Sullivans Travels essays

Sullivans Travels essays The Great Depression was a time when Americans were lost economically, and emotionally, and many movies have been made in an attempt to capture the horrors of life in that time. The film Sullivans Travels however is in my opinion satirizes the Depression. It inaccurately depicts the tribulations of the 1940s and is useless in its historical account. The value in this movie lays in entertainment, and in nothing else. In short, the protagonist in the film Sullivan, a wealthy movie director, wants to make a movie about pain and suffering, and in doing so, decides to live out on the streets with 10 cents in his pocket. From the beginning, he makes a mockery out of human kind in general. We see Sullivan going back and forth from his street-life to his mansion, never fully experiencing how life was for the unfortunate. In his attempt to become a tramp, he makes a joke out of the Depression. He is poor when it is convenient to him, and when he meets a pretty girl, he tries to use him money and fame to impress her. The movie really never focuses in on the pain and suffering of anyone, but instead we see a fickle man who attempted to do something beneficial, but instead turned away from it when it became difficult. Sullivan chooses when he wants to sleep in a bed, and out on the streets, and when the streets posed a problem, he had his team following him in a van while they promoted his actions as simply a publicity stunt. The climate during the Depression was that the poor and unfortunate had no choice as to whether they should sleep on the street or in a bed on any given night, they had no other life that they could go back to. In this movie, we are not exposed to any of the hardships that Americans underwent, but instead we see a game that Sullivan played. At the end of this movie we as the viewer have not been given and interesting insight to life in the Depression, we a ...

The Experts Scientific Definition of Dinosaurs

The Experts' Scientific Definition of Dinosaurs One of the problems with explaining the scientific definition of the word dinosaur is that biologists and paleontologists tend to use much drier, more precise language than your average dinosaur enthusiast on the street (or in an elementary school). So while most people intuitively describe dinosaurs as big, scaly, dangerous lizards that went extinct millions of years ago, experts take a much narrower view. In evolutionary terms, dinosaurs were the land-dwelling descendants of the archosaurs, egg-laying reptiles that survived the Permian-Triassic extinction event 250 million years ago. Technically, dinosaurs can be distinguished from the other animals descended from archosaurs (pterosaurs and crocodiles) by a handful of anatomical quirks. Chief among these is posture: Dinosaurs had either an upright, bipedal gait (like that of modern birds), or if they were quadrupeds, they had a stiff, straight-legged style of walking on all fours  (unlike modern lizards, turtles, and crocodiles, whose limbs splay beneath them when they walk). Beyond that, the anatomical features that distinguish dinosaurs from other vertebrate animals become rather arcane; try on  an elongate deltopectoral crest on the humerus for size (i.e., a spot where muscles connect into the upper arm bone). In 2011, Sterling Nesbitt of the American Museum of Natural History attempted to tie together all of the subtle anatomical quirks that make dinosaurs dinosaurs. Among these are a radius (lower arm bone) at least 80% smaller than the humerus (upper arm bone); an asymmetrical fourth trochanter on the femur (leg bone); and a large, concave surface separating the proximal articular surfaces of the ischium, aka the pelvis. With terms like these, you can see why the big, scary, and extinct is more appealing to the general public. The First True Dinosaurs Nowhere was the line dividing dinosaurs and non-dinosaurs more tenuous than during the middle to late Triassic period, when various populations of archosaurs had just started to branch off into dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and crocodiles. Imagine an ecosystem filled with slender, two-legged dinosaurs, equally slender, two-legged crocodiles (yes, the first ancestral crocs were bipedal, and often vegetarian), and plain-vanilla archosaurs that looked for all the world like their more-evolved cousins. For this reason, even paleontologists have a hard time definitively classifying Triassic reptiles like Marasuchus and Procompsognathus; at this fine level of evolutionary detail, its virtually impossible to pick out the first true dinosaur (though a good case can be made for the South American Eoraptor). Saurischian and Ornithischian Dinosaurs For the sake of convenience, the dinosaur family is divided into two main groups. To vastly simplify the story, starting about 230 million years ago a subgroup of archosaurs split off into two types of dinosaurs, distinguished by the structure of their hip bones. Saurischian (lizard-hipped) dinosaurs went on to include predators like Tyrannosaurus rex and huge sauropods like Apatosaurus, while ornithischian (bird-hipped) dinosaurs consisted of a diverse assortment of other plant-eaters,  including  hadrosaurs, ornithopods, and stegosaurs. (Confusingly, we now know that birds descended from lizard-hipped, rather than bird-hipped, dinosaurs.) Learn more about  how dinosaurs are classified. You may have noticed that the definition of dinosaurs provided at the start of  this article  refers only to land-dwelling reptiles, which technically excludes marine reptiles like Kronosaurus and flying reptiles like Pterodactylus from the dinosaur umbrella (the first is  technically  a pliosaur, the second a pterosaur). Also occasionally mistaken for true dinosaurs are the large therapsids and pelycosaurs of the Permian period, such as Dimetrodon and Moschops. While some of these ancient reptiles would have given  your average Deinonychus a run for its money, rest assured they werent allowed to wear dinosaur name tags during the school dances of the Jurassic period.