they kept the climactic release.

Once Warner Bros. agreed to underwrite the project, Tugend and Shuler Donner went out to audition the killer whales of the world to play Willy. Twenty-one of the twenty-three orcas in the United States belong to Sea World. The company’s executives reviewed the script, shuddered at the message of whale emancipation, and declared all of its orcas unavailable for movie work. Shuler Donner and Tugend looked further. In Mexico, at Reino Aventura, they found not only Keiko but also a dilapidated facility that would be perfect for the film’s fictional dilapidated facility, as well as park owners who were disposed to let their whale appear in a pro-wild-whale, anti-captivity movie.

“Free Willy,” which was shot on a lean budget of twenty million dollars, had a cast of mostly unknowns, and starred a child actor named Jason James Richter, who was the same age as Keiko: twelve. No one imagined what a success it would become, although Shuler Donner had an inkling when, after an early research screening, a man approached her, held out ten dollars, and said, “Here, use this money to save the whales.”

“Free Willy” pulled in huge audiences right from the start—mostly kids, of course, who insisted on seeing the movie over and over and over, thus answering the movie’s tag-line question, “How far would you go for a friend?,” with a worldwide gross of a hundred and fifty-four million dollars. What’s more, the producers had attached a message at the end of the movie directing anyone interested in saving the whales to call 1-800-4-WHALES, a number that belonged to Earth Island Institute, an environmental group. The resulting torrent of calls blew the minds of everyone involved—the executives at Warner Bros., the producers, the people at Earth Island Institute. And not just the number of calls but the fact that many of the callers were asking something that hadn’t been anticipated: Sure, save the wild whales, but, more to the point, what about Willy?

“We had no clue that this would involve Keiko as an individual,” David Phillips, of Earth Island Institute, says. “At that point, he was just a prop in the movie. Of course, everyone had fallen in love with him. The cast was in love with him. Everyone who gets near him gets Keiko virus.”

Keiko, who had become infected with his own virus—a papillomavirus that had caused the pimply irritation on his skin—was still languishing in Mexico, but now he was in demand. The owners of Reino Aventura didn’t want to part with him, but they recognized that he was in poor health, and possibly even dying. They had already tried to find Keiko another home, having previously offered to sell him to Sea World, but Sea World hadn’t wanted a warty whale. Now, suddenly, everybody wanted him. Michael Jackson sent representatives to Mexico, hoping to acquire Keiko for his ranch. Conservation groups wanted him for this or that aquarium. Scientists asked to keep him in a tank on Cape Cod for research.

David Phillips, with the support of the movie’s producers, had formed the Free Willy/Keiko Foundation, whose mission was to rehabilitate and release Keiko. Reino Aventura’s owners finally chose the foundation over other suitors, and agreed to give Keiko away—but the expense of moving and housing him still had to be met. More than a million people had already contributed to the cause, but in amounts that were usually modest, raised at Free Willy bake sales and by kids breaking open their piggy banks. U.P.S. agreed to fly Keiko free of charge, but the container and other incidentals would cost at least two hundred thousand dollars. Shuler Donner brought several bulging bags of letters to the studio executives—letters demanding to know whether Willy had really been set free and, if he hadn’t, what they were going to do about it. The Free Willy/Keiko Foundation got a million dollars from both Warner Bros. and the film’s other production company, New Regency. The Humane Society of the United States gave another million. Next, the telecommunications tycoon Craig McCaw put in a million, through the Craig and Susan McCaw Foundation.

“Craig’s not really an animal person,” McCaw’s spokesman, Bob Ratliffe, said not long ago. “He’s an environmentalist and is interested in the health of the oceans, and—well, long story short, Craig gives the million bucks. And then he gave another one and a half million to build a tank for Keiko in Oregon. His intention was never to be as involved as he became, but he really kind of bonded with Keiko. He went swimming with him. He was actually on the whale’s back, and—well, long story short, he got very involved.”

Mexican children cried bitterly when Keiko was loaded onto a U.P.S. truck and taken away in January, 1996, and who could blame them? The park used to allow kids to have pool parties with him in his tank, and now he was leaving for good, travelling thousands of miles north to the Oregon Coast Aquarium. In a documentary film about Keiko, his Reino Aventura trainers, two beautiful young women, were nearly hysterical about his departure, saying he was not just a whale or a job but their closest friend. The truck carrying him to the C-130 Hercules cargo plane moved at a solemn pace with a police escort, as if it were the Popemobile, and more than a hundred thousand people lined the streets at dawn to say goodbye. In Newport, Oregon, the depressed, gray seaside town where the aquarium is situated, there were more crowds and more tears—Willy was almost free!—and there was the gorgeous new $7.3 million tank that the Free Willy/Keiko Foundation had built for him, and the staff of six to care for him, cure him, and get him ready for the big, wide world. Throughout Oregon, there was Keikomania, with around-the-clock news reports and Keiko-cams and special sections in the newspaper about the whale, with instructions on how to fold a broadsheet into a whale-shaped cap.

“It was like New Year’s Eve when he arrived,” Ken Lytwyn, the senior mammalogist at the aquarium, said recently, sounding wistful. “I’ve worked with dolphins and sea lions and even other killer whales, but Keiko was . . . different. There was really something there.”

By every measure, Keiko thrived in Newport. His skin cleared up; he gained two thousand pounds; he tasted live fish for the first time since infancy; he had toys to play with and a television set on which he could watch cartoons. His caretakers found him more Labrador retriever than orca: cheerful, affectionate, eager to please—the sort of killer whale who, if you were in the tank and he swam over to see what you were doing, would be careful not to accidentally crush you to death. Attendance at the struggling aquarium rose to an all-time high, and all those visitors, with their demands for snacks and souvenirs and motel rooms and gasoline, buoyed every enterprise around.

Wouldn’t it have been great if Keiko could have stayed there forever? He was then twenty-one years old, a middle-aged piebald virgin living as good a life as captivity could offer. But the plan had always been to free Willy, even though a killer whale had never been set free before. Moreover, Keiko was hardly an exemplary candidate for release. He had been confined for so long, had become so thoroughly accustomed to human contact, and was so much more a diplomat than an executioner that it was hard to imagine him chewing holes in walruses and beating schools of salmon to a pulp with his terrible, awesome tail.

When would Keiko be ready to take the next step toward freedom? Criteria had been set up, benchmarks had been established—Was he eating live fish? Could he swim great distances? Could he hold his breath underwater for a long time?—but, still, right-minded people could disagree. In fact, right-minded people could even litigate, as the Oregon Coast Aquarium did, in 1997, to prevent the Free Willy/Keiko Foundation from moving the whale to Iceland, where he would be decanted into the actual ocean, into an open-water pen in Heimaey Harbor. The aquarium’s position was that Keiko was not ready to leave; the foundation’s position was that (a) Keiko was indeed ready to leave, and (b) he belonged to the foundation, not the aquarium. Relations grew ugly, then hideous. In early October, 1997, the board members of the aquarium requested an independent evaluation of Keiko’s health. A few days later, the Oregon Veterinary Medical Examining Board announced that it would investigate Keiko’s care and the legality of his custody arrangements. There was talk in the Free Willy camp of moving Keiko to a pen in Oregon’s Depoe Bay. Finally, a blue-ribbon panel of experts was formed to analyze Keiko’s well-being and determine his fitness for release. To the dismay of the Oregon Coast Aquarium, the run of million-visitor years would soon be over: the panel announced that Keiko was ready and able to go.

Even then, there were skeptics who believed that the effort to free Keiko was doomed. Some of those skeptics also happened to be employed by Sea World, which had been picketed to free their own orcas in the wake of “Free Willy”: they warned that the poor whale would get frostbite if he was exiled to dark, cold, miserable Iceland—this in spite of the fact that Keiko was born in Iceland and that killer whales teemed in the waters offshore. But even among whale people—free-whale people, that is—there was doubt. Keiko, they argued, was already ruined. It was too late to teach him what a wild whale needs to know, and he repeatedly demonstrated an alarming preference for frozen fish over fresh, suggesting that his tastes had become completely corrupted by two decades in a fishbowl. What’s more, there was a conspiracy theory circulating in the most radical anti-captivity ranks that Sea World might actually be behind the free-Keiko efforts, knowing that they would fail, thus inoculating amusement parks around the world from an upwelling of liberationist sentiment.

Skepticism was not the only impediment to moving Keiko to his ancestral home. Consider this: Icelandic fishermen view whales as annoying and gluttonous—blubbery fish-grinders that consume commercial product by the ton. The government has asked the International Whaling Commission to allow regulated whaling again, and Iceland recently accepted the first shipment of Norwegian whale meat in fourteen years. Now imagine that you are David Phillips, of Earth Island Institute, and you represent a telecommunications billionaire, the Humane Society, and Ocean Futures, an environmental group founded by Jean-Michel Cousteau, and you are approaching various Icelandic ministries for permits to construct a million-dollar pen in the harbor; organize a fleet of boats, helicopters, and airplanes; and muster a crew of scientists, veterinarians, and animal trainers for the nurture and eventual discharge of one Keiko, a.k.a. Willy, a whale. Furthermore, the affront of having a whale so coddled in Icelandic waters would not even be offset by the comfort of cold cash, since Keiko would not be on display. There would be no Icelandair travel packages to visit Keiko—he would be living in a pen in the harbor, accessible only by boat, and he would be slowly weaned from human contact to ready him for life among his brethren. “The opposition from the Ministry of Fisheries was fierce,” Phillips said. “This was antithetical to everything they do. There is very little by way of whale-conservation awareness in Iceland, and a lot of hostility toward anything coming from the U.S. So we started looking at other locations, in Ireland and in England, too. But Iceland was Keiko’s home waters and really the best place for him, and, after a long series of complexities, we finally got it approved.”

So now there was another flight to pay for (three hundred and seventy thousand dollars), another pen to build (a million dollars), a staff to recruit and equip and pay. The annual costs of the project in Iceland were estimated at three million dollars; if Keiko never learned to live on his own, the foundation could conceivably be looking after him for thirty more years, at a cost of ninety million dollars. “Along the way, this had become a different kind of project,” Bob Ratliffe, of the Craig and Susan McCaw Foundation, explained. “It was involving planes and helicopters and big boats and major expenses.” But, Ratliffe said, a commitment had been made to the creature, and there was a desire to do something people said couldn’t be done. The flight on an Air Force C-17 was booked, the gallons of diaper-rash ointment to moisturize Keiko during the long flight procured, Familian Industrial Plastics contracted to build the new pen, the staff of fifteen lined up. By September of 1998, it was all ready. The goodbyes were again tearful. Keikomania had rolled on, unabated, since the day the whale arrived in Newport, and two more Willy movies had come out, further inciting whale devotion—”Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home,” and “Free Willy 3: The Rescue”—although these used computer-enhanced footage of wild whales and animatronic models rather than a real Willy.

“I went to his tank and told him goodbye and good luck,” Ken Lytwyn, the Oregon Coast Aquarium mammalogist, recalls. “I would love to see the release work, but, because of who Keiko is, the kind of individual he is, I don’t think it will. I was really sad when they said he was going, but it wasn’t my call.”

Ah, the Westman Islands! So raw, so rugged, ripped so recently from the earth’s dermis—in fact, the youngest landmass on the planet may be the little rock pile called Surtsey, the southernmost Westman in the chain, tossed up above sea level only thirteen years before Keiko’s mother conceived him. And as recently as 1973 a volcano erupted right in the middle of Heimaey, increasing the island’s landmass by twenty per cent. To make a living, people in the Westmans fish and they fish and they fish, and a few of them service the small but steady tourist economy. Slogans range from the somewhat inexplicable “Westman Islands, Capri of the North” to the more explicable “Ten Million Puffins Can’t Be Wrong.” Everywhere you look, you see dozens of these stout, clownish black-and-white birds: nesting in lava outcroppings, teetering on cliffs, plopping like stones into the sea. Every August, the baby puffins sail out of their nests to make their first trip on the ocean and instead crash-land in town, seduced by the lights of human civilization. This magical visitation and potential avian catastrophe is known as pysjunaetur—the Night of the Pufflings—and children and visitors await it every summer, armed with cardboard boxes for the rescue effort, and, in the morning, they release the babies at the water’s edge. When full grown, puffins are enjoyed in the Westmans roasted, smoked, or sliced thin, like carpaccio.

The whale was not unwelcome here when he arrived, in September of 1998, even though you couldn’t see him unless you drove up to the ledge across the harbor and looked through a telescope that the foundation had installed; and even though not many local people got jobs; and even though the Keiko merchandise—the shot glasses and aprons and tea cozies decorated with his distinctive black-and-white face—wasn’t flying off the shelves in the souvenir shops. He was met with what was becoming the standard greeting in Keiko’s life—several hundred accredited representatives of the media and scores of ebullient schoolchildren, many of whom had first seen “Free Willy” when an Icelandic hot-dog company gave the video away for free with a six-pack of franks. Everyone, certainly, liked Keiko, admired him for his gentle giantness, for being the good egg who tolerated being crated and shipped hither and thither, for suffering with a sort of martyred calm the strange, fickle circumstances of his life. If anyone thought that the money being spent on his rehabilitation was an insane extravagance, they didn’t blame it on the whale: it wasn’t his fault that he was captured to begin with and stuck in a lousy tub in Mexico. It wasn’t his fault that he became a ten-thousand-pound symbol of promises kept (or not) and dreams achieved (or not) and integrity maintained (or not) and nature respected (or not). It also wasn’t his fault that he didn’t know how to blow a bubble-net and trap herring, and it wasn’t his fault that he’d been torn from the bosom of his family at such a young age that now he was a little afraid of wild whales, and that they viewed him as a bit of a freak.

Moving the Keiko project to Iceland wasn’t easy. The storms were endless—wild, white, end-of-the-world storms, with screaming winds and waves so high and stiff that they looked set with pomade. A walloping squall hit Heimaey just two weeks after Keiko arrived. The pen net, held in place with what the staff called “the big-ass chain”—each link weighed five hundred pounds—broke apart and had to be rebuilt and reanchored. Keiko’s living quarters were splendid, but everything had to be done by boat, since the land that formed the bay around him was a sheer ridge of petrified lava. A crust of grass grew on the lava, and every summer local farmers ferried their sheep out to spend the season grazing on the ridge. The staff agreed to restrain Keiko when the sheep were floated back and forth, since no one could guarantee that a killer whale wouldn’t have a taste for mutton. And throughout the next three years the caretaking staff turned over again and again, because it was lonely and cold in Iceland, even if you were crazy in love with your whale.

Then the stock market deflated. This would not ordinarily be a matter of much concern to a whale, but Craig McCaw now wanted to pay more attention to his other undertakings—some land-based conservation efforts, some world-peace initiatives with Nelson Mandela—and it just so happened that his company, Nextel, had seen its stock price fall from a high of more than eighty dollars a share to somewhere around ten. He wasn’t crying poorhouse, but the word went out at the end of 2001 that the three-million-dollar annual underwriting from the Craig and Susan McCaw Foundation was finished.

It was such an irony, in a way—just as everything in Keiko’s life has been an irony—that the funding dried up just as the project was starting to accomplish what it had set out to do. In the summer of 2000, Keiko began taking supervised “walks” out of his pen into the ocean. At first, when he saw wild whales he did a spy-hop to look at them and then swam back to the staff boat and followed it home. The next year, he dallied a little, and more than once he stayed with the wild whales when the staff boat sailed away. Meanwhile, the budget for the project was cut from more than three million dollars a year to six hundred thousand dollars, and the helicopter and pilot that McCaw had provided were furloughed, and the Free Willy/Keiko Foundation offices in Heimaey were consolidated into one drab waterfront space, a former grocery store (with, conveniently enough, a huge freezer for Keiko’s herring).

Despite Keiko’s progress, though, there was no irrefutable evidence that he would ever leave his bay pen permanently. During the winter, when the wild whales were gone, he was back in his pen full time, and he was the same tractable fellow as always, ready in a minute to put his big wet rubbery head in your lap. If he was getting an idea of what wildness was, he was still a bit of a baby, and certainly daintier than you might think a killer whale should be. Once, when the trainers instructed him to bring something up from the bottom of the bay, he presented them with a puffin feather when they were expecting something more like a boulder, and then he accidentally dropped it, dived back down, and brought up the same tiny feather. Another time, he came up with a little hermit crab that was blithely scurrying up and down the long row of his teeth, oblivious of the fact that it was inside the mouth of a killer whale. When seagulls stole his food, he got angry, but he usually just grabbed them, shook them a bit, and spit them out.

Really, though, just how big a baby was he? There were plenty of people who wondered whether Keiko was being held back. “I worry about the trainers,” David Phillips said recently. “Just who is more dependent on whom?” It wasn’t simply a question of Keiko’s providing jobs for people but the emotional attachment. One of his trainers carried pictures of Keiko rather than of her children in her wallet. And if Keiko didn’t leave—that is, if he didn’t join a whale pod, learn how to hunt, eschew the easy life of a kept man, a Hollywood retiree—he would have to be funded with new money from somewhere. Whoever contributed to the Keiko project now would have to do it knowing that he or she would probably be underwriting not a magnificent mammal’s colossal leap to freedom but an ongoing day-care program for an aging whale.

Then, on July 7th, he was gone like a shot. The trainers had led him out to the waters near Surtsey, where several pods of killer whales were rounding up a ration of herring, and Keiko headed over to them and didn’t turn back. Days went by, and he was still loitering with them. The project staff checked on him, noted that he was getting on nicely, and then slipped away without his noticing. More days went by. The summer was in full bloom. The sun hung in the sky until close to midnight; the ice creaked and melted; the sheep, now so heavy with wool that they looked like four-legged snowballs, clipped the grass down to the rock on the cliffs surrounding the empty bay pen. In late July, a huge storm muscled in on Heimaey, and for days it was too rough to send anyone out on the water. The satellite was still transmitting coördinates from Keiko’s radio tag, but there was no way to tell whether he was with other whales and eating, or floundering around, lost.

By the time I got to Heimaey, Keiko had been on his own for almost a month. I went down to the office the morning I arrived, during the three-hour window of the satellite feed. It is a large room across from the harbor, outfitted with a motley array of cast-off desks, boating magazines, foul-weather gear, and photographs of a loaf of bread that one of the staff members had baked in the still-warm crater of Heimaey’s volcano. A handful of people wandered in and out: Fernando Ugarte, a Mexican scientist with a master’s degree in the killer whales of Norway; John Valentine, an American whale-training consultant, in town from his home in Thailand; Colin Baird, a Canadian now running the Heimaey office; Michael Parks, a marine-operations coördinator, who is from Oklahoma but lives in Alaska; a Danish whale scientist; a sailor from Ireland; and three Icelandic staff members, one of whom was an awesomely musclebound former Mr. Iceland. Charles Vinick, the executive vice-president of Ocean Futures, had flown in the day before from the group’s Paris office, to organize the effort to figure out where Keiko had gone. Naomi Rose, a marine-mammal scientist with the Humane Society, had also just arrived on what had been planned as a trip to check Keiko’s physical fitness.

“It looks like he’s spent all this time with wild whales,” Vinick said. “To me that’s, like, wow.”

Michael Parks was plotting the satellite information on a marine chart. “He’s south today,” he said. “Jesus Christ, he’s here.” He was pointing to a spot southeast of Surtsey, several inches off the chart.

“He’s making the decisions now. He’s in charge,” Vinick said. “He could be gone for good.” People drifted over to examine the chart. It looked as though Keiko was travelling sixty or seventy miles a day and was now too far away to reach by the project’s fast but open-deck workboat. It was decided that three people would take a sailboat in Keiko’s general direction. This would put them out of regular radio range, making it impossible to receive the updated satellite coördinates. But one of the staff people knew a company in Reykjavik that rented satellite telephones that would work at such distances, and arranged to have one flown from Reykjavik to Heimaey—or conveyed by ferry, if fog, which rolled in regularly, kept the island airport closed. Then another group would carry the phone out to the sailboat on the little workboat. Vinick also wanted to hire a private plane to fly overhead, but none would be available for a couple of days. Once they sighted Keiko—if they sighted Keiko—they would either leave him alone, if he seemed to be eating and keeping company with other whales, or lure him back to the pen, if he seemed distressed or lonely or hungry. By the time all the arrangements were made, everyone seemed a little exhausted, as if they had laid out plans for an armed invasion.

We took a boat out in the harbor to check on the pen. On the deck of the equipment shed was a dead puffin, probably blown sideways by the storm. Inside the shed, someone had posted a list of possible new behaviors to teach Keiko which included “Pec slap and swim,” “Bubble-blow underwater,” and “Swallow Jim in one piece.” A crew of divers was scheduled to start cleaning the seaweed off the net in preparation for winter, although now it seemed like a bootless task, given that Keiko might never come back.

But it was a good day, all things considered. The Humane Society had just revealed that it would take over managing and funding the project, and Craig McCaw’s ex-wife, Wendy, announced a grant of four hundred thousand dollars for Keiko. In the afternoon, the fog thinned, flights made their way to Heimaey, and the rented satellite phone arrived. As we loaded gear onto the workboat, a gray-faced local woman, bundled in a man’s overcoat and red galoshes, hollered from the dock, “How’s my Keiko? Is our star still out there?”

Call me only slightly disappointed. Who wouldn’t want to have seen the great black-and-white whale? Who wouldn’t want to scratch his tongue, look into that plum-size eye, take a turn around the bay pen on his back? All I saw of whales in Iceland were two humpbacks who dived a few feet from the workboat, flourishing their tails like ladies’ fans. Keiko was far away by then, headed for Norway, where he panhandled from picnicking families and romped in Skaalvik Fjord. What a choice! In the entire world, the only country that allows commercial whaling is Norway, and a member of Bergen’s Institute of Marine Research suggested that it was time to stop the madness and put Keiko to death. But the children who swam on his back and fed him fish reportedly found him delightful, as has everyone who has ever known Keiko. He played with them for a night and a day, the luckiest whale in the world, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

 

These are some humorous poems by a poet named Kenn Nesbitt.

Why don’t you try writing a few yourselves?

I Have to Write a Poem

I have to write a poem

but I really don’t know how.

So maybe I’ll just make a rhyme

with something dumb, like “cow.”

Okay, I’ll write about a cow,

but that’s so commonplace.

I think I’ll have to make her be…

a cow from outer space!

My cow will need a helmet

and a space suit and a ship.

Of course, she’ll keep a blaster

in the holster on her hip.

She’ll hurtle through the galaxy

on meteoric flights

to battle monkey aliens

in huge karate fights.

She’ll duel with laser sabers

while avoiding lava spray

to vanquish evil emperors

and always save the day.

I hope the teacher likes my tale,

“Amazing Astro Cow.”

Yes, that’s the poem I will write

as soon as I learn how.

–Kenn Nesbitt

 

 

 

 

My Dog Ate My Homework

My dog ate my homework.

That mischievous pup

got hold of my homework

and gobbled it up.

My dog ate my homework.

It’s gonna be late.

I guess that the teacher

will just have to wait.

My dog ate my homework.

He swallowed it whole.

I shouldn’t have mixed it

with food in his bowl.

–Kenn Nesbitt

The Tiger and the Zebra

The tiger phoned the zebra

and invited him to dine.

He said “If you could join me

that would simply be devine.”

The zebra said “I thank you,

but respectfully decline.

I heard you ate the antelope;

he was a friend of mine.”

On hearing this the tiger cried

“I must admit it’s true!

I also ate the buffalo,

the llama and the gnu.

And yes I ate the warthog,

the gazelle and kangaroo,

but I could never eat a creature

beautiful as you.

“You see I have a secret

I’m embarrassed to confide:

I look on you with envy

and a modicum of pride.

Of all the creatures ever known,”

the tiger gently sighed,

“It seems we are the only two

with such a stripy hide.

“Now seeing how we share this

strong resemblance of the skin,

I only can conclude that we are

just as close as kin.

This means you are my brother

and, though fearsome I have been,

I could not eat my brother,

that would surely be a sin.”

The zebra thought, and then replied

“I’m certain you are right.

The stripy coats we both possess

are such a handsome sight!

My brother, will you let me

reconsider if I might?

My calendar is empty so

please let us dine tonight.”

The tiger met the zebra in

his brand-new fancy car

and drove him to a restaurant

which wasn’t very far.

And when they both were seated

at a table near the bar,

the zebra asked “What’s on the grill?”

The tiger said “You are.”

“But please, you cannot dine on me!”

the outraged zebra cried.

“To cook me up and eat me

is a thing I can’t abide.

You asked me for your trust

and I unwarily complied.

You said you could not eat me

now you plan to have me fried?”

“And what about the envy

and the modicum of pride?

And what of us as brothers

since we share a stripy hide?”

“I’m sorry,” said the tiger

and he smiled as he replied,

“but I love the taste of zebra

so, in other words, I lied.”

–Kenn Nesbitt

 

 

 

 

 

Frank, the Frog Collector

I’m Frank, the frog collector,

and I’m happy to report

my collection’s nearly finished;

I have frogs of every sort.

I record them in my journal

so that every single frog

is accounted for completely

with an entry in my log.

I have hundreds, maybe thousands

of amphibians at home.

I have frogs of quilted fabric.

I have frogs of gleaming chrome.

I have frogs of painted porcelain,

and frogs of brass and tin.

I have frogs you open up

to find another frog within.

There are small magnetic tree frogs

clinging gently to the fridge

and Louisiana bullfrogs

on a plastic bayou bridge.

I have frogs on ancient bicycles

with shiny silver bells.

I have frogs proposing marriage

to their froggy mademoiselles.

You’ll see frogs ascending ladders.

You’ll see frogs descending stairs,

yes, and frogs reclining dreamily

in comfy leather chairs.

I have frogs with pink umbrellas.

I have frogs engrossed in books.

Even frogs that dangle fishing poles

in nonexistant brooks.

My abode is filled with frogs

from top to bottom, front to back.

There are frogs in every corner,

every crevice, every crack.

There is only one that’s missing;

just one blank space in my log.

So I’m begging, mom and dad,

can I please have a REAL frog?

–Kenn Nesbitt

 

My Elephant Thinks I’m Wonderful

My elephant thinks I’m wonderful.

My elephant thinks I’m cool.

My elephant hangs around with me

and follows me into school.

My elephant likes the way I look.

He thinks that I’m fun and smart.

He thinks that I’m kind and generous

and have a terrific heart.

My elephant thinks I’m brave and bold.

He’s proud of my strength and guts.

But mostly he likes the way I smell.

My elephant thinks I’m nuts.

–Kenn Nesbitt