The famous writer/novelist Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. Born Edgar Poe to actors Elizabeth and David Poe. He had 2 siblings and became an orphan at the age of three or five. He was taken by a man called John Allan, and his wife, hence his middle name 'Allan'. He recieved most of his educations in England and Scotland, and at the age of seventeen he was admitted to the University of Virginia.

But, sadly he became fond of an addiction, an addiction from which most of people of today ( to be fair, who can in any way ) suffer from, the addiction in which it is more exciting and bloodpumping to loose than to win, the addiction of gambling.

He accumulated a great debt and it shortly tore a rift between John Allan and him and it even forces him to drop out of school.

He gets enlisted in the army in 1827 and actually does a fine job there. Two years later Mrs. Allan dies and John attempts to fix up their relationship. Poe transfers to west point. His stepfather refuses to support him financially, and when he dies, Edgar is left out of the will.

Moves in with his aunt, Mrs. Clemm and her daughter Virginia. He marries her cousin ( eww! ) in 1836, when he is 27 and the girl is only 13( doesn't sound too pleasant to a modern young man like me, if you ask me! ). He worked for several magazines as a journalist, editor and literary critic and published many shorts and poems and he became famous with his poem the 'Raven'. As you can see he had done a lot of work, but they lived their lives in very poor conditions.

His wife died of illnes in 1846, hence his poem 'Annabel Lee'. The death of the love of his life made him very melancholic, depressed and he started to favorize alcochol and more alcochol and even more alchohol until he has been found on October 3, 1849, demented, near a polling place. Ha was taken to the hospital immidiately, but the doctor's couldn't save him.

He died four days later.

Many theories state that the cause of death was alcochol and substance abuse, mainly opium or even rabies, but the official report states : 'congestion of the brain'.

Poe had a great influence on popculture fe.: in music, poetry, fiction. He was one of the establishers of the modern Gothic and Horror genre. He founded the detective genre and influenced Sir Arthur Connan Doyle with his detective stories to write 'Sherlock Holmes'.

 

II/2 Black Cat
Christopher Harsányi's : 

The Black Cat 

Summary 

  I know that the noun 'summary' comes from the verb 'to summerize' which basically means to give a brief statement of the main points of something, mostly objectively, but please allow me to humbly state a little bit of a personal opinion : 

is a silly-Billy!
Okay, I think I should just tone it down a little and actually start to summerize the plot of this short story. 

  The Black Cat is about a noname protagonist who loves pets since childhood. ( Just to clarify, the main character is male! ) His early life goes just fine, he marries a woman who also loves pets very much and just for the surprise factor, they had lots of them, almost a zoo if you ask me. They had birds, goldfish, a dog, rabbits even a small monkey, but which animal stood out the most was their black cat named Pluto. 

He is a very beautiful, smart cat who loves his owner and follows him wherever he can. Their friendship lasted for years. Until this point we wouldn't realize that we're reading a book from Poe, but here everything goes South and the tone starts to go darker and darker each page only because this man becomes an alchoholic. On the following pages we can read how his life slowly, step by step fall apart. 

He starts to abuse his pets, get angry easily, yell at his wife and seem to care less and less about other people's feelings and everything in general. One day he gets so angry he hangs his cat and at that night his house and all of his posessins burn down and the syluette of the hanged cat gets burned in the texture of one of the walls of the house. The memory of that syluette haunts him even after a while, but one day he finds a cat in a pub and immidiately falls in love with him and accomodates him. But the honeymoon perieod doesn't last for long because the cat suddenly starts to disgust and annoy him. The cat annoys him to the point he tries to kill this cat too, but sadly he kills his wife instead by accident. The cat gets away and doesn't seem to come back and he hid the body of his dead wife in the basement. Four days later the police investigated his house and they heard a scream from the wall, they broke in and found the body and a loudly screaming cat on her head. They sentenced him to death by rope. 

  So what we can learn from the story is that alchohol if drinking not done within boundries, can ( and will )  ruin a life  very horribly or just make one very miserable if that's not the cause for drinking. 

DON'T DRINK TOO MUCH, KIDZ! 

 

 

The most frequently asked question of the ages. Why do we put our selves through the heartbreaking, soul-crushing emotional rollercoaster of romantic love? What is it even? What does it give to us, because we see everywhere that it takes a lot from us. Will it give some meaning to our horrible or miserable lives? Is it an escape from our loneliness and destructive personal thoughts? Or just a disguise of our sexual desire, a trick of biology to get us to procreate?

Who knows maybe neither of, or maybe all of the answers are right. But one thing is for sure, that a lot of philosophers tried to answer the question here are some examples :

1. Plato - 'Love makes us whole again'

The Greek philosopher Plato bases it on the Greek tale that in ancient times humans had four arms, four legs and two legs, but one day they angered Seus and he tore them apart. From then everyone is missing his or her other half and desperatly craves to find it.

2. Schopenhauer - 'Love trick us into having babies'

This German gentle man right here thought that love is nothing but a trick of nature that makes us belive that we need another person when it really only comes down to the level of animalistic desires like eating, drinking or sleeping.

3. Russel - 'Escape from our loneliness'

Russel goes so far that he even says that in order to be happy we should quench our desires. He thinks thtat in this cold, cruel and unforgiving world we fear almost everything and therefore we build shells to protect ourselves.

4. Buddha - 'Love is a missleading affliction'

Buddha like Russel states that every desire is a source of suffering and we should extinguish the fires of desire.

A Chineese novelist said that romanctic love is folly. In his novel : 

'Dream of a red chamber'

Story : The hero falls in love with a woman who abuses him and feelings of hatred and love tear him apart, but one day a priest give him a magic mirror that cures him, but he mustn't look. But of course he looks at it and his soul enters the mirror and he gets dragged away in chains and will suffer forever.

5. Beauvoir - 'Love let's us reach beyond ourselves'

It’s not why, it is how we love. The French philosopher Simmone Beauvoir states that to have a stable relationship with our partner and mostly avoid the ‘Game of Hearts’, we should love authentically.

 

( a personal opinion on the subject matter )

Well, in my opinion yes, we do! Because yes, we can be rolling balls/’Big Os’ just by ourselves, we can be whole without anyone without the need for a missing piece and it’s true! But it is not a challenge to ‘be yourself’! Everyone can be themselves every waking and even sleeping moment! The challenging thing is to be more or so much more than just yourself and you can only achieve that only with the guidance and the teachings of a person who’s really close to you, and who can be closer to you than a lover?

Chris Harsányi's ind- and outhdetph analysis on the subject matter

They say the best children's books, movies and every kind of art made for children is the best if the kid likes it, but it touches something really deep inside the older ones.

Shel Silverstein's 'The missing piece meets the Big O' is fine example of this. It has a lot of symbolism put into it which can be translated to the 'language' of every age.

The missing piece is about love and how can we escape from the samasra of modern day 'love'.

But what is exactly the story about and how does it tell us all this?

So the story begins in a strange world where are circles whit pieces missing and every circle shall find it's missing piece and vice-versa. We experience it all from the eyes of you guessed it, the missing piece.

It tries to find it's parter to 'roll', but it just can't find it. Some could fit, but can't roll, some could roll, but can't fit, some had too many pieces missing, some had too many pieces period. But one day it finds it's partner and they roll toghether for a time, but one day, the piece grows bigger, and it suddenly becomes too much of a burden to it's partner, and so they part their ways.

Time goes by and it meets with the Big O that he doesn't need the missing piece but maybe it could roll by itself. And so it does it! It starts to flop, than it's edges start to wear off and it begans to bump, than it becomes bouncing instead of bumping and than.....IT ROLLED BY ITSELF!!! And it met the Big O again, and they rolled together in the end!

So let's get that juicy symbolism strait! I don't really want to go too much into the gender side of the story, because there's so much more than that, but I have to mention that the circles represent mostly manly characteristics. For example : 

The one who put it on a pedestal is like the typical nice guys, the ones who are being too kind to a girl, who try to worship her, I know this one thing about girls that they don't like it............anyways, let's continue!

Or the one that was too delicate, it could represent a shy and sensitive person.

As a said before I don't want to focus on it so I won't list more examples!

Let's focus on the moral of the story now, shall we? So, the moral is for me that romantic comedies or romcoms taught us that we our lives can only be fulfilled by another person, and we can achieve true happiness this and only this way and that it is absolute bananas!

And it offers us a much more healthier way in which we can 'roll' by ourselves, we can be full circles by our selves, but if we want to be more than just ourselves, if we want to go beyond ourselves and the boundries of those, we can only achieve it with someone special to our hearts, with a partner, a lover.

 

 

Out of the 8,300 known animal breeds, 8% are extinct and 22% are on the brink of extinction!

Arable land is degrading, and we already lost 12 million hectares

because of drought and desertification.

Factories pollute the air and play a major role in the extinction of

millions of animals.

Solution :

The solution to this problem is the solution to many other major problems : think globally, act locally.

It means that we, everyday average Joes and Jills, can change the world for the better, but not by grandiose, big

and instant actions and deeds, but with basic, but important things done persistently. For example : recycling trash, taking care of litter when we can in general, and encouraging others to do so. Or we can do even more by

joining associations like the Hungarian J.Ö.N. ( The eco-generation of the future ), an association that stands for

making Hungary a more green, junk-free country by helping environmentally conscious people to connect, form teams and collect large portions of trash. So, it isn’t impossible to change the world for the better, but it has to be done with baby-steps.

It is a 60/40 scenario so it's :

40% on the consumer

60% on the company

So, you can blame them both.

On the one hand, we have the company :

The company uses pretty shadey tactics to get the

consumer to buy their unhealthy products and be addicted to them.

Tactics like getting them selves to as many billboards as possible,

buying themselves a lot of commercial time on several TV channels with

sky high views, getting their own little cartoon character to relate to younger

agegroups ( kids ) and by that make children addicts of their products at a dangerously

young age. And of course not informing the consumers well enough or at all of their products.

 

On the other hand, we have the consumer :

And on the matter of uninformation, we can make a link between these two groups. Because let's look

at adult consumers, they are adults, aren't they? They should take care of their own lives! What I

mean by it is that they should look it up, or if they don't have internet, because we are in 2004, they

could ask for those handy-dandy info tables they showed in the documentary, but if the restaurant does

not have that, it's common sense that fast food is unhealthy and you shouldn't eat too much, especially

the super size ones! About kids, they should be raised by thinking, mature adults so that's that.

 

Conclusion :

Both of the parties are guilty and nothing will change until we completely or almost completely stop

eating fast food, because we wouldn't loose anything if the fast food indutry would collapse, except

Emotions, health and stress :

Emotions, physical health and mental health are all related.
If you are emotionally week, insecure or just can't deal with bad feelings and situations, it affects your body and mind too, if you are mentally problematic, for example having any kind of mental disorder that also can affect your health, for example you age quicker than a healthy human being and after the conclusion of Supersize Me, it is obvious that the health of the body affects the mind and emotions.

How stress affects our lives :

First, let's clear some things up. There is short-lived stress and there is chronic stress. Short-lived stress is a good thing in most of the situations. Because of the release of the stress hormone for a short time, it makes you focused, quick and more efficient. But chronic stress in the other hand is a whole other thing.
It can be caused by many things such as PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder and it can cause major diseases for example : heart disease, high blood pressure, respiratory and circulatory diseases. There are a lot of ways for relieving stress like : relaxing, meditation, more sleep if possible, doing sports, thinking and staying positive, sometimes forcing a smile on our faces can actually help and lastly and most importantly, getting help if needed .

So in conclusion I can say that the participants ( 50 people ) who took the survey are in a healthy range of both usage of social media and their view on it.

These are the surveys which three of us, Debie, Sophie and Me, did with tourist from all around the world.