Boo to Blackboard 9. Students and teachers alike thought the inconvenient, poorly color-schemed and hard-to-navigate days of Blackboard were a thing of the past. But their fevered anticipation was met with a nicer color scheme and whole new realm of glitches. As students, we’re a little more glitch-resilient than our profs, who just recently learned to use the program. But there’s nothing worse than feeling disconnected on the first day of classes — especially after an entire summer to work out the glitches, which included partial deletion of discussion board postings and a lot of unplanned maintenance shutdowns. We spy a lot of student frustration on the forefront. Hopefully we’re on to the next version pretty soon. You know what they say, 10th time’s the charm.
Bravo to Rips Premium Frozen Cocktails. The 100-calorie alcoholic freeze-pops are the best thing since those icy childhood treats, whose animal namesake still confuses us. The long road to success of Rips makes us feel like ASU has finally produced the kind of entrepreneurship to revive our party school status (while simultaneously supporting our top-ranked business school, of course). Way to make bank with a mullet-style twist… you know, mixing pleasure with business. Many Sun Devils take their poolside drinking very seriously, and it’s comforting to know there are three flavors of icy indulgence that effectively disguise students’ favorite school-year activity.
Boo to those people in class who are already wasting our time. You know the type — the ones who can’t take a hint that class is almost over and pop the weird last-minute questions, like “What’s the format for the final?” as everyone is ready to leap out of their seats. Or the ones who present irrelevant commentary about their lives when called on to state their name and major. Or even those who fervently get the professor’s attention only to ask what edition of the textbook is needed for the class when it’s listed on the syllabus everyone has been staring at for an hour.
Bravo to the Texas Longhorns for sticking it out in the Big 12. If Texas would have left the Big 12 and joined the Pac-10, Oklahoma would've come along, too, with other tough Big 12 schools. That would've meant more losses for the ASU football team. The Longhorns chose to stay, and in doing so saved the Sun Devils from more 4-8 seasons.
Boo to prison escapes. In addition to the three convicts making national news for escaping last month, another inmate fled from a work site in Tucson on Wednesday. He was captured Thursday morning, and the two who got loose in July were caught Thursday night, but overall this makes five escapes in two months. The escapees were compared to Bonnie and Clyde, though their story lacks that same awe in the general public. They might contribute to an idea of Arizona as the land of cowboys and outlaws, but hopefully we see an end to prison breaks and have one less reason to see our state in the national news.
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