Jason Wu

Saratoga’s bid for a CCS title in tennis ended with a semifinal loss to No. 3 Bellarmine College Prep on May 11 at the Courtside Club in Los Gatos.

With its lineup heavily depleted by recent injuries to key players, the boys tennis team has stumbled in its yearly run through the regular season. The team has lost to Los Altos and Monta Vista, respectively the No. 2 and No. 1 teams in the De Anza League. The team played Los Altos twice, losing 5-2 on March 30 and 4-3 on April 18, and lost once against Monta Vista 6-1 on March 31. The team finished the De Anza league season with an overall record of 9-3.

With its lineup heavily depleted by recent injuries to key players, the boys tennis team has stumbled in its yearly run through the regular season. The team has lost to Los Altos and Monta Vista, respectively the No. 2 and No. 1 teams in the De Anza League. The team played Los Altos twice, losing 5-2 on March 30 and 4-3 on April 18, and lost once against Monta Vista 6-1 on March 31. The team finished the De Anza league season with an overall record of 9-3.

After second place finishes at CCS and Norcals last year, the boys’ tennis team is looking to replicate its performance in the upcoming season. Repeating the team’s dominant title run at the California High School Tennis Classic will be more difficult this year with the absence of five starters from last year, including top singles players John Lamble and Michael McGinnis, who now play at Santa Clara University and Boston College, respectively.

Jian Li scored a 2,400 on the SAT, graduated in the top 1 percent of his class at Livingston High School, New Jersey, and participated in a host of extracurricular activities. Despite his impressive resume, Li was rejected by Princeton University in the spring of 2006. It is easy to conclude that he simply suffered a bad break — thousands of similarly well-qualified applicants are rejected by top tier universities every year, and Princeton rejects about half of applicants with a 2,400.

Growing up, senior Chris Chung knew almost from day one that he wanted to attend UCLA. Fast forward to his senior year, however, and he seems a bit unsure about what school he wants to be heading to come next fall.

"Fifteen out of 15— I think we've located a place where there are a lot of bad actors," said Sen. Al Franken of a report by the Government Accountability Office which found evidence of deceptive and aggressive marketing techniques used at all 15 for-profit colleges it investigated.

In mid 2009, a group of Christians, Jews, and Muslims created the Cordoba Initiative, an association that planned to build an Islamic community center near Ground Zero in New York called Park51 that would house a mosque.

With the promise of a victory over arch-rival and undefeated Menlo hovering just a racquet's length away, the boys' tennis team fell just short amidst a perfect storm of injuries in the finals of CCS, held at the Los Gatos Courtside Club on May 14. Disaster struck the Falcons as they were leading the Knights 3-2 in the best of seven contest. As the remaining two matches both went into third sets, players John Lamble and Andrew Hsieh both began cramping badly.

Senior Eric Gast closed out his last regular season match as a Falcon with perfection—literally. Playing No. 3 singles in the Falcons' final league match against Palo Alto on April 22, Gast won 24 straight points in the second set of his match, accomplishing a feat known in tennis as the "golden set."

Late into the sixth and final round of the 35th Annual CalChess State Scholastic Championships, the Falcon chess team knew that their bid for a sixth straight state championship would almost certainly end in defeat.

With commercials on TV and large billboards for the 2010 Census everywhere, almost everyone knows about the forms they are suppose to fill out and mail back. In addition to all the ads placed by the US Census, another group, especially in Silicon Valley, has started its own campaign for the census: Write in "Taiwanese."

The hot and humid climate of Marjah, Afghanistan, is not particularly hospitable to American soldiers. Unsurprisingly, neither are the people. NATO officials forthrightly stated that "civilian casualties are inevitable" and, with that, descended on Marjah with the explicit intent of wreaking as much havoc as possible. This would have caused political uproar anywhere else. In Helmand, the world's largest opium-producing region responsible for over 42 percent of the annual global output, this is life.

Perhaps only the Falcons could be disappointed with a third place finish at the nation's premier high school tennis tournament, the Corona Del Mar National High School All-American Boys Invitational in Newport Beach March 20-21. The team, coming in as the third seed, placed third in the USTA-sanctioned event, which featured 16 top teams from around nation, with some teams even hailing from places like New York City, North Carolina and Idaho.

n the interest of reusing test questions in the future, some teachers do not allow students to look their graded tests. As much as this decision benefits these teachers, who are often swamped with tests, homework and projects to grade, it undermines a key component of a good education: self-learning and reflection.

Although the school recently invested money into resurfacing the tennis courts, small cracks have already formed. Although the cracks raise questions about the long-term durability of the tennis courts, the main purpose of the renovations was to make the courts "playable" again, assistant principal Joe Bosco said. "We did a $24,000 emergency safety repair in anticipation of a full-scale renovation. The courts are now safe and that was our first priority, " said Bosco.

Applying to colleges and anxiously waiting for a reply at one's mailbox is hard enough without being blindfolded. The content of recommendation letters has been kept under lock and key—so much so that they have become a thing of mystery and anxiety to seniors. The current system is understandable—if not to students at least to teachers. It prevents kids (or their parents) from taking up arms to go to their teacher's house, knocking on their front door and demanding a recommendation letter more complimentary to their college repertoire.

When President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, reactions ranged from anger to utter disbelief. Even the president himself admitted he did not feel he had done enough to deserve being awarded a prize given to the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. Conservatives have had a field day with the announcement, going as far as to demean the century-old prize that is among the most prestigious awards in existence. What the critics fail to realize, however, is that Obama was not awarded the prize for what he has done, but rather for what he will do.

Ryan Masterson is a percussion teacher for the marching band, pianist, composer and ... a cage fighter? Smashing the stereotypical mold of the dainty musician, the tall, athletic-looking Masterson trains for cage fights in his spare time.

It's a bird, it's a plane...no it's a nudibranch! The nudibranch (pronounced noo-duh-brank), a type of sea slug, is one math teacher and avid scuba diver Debra Troxell's many favorite underwater organisms. Nudibranchs come in all shapes and sizes, which is why they are still considered a novelty to Troxell despite the fact that she inevitably sees one on every trip. "Nudibranchs are my favorite," she said, "but octopi are also pretty cool." Troxell first started diving in 1981 as a sophomore at Florida Atlantic University when she became certified in warm water diving.

"The Daily Show" host Jon Stewart considered the public option component of President Obama's health care package so appealing that he believed Republicans disliked it only because of the way the Democrats described it. Surveys conducted by pollster Frank Luntz showed that the public disliked the plan when it was called the government option, but supported it when it was called the public option. "The Republicans would probably have less of a reason to oppose the plan if it was called AIDS—American Insurance Department Solutions,” he quipped.

It is one of the greatest academic ironies that one of the most popular sources of information today is also one of the most controversial. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that contains 13 million articles in 200 languages, has been criticized by scholars who believe that the website's open editing system makes it unreliable and inaccurate. However, Wikipedia's popularity remains undiminished. It is the 7th most visited website on the web.