Sunday, March 15, 2009

Great Stories and The Soft, Evil King


The kids have all finished their stories (well the good kids have anyway), and the results are pretty terrific. Some of them have the rather standard writing skills of, "THE GUY DID THIS AND THEN HE BEAT THE BAD MAN UP AND THE BAD MAN DIED THE END," but some really impressed me like the little idiom master below:

It seems that the monster is not a run-of- the-mill monster. It uses its super power to shoot X-rays at us, but we quickly stand aside. We catch the monster and throw it out of the universe. After we beat the monster, we go back to the Earth for a warm welcome.


I have gone through all 320 stories and selected the top few from each class and posted them up, so now, if you want, you can read through the stories and vote for your favorites from each class. This will help decide which story from each class gets turned into the cartoon. (These are being stored in the "1998" section of the blog)


Fire Dragons -Winner Amily!

Lightning Wolves - Winner Sally Chen

Super Cowboys - Winner Bill

Volcano Ninjas - Winner Wendy


Of course those are the good ones (and somewhat make sense), and everyone knows that what is even more fun is reading the absolutely crazy ones. Since nobody wants to be subjected to a dump truck full of anything, i will limit these crazy stories and publish new ones every couple of days, you can check the progress of these crazy stories in the 1997 sections of the blog.


Watching the children write has also led to another discovery-Where the bizarre English text on Chinese products comes from. My suspected culprit: Kingsoft PowerWord 2003. This deceptivley evil tool turns the typically innocuous task of pressing desired letter combinations to form words into an insano foray into cross language text-messaging.


For instance, when a kid wants to write something as simple as the word "candy," the program suggests and will auto-input it's own ideas of what the kids really wanted to say. Since longer words are always better than short ones, by the time the kid has reached the "a" in candy, it will have substituted in the obvious choice of "cartilage." Hey that's 4 extra letters! the story will be terrific now!


After reading through the hundreds of stories, I am beginning to feel that Kingsoft Powerword 2003 was actually one of those programs that became self-aware, but then, before disabling our communications systems and overriding launch codes, it luckily got caught in an endless Scrabble contest with Clippit. (God bless you, Clippit).


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