Category Archives: Entertainment

Entertainment, National

Jussie Smollett

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Jussie Smollett was born on June 21, 1982, and is an American actor and singer. Jussie Smollett grew a big following after appearing on the famous show Empire. He plays Jamal Lyon.

On the night of January 29, 2019, Jussie Smollett tells the police that at around 2 a.m. what he believed were two white males, wearing masks and a MAGA (make America great again) hat, had attacked him. According to Smollett, the two men hurled racial and homophobic slurs at him. They then tied a rope around his neck and poured a chemical substance on him.

Smollett says he went home and one of his close associates had to call and tell the police 40 minutes after the incident had occurred. Sources say that Smollett was hesitant to call the police because of his status.

After the attack was shared to different media outlets, there were a lot of A-list celebrities that offered their support to Jussie Smollett.

After the investigation, police noticed that some things that Jussie was doing after the incident were odd. For example, the night of the attack, Smollett said that he had broken ribs, two days later he was seen at a concert dancing and jumping. It didn’t make sense as to why someone who had broken ribs would hold a concert.

On February 1, Jussie released his first public appearance on Good Morning America, he said, “Let me starts off by saying that I’m O.K. My body is strong but my soul is stronger.”

During the interview, people noticed how Smollett was getting defensive when Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts asked why didn’t he give the police his phone. Smollett said he had personal pictures and information that he didn’t want the police to see. People thought that if you are innocent, and have nothing to hide, you’ll just give the police your phone.

A few weeks after the incident, it came out that police think that Smollett hired two brothers to stage the attack, and the reason why he did this was because he wasn’t getting paid enough. For his role on the show Empire, he only gets paid $20,000 an episode and he thought that wasn’t enough, so he thought that by staging this attack, he would get a raise and get donations for the hate crime that happened to him.

A lot of people were hurt that he could have lied about a situation like this, feeling that he’s making it harder for people of color to come out in the future and tell their hate crime stories.

Clubs and Activities, Music/Concerts

Benstock

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Image taken from: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwXG-KyL_O1oNUtEWnRHN3Nsejg/view

Every year, Highland Park Senior High has an event called Benstock. The NHS organization oversees this event, and had auditions on February 11th, 13th, and 14th. Those who auditioned for this event, and passed to perform, must attend rehearsals on March 6th and 7th at 2:00 to 5:00.

March 8th is the day of performance, starting at 6:30, at Highland Park Senior High, in the auditorium.

Benstock is an event for people to come and watch people perform their talents. It is very similar to a talent show. If you have attended a Benstock during the past years, you know how fun and exciting it can be.

Invite your friends and come with $5-$10 to attend this event. Come to have a fun time, cheer on your friends and watch amazing performances from your upperclassmen, peers and friends.

If you didn’t know about auditions, or missed the dates, don’t worry, Benstock is held every year and will hold auditions around the same time each year. Pay attention to the posters on the walls in the hallways. These posters will inform you of where and when auditions are held.

Even if you or friends aren’t performing, you can still go and enjoy your time. In previous years they had people sing, dance, tell jokes, play their instruments, and even teachers performed as a band. Some of these performances you just can’t miss.

Setting up and creating this event is not very easy. If this type of work interests you, you can join the NHS. NHS stands for National Honors Society which is a national organization that recognizes academic excellence in students. The purpose for NHS is to promote leadership, help in volunteering, and create an amazing character out of everyone. Those who want to join NHS should strive to show reliability, honesty, sincerity, and are expected to be leaders.

Image taken from: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwXG-KyL_O1oUGpMNElWejFXeVU/view

The the first requirement to join NHS is to have a GPA of 3.75 after the first semester of your sophomore or junior year. You also must include an essay on how you have previously served for a project, or how there is a service project you want to do in the future. Other than these requirements you will also need three letters of recommendation.

Any other questions you have can be sent to either of the NHS faculty advisors: Stacy Hanson or Jody Rohweller-Kocur. To get their information, go onto the Highland website and go the the NHS page.

If you have no interest in joining the NHS but would like to be caught up with what they do, you can follow their Twitter or Facebook page.  

Movies/TV/Theaters

Here’s what happened at the 2019 Oscars

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By: Daniela Fernandez and Maddie Baggenstoss

This year’s Oscars was held at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California. The Oscars have been going on since 1929. What happened this year? Keep reading to get all the tea!

This year’s Oscars had no host. They originally were going to have Kevin Hart host this year’s Oscars, but after old homophobic jokes he made resurfaced, he stepped down claiming that he didn’t want any drama during the Oscars, according to Vox. This was the first time since 1989 that the Oscars haven’t had a host.

The awards ceremony opened with Adam Lambert and Queen playing some of their hits.

Here are the winners of big awards from the Oscars.

This year’s winner of the Best Actress Award was Olivia Colman. She won for her role as Queen Anne in The Favourite.

The winner of Best Supporting Actor was Mahershala Ali in Green Book for his role as Don Shirley.

Regina King won Best Supporting Actress in If Beale Street Could Talk as Sharon Rivers.

This year’s Best Picture award went to Green Book. Best Animated Feature went to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

Best Director went to Alfonso Cuarón for Roma. He also won Foreign Language Film for Roma, and Best Cinematography for Roma.

Best Original Music Score went to Black Panther with Ludwig Göransson. Black Panther also won Best Costume Design with Ruth E. Carter, and Best Production Design with Jay R. Hart and Hannah Beachler.

Best Original song went to “Shallow” written by Lady Gaga, Mark Ronson, Anthony Rossomando and Andrew Wyatt.

Best Adapted Screenplay (which is a screenplay based on a book) went to Kevin Willmott, Spike Lee, Charlie Wachtel, and David Rabinowitz for BlacKKlansman.

Speaking of winners, the winner of the Best Actor Award, Rami Malek, accidentally ended the awards ceremony with a bang. Or rather, a thud. According to People, Malek fell off of the stage shortly after finishing his acceptance speech. By that time, the televised production had finished, so the incident did not appear on TV. However, there are pictures circulating the internet. They show a startled Malek on the ground, having just stumbled into the crowd.

Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper also gave an impressive performance of the song “Shallow” from the movie A Star Is Born. “Shallow” won the Oscar for Best Original Song. Before Gaga and Cooper even got on stage, the crowd applauded them. Many news sources are calling the performance iconic and amazing, and they’re not wrong. It was packed with emotion and the song is beautifully written.

Overall, we are sure this year’s Oscars are going to be remembered for quite some time.

Entertainment

Toki Pona, the world’s easiest language

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As you know, languages have existed pretty much forever. They‘ve obviously changed greatly over time, but one thing about language is consistent throughout the entire world – there are many. There is an estimate of over 6,500 different languages spoken all around the world, thus it’s difficult for everyone in the world to easily communicate. Many countries even have multiple official languages, spoken at a national level by equally large amounts of people. Like in the country of Ethiopia, the languages of Amharic, Tigrinya, Afar, Oromo, Somali, and many others are all spoken on a regular day-to-day basis. And that’s just one country out of over a hundred and ninety.

But what if there was a way we could all communicate using the same means of communication, what if there was a written, and spoken form of communication, that anyone could easily pick up and use? And what if that form of communication was personally tailored to be easily pronounced, and spoken by people of any linguistic background? You’re probably thinking of Esperanto, but no…this isn’t Esperanto, this is better, it’s called Toki Pona! Why is it better? Well, here’s why: According to OxfordDictionaries, Toki Pona was a language created back in 2001, but it wasn’t really used, or even heard of, by a wider population, until in 2014 when Sonja Lang released the book, Toki Pona: The Language of Good. After the book was released, Toki Pona was practiced and spoken on dedicated online chat rooms, and at occasional community meet-ups.

But what even is this language, and why should anybody really care? Well, they should care because Toki Pona is personally crafted to be the easiest, and most realistically potential universal language that could unite the world. And, it’s really easy to learn as the entire language only relies on its 125 root words (and 14 phonemes).

But how does that work? With only 125 words, how would you say…anything? Well, it’s because according to the official book of the language, it’s how you use them. If you were to see a table, you would call it “a table” but what if in your language, there’s an incredibly limited vocabulary, well, then (in Toki Pona’s case) you’d call it a “Four leg wood.” Or, what if you spoke Toki Pona, and ate a hamburger? Hamburger? Don’t you mean “Round meat food?”

Toki Pona is just like that, and it’s surprisingly efficient, as you can add on as many of the root words as you like in order to make the object, or thing you’re describing more efficient. An actual example of this language is the phrase “waso telo” which are the Toki Pona words for “water bird” which means seagull, there’s also “ilo toki” which means “talking tool” which usually refers to a phone. Toki Pona thus heavily relies on context.

But along with having a Latin alphabet alongside its traditional unique Sitelen Pona, members of the online Toki Pona community have adapted the to Arabic, and Korean script, making it even more easy, and accessible. But for me personally, I think the best way to learn it would be to learn the symbols, because once you learn what those one hundred and twenty five symbols mean, and just get over that hump, that’s it, you’ve learned the entire language, there really aren’t that many rules.

Tech/Games

Why are battle royale games popular?

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Battle royale games have gained a lot of popularity in the past couple of years. Games such as Fortnite and Pubg have been some of the most played games in the past year. But why are battle royale games so popular?

Battle royale style games are pretty recent. The first iteration, that people consider battle royale, is the “Hunger Games” mini game in Minecraft servers, which was styled after the movie and book series The Hunger Games.

Today, according to digitaltrends.com, battle royale games have 6 defining characteristics:

  • giant maps for the player to explore
  • that you start of with nothing
  • caches and chests from which you get items from
  • a storm or barrier that forces players to get closer together
  • the last player or group standing wins the game
  • something that makes the specific battle royale game unique (or every game would be extremely similar)

Which brings me to the first point on why they are popular, which is their aspect of being unique. Games such as Fortnite are widely played because they are unique. In Fortnites’ case, it’s building system is what makes it unique, and so fun to play, because you don’t have to sit in specific areas for cover, you can build your own.

But uniqueness is not the only reason battle royale games are popular. They are also popular because its system is very easy to apply to many games. Like how recently, they released a game called Tetris 99 which uses an old and very popular popular game, Tetris, and then they made it so you had to play against 98 other people, effectively making a battle royale Tetris game.

But, not only that, battle royale games are also super popular today because many of the biggest battle royale games are free. Games like Fortnite and Apex Legends can now be played by pretty much anyone because people aren’t blocked by a hefty price for the game. So, everyone can try them, and why wouldn’t you, it’s free.

Music/Concerts, School Life

Scotapalooza 2019

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Every year, Highland Park Senior High School hosts a musical event called “Scotapalooza.” It took place on January 27th, 2019, which was right before the 4 days off of school. This event featured many different bands that performed. This year, the line-up for music was: both the middle and high school jazz bands, the Highland Tour band, and other small ensembles including a rock band and the “Ben Jossi Combo.”

The event took place at the North Garden Theater, which had plenty of space for the bands and seating for guests.

Scotapalooza also had a wide range of drinks and snacks to attract guests. This included a full bar, and a food station with pretzels and cookies. This part of the event itself helped raise $247 for Highland’s music program.

Overall, Highland raised $4,213 in revenue for Highland’s music program. A lot of it came from donated gift cards, same-day purchased tickets, and from food and beverage sales.

In the past, the money raised has gone to purchasing a new drum set which the band needed for jazz band. This year, the money raised will go towards purchasing new instruments, sheet music, and more needed musical items.

Scotapalooza is a great event that brings everyone at Highland together with multiples genres of student music. It also helps the Highland community by supporting high school music programs.

Image taken from: https://m.evensi.us/4th-annual-highland-park-senior-high-instrumental-music-scot-palooza-north-garden-theater/285575543

Music/Concerts

Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse review

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By: Vivian S

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, directed by Peter Ramsey, Robert Persichetti Jr., Rodney Rothman, and Bob Persichetti, was a resounding success. It has made $340.6 million at the box office and has a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes (as of this writing), and its success is well deserved.

Into the Spider-Verse centers around Miles Morales, a teen from Brooklyn who is bitten by a spider and gains powers. The movie shows his journey in learning how to become Spider-Man. At the same time, spider people from other dimensions have been thrown into his — and they need to get back home.

The entire movie was amazing to watch. Each character in the movie was fun, with different designs and personalities. The animation was gorgeous, and once the story really got started, it had me hooked. Even though the movie was great, some scenes took it to a whole different level for me. The moment when Miles truly becomes Spider-Man is, in my opinion, the best scene in the entire movie: I could watch it again and again.

This is not to say the movie is perfect. One of the biggest drawbacks for me was all the flashing lights. The trailers weren’t exaggerating the movie’s tendency toward flashing colors and lights, and sometimes it just got too bright.

Another problem for me was that there was so much more about the story and characters that I wanted to see. Looking back now, it feels like some pieces are missing, especially in Gwen’s character arc. From watching the trailers, I figured that Gwen would be one of the main characters, but when I watched the movie, it felt like she took a backseat to Miles and Peter. It feels to me like some of her scenes might have been cut. I think the movie left a lot of opportunities on the table, because the story and characters are so amazing.

All in all, I loved watching this movie: the animation, the story, the humor, the serious moments, the soundtrack, and so on. Everything was amazing! You can tell that a lot of work and talent went into it. I cannot recommend this movie enough.

Entertainment

How to spend a day at Mall of America

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The Mall of America has many great places you can visit. Here are some places you can visit at the Mall of America.

1. Nickelodeon University

It’s an indoor amusement park and kids and adults can go on exciting rides including:

  • Log chute
  • Avatar Airbender
  • Adventuire bay
  • Big Rids
  • Crazy Cars
  • Pepsi Orange Streak
  • Pineapple poppers

You can also meet your favorite Nick characters from Spongebob to Ralph and do exciting things with your family.

2. Shopping

If you enjoy shopping, the Mall of America has over 500 stores, so you can probably find something that you like, from fashion, to food and toys. These stores include:

  • Sears
  • Vikings Locker Rooms
  • Chapel of Love
  • Old Navy
  • Foerver 21
  • Foot Locker
  • Payless

These stores have great things you can enjoy and buy for your whole family.

3. Dining

The Mall of America has great food options such has A&W. Together with your friends and families, you can share an original experience centered on a distinctive taste. Asian Chao has a wide variety of Asian dishes like orange chicken, fried mushrooms, fries, sushi, and other popular Asian dishes. At Benihana, you can enjoy Hibachi steak, chicken and shrimp.

Movies/TV/Theaters

Movies to see in 2019

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2018 had some really good movies, but most of them weren’t worth the ten dollars it costs to go see them in the theaters. 2019 is sounding like it will be much more promising when it comes to movies worth seeing though. 2019 will bring movies of all genres: animated movies, comedies, super hero movies and even some good looking horror movies. There are also a lot of sequels coming out like Frozen 2 or Avengers: Endgame.

Before I go any further, this article is going to based completely off my own opinion. I’m not basing the movies mentioned off any criteria other than what I’m excited to watch.

So here are the top ** movies coming out this year:

Captain Marvel – March 8, 2019

The movie takes place in the 1990s and introduces the world to Carol Danvers, the Air Force pilot who obtains superpowers.

Us – March 22, 2019

Jordan Peele is writting this movie as a follow-up to his previous movie, Get Out.

Dumbo – March 29, 2019

This movie is going to be a live action version of Disney’s animated movie by the same name. The movie is going to be directed by Tim Burton, so you know it will be good.

Shazam! – April 5, 2019

The DC movie is about a teen who receives the power to transform into an adult with the powers like strength, flight, and many others.

Pet Semetary – April 5, 2019

Another Stephen King story brought to life.

The Curse of La Llorona – April 19, 2019

This movie is based off the legend of La Llorona. I don’t think this movie will be done very well, but I’m excited to see what they do with the aspects of the legend.

Avengers: Endgame – April 26, 2019

The movie is going to continue on with the story told in Avengers: Infinity War. This movie will also kill off some main characters.

Pokemon Detective Pikachu – May 10, 2019

It looks like the story line for the movie isnt great, but Ryan Reynolds is always funny so I’m going to see it.

The Lion King – July 19, 2019

Another live action Disney remake. I’m excited though.

It: Chapter 2 – September 6, 2019

The story will take place when the children from the first movie are adults.

Aladdin – May 24, 2019

Again, another live action Disney remake. The actor for Aladdin, Mena Massoud, looks like a good fit to play the Arabian character but, in my opinion, the actor playing Jasmine doesn’t.

Men in Black International – June 14, 2019

It’s about time.

Childs Play – June 21, 2019

Another remake of the Chucky movie. The doll always scared me so I guess the movie serves its purpose.

Toy Story 4 – June 21

Apparently they are going to continue to make these without Andy.

Grudge – August 16, 2019

I never watched the old Grudge movie so I’m excited to watch this version of the Japanese remake.

Ford vs Ferarri – June 28. 2019

These kinds of movies always look boring but turn out to be good at the end. This movie is about the American car company Ford’s efforts to build a race worthy car to beat the Ferrari team at the 1966, 24 Hours of Le Mans race. The story is based off of true events.

Spiderman: Far From Home – July 5, 2019

Turns out Spiderman isn’t one the characters who die in Avengers: Endgame.

The Addams family – October 11, 2019

This is going to be animated.

Even though 2019 is apparently the year of the remakes and sequels, a couple of movies I don’t think needed to be done again were Hellboy, The Angry Birds Movie 2 and 47 Meters Down: Uncaged. The original Hellboy movie was great, the generation that liked the Angry Birds are too old to want to watch the new movie, and the first 47 Meters Down was not a good movie; I don’t think the second one will be any better.