Senior Louis Weil was suspended Wednesday for driving recklessly in the bus parking lot while buses were leaving school, according to Blair security. Weil was given a 10-day suspension after Security Assistant Everett Campbell saw him executing what he described as "crazy maneuvers" while the last buses were leaving the school's parking lot at around 3 p.m. Tuesday.
As Student Member of the Board of Education (BOE), senior Sebastian Johnson finds himself wedged between his constituency and reality, but there's no place he'd rather be. "Students don't always realize the political realities of what they want to advocate for," Johnson explains, citing the school system's new Grading and Reporting Policy as an instance in which "political realities" conflict with even his own initial opinions on the issue.
It's hard to believe it now, but there was once a time when hatred was an emotion we tried to suppress, mitigate or otherwise hide. And then came cable news.
On Dec. 16, 2005, The New York Times printed a story entitled "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts." The story detailed a program in which the National Security Agency (NSA) eavesdropped, without warrants, on Americans they thought were communicating electronically with terrorists outside of the country. On Feb. 6, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales met with members of Congress to discuss the program. While opponents argue that the wiretapping is detrimental to civil liberties, supporters maintain that it is necessary for the protection of American citizens.
German poet Johann Goethe's quip that "there is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity" is remarkable not for its biting directness, but for its depth. It is an observation that blames the worst problems on thoughtful, premeditated stupidity — not the passive foolishness that makes you leave an assignment for the last minute, but sincere, deliberate ignorance.
He's been writing in support of Advanced Placement (AP) tests for over two decades, formulated a controversial and nationally respected ranking system for high schools based solely on the number of AP tests administered, declared APs the catalyst of a golden age in American education and said that APs will soon overtake the SAT as the standard measure of high school learning. But Washington Post education reporter Jay Mathews is no sellout. He's a utilitarian.
Holler people of Blair!!! The Editors-in-Chief decided they needed a break from the emotional strain of dealing with the tough (or should we say inane) questions and requested assistance. The great Danny Scheer, from SCO, and the bitter Armin Rosen, from Print, responded to the call and wrote what is undoubtedly one of the 15 best Ask Chips EVER. LOL.
It's impossible to say which elements of this bloated pop culture of ours will find traction in a future whose tastes we can only predict. No one can say for sure if Harry Potter will join Sherlock Holmes, Frodo and Dracula on the short-list of great British fictional characters, or if the works of J.K. Rowling and C.S. Lewis will be held in equal esteem. But this is a distinct possibility. It wouldn't surprise me either if future PhD theses explored everything from the septet's religious symbolism to its social and political allegory to its treatment of the teenage psyche. There hopefully won't be a lot of it, but there will be Harry Potter scholarship. One of these days.
"Get your weed," decrees Three 6 Mafia from the car stereo. "Get your blow. Get your drink together. Cause we about to get high." It is 2:15 p.m. on Oct. 10. There is no drink or blow here, but single-gram "dime bags" holding small, dull-green clusters of the Cannabis sativa leaf are in abundant supply. And despite all lack of indication that the half-dozen Blair seniors packed into the car of James, a senior, will soon be blasted sky-high, it is more or less understood: Today, they will do what they have done practically every day since the beginning of the school year and are planning to do every day this week. As Three 6 Mafia declared, they are about to get high.
The "amateur ideal" is undeniably in decline. The once-revered concept of the amateur athlete as a moral and physical exemplar, a well-rounded scholar-athlete in the mold of Roger Bannister, who ran the first four-minute mile while studying medicine at Oxford, is not just antiquated, but gone.
In a 1989 essay State Department planner Francis Fukuyama made an ambitious claim; a sweeping and overarching declaration of not just the end of fifty years of ideological warfare, but millennia of human intellectual development; a claim simple in concept, but infinitely complicated in its implications. In an essay entitled "The End of History," Fukuyama postulated that the democratic revolutions of 1989 were "not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
I don't know if this rumor made it to America or not, but sometime during the middle of July, during the third week of my six-week trip to Israel with the Nesiya Institute, word spread that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had suffered a heart attack. When one of the Israelis traveling with my program told me that this had been a falsehood, most likely spread by anti-disengagement proponents, I wondered how it was that so juvenile and unsubstantiated a rumor could take hold in a country as westernized as Israel. That would never happen in America, I said aloud. But then again, replied the Israeli, America has never had anything like the Gaza disengagement.
If the liberal historian Howard Zinn is correct in saying that history is nothing but an endless sequence of present-days (I believe that he is), then a past date, namely 1935, is just as relevant to the ongoing debate over Social Security as the future date of the program's insolvency. And just as constructionists look to the intent of the Founding Fathers to decipher the often nebulous subtext of our Constitution, we should frame any debate on Social Security in the context of the expectations and intentions of its Founding Father: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
"Then it was suddenly revealed to me that my own humble existence and the Realms of Truth were less widely separated than I had supposed, that at certain points they were actually in contact; and in my new-found confidence and joy I wept upon his printed page, as in the arms of a long-lost father."
I think our Senators need to be reminded of just how little the debate over the "nuclear option" matters. The filibustering of judicial nominees is not the gross abuse of power that the Republicans cast it as, nor is its banning a threat to the very pillars of democracy as Democrats have maintained. Aside from extreme partisanship there are few conflicting or overarching principles in play, since this is, fundamentally, a disagreement on procedure.
Films often achieve cult status either because they don't make any sense whatsoever — "Rocky Horror" definitely qualifies — or because, like "The Matrix" or "Fight Club," they seem to make so little sense that, on closer examination, they make perfect sense. "Kontroll," rookie director Nimrod Antal's existential allegory filmed entirely in the Budapest subway system, falls under the latter and more paradoxical category.
Just as no contemporary author would dare to undertake a work of the length, sensitivity, and historical perspective of a "War and Peace," "Don Quixote" or "Les Miserables", so too would no modern director undertake a film with the scope or complexity of "Andrei Rubelev."
I was somewhat taken aback when, in a short speech after the opening performance of her production of August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson," director Saret Scott opined that the middle-aged Wilson is already one of the great American playwrights. But after seeing "The Piano Lesson" I can find little grounds on which to disagree with her.
Although the Blair Community Ice Hockey Team was down 9-2 late in its Feb. 20 playoff game against Howard High School, defeat was far from the minds of the Blazer faithful. This was, after all, a come-from-behind team, a team that had earned its first ever playoff berth after a winless season the previous year.
Carnivores: people for whom the word "tofu" resonates with about as much familiarity as "quantum physics" or "proper hygiene."
The best journalism is undoubtedly that which does not read like typical journalism. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, for instance, wrote in the third person primarily to suck the journalistic tedium out of their Watergate saga "All the President's Men." The result was a modern nonfiction classic. Upton Sinclair is today revered as one of history's most important muckraker journalists. It is both ironic and fitting that his most significant work of journalism was a novel, "The Jungle."
As a member of the Board of Education, former Blair PTSA President Valerie Ervin will take aim at the achievement gap, push for minority participation in GT classes and programs and advocate decreased class sizes. She will also confront an issue that lacks the visibility, but not the importance of GT enrollment and academic discrepancies: budget clarity.
What happened to the great visionaries in sports? Where did you go, Pete Rozelle? What happened to you, Roone Arledge? Where are the daring, farsighted few willing to look past the minutia of the present in order to create something lasting, something special for the future?
On Sept. 24, the lives of five area teenagers ended early on the roads of Montgomery County. The following week, County law enforcement officials and local policy makers made numerous calls for action, ranging from helicopter traffic surveillance to reforms in the driver's license testing process.
The use of historical precedent often times ignores the nuances of the event that is being used as an example. Take for instance the popular comparison of Iraq to Vietnam. The two are alike in that they are wars in which the United States fought; yet the nature of the conflicts could not be less similar.
Let's see how well you know your presidential election history. Who won the first debate in 1996? The second debate in 1988? The third in 1980? Of course you have no idea, because debates don't really matter.
Of all the institutions in this pop culture of ours, there is nonemore insidious than the sequel. It constantly amazes and puzzles methat some of the finest directors and producers we've ever had are so eager to sacrifice their very souls at the altar of the sequel. They so eager to betray their original artisticvisions in order to score fat checks and box office buzz. From George Lucasthe world received the cinematic atrocities known as the Star Warssequels; from Francis Ford Coppola the laughingstock that was GodfatherPart III; from Steven Spielberg, a convoluted second visit to the world ofJurassic Park. But selling out is good business; Jurassic Park 2:The Lost World had what was at the time the highest grossing openingweekend in movie history.
It's halftime at the Texas state football championship game and the Permian-Odessa Panthers are down by a lot. As their coach (Billy-Bob Thornton) gives a fiery locker room speech, the camera cuts between the battle-scarred faces of the game-battered gridiron warriors, capturing the blood, the sweat, the tears of high schoolfootball at its highest level.
Of the American electorate, Abraham Lincoln said, "If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters." In this election our country, 26% of which is composed of people under the age of 18 according to the U.S. Census bureau, is in danger of reversing four years of progress, and instead sitting on four years of a John Kerry presidency.
In his book Worse than Watergate, former Nixon legal aid John Dean expresses surprise at George W. Bush's ability to run a secretive and dishonest administration. After all, Nixon had the sort of ruthless intellect that made him truly Nixonian, whereas Bush seems a little too preoccupied with basic pronunciation to control a political machine anywhere near as frightening as his predecessor's.
I suppose I like Festival Express because it is something of a throwback. It's a throwback to the wonderful pre-Fahrenheit 9/11 days of documentary filmmaking when documentaries, as the name suggests, documented. Popular documentaries are today so mired in political rhetoric that I briefly feared for the survival of the genre, what with audiences appearing to favor the malicious (Michael Moore accosting senators on the street) over the meaningful (when was the last time you watched Frontline, PBS's Oscar-nominated documentary program?). For a glorious hour and a half my fears were almost totally allayed, as the film simply documents the six-day drinking binge that was The Band, The Grateful Dead, and Janis Joplin's
An anti-pullout protester on the streets of Jerusalem.