Beauty and the Geek is a reality television series. The premise of the show consists of a group of “Beauties” (young women who have relied primarily on their looks) and a group of “Geeks” (young men who have relied primarily on intellect). They are paired up to compete as couples for the prizes. In the fourth season, it included an extra team with a male “beauty” and a female “geek”. For the fifth season, the beauties and geeks competed against each other at first, and teams of one beauty and one geek were not selected until episode three. Each beauty lives with her geek in a room during the competition. There are challenges in each episode – one testing the beauties on academic subject, and another that has the geeks competing in a more social realm.

Here is the sneak peak of the new season in 2013.

 

The show simply plays on stereotypes – “beauties” are those attractive young women but aren’t very bright and “geeks” are smart but peculiar guys with limited social skills. It is based on how well the beauty and the geek get along.

 

http://jonnegroni.com

 

This is a site of a writer called Joh Negroni. He writes everything he muses on and cares about. There are also articles he wrote about movies.I found one of his recent posts on The Pixar Theory so interesting. Check it out!

I’m 21 this year. In this twenty something category, it’s like growing up, but not yet an adult, I still recognize that I’m part kid. It’s easy to be controlled by our age; and the expectations that supposed to be at certain stages. Few years ago, I was still like wondering when I would be old enough to get a driving license or just go legally drinking. People always say that the “twenties” is short. It always stuck in my mind – by what age I graduate, buy your first apartmente, get married, have kids, then by when I should start my retirement. All these “goals” which should be able to acheive at certain stages in our life don’t even match the goals I  plan to reach when I was still a ten something teenager.

It is funny. When I was fifteen, I couldn’t wait to be eighteen. When I was eighteen, I planned to be married by 25 with two kids. When I was twenty, I made a list of all the goals I had in my mind and hope to accomplish them. I am already at the exact stage which everything seems so far away years ago. Time does change everything. I have been always hoping to get a ticket to Europe. I hope to travel around the world. I hope to have interesting conversations with strangers from different countries. I hope to get my dream job. I hope I don’t do only any of these things I hope but all of them.

 

 

11 Questions Every Twenty-Something Needs to Ask.

 

Photographs can be a source of information; photographs communicate information in visual form. It has been a while that the camera records everything at everywhere, at wars, at home and on streets; in different society and environment. A collection of photographs become visual documents; for examples, images preserved in family albums, in government records, in historic scrapbooks, etc. Yet at first I think each photograph captures only that one instant moment in an event, it actually tells more than the freeze action but a story, cultural values and attitudes.  To appreciate a photograph, we should also try to consider the motives of the photographer and the subject.

 

I found a link to give you three tips to help your photos tell a story.

 

Photographs do what our eye itself cannot, to preserve the appearance of an event. Photographs will “continue to exist in time instead of being arrested moments”. Photographs also construct a context, to construct it with words.

 

“A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an         interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.”

Berger, J. (1978). Uses of Photography. Vintage International: New York.

 

“Looking for my father” is Russian photographer Natalya Reznik constructed time capsule. She last saw her father when she was at three. She was fascinated by the thought of him; the idea of his presence and the reality of his absence. She uses photographs to look for the father she never knew.

I do not remember how he looked, I do not have any image of him in my memory. I try to find him by means of photography, to create memories which i never had—memories about family with my father. My mother was always dreaming of an ideal man. She met my father in Sochi, which soon ended up with a marriage. She did not know much of him, only that he was a captain and worked somewhere in North Russia.

They never lived together. He usually came for a few weeks and then dissapeared. At some point my mother found out that he had another wife and a child. She could never forgive him and soon they divorced. In her albums there was almost no photo left of my father—not only she divorced with him, but also destroyed all the photos of him including those from the wedding day. This project is very personal, somewhere in between documentary and fiction—where the dreams of my mother are real, but the memory I created for myself based on them, is fictional.—Natalya Reznik

 

When the world starts to get you down and nothing seems to get your way.

And it’s here to begin my story………….CHEERS

I have been watching a lot of musicals in these few months.

 

Bob Fosse, an innovovative choreographer, once said that, “the time to sing is when your emotional level is too high to just speak anymore, and the time to dance is when your emotions are just too strong to only sing about how you feel.”

 

A Woman is a Woman, Jean-Luc Godard, 1961

There is a scene in which the female character Angela did the little dance, “choreography by Bob Fosse”, then the phone rings while she is frying an egg. She tosses the egg up and it sticks to the ceiling, she runs to the other room to answer the phone, says “just a second,” then she runs back into the kitchen in time to catch the egg, put it in a dish. And she return to the phone to finish her conversation with Alfred, the male character.

 

 

My Sister Eileen, Blake Edwards ,1955

In this movie, Bob Fosse choreographed the dance number featuring himself as Frank and Tommy Rall as Chick. They are rivals for the affections of Janet.

I like early mornings. It is the moment when I feel like the whole world is still sleeping and I am the only one who is awake. I kind of forget all my problems; nothing to worry about. Everything in the early morning is just so unreal. I feel like at that moment when I open my eyes, there is only this little me, this big world and that beautiful sunrise.

 

Yet I seldom wake up in the very early morning unless I have morning class. When I wake up late; it is usually with heaps of unknown worries.

Some stupid thoughts always come up in my mind from nowhere…

I am just too normal to live an amazing life…

http://vimeo.com/73406948

“Paperman”, an Oscar-winning animated short film

 

I love this short film. It is so romantic. The story is bold and beautiful even without a single line of dialogue.  It shows that magic can flourish in this cold world.

My world as well, not hopeless.

“There is a place. Like no place on Earth. A land full of wonder, mystery, and danger! Some say, to survive it: You need to be as mad as a hatter.” (Alice in Wonderland)

Mad as a hatter? People who worked in those Englsih hat factories in 18th and 19th centuries were exposed daily to trace amounts of metal, which accumulated in their bodies over time. Some workers suffered from some sorts of impairment caused by mercury poisoning. Therefore the phrase “Mad as a Hatter” became popular as a way to refer to someone who was perceived as insane.

Which unluckily I am not… Doing a media degree is not easy. Everything is about creativity. I daydream a lot and give myself very good idea to try out something; but I seldom work on it. I have several high school friends doing either media or fashion design at universities. They always laugh at me that I don’t believe impossible things. And they said there is no use trying only if I believe impossible things. They said it is a great pleasure to do what people out there say you cannot. I guess I should try stay as mad as a hatter… My mum once told me, “just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.” True, every cloud has a silver lining. No matter what I am goign through now, I will keep hold on my faith. It is doomed at the moment; but I believe a miracle is going to happen.

I am not Alice but I am in Wonderland. Either I take the blue pill, then the story ends and I wake up in my bed; believe whatever I want to believe. Or I take the red pill, I can probably stay  in wonderland and see how deep the rabbit hole goes. Ummm… I’ll choose the red.

 

Jasmine said they are trying to work out the idea of each class creating few questions to the symposium to be answered.