Category Archives: Entertainment

Entertainment, School Life

Benstock 2017

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Highland Park’s annual talent show, Benstock, happened Friday, March 10th. The event included a total of nineteen acts, each showing off many different talents such as: rapping, singing, dancing, spoken word, and even some magic. All nineteen acts were pretty great, and some even had people up on their feet dancing along to the music. The performers worked on their acts for weeks before the show, and you could see that in all of their performances.

Image courtesy of: Danasja Hall

The beginning of the show started with a short act performed to let people know that cell phones should be turned off, and the acts following only got better.

Fatuma Harbi, a junior at Highland said, “My favorite part of the show was the last act. The dancing and music was amazing and it just made the whole crowd happy.”

Out of all of the acts that were performed that night, my favorite had to be the magic act. Not only did it amaze many, but it was hilarious. For this act, members from the audience got pulled up on stage and got to participate in the show themselves. No one in the audience will be able to forget the little kid who got up on stage and made everybody laugh. 

The show included many vocal acts (singing, rapping, spoken word), all of them unique in their own way – from piano to guitar to even accapella singing.

The spoken word performance left many with tears, and everybody, including myself, loved it all.

Dancing included everything from K-pop dances to hip-hop, as all were included in this show. Many of our talented dancers blew us away with their dancing skills; it was something you wouldn’t be able to forget.

Benstock lasted for three hours, with a fifteen minute intermission, in between the acts, for people to be able to stretch out and take a small break. The line for tickets stretched out of the silver doors, and out to the parking lot in front of the main office.

This year’s Benstock was one that people had to be there for; all of the acts were amazing, and everybody left the show happy and satisfied.

Entertainment

Quinceañeras

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Every culture has different traditions. In the U.S., we have Sweet Sixteens, and in the Latino culture, we have quinceañeras.

Quinceañeras are a rite of passage for fifteen-year-old girls (also referred to as quinceañera) who are going from a little girl to a young woman. Some families also celebrate the quinceañerea when their daughters turn 16, but still celebrate quinceañera style. People that celebrate this might switch it up due to their religion and/or their beliefs, but the celebrations include the same things.

Planning a quinceañera is a long process; people usually start planning 3-4 months in advance considering everything from the dress, to the color, to what kind of dances she wants. Many companies have quinceañera expos where they show dresses, cakes, invitations, decorations, and basically anything you need for your dream party. Here in Minnesota, El Nuevo Rodeo (located in Minneapolis) has a quinceañera expo every year around the end of January, beginning of February.

One of the most important things involved in a quinceañera are the dances the girl will be doing. Usually, there are 3-5 dances which include:

  • Entrance dance
  • Main waltz
  • Father-daughter dance
  • Surprise dance

There will also be a coronation, where the quinceañera will receive her last doll, her crown, a change of shoes, and a surprise gift – usually given by the parents or the godparents. The last doll, and the shoe change (flats/sneakers to high heels) are another way of showing that this is her growing up from a little girl to a young woman. The crown is given not only so the quinceañera feels like a princess, but to show that you are the princess within your family.

Once the coronation is over, the quinceañera will usually have a surprise dance, where she and her court perform a choreographed dance which usually involves an outfit change and the use of props. Once the surprise dance is over, the real dancing begins.

Quinceañeras are a very important tradition in a young Latina’s life. Mine was a day I will never forget.

Entertainment

The 89th Oscar’s

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The Academy Awards, also known as the Oscars, is a group of twenty-four artistic honors given each year by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), to award excellence in cinematic achievements chosen by votes (as stated on oscars.org). The awards started in 1930, during which it was broadcasted on the radio until 1953 when it first was shown on TV. The Oscars are shown in over 200 countries, and it has served as a model for many other television awards such as: the Emmy Awards for television, the Tony Awards for theater, and the Grammy Awards for music and recording.

This year is the Oscars 89th awards ceremony, and every year they give out awards to Best Picture, Actor/Actress, Supporting Actor/Actress, Animated Feature, Cinematography, Costume Design, Direction, Documentary Feature, Documentary Short, Film Editing, Foreign Language Film, Makeup and Hairstyling, and total score. This year, winners of the Oscars included many movies such as La La Land, Moonlight, Suicide Squad, and Zootopia.  

There was one thing a little different this year about the Oscars. If you were watching when this event occurred, you might have had a little déjà vu or shock. An award was announced for the wrong person, similar to what happened to Steve Harvey, back in 2015, when he announced the wrong winner for Miss America. Harvey announced Miss Colombia as the winner, when in actuality it was Miss Philippines. He took this opportunity to get a little redemption for all the hate he got that followed his mistake.

What exactly happened at the Oscars? No one is truly sure what happened, but all we know is that the announcers, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, didn’t catch a mistake that was written on the envelope twice, saying “Award for best leading actress” before reading the winner’s name. They announced the name for the wrong Best Picture winner.

Many celebs said that it was a hard way to  find out that you lost, and to find out that you won. No one could fully celebrate as much as they wanted to. People were very happy for the Moonlight cast, but felt sad for the La La Land cast as they were first called up to accept the award they didn’t win.

Even though Faye Dunaway announced the wrong winners, Warren Beatty, her co-host, gave her the wrong envelope. Many people call this a half-Steve Harvey, then a full-Steve Harvey, because they were given the wrong envelope, and did not just read it wrong.

The show later went on to Jimmy Kimmel, who foreshadowed his next stunt at the Grammy’s. Kimmel brought in a bus full of tourists, and walked them through the entire awards ceremony. The tourists, dressed in sweatshirts and other casual clothes, were as surprised as the rest of us. He warned the crowd before the tourists entered, and joked with each one as they passed him. Every tourist got to shake famous peoples’ hands, and one even asked Denzel Washington marry them.

As many would say, this year’s Oscars were filled with many ups and downs, and many laughs. The final winners for each category were:

Best Picture: Moonlight

Actor: Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea 

Actress: Emma Stone, La La Land

Supporting Actor: Mahershala Ali, Moonlight  

Supporting Actress: Viola Davis, Fences

Animated Feature: Zootopia 

Cinematography: La La Land

Costume Design: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Direction: Damien Chazelle, La la Land

Documentary Feature: O.J: Made in America  

Documentary Short: The White Helmets

Film Editing: Hacksaw Ridge

Foreign Language Film: The Salesman 

Makeup and Hairstyling: Suicide Squad

Score: La la Land

Entertainment

Upcoming concerts

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It seems like we’re being constantly bombarded by increasingly alarming or unsettling news, but here’s a happier note to balance it out: Spring and Summer of 2017 are definitely going to be good times for live music in Minnesota.

First, in less than a week, on March 12th, Panic! at the Disco, a popular alternative band, is going to be at the Xcel Energy Center on their Death of a Bachelor Tour. Just a few days later, on March 14th, pop princess Ariana Grande will be performing at the same venue for her Dangerous Woman tour,  and the day after that will see Miranda Lambert, a country singer-songwriter, there on her Highway Vagabond tour.

A lot of bands from the seventies, eighties, and nineties will be stopping by to play the Xcel as well: Eighties rock band Bon Jovi will be performing on the 27th, and on April Fool’s Day, Green Day, a punk band first formed in the nineties, will be there for their Revolution Radio tour. Iconic rock band Def Leppard will perform on April 21st, and May 11th will see the music of eightie’s bands Hall and Oates and Tears for Fears, who are currently touring together. On July 14th, Queen (with the addition of Adam Lambert) will be playing, and Roger Waters, from Pink Floyd, will be performing on July 27th.

The Xcel can’t have all the great performances though: at the end of July, on the 30th, Guns and Roses will be playing US Bank Stadium on their Not in This Lifetime tour, the first tour since 1993 to have the three classic members of the band (Axl Rose, Slash, and Duff McKagan) perform together. Shortly after that, on August 12th, Coldplay will play the same venue.

In conclusion, go get tickets before they’re gone!

Clubs and Activities, Tech/Games

HPHS Robotics

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This weekend, the Highland Park robotics team are hopping on a bus and going to Duluth to compete in the 2017 First Robotics Steamworks Competition. This competition will determine if the team will move on to the worldwide competition in St. Louis later this year.

For those of you who don’t know, First Robotics competitions work like this: every year First Robotics creates a challenge, this year it’s “Steamworks,” they lay out a field of play for the robots to traverse, and complete unique challenges in order to earn points, to eventually win the match. One challenge this year was to make your robot climb a rope onto an “airship.” Another was to make the robot throw wiffle balls into a boiler in order to “power” the airship.

When the match starts, the first 15 seconds are called “the autonomous period.” This is where the robots do pre-programmed tasks and deliver pre-loaded game pieces. After the 15 seconds expire, the team’s drivers take over for the last 2 minutes, and 15 seconds, of the match. In this time, teams might try to defend an objective, or complete some of their own. The team’s drivers have to be some of the most talented people on the team as one crucial mistake could mean the end for your team’s season.

Behind the scenes are the build team, the business team, and the programming team. During the six-week long build season, the build team comes together to actually turn their designs into reality. This job takes skill, and the ability to work with your hands. During the hectic build season they must work hard to assemble a robot that can physically accomplish all the methods of winning. According to freshman Alexander “Zuperman17” Busch, the hardest part of being on the build team is managing your time properly in order to finish everything with time to spare. “I mostly like the snacks,” He said jokingly.

The business team works with local businesses in order to get sponsorships, and to manage the team’s finances. One member of the business team, Greta Shore, says robotics helped her follow her passion for science, engineering, and technology. “It helped me develop relationships with upperclassmen,” she said with a “dab.”

In contrast to the large rosters of the build team and business team, the programming team is much smaller with only two members. One member of the programming team, Alexis, said, “Robotics is challenging, but fun, and very rewarding!”

Overall, robotics isn’t about the competition, according to the FRC (First Robotics Competition), it’s about the cooperation, or working with other teams, and with your team, to accomplish goals. That’s what really makes robotics special; it’s the “varsity sport of the mind.” It’s extremely different than many other sports because two teams can win the match. Robotics combines the precision of an athlete, the smarts of mathlete, and the determination of a boxer.

For all of you who want to join an after school activity, but don’t know what to join, the robotics team always welcomes you.

Entertainment

The 89th Academy Awards

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On Sunday, February 26th, the 89th Academy Awards will air on television. They’re going to be hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, and a total of twenty-four awards will be given out. They range from the big ones (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director) to the smaller ones (Sound Mixing, Makeup and Hairstyling), but all of these aspects are vitally important to creating a complete movie for us in the audience to enjoy.

The movies nominated for Best Picture, the most prestigious award of all, are as follows:

  • La La Land: a musical romance set in modern-day Los Angeles starring Emma Stone as an actress and Ryan Gosling as a jazz musician
  • Arrival: a science fiction movie about a linguist who’s brought in to translate the language of a mysterious spaceship
  • Hacksaw Ridge: a true story, from World War II, about an army medic named Desmond Doss; the only American soldier to fight on the front lines of the war without a weapon
  • Hell or High Water: a crime drama about two brothers who work together to rob a bank that is foreclosing on their family land
  • Hidden Figures: a true story about the African American women who did the math to put men in space
  • Fences: a drama about an African American man who’s eaten away by the fact that he’s too old to play in the major leagues
  • Lion: a drama about an Indian boy who, twenty-five years after being separated from his family, attempts to find them again
  • Moonlight: a movie telling the story of a young black man from childhood to adulthood on the streets of Miami.

As is rather standard for the Oscars, most of the nominees are drama films or biopics. This year, a full half of the movies focus on people of color, a stark change from last year when the Oscars received widespread criticism for the lack of nonwhite nominees. Also interesting about this year’s list of nominees is the presence of the film Arrival, considering that it is rare for a science fiction movie to be nominated for Best Picture.

The red carpet will start at 6:00 PM, and the award ceremony itself will begin at 7:30 Central Time, airing on ABC.

Advice/How To, Tech/Games

How to get off your phone

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The are so many ways that  teens can get off their phones, especially in school, during church services, and also at the dinner table. Here are a few that might help.

  • One way to get off your phone is to turn off your data when you are in class, church, or at dinner. If you also turned your notifications off, it would help.
  • You can also uninstall things that you don’t really use, so it won’t take anymore of your time sorting through them.
  • You can also set a specific time to get on your phone and when to get off of it, and you can set a charging station outside your room so you don’t look at it.
  • Also, leave your phone home when you go to church or dinner.

There are many more ways to try to get off your phone, but these are just a few simple ideas.

Editorials/Student Voice, Sports, Tech/Games

How eSports and traditional sports compare

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Esports, maybe you’ve heard a lot about them, but most people have no idea what they are or why they’re popular. For people who aren’t familiar with video games, it might seem confusing why people would want to watch someone play a game that they could just play by themselves. If you think about the premise though, it’s very similar to “real” sports.

Let’s just start with the premise of the competition and tournaments. In traditional sports, teams compete through a long regular season where they play games weekly, and at the end of the season whoever is at the top of the standings will advance to the playoffs, and perhaps the championships. In most eSports, it works almost exactly the same. For example, in the extremely popular eSport, League of Legends, there is a six month long regular season, and a world tournament at the end of the year. So, just by the basic structure of the leagues and competition, the two entities are similar.

Another way that traditional sports and eSports are similar is the formalities of competition. You may think that video game tournaments are just messy, loud rooms filled with nerds staring at screens, but in reality it’s a highly organized event. Teams wear jerseys, shake hands, have equipment sponsors, coaches, substitutes, referees, announcers, and large live audiences. All these things exist in both sporting realms. It was through obtaining these things that eSports was able to get the attention of big investors, and become the nightmare of traditional TV producers.

One way that eSports have gained recognition is just the sheer number of people that love and watch them. Online viewership for eSports happens on video game streaming websites like Twitch and YouTube and has skyrocketed in the past few years with events like the Counter Strike Global Offensive championships garnering 2.2 million concurrent viewers (1.2 million off the internet and 1 million people on TV, according to dextro.com), smashing the record for concurrent viewers of any eSport. The way that professional video gaming is able to attract so much attention is through their platform. People who play their game will see notifications for an ongoing eSport event when they log in, allowing the companies to target an audience they know will be interested in watching the matches.

A final way to compare traditional sports and eSports is the players themselves, but obviously physical athletes are much more in shape than the average eSports competitor so let’s consider the training hours. Most sports teams will spend up to 5 hours a day training, working out, revising strategy and reviewing film. The average eSports team spends 9-12 hours a day training, and although playing video games may not be as strenuous physically it can a exhausting, draining effect, and the players have to pour just as much energy and focus into their work as other athletes do. A big concern for physical athletes is injuries, but those do happen in eSports as well. The most common sorts of injuries are wrist, finger, and elbow, but often mental injuries can occur as well. When you play a seemingly silly game in front of 12,000 people, for 10 million dollars (basically your only chance of getting a real salary that year), after training for 12 hours a day stress related problems often happen. Recently a big victory was scored for all of eSports when Riot Games lobbied the US Citizen and Immigration Services to make P-1 athletic visas available to professional gamers, to allow them to traverse from tournament to tournament easily.

Recently, eSports have been gaining more recognition throughout the world, and as time goes on the industry will only grow. The biggest question surrounding eSports today is whether they will ever be able to compete with the likes of the NFL and other major sports leagues. In my honest opinion, those sports will never be topped by video games, but maybe, someday, the two could be equal.

Editorials/Student Voice, School Life, Tech/Games

The issue of technology in the classroom

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In the past few years, there has been a huge advancement in technology. This technology is being used for education (for example: school issued iPads). Even though the idea of technology is a good idea for helping children learn, it is also creating a distraction for their learning. In St. Paul Public Schools, there are many kids that are distracted by either their iPads or cell phones in the classroom (playing on them instead of doing their school work). This is causing them to not focus and learn, which can result in bad tests scores and low grades. 

One of the issues with school iPads is the App Store which allows kids to download and play games on the device. In the last year, there have been fixes that have taken the App Store off of school iPads. This helped for awhile, until kids figured out how to either get the App Store back or they found other ways to play games. The App Store battle is a constant issue which is continuing to cause kids to be distracted in the classroom.

Another issue is the use of cell phones. Each teacher has different rules about phones but kids still use them to “listen to music while doing work.” There have been studies proving that listening to music is more of a distraction than a help for doing work (for an example see: http://www.spinedu.com/listen-music-studying/).

One more issue with cell phones is that if a student doesn’t have an iPad with them, they say they will just use their phones to do the work. The problem with this is A) the screens of cell phones are small so it is difficult to produce quality work and B) without the school iPad app restriction, the student is able to do anything on their phone even if they say they are doing work.

Since school issued iPads, and personal cell phones, are both an issue in a learning environment, there should be someone who looks into enforcing more efficient rules for the use of these devices in the classroom.

School Life, Tech/Games

Programming at HPSH

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ianHighland offers a wide range of electives. Electives can be used to explore studies outside the core curriculum. Electives offered are anything from sports and journalism, to photography and programming. I am here today to talk about one particular elective: computer science with Mr. Peterson.

Back in my Junior year, I took computer programming as an elective. I liked my experience, as I thought the class was fun but simple, and Mr. Peterson was a great guy. The class taught me how to use Scratch and Google Sketchup, and unlike a lot of other classes, he gave us a lot of creative freedom. Most assignments had an end goal requirement, like “have it multiplayer” or “draw a house,” but anything else was up to us. We could decide what kind of multiplayer game it was, and what the details of the houses were.

Perhaps the reason why I did so well in the class, was because I had experience in programming and model design. As a kid I had always been very creative and loved Legos. Eventually, I turned to video games, but my creativity stayed the same. In games like Minecraft and Garry’s Mod I could explore and interact with my own creations; which is a wonderful, godlike experience.

Then I found LittleBigPlanet, a game that gave a limited range of tools that, if you knew your stuff, could create almost anything. The game is primarily a platformer, but I have seen people create shooters, RPGs, mini games, full length movies, anything and everything you can set your mind to, if you know how to make it.

How the programming in LittleBigPlanet works is a lot like Scratch; how you place and hook up modules to activate things. It is as complex as you make it. If I want to make it so that when the player grabs a button it turns on a light, I place an object called a “grab sensor,” and wire it up to a light.

I can make the same concept more complex too. Like if I want it to be that only certain characters can grab the button, and make the light turn on permanently, I can add a tag sensor and hook that and the grab sensor up to an AND gate, and hook that up to a counter set to 1, so when a certain player with a tag grabs the button, both conditions are met so the AND gate sends out a signal, activating the counter so it is at 1/1 and permanently sends out a signal to the light.

I have used this system to create some pretty complex stuff, like a character stealth system, movement speed of characters, etc.

So, if any of this sounds interesting to you, or if you would like to learn more about programming, you should check out Mr. Peterson’s elective class.