Friday Night Lights

My friends and I recently got Netflix and now that we have watched all the movies we wanted we found the NCB show Friday Nigh Lights. Not really keeping up with the show when it came out, we decided to start with season one. In high school being a football star this show hit to heart. Once I watched the first episode I could not stop. Friday Night Lights takes its inspiration from the non-fiction book Friday Night Lights: a town, a team, a dream and the 2004 film based on it. The book shows details about the 1988 season of the Permian Panthers, a high school football team in Odessa, Tx. Season one itself is about the community of Dillon, Texas and how the high school football team affects the town as a whole. While screen time of characters varies from episode to episode, the show is most focused on Panthers' football coach Eric Taylor who strives to balance his emphasis on family, his status in a sometimes confrontational community, and his personal ambitions. His family – wife Tami Taylor a guidance counselor turned principal at Dillon High, and teenage daughter Julie Taylor are also central to the show. Coach Taylor and Tami are the only two characters to appear in every episode. When Tami becomes pregnant and gives birth to Gracie Bell Taylor, tensions within the family increase and Julie becomes more rebellious.

Outside of the Taylor family, the show focuses on the respective lives of the Dillon's high school football players. In the series' first episode, star quarterback Jason Street, who suffers an injury that leads to an end to his football career and a disability that he resists and then learns to cope with throughout the series. Lyla Garrity, who at the time of Jason's injury was his girlfriend, parallels his story, as she goes from a Panther cheerleader to a Christian youth leader later on. As a result of Jason's injury, shy and nervous Matt Seracen, becomes the Panthers' starting quarterback and eventually dates the coaches daughter, Julie. It also reveals that Matt's father is serving in Iraq and that he must therefore care for his grandmother Lorraine Saracen all by himself, with help only from his best friend Landry Clarke. Brash star running back Brian Willams, knows as smash, quest for a college football scholarship and fullback Tim Riggens who is an on-and-off alcoholic and partier. Tyra Collette also stars as a town vixen who goes from Tim's occasional girlfriend to Landry's lover following Landry's defense of her from a rapist. Though this show does not air much anymore on TV, if you havent seen any episodes it is a must for a football fan. 

With The Old Breed

When one speaks of WWII all that pops up in people’s mind is Pearl Harbor and the Nazi Holocaust, but the war was much more than that. In my history test this semester we were assigned to read a WWII memoir by Eugene Sledge, nicknamed Sledgehammer by his company, called With the Old Breed. Sledge was a 60 mm mortar man on the K Company, 3^rd battalion, 5^th marines, 1st division. Sledge's memoir gives a perspective on the Pacific campaign in Peleliu and in Okinawa. His memoir is a front-line account of infantry combat in the Pacific War. It brings the reader into the island hopping, the jungle heat and rain or full frontal assault used by his enemies. Sledge wrote starkly of the brutality displayed by American and Japanese soldiers during the battles, and of the hatred that both sides harbored for each other. In Sledge's words, "this was a brutish, primitive hatred, as characteristic of the horror of war in the Pacific as the palm trees and the islands." Sledge describes one instance in which he and a comrade came across the mutilated bodies of three Marines, including one Marine whose genitals had been cut off and stuffed into the corpse's mouth. He also describes the behavior of some Marines towards dead Japanese, including the removal of gold teeth from Japanese corpse and taking anything they could find. Sledge describes in detail the sheer physical struggle of living in a combat zone and the debilitating effects of constant fear, fatigue, and filth. In Okinawa marines had trouble staying dry, finding time to eat their rations, practicing basic field sanitation. It was impossible simply moving around on the pulverized coral of Peleliu and in the mud of Okinawa. If you are a fan of WWII this is a must read. I read almost 50 pages a night because I could not put it down.