With the newest release of Worst Thing I’ve been Cursed With Pop-Punk band Sparks the Rescue exceptionally display their talents, finally making headway into Fearless Records music industry. This underdog band has got the ball in their court for this year, or rather- they have one heck of a singer at the microphone.
Today was the first day of the voting for the Senior Superlatives. It was also one of our biggest days of the year in terms of traffic. Due to this huge increase in traffic, old stories that had gone unnoticed suddenly were thrust into the limelight. This happened specifically to a certain opinion piece by Heather Nale, entitled “NHS Dinner Fashion FAIL”. The article generated an enormous amount of response, much of it very negative.
So I would like to take a moment to explain The Cub’s editorial policy and its stance on this entire issue.
To begin with, it is and always has been the policy of The Cub to publish opinion articles, regardless of whether we agree with it or not. It is my opinion that any opinion, regardless of how unpopular it may be, deserves to be heard and evaluated on its own merits, and the author of that opinion should not be subjected to hate or intimidation from anyone. If the author is allowed to be threatened and be a target of such vitriolic comments, then their right to free speech is encroached upon. The correct way to respond to an opinion piece (and the article was clearly labeled as such) is by clear, informed discussion and disagreement. I agree that the tone of the article was in some parts rather bad and condescending, but that is not good reason to respond to it in kind. I would also like to point out that Heather did not use any names or anything else that could link any specific person with the topic of her article. The commentors on the other hand, had a very specific target in mind, and were not afraid to let everyone know just what they thought of her.
Personally, I think this is a huge overreaction to an opinion article, and does more to damage the image of the members of the Salem NHS than this (otherwise) obscure article would ever have done. Is this the correct way to act over a short opinion piece published on this site? I don’t think so.
So, while I think that Heather could have worded her piece differently, I believe that she has every right to voice her opinion without being shouted down by a group of people that are supposed to be the very best of Salem High School.
By: Paige DeNardi
The hype about the Royal Wedding has been everywhere, from magazines, to T.V. you name it. Everyone wanted to know what Kate was going to wear, who designed the dress, would she cry etc. With all this excitement I expected the wedding to be some earth shattering event…it wasn’t. Lasting on some programs for about 5 and a half hours, and on TLC all day long, the event was more of a nuisance than anything.
“I remember trying to look for delays the news,” says SHS Senior Zeb Ehringer. “All that was on was the stupid wedding, so I couldn’t even figure out if we had school.” Starting at approximately 5 in the morning, the wedding was quite the annoyance, all for a couple in England that doesn’t have one single thing to do with America.
Many people, as did I, thought the wedding was going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. They saw visions of jewel covered horse drawn carriages, a princess in a giant ball gown, and they expected it to be the most romantic thing they’d ever seen in their lives. “I was sadly disappointed,” says SHS sophomore Nicole Clark . “The wedding was kind of boring, and her dress wasn’t as fantastic as they said it was going to be.” Indeed it wasn’t. In fact Kate Middleton’s dress was identical to that of Grace Kelley’s.
In all honesty, Royal Weddings are stupid. Yes, it’s great that the prince found love and all that, but well so did millions of other people and their weddings were more exciting. Maybe it had lasted less time it would have pulled in more viewers, and been just a tad more exciting. By the time they got to their first public kiss on the balcony, I expected them to pass out from exhaustion or something. All in all, it wasn’t worth the almost 20 years it took to watch.
By
Megan Hoskins
American Idol has been around for many years and my favorite judge has always been Simon Cowl. But are the new judges making the show better or worse? Continue reading
By Brittany Campbell
You know your favorite book series is horrible as a TV show when one of the main actors can’t even pronounce his love interest’s name correctly. So yes, if you are a loyal fan of Charlaine Harris’s book series, the Sookie Stackhouse novels, you will be greatly disappointed by the TV production released by HBO. After a whole season of hearing “Sucky, Sucky, Sucky,” instead of the name “Sookie,” actor Stephan Moyer was definitely describing my opinion of the True Blood TV show as a whole. Since I am a huge fan of the book series, I thought I could give him another chance- thinking that maybe by the end of the season he would be able to pronounce the name Sookie correctly. Wrong, he still couldn’t pronounce it even by episode 12, now I have lost all hope on the improvement of his speech impediment.
Compared to its marvelous literature counterpart, the TV reproduction is absolutely atrocious. It is a disgrace to the book series and a disgrace to TV, having been morphed into something that will discourage people from even reading the books. All HBO did to the book series before releasing it on television is add a bunch of adult content and cast horrible actors to play the roles.
Most people who did not read the books tend to like the TV production, but those who have read the books tend to have an opinion of dislike for the show. I can give the first season props that it did follow through in staying with the book’s plot, but the details that were added to fill in the time slot of an hour of airtime were not needed and they were twisted into ruining the potential of the show. In conclusion, to quote my friend Stephan Moyer the first season of True Blood is utterly and truly “Sucky.”
By Brittany Campbell
If you’re full of life, like actress Jane Pfitsch then you will most likely enjoy one of the newest productions at actors theater in Louisville called, “Barefoot in the Park.” The play stars Pfitsch herself as Corie Bratter a newly wed to rising lawyer Paul Bratter (played by Lee Aaron Rosen). Having yet to adjust to married life, the couple start facing many emotional and financial difficulties on every front except the honey moon, where both of the characters seem to fit in quite well. As a romantic comedy, the play was only entertaining because the theater cast some exceptionally good actors in the play, people that knew what they were doing and not the fresh meat. The script itself as a play could have easily failed because it had hardly any substance in the plot. But, luckily the actors were well accomplished and able to pull the play off without boring the audience with many monologues in the same tone.
For example the actor of Paul Bratter, Mr. Rosen has had roles in the films “Saving Private Ryan,” and “Company K,” pair that with Peggy J. Scott who played Corie’s mother Ethyl in “Barefoot,” that has been in cinema productions such as “Finding Amanda,” “Serial,” “Pedalfoot,” and a Broadway production of “Is He Dead?” you give “Barefoot in the Park,” a chance for some pretty sophisticated acting. Another dynamic actor in “Barefoot,” was the brutal V Craig Heidnreich. The evidence behind this man’s awesomeness lies in Actor’s plays of the past, where Heidnreich played the very first Dracula in the play based off of Stoker’s classic. So, the reason he is dynamic is because Dracula is one of the best plays to be performed at Actors, or anywhere for that matter.
To end this review, “Barefoot,” as a whole was an excellent play, with an exceptional cast. If given the chance, I highly recommend going to see this play the next time it is preformed at Actors again, or wherever you may be. By looking at the program handout or glancing at the play on a first impression, “Barefoot,” may not seem worth your while, but I can guarantee that it is full of good laughs and funny jokes, some adult humor, and a delightfully tacky 70’s wardrobe to complete the whole concoction.
I know that not everyone likes computers. I understand that some people are just not good at using them. Yet, the same thing can be said about math; some people are good at it, some are not. That doesn’t change the fact that mathematics are a required course throughout our school careers.
One of the reasons that have been cited for the teaching of higher-level math like Trigonometry and Calculus is that it helps students in critical thinking and reasoning skills. I agree with that, math can definitely contribute to the development of children and teenager’s minds. But over the past few weeks, I have came to a conclusion that sometimes math isn’t the best way to develop those skills. Let me explain.
In most instances in math, the steps to the solution are fairly obvious. You start with problem A and through a well-defined series of steps find solution B. There is only a few instances in my experience that deviates greatly from this. Granted, I have not taken any calculus classes, so there might be many instances of deviations in those classes. Why I bring this up is because it is my belief that true critical thinking and reasoning skills don’t come from following a series of steps, plug in this number in this place, then divide, then add, subtract, multiply, and the take the square root. I think being given a problem, and figuring out how to solve it yourself is much more useful for both developing minds and the real world. I think students should be taught the techniques necessary to solve the problems, but leave it up to the students to figure out how to use those tools.
This has been growing on my mind for the last couple of days, mainly because in the last couple of days I have actually used my mind to actually think and reason for the first time in a long while. Let me tell you something, it is not some school assignment that caused this terrible state. No, it was me learning a programming language. I sat down and decided that I would learn Lisp, a fascinating language that has been around for a long time (it is the second oldest programming language). The project that I started: make a Roguelike game, and in doing so, learn Lisp. I learn best when I am actually applying the concepts that are being talked about, not just listening to a teacher drone on about whatever the topic of the day is. I also didn’t pick up my copy of Land of Lisp, a very excellent beginner’s book on Lisp, and try to use it to learn the language either. Make no mistake, I really like the book, and it is very easy to read and understand, but its downfall for me was simple: it gave me the code within the text, and then it would explain it to me. I didn’t have to truly understand how or why it worked, I could just copy it from the book, and Boom! I had a working program. And me, being the lazy person that I am, would just do that, without actually “getting” the code. So, after accepting this fact, I filed away that book and after a short discussion with a friend on what to do, I settled on a roguelike game. I was hesitant at first, could I do this seemingly complicated thing, being a complete beginner? I stuck with it, causing Google’s servers to slow down from all the searches I was doing on how to do this or that. One thing I never did was google “how to program a roguelike in lisp.” Instead, I looked up specifically how to do certain things. With that, and the code to my friend’s own version of the game (in another, entirely different language), I was able to write my own. And you know what? I learned more from that 8 or 10 hours total I spent on that project than I had learned from pouring over that book.
What was the point of that anecdote? During that entire time I was actually having to think, having to use every bit of my brain power to figure out how to do that. I didn’t have any step-by-step guide to how to do it. I knew what my end goal was, and that was it. I learned the different concepts as I went along, and was able to apply those to the situation at hand. Now, when I go to do something else in Lisp, I will not have to spend so much time googling various aspects of the language, because I actually learned the stuff. I didn’t memorize the various words just long enough to solve the problem at hand. By forcing myself to learn the concepts as I needed them, I was sure to not discard any information as irrelevant or unneeded.
I think that similar techniques could and should be used in school more often. How often, at the end of the school day, can you honestly say that you learned something? I don’t think that many of us could answer that question positively honestly. That, I think, is a travesty. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying any teacher here at SHS is not doing their job. I think it is more of a symptom of the way our education system currently works. Too much emphasis is put on passing the Standardized Test Flavor of the Month © instead of actually preparing students for life outside of school. Instead of in math class teaching students how and why something works, and then applying that to real-world problems, or even better, selecting problems that require students to use a variety of math concepts from across their high school career (how many seniors actually remember most of geometry?), we just focus on what we need to know to pass the test. After we are done with a class, we move on, and don’t revisit many of the concepts that seemed so important just a year or semester ago.
I do not mean to tell math teachers, or any other teachers for that matter, how to do their jobs. I can’t really blame them for the way they teach right now. As I said, it is a symptom of the broken education system that we “enjoy” here in America. What I am advocating though is that teachers try to add more “thinking” questions to their homework or other class projects/work, and less “regurgitate this fact or figure” questions. I swear, it won’t seriously hurt students if they have to use their grey matter every once in a while.
By Brittany Campbell
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA), is undoubtedly facing criticism for its “holiday handling.” Should people have the right to say when enough is enough if the situation is concerning the well-being of thousands? U.S citizens have had quite a qualm with the installation the new full body scanners and “enhanced” pat-downs added to the security system in 70 of 450 of the nation’s airports.
Travelers have the option to opt out of the full body scanner, but then they must go through the timed art of “gate-rape,” otherwise known as the “enhanced” pat-down, by a TSA security member. Gate-Rape consists of a TSA member probing around in “certain,” body areas such as the groin, chest, and rear-end. While travelers have the right to be patted down in a private room, they are still forced to submit to the hands in a pat-down if they trigger an alarm or refuse to go through a full body scanner. Many have claimed that the new system consists of “groping people in the name of safety.” John Pistole, chief of TSA, states that airline travel is a “privilege,” and that for now, “nothing will change.”
The full body scanners being placed in airports around the nation create a blurry image of an unknown person “in the nude.” Pistole has also made it clear that the scanner doesn’t come in contact with the future traveler, and also that the TSA member looking at the nude image presented doesn’t come in contact with the traveler because the traveler’s facial features are distorted. So don’t worry, the TSA member won’t see your face, but they will see every other naked crevice and curve of your unshielded body. But, again you can opt out of the scanner for a “mildly” invasive pat-down.
There have been many complaints and incidences that have come along since the installation of both devices. Dealing specifically with the pat-down, one woman was asked to remove a breast implantation after a fight with breast cancer, and another man was patted down so severely that it caused his urostomy bag to burst, after the TSA member failed to heed his warnings. Both of these incidents could have been avoided, and there have been statements made about adjusting the new system and working out a few bugs. For now U.S citizens must deal with the upcoming changes, and wait until there is yet, further “improvement,” toward our airline security system.
By
Amber Hollen
In a world of competition, where perfection is a must, some people feel pressure to be the best and look the best. When it comes to being thin, to win, you must be the thinnest. Eight million people in the U.S turn to an eating disorder to achieve weight loss. Three percent of women turn to Anorexia, (self-imposed starvation,) and four percent turn to Bulimia, (Which is purging the food you take in.)
“Eating disorders aren’t the best way to lose weight,” Senior Gunnar Kennedy says, “because the person will never find their body good enough.” Most eating disorders develop by the accident of a diet gone too far. A dieter may just want to change their body to look thinner, but what the dieter may not know is that eating disorders can lead to kidney, and liver disease, heart failure, and death if taken too far. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate out of any psychological disease.
There are more than 8,500 “pro-Ana” websites, which are designed by and for people with eating disorders. The websites give tips on dieting, how to hide you’re eating disorder, lists of calories in foods and more. “Everyone is unique; you don’t need to try to fit in.” Courtney Axsom says. Everyone is too busy trying to conform into the latest trend and weight limits to be their self. In our society, if you’re not thin, you’re considered lazy. But if you are thin, you’re automatically beautiful. Everyone is trying to achieve fake beauty and perfection, so they take away an essential item from their life, proper nutrition.
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