Tag: high school

Score 50,000 points and fly in the military

A guy went from high school dropout to drone pilot instructor in the Army — not a position most 19-year-old enlisted hold, by the way — thanks in part to his video game skills.

Sigh.

The soldier in question was a high school dropout who joined the military to make his father proud (graduating from high school, however, does not do that). But his failing grades in school made his superiors skeptical of his qualifications to be a helicopter mechanic, his first choice. So they asked if he wanted to be a drone pilot.

Surprise, surprise, this doesn’t sit too well with bona-fide academy flyboys. Says P.W. Singer, a former defense policy adviser to the Obama campaign, and the author of “Wired for War,”

“You tell that story to someone in the Air Force, like an F-15 pilot, and they go, ‘I do not like where this is headed. You know, I’ve got a college education. The military spent $5 million training me up. And you’re telling me that this kid, this nineteen-year-old-and — oh, by the way, he’s in the Army — is doing more than I am?’ And that’s the reality of it.”

In all seriousness, it’s great that the kid is joining the military. More power to him if he really wants to do so. He just better remember that the Konami Code doesn’t work in real life.

What happens when you let everyone onto Facebook?

This. This is what happens when Facebook let everyone onto their social networking site.

Originally designed for college students, Facebook was the way to stalk that girl you sit behind in Lit class. You know, the one who’s always whale-tailin’ it up.

Back then, you could have a group dedicated to “dead baby” jokes or Elmo slash-fiction, and no one cared because they were busy getting into “it’s complicated with” relationships with their BFFs.

Not anymore.

Facebook opened her borders up to everyone. The high schoolers were first, trying to find new ways to display pictures of themselves looking in mirrors. Then, the parents joined.

Now every group has that one bored soccer mom trying to have a serious discussion about teen pregnancy on the “I Don’t Remember Last Night” group message board. (She followed her son, who is in college, there to keep tabs on him.)

So, good-bye “Dead Babies Make Me Laugh” group. Sorry all the moms with new babies didn’t find you as hilarious. It was fun while you lasted, but to be fair, you kids are not nearly as funny as our class was. We invented dead babies. Posers.

US teens learn to lie during surveys

According to a survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, US teens are more likely to lie about having sex, doing drugs and smoking cigarettes than they were in the 1990s.

“About 48 percent of high school students were no longer virgins in 2007, down from 54 percent in 1991.

“Meanwhile, just 15 percent said they’d had four or more sexual partners, down from 19 percent in 1991.

“And 62 percent of sexually active students said they’d used a condom the last time they had sex, up from 46 percent in 1991.

“Some 35 percent of teens had at least one drink of alcohol in the month before they were surveyed in 2007, down from 42 percent in 1991.

“Marijuana used has fallen to 20 percent of students from a peak of 27 percent in 1999 while methamphetamine use is down to four percent of teens surveyed in 2007 from 10 percent in 2001.

“Nearly half as many students admitted to carrying some kind of weapon: 17 percent in 2007 compared with 33 percent in 1991.”

So, at least teens are smarter than their counterparts in the 1990s.

‘This isn’t Vietnam … there are rules’

As part of our ongoing coverage of “Summer is here” — which will continue until mid-October — there’s an element we’ve forgotten: driving around.

For our high school and college readers, this is the time that you and your peers are bored and will drive around, pretending that going nowhere is “something.” For the adults, this means you’re going to a lot of stores with wedding and baby registries.

Without fail on any of these excursions, an argument will arise about the rules to calling Shotgun and Rock-Paper-Scissors (or Roshambo to non-South Park viewers). We’d normally use this as an excuse to write a How To, but someone has beaten us to it and done so throughly.

We suggest sending this link to that friend that calls Shotgun during the planning stages of your Warped Tour trip in August.

Fun Fact:
“The history of calling ‘Shotgun’ goes back to the days of covered wagons and the Wild West. On a trip across the plains, the driver of a wagon would hold the reins of his horse team and concentrate on driving. This left him and the occupants of his wagon susceptible to sneak attacks from bandits and thieves. To avoid this atrocious circumstance it became necessary for one person to sit next to the driver with a shotgun and fend off the enemy.”

Nicht denkt jemand an die Kinder?

Germany-home of Oktoberfest and upright proper Aryan pornTexas high school students were recently shocked to discover a picture of a newsstand with “revealing” adult magazines in their German textbook. Man, I can only wonder what the school’s art history students are thinking right now while going through their sculpture textbooks. They must tripping balls!

Please, think of the athletes

The International Olympic Committee would like to remind you that human rights violations are no reason to boycott the Olympics.  It’s important to recognize the diversity of other cultures and some of those, like the Chinese when it comes to Tibet and Myanmar, are dicks.

“‘We believe that the boycott doesn’t solve anything,’ [IOC President Jacques] Rogge told reporters[.] ‘On the contrary, it is penalizing innocent athletes and it is stopping the organization from something that definitely is worthwhile organizing'” (emphasis ours). 

In other news, the IOC is still preoccupied with hard-hitting, globally-destructive issues like doping.  The IOC: just like in high school, it’s all about the jacques jocks.