Bravo to space tourism. Dominating the world’s aircraft manufacturing just wasn’t enough for Boeing, which announced Wednesday its plans to enter the commercial world of space exploration. Start saving your monies now, folks — the first commercial flight out of this stratosphere is coming in 2015. (Of course, you’ll have to pay the fare to get to Cape Canaveral, Fla., first.) The space capsules would carry about seven people, four of whom would be astronauts. Opening space to the common man and Star Wars fans would also cheapen the cost of sending our astronauts to the final frontier.
Boo to student arrests. ASU and Tempe Police made 140 arrests on the Tempe campus in the first two weekends of school. Of those arrests, 133 were alcohol-related. Even with all of the warnings published in The State Press about increased ASU and Tempe Police enforcement in dorms and around campus, students are still drinking irresponsibly. And it’s a growing problem. While being arrested for underage drinking at your residence hall isn’t nearly as irresponsible as getting behind the wheel — drunk driving incident account for at least three of the arrests — it’s important to recognize your limits and when it’s appropriate to drink. We all like to wind down, but when the Tempe and ASU Police are landing that many arrests in two weeks, something needs to be done.
Bravo to something modern happening to the library. ASU Libraries launched its first collection of e-books this week and has six Kindles available to loan out. We’re partial to reading our books in print, naturally, but then again, the collection features young adult fiction like “Twilight” and “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” so this implementation is appropriate for that audience.
Boo to poverty. There were 44 million Americans below the poverty line in 2009 — that’s one in seven people and the highest it’s been in 15 years. Arizona has it even worse — one in five Arizonans are below the poverty line. The New York Times said a rise in shared households might have kept the statistics from climbing higher; there has been an 11.6 percent jump of multifamily households over the last two years. The poverty line for a single adult is $10,830 and is $22,050 for a family of four. Here’s hoping that the poverty rates turn around soon.
Bravo to Reggie Bush for returning his Heisman trophy. The NCAA would likely have taken his award away anyway, but this saves us a couple weeks of will-they won’t-they reporting on SportsCenter. Whether he deserved to be stripped of the award or not is up to public debate, but Bush’s selfless decision allows the Saints to focus on repeating as Super Bowl Champions. And maybe, just maybe, Reggie Bush can become the type of player a Heisman Trophy winner is supposed to be.
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