Laws Restricting the Paparazzi Essay -- Celebrity Photographer Media T

The paparazzi - a fusion of the Italian words papatacci, meaning gnat and razzi meaning the popping of flashbulbs. It is also known as aggressive photography. The word paparazzo was coined by Federico Fellini, the name he gave to a prying society cameraman in his 1959 film "La Dolce Vita". Paparazzi photographers are fueled by large sums of money offered by the tabloid press. They try to catch the rich and famous in unflattering situations. The new breed of journalism grew by leaps and bounds after the Watergate scandal first broke in Washington, DC (Petersen's, 57). At first the paparazzi were an annoying group of photographers who were persistent when trying to get the perfect shot of a celebrity so they could sell the image for large sums of money but as technology became more advanced so did the equipment the paparazzi used - telephoto lenses, hi-tech listening devices, and powerful zoom lenses on video cameras. No major celebrity can avoid them. Emerging from cars, entering glittering parties or trying to take a secluded vacation, the glamour figures of the '90s are hounded mercilessly by the men-and a few women-who wield long lenses and a brazen shamelessness (Maclean, 38). Today, paparazzi's tread on private property, film celebrities during intimate moments, and even go as far as stalking a public figure. Some of these photos can be worth in the millions of dollars. A single photograph of Prince Charles seen together with his mistress Camilla Parker-Bowles is estimated to be worth 5 million English pounds. The prince says he "would love to figure out a way for the proceeds to go to charity" (Newsweek, 95).The prince and his mistress usually arrive and depart at different times in order to avoid the paparazzi when they attend a function together. The prince has been lucky. Almost all well known faces have had run-ins with the paparazzi but many have horror stories to tell. The Screen Actors Guild has been concerned with the paparazzi and how it affects many of it's 100,000 members. "The death of princess Diana was the final straw" according to the SAG president, Richard Masur. He, along with California Senators Diane Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, and three respected constitutional scholars had a meeting to discuss what could be done about the paparazzi. In less than four hours, they came up with the rough wording of S. 2103 (Quill, 27). Before... ...g with the intent to capture audio or video images of a celebrity or crime victim engaging in a personal or family activity. It will allow the celebrity or crime victim to recover damages from the paparazzi and people who employ them (Victorville). According to Andrea Brown, a spokesperson for former governor Pete Wilson, "The governor thought it was important because of safety issues for normal everyday people. These people deserve to conduct their personal lives in private. Technology requires changes in any law. It creates new ways for people to commit crimes." After all the research done on the pro's and con's of new laws that would affect the paparazzi it's easy to see how these laws could affect people on both sides of the issue. Paparazzi photographers have to make a living and the famous deserve their privacy. Celebrities know that with fame comes the loss of privacy but they do not deserve to loss all privacy and not all paparazzi photographers are ruthless, shameless, aggressive people. The laws that came into effect on January 1st, 1999 were only to restrain the most aggressive of photographers. We can only hope that the paparazzi will learn when they've gone too far.

Last three paragraphs of “The Great Gatsby” Essay

This passage is the last three paragraphs of the story. The passage is Nick’s thoughts on Gatsby and the future. This passage ends the story and concludes Nick’s narrative. It happens while Nick is going home to Minnesota in a train. It illustrates the main theme of the un-attainability of the American Dream. In the first sentence of the passage, Fitzgerald uses the word â€Å"brooding† to show the mood of Nick, the narrator. Brooding gives an impression of deep, dark thinking. Next, he talks about the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, a symbol that pervades the writing throughout the work. It symbolizes Gatsby’s hopes and dreams for the future. Fitzgerald uses the word â€Å"wonder† to show Gatsby’s excitement for his future with Daisy. Fitzgerald also uses the word â€Å"obscurity† to describe the land west of New York. This gives the tone a careless tone because Nick doesn’t explain what he really means. Nick also proceeds to call the Midwest â€Å"the dark fields of the republic.† In the second paragraph, Fitzgerald mentions the green light again, calling it â€Å"the orgastic future.† This description shows the expectations everyone has for future, but only a few people attain it. The diction of the second paragraph adds to the tone of the passage, showing the un-attainability of the American Dream. The last paragraph is only one sentence and is also the last sentence in the book. Fitzgerald uses this sentence to show that the â€Å"current† is flowing towards the East, and hence corruption. He uses the word â€Å"ceaselessly† to describe the movement of time into the past. Nick’s physical movement west is also his movement into the past and traditional values. Fitzgerald’s word choice affects the mood of the passage in many ways. In the first paragraph, Nick sounds bitter about the un-attainability of Gatsby’s dream. He says that it was â€Å"so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.† This sounds bitter and resentful. Nick then goes on to talk about how the dream that Gatsby strove for was fake and an illusion. He says that what he was really looking for was in the vast Midwest. In the second paragraph he becomes sentimental and dreamy, using ellipses to show how he keeps stretching for the American dream, which is just ahead of him. Nick turns even more sentimental in the third paragraph, saying that he is moving into  the past and embracing traditional values in spite of the overwhelming corruption. The Great Gatsby is dedicated to the theme of the decay and the unattainability of the American dream and the last three paragraphs of the book fully illustrate that theme.

Domestication History of Squashes (Cucurbita spp)

Squash (genus Cucurbita), including squashes, pumpkins, and gourds, is one of the earliest and most important of plants domesticated in the Americas, along with maize and common bean. The genus includes 12–14 species, at least six of which were domesticated independently in South America, Mesoamerica, and Eastern North America, long before European contact. Fast Facts: Squash Domestication Scientific Name: Cucurbita pepo, C. moschata, C. argyrospera, C. ficifolia, C. maximaCommon Names: Pumpkins, squash, zucchini, gourdsProgenitor Plant: Cucurbita spp, some of which are extinct  When Domesticated: 10,000 years agoWhere Domesticated:  North and South AmericaSelected Changes: Thinner rinds, smaller seeds, and edible fruit Six Main Species There are six cultivated species of squash, which in part reflect different adaptations to local environments. For example, the figleaf gourd is adapted to cool temperatures and short days; butternut squash is found in the humid tropics, and pumpkins grow in the widest range of environments. In the table below, the designation cal BP means, roughly, calendar years ago before the present. Data in this table has been assembled from a variety of published scholarly research. Name Common Name Location Date Progenitor C. pepo spp pepo pumpkins, zucchini Mesoamerica 10,000 cal BP C. pepo. spp fraterna C. moschata butternut squash Mesoamerica or northern South America 10,000 cal BP C. pepo spp fraterna C. pepo spp. ovifera summer squashes, acorns Eastern North America 5000 cal BP C. pepo spp ozarkana C. argyrosperma silver-seeded gourd, green-striped cushaw Mesoamerica 5000 cal BP C. argyrosperma spp sororia C. ficifolia fig-leafed gourd Mesoamerica or Andean South America 5000 cal BP unknown C. maxima buttercup, banana, Lakota, Hubbard, Harrahdale pumpkins South America 4000 cal BP C. maxima spp adreana Why Would Anybody Domesticate Gourds? Wild forms of squashes are harshly bitter to humans and other extant mammals, so bitter that the wild plant is inedible. Interestingly, there is evidence that they were harmless to mastodons, the extinct form of American elephants. Wild squashes carry cucurbitacins, which can be toxic when eaten by smaller-bodied mammals, including humans. Large-bodied mammals would need to ingest a huge amount to have an equivalent dose (75–230 whole fruits at once). When the megafauna died off at the end of the last Ice Age, wild Cucurbita declined. The last mammoths in the Americas died off about 10,000 years ago, around the same time squashes were being domesticated. Archaeological understanding of the squash domestication process  has undergone a considerable rethinking: most domestication processes have been found to have taken centuries if not millennia to complete. In contrast, squash domestication was fairly abrupt. Domestication was likely in part the result of human selection for different traits related to edibility, as well as seed size and rind thickness. It has also been suggested that domestication may have been directed by the practicality of dried gourds as containers or fishing weights. Bees and Gourds Stingless bee pollinating a gourd flower. RyersonClark / iStock / Getty Images Plus Evidence suggests that cucurbit ecology is tightly bound up with one of its pollinators, several varieties of an American stingless bee known as Peponapis or the gourd bee. Ecologist Tereza Cristina Giannini and colleagues identified a co-occurrence of specific types of cucurbit with specific types of Peponapis  in three distinct geographic clusters. Cluster A is in the Mojave, Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts (including P. pruinosa); B in the moist forests of the Yucatan peninsula and C in the Sinaloa dry forests. Peponapis bees may well be crucial to understanding the spread of domesticated squash in the Americas because bees apparently followed the human movement of cultivated squashes into new territories. Entomologist Margarita Lopez-Uribe and colleagues (2016) studied and identified molecular markers of the bee P. pruinosa in bee populations throughout North America. P. pruinosa today prefers the wild host C. foetidissima, but when that is not available, it relies on domesticated host plants, C. pepo, C. moschata and C. maxima, for pollen. The distribution of these markers suggests that modern squash bee populations are the result of massive range expansion from out of Mesoamerica into the temperate regions of North America. Their findings suggest that the bee colonized eastern NA after C. pepo was domesticated there, the first and only known case of a pollinators range expanding with the spread of a domesticated plant. South America Microbotanical remains from squash plants such as starch grains and phytoliths, as well as macro-botanical remains such as seeds, pedicles, and rinds, have been found representing C. moschata squash and bottle gourd in numerous sites throughout northern South American and Panama by 10,200–7600 cal BP, underlining their probable South American origins earlier than that. Phytoliths large enough to represent domesticated squash have been found at sites in Ecuador 10,000–7,000 years BP and the Colombian Amazon (9300–8000 BP). Squash seeds of Cucurbita moschata have been recovered from sites in the Nanchoc valley on the lower western slopes of Peru, as were early cotton, peanut, and quinoa. Two squash seeds from the floors of houses were direct-dated, one 10,403–10,163 cal BP and one 8535-8342 cal BP. In the Zaà ±a valley of Peru, C. moschata rinds dated to 10,402-10,253 cal BP, alongside early evidence of cotton, manioc, and coca. C. ficifolia was discovered in southern coastal Peru at Paloma, dated between 5900-5740 cal BP; other squash evidence that has not been identified to species include Chilca 1, in southern coastal Peru (5400 cal BP and Los Ajos in southeastern Uruguay, 4800–4540 cal BP. Mesoamerican Squashes The earliest archaeological evidence for C. pepo squash in Mesoamerica comes from excavations carried out during the 1950s and 1960s in five caves in Mexico: Guilà ¡ Naquitz in Oaxaca state, Coxcatlà ¡n and San Marco caves in Puebla and Romero’s and Valenzuela’s caves in Tamaulipas. Pepo squash seeds, fruit rind fragments, and stems have been radiocarbon dated to 10,000 years BP, including both direct-dating of the seeds and indirect dating of the site levels in which they were found. This analysis allowed also to trace the dispersion of the plant between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago from south to north, specifically, from Oaxaca and southwestern Mexico toward Northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. Xihuatoxtla rock shelter, in tropical Guerrero state, contained phytoliths of what may be C. argyrosperma, in association with radiocarbon-dated levels of 7920/- 40 RCYBP, indicating that domesticated squash was available between 8990–8610 cal BP. Eastern North America In the United States, early evidence of the initial domestication of Pepo squash comes from different sites from the central midwest and the east from Florida to Maine. This was a subspecies of Cucurbita pepo called Cucurbita pepo ovifera and its wild ancestor, the inedible Ozark gourd, is still present in the area. This plant formed part of the dietary complex known as the Eastern North American Neolithic, which also included chenopodium and sunflower. The earliest use of squash is from the Koster site  in Illinois, ca. 8000 years BP; the earliest domesticated squash in the midwest comes from Phillips Spring, Missouri, about 5,000 years ago.   Selected Sources Brown, Cecil H., et al. The Paleobiolinguistics of the Common Bean (Phaseolus Vulgaris L.). Ethnobiology Letters 5.12 (2014): 104–15.  Giannini, T. C., et al. Ecological Niche Similarities of Peponapis Bees and Non-Domesticated Cucurbita Species. Ecological Modelling 222.12 (2011): 2011–18.  Kates, Heather R., Pamela S. Soltis, and Douglas E. Soltis. Evolutionary and Domestication History of Cucurbita (Pumpkin and Squash) Species Inferred from 44 Nuclear Loci. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 111 (2017): 98–109.  Kistler, Logan, et al. Gourds and Squashes (Cucurbita Spp.) Adapted to Megafaunal Extinction and Ecological Anachronism through Domestication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112.49 (2015): 15107–12.  Là ³pez-Uribe, Margarita M., et al. Crop Domestication Facilitated Rapid Geographical Expansion of a Specialist Pollinator, the Squash Bee Peponapis Pruinosa. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Scie nces 283.1833 (2016).  Zheng, Yi-Hong, et al. Chloroplast Phylogeny of Cucurbita: Evolution of the Domesticated and Wild Species. Journal of Systematics and Evolution 51.3 (2013): 326–34.