Talks to Ted

The Best Gift I Ever Survived

This TED Talk is inspired by someone's difficulties with cancer and what happened to the person because of it.  She is just a normal person, but the thing that differentiates her and makes her a qualified speaker in this topic is that she experienced the situation first hand. This is really all she needs to be a reliable speaker because only someone who experienced all the emotions that she did could accurately tell a story like this. She used a lot of pathos by describing her emotions during her struggle with cancer. Her story does lack in logos because she is focusing on appealing to people's emotions and changing how they feel about their experience. Her reason for speaking is to convince people to think differently. She is targeting her story to really anyone with access to medical facilities that can treat people with cancer because everyone is at risk of getting cancer.

I chose this TED Talk because I was curious to what gift the speaker could be talking about, and I found it to be very interesting because of its surprising ending.This is a story that starts out ambiguous, but consistently positive and at the end it is revealed that the story is really about the speaker's experience with having a brain tumor removed. This was conveyed very strangely and in an unexpected manner because the listener is expecting something positive at the end of the story, but instead the speaker revealed that she was talking about her brain tumor, which is generally recognized as a negative thing. The author's unique way of telling a story was ultimately effective because it helped the listeners to look a something negative in a different light.

Dooble Indeminiety

4. In your mind, are there any heroes in Double Indemnity? If so, who?
The movie Double Indemnity had some interesting characters, but none of them were perfect (especially not Walter Neff or Mrs. Dietrichson). In my mind there was one person who is the closed to being described as a hero in this movie, Mr. Keyes. The rest of the characters proved to either not have the correct characteristics of a hero or there was simply not enough known about them. Walter and Mrs. Dietrichson (despite being the main characters) both proved to be capable of planning and carrying out a murder, which obviously makes them too corrupt to be considered heroes.

Mr. Keyes stood out to me because he was the one who was actively working to find out how Mr. Dietrichson, and who could have been responsible for his death. The main characters in this case seemed to better fit the role of the villains, while Mr. Keyes was the hero trying to stop them from getting away with their evil deed. The fact that Walter decided to confess to Mr. Keyes because Walter would have decided to confess to someone that would do the right thing with the information. Although I do consider Mr. Keyes the hero, I do not consider him to be the perfect hero. He was not doing what he did in the movie out of the kindness of his heart; he was doing it because it was his job and he was sort of motivated by money to do it well.