Gautham Ganesan

Conducting post-game interviews with players, running into former center and current Sharks development coach Mike Ricci (twice!) and receiving an inspirational speech from radio play-by-play voice Dan Rusanowsky comprised the stuff of dreams for an avid Sharks fan like me. That is, of course, until all of those seemingly impossible products of a teal-tinted imagination came to fruition on Nov. 10.

For hockey fans around the globe (all seven of us), Christmas comes four months late each year as the grueling monotony of the regular season’s latter months gives way to, quite objectively, the best tournament in professional sports: the Stanley Cup playoffs.

If legislation proposed by Democratic assemblyman Tom Ammiano of San Francisco is signed into law, any Californian over 21 would be able to legally purchase, and be taxed for, marijuana from specialized vendors.

It didn’t take President Barack Obama long to begin righting the myriad wrongs committed by the disastrous regime he is thankfully replacing. Just 12 hours into his tenure as the 44th president of the United States, Obama signed a bill to shut down the controversial Guantanamo Bay prison, notoriously used by the Bush administration to torture suspected terrorists, by the end of the year. The move is refreshing to say the least, instilling confidence that the Obama administration is every bit the human rights proponent it billed itself as during the campaign. The stench emanating from the ethical and legal quagmire that is Guantanamo Bay, however, only grows more pungent in the aftermath of Obama’s veritable admittance that the events occurring in the prison directly violated the Geneva Convention.

It’s the day before finals and an anxious junior logs onto Aeries in hopes of checking his multitude of borderline grades. The student attempts to calculate the scores she needs on his semester exams to see how she should balance her study time for each of her subjects in order to secure grades that she finds acceptable. To her overwhelming dismay, the student discovers that Aeries is, in fact, entirely shut down. The district has deemed it prudent to shut down Aeries one week before the end of each grading period, a decision that has led students to have numerous headaches and panic attacks, making it a dubious necessity at best. Many students who enter finals with borderline scores are unable to check their grades and determine what score they require on a given final exam. Unfortunately, despite numerous complaints, the administration has been unresponsive to student angst regarding Aeries.

Friday, March 13th will prove to be a lucky day next month for 12 students of the government classes, who will be afforded the rare opportunity to be the jury in the real trial of an accused DUI offender. To make matters even more unusual, attorneys will present their cases not in the courtroom, but in the McAfee Center.

Venturing into the library, one is confronted by a vast array of students attempting to access standard sites on school computers, but to no avail. YouTube? Blocked. MySpace? Forbidden. Facebook? Access denied. The district has gone overboard in its quest to, according to the filter that appears when students attempt to access the aforementioned sites, ensure that students “should only be using school computers for educational purposes.”

After a long night of incessant partying and heavy drinking, a student finds himself with two options: spending the night on the host’s front lawn or risking death by hopping in a car with an alcohol-influenced driver, two decidedly less-than-pleasant choices. Soon, however, if a proposed plan to reinstitute the Safe Ride program at Saratoga High goes through, the student may have the far more preferable third option of chartering a volunteer to pick him up and drop him off at home, no questions asked.

The recent Mumbai bombings have brought long-harbored feelings of animosity between India and Pakistan back into the spotlight, compounding the fear of another clash between the two nuclear powers. The attack, which occurred on Nov. 26, consisted of Islamic terrorists bombing and raiding several different locations around the city, killing, according to the New York Times, nearly 200 individuals, wounding roughly 300 and taking a number of hostages. The attack was performed with devastating efficiency and spanned nearly two days until Indian authorities managed to regain control of Mumbai. The testimony of captive Azam Amir Oasab confirmed conjecture that the attackers were trained by a Pakistani militant group originally formed by Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, to fight Indian influence in the Kashmir region. The mere fact that such a large-scale act of terrorism was successfully carried out on Indian soil and unable to be stopped, or at least inhibited, by the Pakistani government is unconscionable. But Pakistan’s refusal to hand over suspected members of the Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorist organization allegedly responsible for the attack when the country itself claims to have detained at least 15 members of the organization reeks of ulterior motives on the part of Pakistan.

With the Bush administration coming to a merciful close Jan. 20, one would envision a smooth ride out of the tunnel of decrepit financial policies, steady decline in individual liberties and unnecessary war that has encapsulated the last eight morbid years. But alas, the engine has sputtered one last time as, in one of his final acts as commander-in-chief, Bush has feebly strung together a deal with North Korea that appears shortsighted at best and significantly detrimental to American efforts in that region at worst. Given the President’s track record, the latter seems more likely.

It would seem that an esteemed public high school located in an affluent neighborhood in the heart of Silicon Valley would be at the forefront of technological advancement. Saratoga High should logically boast a vast array of high-tech educational options for its students, ranging from the availability of high-speed wireless internet to a greater emphasis on technology-based learning.

In recent weeks, Southeast Asia has been rocked by two calamitous natural disasters. A 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck Chengdu, the capital of the Sichuan province of China, on May 12, toppling buildings and schools throughout the province and even shaking buildings in Beijing 932 miles away. To date, experts estimate that the earthquake has killed 55,000 people. Meanwhile, just eight days before, a cyclone struck Myanmar, previously known as Burma. Reports have the death toll nearing 134,000. Although both events have captured world headlines and left thousands homeless or otherwise devastated, the earthquake in China has dominated the news, leaving many people uninformed and ignorant regarding the situation in Burma. While this is largely due to the military junta’s stranglehold on foreign media entering Myanmar, this oppressive dominion over news flow should provide all the more reason for people to try and help in Myanmar.

The Summer Olympics and world politics aren’t supposed to mix, but inevitably do. As Beijing prepares to host the 2008 Olympic Games and circulates the vaunted Olympic torch around the globe, controversy percolates and protesters strike, as observed in San Francisco where rabid opponents of Chinese foreign policy assembled to express their disapproval of the torch’s significance.

In recent weeks, Southeast Asia has been rocked by two calamitous natural disasters. A 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck Chengdu, the capital of the Sichuan province of China, on May 12, toppling buildings and schools throughout the province and even shaking buildings in Beijing 932 miles away. To date, experts estimate that the earthquake has killed 55,000 people. Meanwhile, just eight days before, a cyclone struck Myanmar, previously known as Burma. Reports have the death toll nearing 134,000.

Senior Daniel Yang rushes home after school and logs on to his computer, tentatively maneuvering his way to an online forum to discover the unthinkable: he has been killed. No, Yang is still alive and well in a physical sense, but his online Mafia persona has been eliminated. Mafia, a popular campfire game in which players are assigned roles as either a member of the “mafia,” or a “civlian,” has found its way online. Members of the mafia choose a civilian to “kill” during the night phase of the game, while civilians try to figure out who the mafia is during the day phase.

Following the announcement of assistant principal Gail Wasserman’s retirement, the school has named guidance counselor Brian Safine as her replacement, beginning in the 2008-09 school year. “I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to lead students at SHS,” said Safine. “I’m very happy about the direction the school has taken in the five years I’ve been here, and I’m happy to move that even further.”

This story originally appeared in the February 15, 2008 edition of The Saratoga Falcon Recent decisions by Yale and Harvard to significantly increase financial aid for students of middle-class families (defined as families accruing $120,000 to $180,000 annually) have been met with fanfare nationwide. Although this is terrific news for students of Yale, Harvard and other wealthy, high-end universities with endowments in the tens of billions, it would be wrong not to discuss the inevitable repercussions of these moves.