Boo to Wednesday classes. Although some students are sitting at home with family this Thanksgiving Eve, a good portion of us are in those few ASU classes that were either not canceled or couldn’t be skipped. Although we’ll all be rushing to get home in time for pumpkin pie tomorrow in the name of catching up with a syllabus hopelessly behind schedule, enduring that one last lecture before a four-day weekend will just give us one more thing to be thankful for.
Bravo to ASU athletics director Lisa Love for taking swift action to spare us an offseason speculation spectacular in regards to ASU football. Love told multiple sources recently that coach Dennis Erickson will be back for another season, which eliminates the inevitable rumor mill and obnoxious conjecture about if/when he should be canned. We aren’t sure just yet how we feel about Erickson holding the reigns for another season in Tempe, but we appreciate that we’re already done hearing all the talk about the embattled coach’s job status. Erickson is 23-24 so far, which is depressing, but consider that ASU’s last Rose Bowl coach, Bruce Snyder, went 21-23 his first four season here and there may be room for optimism.
Boo to the boycott of TSA body scanners. Transportation Security Administration director John Pistole told Fox News that the boycott was “irresponsible,” and we agree. Traveling during the holidays isn’t always the most relaxing thing to do. But complicating it for everyone by opting out of both the scanner and the full-body pat downs? The ripple effect on holiday travel will be unnecessarily enormous. The process is already under heavy scrutiny, but for now if we want to use transportation with the rest of the public, we should make it as simple as possible. And TSA is standing firm on its security policies, with 385 body scanners already implemented in 68 airports in America.
Bravo to Path and its revolutionary “personal networking” site. This spin on the inflated “social networking” community has a friend-list cap of 50 people where people can communicate with their closest friends and save their less personal lives with their hundreds of friends on sites like Facebook. Path is being launched first as an iPhone App, but will also be available on web browsers. According to the brains behind Path, the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar proposed the theory that the human brain can only sustain 150 relationships at once. Therefore, the reasoning behind the cap is that 50 is probably a more realistic look at who we are capable of maintaining intimate relationships with. We can definitely see ourselves meandering down this Path in the future.
Boo to the exchange of artillery fire between North and South Korea on Tuesday, and for waking up our President at 3 a.m. The hour-long artillery attack started by North Korea rained down on South Korea, killing two South Korean soldiers and injuring multiple civilians and military personnel in the process. The North refuses to even take responsibility for starting the exchange, and the White House has called upon the North to “halt its belligerent action.” Although, as Victor Cha suggested in his op-ed piece for The New York Times, North Korea is simply flexing its muscle during its likely transitioning leadership from Kim Jong-il to his son Kim Jong-un. However, there are less aggressive ways to show off power, Korea.
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