Fried Green Tomatoes at Whistle Stop Cafe: Novel vs. Movie Essays

Fried Green Tomatoes at Whistle Stop Cafe: Novel vs. Movie â€Å"I may be sitting at the Rose Terrace Nursing Home, but in my mind I’m over at the Whistle Stop Cafe having a plate of Fried Green Tomatoes† (Flagg ). Both the novel and the movie received a number of great reviews and honors. However, the two vary greatly in content. The novel, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, brings the reader a much more detailed and very different story compared to the movie. For example, the character Vesta Adcock as portrayed in the novel is a citizen of Whistle Stop. Flagg sees Vesta as having church meetings and socials at her home and also as being the president of the drama club. â€Å"... Mrs. Vesta Acock, this little bird-breasted woman... who’s from Whistle Stop, came in wearing her fox furs and her diamond dinner rings† (Flagg 27). However, in the movie, Mrs. Adcock’s character changes completely. She does not play a woman from Whistle Stop, but Ed Couch’s aunt. The film shows her as a grouchy old woman residing in the Rose Hills Nursing Home Also, in the novel Flagg describes Buddy Threadgoode’s lover as Eva, the town harlot and proprietor of â€Å"The Wagon Wheel River and Fishing Club†. â€Å"...she had slept with a lot of men..., but [Buddy] didn’t care. Eva was as easy with her body as she was with every thing else.... The first time she took [Buddy] to bed, she made him feel like a man† (Flagg 94). Although the movie shows Buddy in love with the most admired woman in Whistle Stop, Ruth Jamison, the film shows Buddy walking with Ruth by the river. His eyes light up when he sees her and he cares about her greatly. In fact, he was trying to retrieve Ruth’s hat when the train killed him. Ninny Threadgoode says in the movie, â€Å"...his heart belonged to Ruth Jamison.† In addition, in the novel, Evelyn, who feels her life has become an endless battlefield, mainly because of her severe self-conscienceness, invented a person she used to give her courage in times she felt belittled. When someone would make her feel worthless Evelyn would think about Towanda and all the super hero battles she would fight if she really were Towanda. â€Å"Evelyn had even made up a secret code name for herself... a name feared around the world: TOWANDA THE AVENGER!† (Flagg 238). On the other hand in the movie, the unrefined and untamed Idgie Threadgoode thinks up Towanda. Evelyn uses... ...st scattered to the wind.† She does not find her house, although her new friend comforts her. In the movie, Ninny says,â€Å" Hey Evelyn, somebody stole my house. It was right here when I left.† Evelyn, who has fallen in love with Ninny, takes Ninny to her house and makes a home for her there. However, in the novel, Ninny Threadgoode goes back to her home in Whistle Stop, a growing city. There has been a lot of changes in the town, and all of Ninny’s memories have become rundown issuers. Despite the changes she returns to her house. Shortly after she returns, she dies a peaceful death in her sleep. â€Å"She wasn’t sick...she died in her sleep† (Flagg 378). Indeed, the movie and the novel hold many differences. Characters have changed, been eliminated, events have been left out, and relationships differed. Despite the changes, the film still managed to live up to the standards the book set. â€Å"Fried Green Tomatoes is a thorouly enjoyable move...,† says James Berardinelli quoted from the internet. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1987, this novel has tons of material which changed in the screenplay. However, both works offer dynamic characters, an interesting plot, and charming dialogue.

Religions of the World Jesus/Mohammed

Two thousand years have come and gone, but still they remain the unfinished story that refuses to go away. Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew from rural first-century Galilee, and Mohammed from Mecca are without doubt the most famous and most influential human beings who ever walked the face of the earth. Their influence may at present be declining in a few countries of Western Europe and parts of North America, as has from time to time transpired elsewhere.But the global fact is that the adherents of Jesus and Mohammed are more widespread and more numerous, and make up a greater part of the world's population, than at any time in history. Two billion people identify themselves as Christians; well over a billion Muslims revere Jesus as a prophet of God (Freedman 2001). Unnumbered others identify themselves as know and respect his memory as a wise and holy man. This work begins with tracing the lives of Jesus and Mohammed historically. Then it deals with different aspects of the practice and th e teaching of Jesus and Mohammed. How their messages are being carried out in the world today will be considered in the conclusion.The personality of Mohammed remains obscure in spite of his sayings and the many legends about him. There have been almost as many theories about the Prophet as there are biographers. According to tradition, he was born in A.D. 570, about five years after the death of Justinian, into a cadet branch of one of the leading families of Mecca. His father died before Mohammed was born, and his mother died when he was still a small child. First his grandfather, then an uncle, who was in the caravan trade, reared him.As a youth in the busy center of Mecca he probably learned to read and write enough to keep commercial accounts; he also heard Jewish and Christian teachers and early became interested in their religious ideas. Mohammed must have suffered, in these early years, from hardships, and he evidently became aware of the misery of many of his fellowmen. The se early experiences were later to be the basis of his fervent denunciations of social injustice. At the age of twenty-five, he married a wealthy widow and probably went on some long caravan trips, at least to Syria.This gave him further contacts with Jewish, Christian, and Persian religious teachers. At the age of forty, after spending much time in fasting and solitary meditation, he heard a voice calling him to proclaim the uniqueness and power of Allah. Mohammed seemingly did not, at first, conceive of himself as the conscious preacher of a new religion. It was only the opposition from those about him at Mecca that drove him on to set up a new religious community with distinctive doctrines and institutions. In 632 Mohammed died, the last of all the founders of great world religions.Little is known of the early life of Jesus Christ. Born a few years before the year 1 A. D. in Bethlehem of Judaea, he lived in Nazareth, a city of Galilee, until he was about thirty years of age. We h ave no reason to doubt the tradition that after the death of Joseph, the head of the family, Jesus became the main support of Mary and the younger children. He worked at his trade, that of a carpenter, and lived the life which would be expected of a religiously-minded young Hebrew.At about the age of thirty Jesus suddenly appeared at the Jordan, where John, a cousin of his, was performing the rite of baptism on those who came professing a desire to amend their ways and live better lives. Jesus also came and, against the scruples of John, who saw that Jesus was in different case from the others, was baptized. It marked a turning-point, for with the outward ritual act came an inner spiritual experience of profound significance for Jesus. A voice assured him that he was in a unique sense his Father's â€Å"beloved Son,† in whom he was â€Å"well pleased† (Borg 1997). It seems to have been the consummation of his thought and prayer and eager yearning for many years.He had received his revelation; he would proclaim God as a Father and men as his sons. He was filled with a sense of mission, of having a work to do and a message to deliver, which to the end of his life did not leave him for a moment. He went from place to place in Palestine preaching in the synagogues and out-of-door places wherever the people congregated, and talking to individuals and to groups as they came to him with their questions and problems. He began to gather about him a little company of disciples, which soon grew to twelve and which accompanied him on all his journeys.He spent much time in giving them instruction and on several occasions sent them out to heal and to preach. Jesus came to establish a kingdom, and this was the burden of his message. But he never forgot that the form of the Kingdom and many things connected with its coming were of lesser significance than the inner meaning and the principles on which it was based. The first of these was man's relationship with G od.Jesus was not only a teacher; he was a worker of miracles. The Gospels tell us that he cured the sick, opened the eyes of the blind, fed the hungry, stilled the storm, and even raised the dead. Much was made of these wonders by former generations of Christians, who used them as proofs of the divine character of the One who performed them. Such use of these incidents does not produce the effect it once did and is being discarded.A closer study of the attitude of Jesus toward his own miraculous power clearly indicates that he minimized its significance. He would have men secure a better perspective and realize that moral power was on a higher level than the ability to work marvels. With this in view it scarcely seems congruous to use the miracles in a way which could scarcely be acceptable to Jesus himself. But of all the impressions Jesus made the strongest was that he was in touch with God his Father and that this was the explanation of all the wonderful things about him.Jesus, h owever, was not only winning followers and bringing them close to God; he had come into collision with the religious authorities of his people, and in the end lost his life at their hands. They were formalists and as such had not averted the danger of losing sight of the vital principles of their religion. Jesus was an innovator, and felt free to act in accordance with the inner spirit of the old precepts even when by doing so he ran counter to the letter of the law.When Jesus appeared in Jerusalem at the feast of the Passover, He was seized and, after having had a preliminary hearing before the Jewish high priest and Sanhedrin, was taken before Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator, and was condemned to death. He was crucified, together with two criminals, and died at the end of six hours' agony on the cross. His body was taken down by friends in the early evening and laid in a rock-hewn tomb. The hopes of his disciples were dashed to the ground, and undoubtedly the Jewish leaders a nd the Roman authorities thought they had rid themselves of an exceedingly troublesome creature (Allen 1998).But such was not to be, for a very remarkable thing happened the third day after. To the utter amazement of his disciples, who had not recovered from the paralyzing effect of their grief and disappointment, Jesus appeared to them so unmistakably that they were convinced that death had not been able to hold its victim and that Jesus was alive.Their new enthusiasm, the founding of the Christian Church on the assurance of the presence of the living Christ, the adoption of the first day of the week as a memorial of the day when Jesus reappeared alive -all these historic facts bear witness to the genuineness of the disciples' testimony that the same Jesus who had journeyed with them, who had died and had been laid away in the tomb, was raised from the dead, their living Master forevermore. They immediately went out to preach â€Å"the gospel of the resurrection,† and with t hat the history of the Christian Church was begun.Mohammed's teaching, from the beginning, shows strong Jewish and Christian influence. Mohammed learned the great stories of the Old Testament; especially was he impressed with the life of Abraham whom he later considered one of his own predecessors and who he claimed had founded the Ka' bah at Mecca. He, likewise, learned of the Christian Trinity whom he understood to be God the Father, Mary the Mother, and Jesus the Son.He was looking for common ground on which to found a faith for all monotheists. He had a profound respect for Jews and Christians, especially for the Jews, though when they refused to join him and when later they thwarted him, he attacked them fiercely. Mohammed took from Jewish, Christian, and also Persian teaching only what he wanted, and he combined all he borrowed in a set of ideas that always bore his own mark. In the Koran, for example, he uses the characters of the Bible as successful advocates in the past of the doctrines of Mohammed in the present. Mohammed called the Jews and the Christians the â€Å"People of the Book,† and he came to believe himself called to give his own people, the Arabs, a book.Soon after Mohammed's death in 632, a wave of conquest gathered in all of Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, and part of Persia. In less than a century all of North Africa, Spain, Asia Minor, and Central Asia to the Indus River were swept by the conquering armies of Islam. These conquests were as orderly as they were speedy; little damage seems to have been done, and immediately after the Arab armies entered an area they organized it. The Arab annexation, at first, meant little more than a change of rulers.Life and social institutions went on as before with little interference and no forced conversions; the conquered peoples could even keep their own religion by paying a tax. The Arab colonies planted in each new territory became the centers from which Islamic religious ideas spread a nd in which, at the same time, a new culture developed. Not until the new peoples, like the Seljuks, who were outside the Graeco-Roman tradition, were converted to Mohammedanism did Islam become fanatical. Indeed, no such militant intolerance as characterized the Christian attack on paganism was normally shown by the Mohammedans until into the eleventh century.The reasons for these fantastic conquests were various. To his own people, especially to the desert tribes, Mohammed offered war and booty, and to those who lived in the Arab towns he offered the extension of commerce. Caravans travelled in the midst of the Muslim armies. For those who died, Islam promised a glowing paradise. One drop of blood shed in battle, even a single night spent under arms would count for more than two months of prayer or fasting.Christianity and Islam have, like every other religion, developed their own mythology. These mythologies are at its height in the beautiful imagery that centers around the festi vals of Christmas, Easter and Eid-ul-Fitr and Eid-ul-Adha (â€Å"Eid† or â€Å"Id† means festival). Indeed, there is today a rediscovery of the value of myth in human life. Today Christianity and Islam provide a good framework for the religious life. Some people, possibly lots of people, would claim that if Jesus and Mohammed were wrong, they can no longer be relevant. That claim can probably be disputed on theological grounds (Freedman 2001).The remarkable ‘footprint' of Jesus and Mohammed in history has strangely contradictory implications for an encounter with them today. On the one hand, it means that a true and adequate understanding of the men remains a vital task, even as third millennium has dawned. Just as in the first century Jesus was embraced as Saviour of the world by Jews and Gentiles excluded from religious and political power, so today he is welcomed above all by ordinary, poor and marginalised people – in the west and the east, and especia lly in the South. Like Paul, they see him, God's gospel, as having the power to liberate them from sin, their personal sins, the socio-political, cultural and structural sins of their nations, cultures and churches and the unjust economic and technological structures of the so-called ‘global village'.At least in the western world, it remains true that we can understand neither Christian faith nor much of the world around us if we do not come to terms with Jesus of Nazareth and the two millennia of engagement with his heritage. The followers of Jesus and Mohammed live in every country of the globe. They read and speak of these people in a thousand tongues. For them, the world's creation and destiny hold together in their gods, the wholly human and visible icon of the wholly transcendent and invisible God. Jesus and Mohammed animate their cultures, creeds and aspirations.ReferencesAllen, Charlotte. (1998).The human Christ: the search for the historical Jesus. Oxford: Lion.Borg, Marcus J., ed. (1997). Jesus at 2000. Boulder: Westview Press.Freedman, David Noel. (2001). The Rivers of Paradise: Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, and Muhammad as Religious Founders. Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, MI.

What is Valerian

What is Valerian? Valerian is typically an herb whose roots are used medicinally for the treatment of various health problems. As such, valerian is mainly used in the treatment of sleep problems, especially among individuals suffering from insomnia. In addition, the herbal remedy is used in the treatment of other health problems that include; depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue and stress. Moreover, some individuals use the herbal remedy in the treatment of joint pain, menstrual symptoms and muscle pain. In regard to this, numerous studies have indicated that valerian is effective in the treatment of these health problems, especially insomnia. Brand name: Valerian, Valerian Root Generic name: valerian What is the source of the herbal remedy? The herbal remedy is obtained from the roots of valerian, a perennial plant that grows in various parts of the world. As such, the preparation of the herbal remedy involves pressing the valerian roots into fresh juice or drying and crushing the roots to power form. Hence, the herbal remedy is available in various forms that include; fluid extracts, tablets, tinctures and capsules. However, in most cases valerian roots is usually combined with lemon balm or hops due to its sharp order in order to cover the scent. Indications Valerian root is mainly used in the treatment of insomnia, since it helps in the improvement of sleep quality. According to Leach Page (2015), valerian root mainly shortens sleep latency and enhances the quality of sleep. However, it is recommended for individuals with insomnia should to use the herbal remedy for several days, preferably more than two weeks in order for it to be effective. Essentially, valerian works by increasing the amount of GABA (gamma aminobutyric acid), particularly in the brain whereby this minimizes the brain activity, hence resulting to drowsiness (WebMD, 2017). In addition, valerian root is used in combination with other herbs such as lemon balm to minimize the symptom of restlessness, relieve anxiety as well as reduce menstrual pain. Recommended dosage and available routes Valerian is usually administered orally. According to WebMD (2017), insomnia patients should take 400-900mg of valerian extracts, about two hours before bedtime. In addition, valerian extracts (120mg) are taken in combination with lemon balm (80mg) for the treatment of insomnia. Noteworthy, valerian needs to be taken about two hours before going to bed and continuously for about four to six weeks even when there is an improvement in sleep. On the other hand, the recommended dosage for anxiety is 120-200mg of valerian extracts taken for about three to four times each day. In addition, valerian extracts (120mg) are taken in combination with lemon balm (80mg) for the treatment of insomnia. Noteworthy, valerian needs to be taken about two hours before going to bed and continuously for about four to six weeks even when there is an improvement in sleep. On the other hand, the recommended dosage for anxiety is 120-200mg of valerian extracts taken for about three to four times each day. What are the side effects or adverse effects? Although, valerian is mainly regarded as safe, especially when used for a short period of about four to eight weeks, the herbal remedy is associated with various side effects that include; uneasiness, headaches, stomach upsets, excitability, dry mouth as well as daytime drowsiness (WebMD, 2017). In addition, the usage of valerian may cause breathing difficulties, tiredness, jaundice, nausea and lack of appetite. Thus, individuals using the herbal remedy need to effectively monitor the adverse effects and seek medical assistance once they develop breathing difficulties or swellings on the face or throat. Who should not take this herbal medication? Valerian should be not be taken by pregnant mothers or breastfeeding women due to lack of sufficient evidence pertaining to the safety of the herbal remedy during pregnancy as well as breastfeeding. In addition, the herbal remedy should not be taken by children except under the guidance of a healthcare provider. Moreover, patients who are scheduled for surgery should avoid the use of valerian since it affects the CNS (Central Nervous System) and this usually increases the anesthesia effects and could be harmful to the patient due to the development of various life-threatening problems. Interactions Valerian usually interact with various medications that include; alprazolam, sedative medications like benzodiazepines and anticonvulsants. For instance, valerian usually reduces the breakdown of alprazolam in the liver, hence increasing the side effects associated with alprazolam. Moreover, the usage of valerian alongside other sedative medications usually leads to excessive sleepiness. On the other hand, metabolizes of valerian usually involves certain enzymes in the liver, hence valerian might interact with various other medications whose metabolizes involves similar enzymes such as statins and antihistamines (VarteresianLavretsky, 2015). What are the sources of this information? This information is mainly obtained from various research articles on the studies conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of valerian especially in regard to the treatment of insomnia. The research articles offer substantial information on the usage and effectiveness of valerian as well as the possible risks associated with the use of this herbal remedy. Conclusion Apparently, valerian root is an effective herbal remedy especially in the treatment of insomnia. However, some of the possible risks associated with the usage of this herbal remedy are unknown. Therefore individuals ought to use the herbal remedy under the guidance of a healthcare provider and efficiently monitor the side effects.