Blog Entry #2

Oswalt defines the word otaku simply as someone who has an obsession with something very small and minute.  He never really says what geek and nerds were to him since he didn’t consider himself a geek, but he said other people classified geeks as people who were in to comic books and anime. He is defining these terms because he wants the audience, who might not of grown up in the 70’s or 80’s, to know what he is talking about. The point of this is really about how geeks and nerds used to be classified and seen as outcasts, but now because of the changing pop culture with movies, it seems as though what the nerds were into is now popular. The larger point about society is really that over time, because of technology advances, there isn’t really a category called nerds since everyone has their own small obsession, which is what otaku means. I agree with Oswalt’s point that everyone is becoming more accepting of these obsessions, but it would be nice as he said he wants his daughter to do, to discover something no one else has that really isn’t main stream yet. I think certain levels of geekiness have become normal. The people who like anime or comic books have definitely been accepted into society, but the ones who read all day and have bug collections or something are still looked at differently.

Supermarket Pastoral is basically a literary form where people feel as though they are eating safer food and helping the earth and encourage you to buy their product. Supermarkets basically make up little stories on their food labeled organic, which makes the consumer believe that the animals and food was grown as in stories we read when we were younger. He is talking about this word because as he started buying more and more organic foods he was wondering if the images he imagined of the animals was really what it was like on the farm. He believes that in order for the farmers to make more money that just have journalists write nice little descriptions of how the animal was raised without actually giving too much information. This then lets the buyer imagine their own image of the life of the animal. This essay basically is saying that the organic agriculture culture is more or less fake, and is only trying to get bigger revenue for taking better care of their products.