The Bowdoin Orient

President George W. Bush's 2006 budget, to be unveiled Monday, may propose eliminating the Upward Bound program, which has had a chapter at Bowdoin since the 1960s. The funds would be redirected towards an extension of the No Child Left Behind program, according to a report in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

When high school juniors sit down to take the SAT on March 12, they will face a radically different test than today's college students took for college admission. New portions will be added to the test and other parts will be removed.

Four students' portable music players proved a little too portable Saturday as their iPods were stolen out of the visitor's locker room near Morrell Gymnasium. The digital devices were snatched from the bags of visiting students from Trinity College. Bowdoin Security and the Brunswick Police Department are investigating.

Ian McKee '98, who won 15 minutes of fame and a bride on The Bachelorette last March, split from his wife of almost a year, Meredith Phillips.

Erik Tillotson, the Brunswick resident who was arrested for trespassing on the Bowdoin campus in late November, is back in town.

The U.S. Supreme Court will not hear the case of a Bowdoin graduate who sued in federal court over a 1999 Judicial Board decision, the court said in an order issued earlier this month.

Two thefts that occurred on the Bowdoin campus last year remain unsolved, despite the detailed available information on them.

For nearly 40 years, Upward Bound has helped young Americans become the first in their families to attend college. This program, which offers the promise of the American dream to those it might otherwise pass by, may soon be imperiled by the prospect of budget cuts. The loss of Upward Bound would be upsetting.

Until the January 30 election, I had all but abandoned my faith in the U.S. venture in Iraq as the situation, with the insurgents' unrelenting campaign of violence and the grim signs of an imminent civil war, seemed beyond repair.

Given the preparations being made to gut the Social Security system and the still-precarious situation in Iraq, I've been wondering how President Bush II will be remembered decades from now. Will history be kind? What will be his legacy?

Last week in this space, I narrated the experience which led me to conclude that our worship of "the thesis" and its pernicious side-kick, "the thesis sentence," places a bogus priority on rational argument at the expense of accurate observation. As a result, when writing papers students tend to view texts (and I speak specifically of literary texts) as tools for proving their point rather than the soil from which they are to be tilled.

At some points in our lives, most of us have received some sort of "preparing for college" type lessons. Whether it be in high school, with an "Effective Note-taking Seminar" or during Orientation with a "Balancing your Time" discussion, there has been an emphasis on teaching us how to succeed in college, not only within the classroom but outside it as well.

A new translation of the Bible has received attention in the news recently. The new "gender accurate" version released by the Today New International Version will replace archaic terms such as "with child" to "pregnant." Loaded words such as "men" will be changed to "men and women." The effort is being made to make the Bible "more accessible" to younger readers.

The tired, old ways of doing politics will not suffice in times such as these. We need a bold, passionate leader who will make Democrats truly stand for something. We need someone to energize the grassroots activists that make up our base. The Democratic Party needs Howard Dean as its new chairman.

Lawrence Summers' reported remarks at the conference "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce," were quite like that dreadful seminar moment. One ignorant individual undermined an entire intellectual endeavor by refusing to take it seriously and to commit to the work necessary to progress in understanding.

January 30, 2005, the day Iraq voted for the first time after its "liberation" from Saddam Hussein's regime, I was inspired by a photograph. It was a picture of an Iraqi woman, dressed in traditional Muslim garb, with a hand in front of her face.

I was disappointed to read last week's article "GOP Descends on D.C." and find no mention whatsoever of the tens of thousands of protesters who were also in town.

The Superior Court in Portland, Maine is housed in an intimidating building of stone that remains a foreboding gray even on the sunniest of days. At first glance, its color somehow seems out of sync with its purpose of delivering clear, unambiguous justice. One wonders where the shining white marble and statue of blind justice are.

A relatively unknown but powerful organization on campus is the Inter-House Council, known as IHC.

Dear Dr Jeff: Last weekend I froze my toes teleskiing at Sugarloaf. They're still kind of numb and tingly. Did they get frostbitten? What can I do about it now? G.G. Dear G.G.: Hopefully your toes only got frost-nipped, a less damaging form of cold injury than frostbite.

While looking through the news this week, we came across the heroic story of a Slovakian man trapped inside his car by an avalanche.

As we begin the new semester and kick-off the "Did You Know" column from Sustainable Bowdoin, we would like to take a moment to reflect on the meaning of "sustainability" and its implications for your life at Bowdoin College.

At least three Bowdoin students braved chilly temperatures and unprecedented security measures to join the approximately 100,000 people gathered in the nation's capital last week to observe President George W. Bush's second inauguration ceremony.

While Bowdoin students spent the bulk of January interning, working, and more likely, sleeping in, students at hundreds of colleges across the country, including nearby Middlebury and Colby Colleges, were already back to the books, thanks to an innovative system called "January Term."

What do you get when you add together a buddy road trip, wine, romance and meticulously created characters courtesy of one of the best directors working today? Why that would be a scrumptious, Oscar nominated glass of Sideways of course.

Johnny Carson's recent passing saddened the entertainment community, where he was known as the original king of late-night television.

Recently, I gave my mom Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven as a gift. To be perfectly honest, I had no idea what it was about. I had merely heard various TV and radio personalities who were roughly my mom's age and attitudinal disposition extol the book as a thoughtful and inspiring encore to Albom's first best-seller, Tuesdays with Morrie, which I had not read.

If big lonely houses are the classic cauldrons for toil and trouble in Hollywood horror, little kids are its most active ingredient. From The Shining to The Sixth Sense, the corrupted innocence of kiddies turned morbid or outright evil keeps coming back to haunt us.

The fourth and best movie from the South Park guys features both intelligent political satire and marionette porn. Team America is the elite fighting force for America's policing of the world and fighting of terrorism.

Autolux, Moving Units and Secret Machines when they played Bowdoin. That was totally awesome.

It's the end of another year in Hollywood, and the Oscars are here again. Prada and Armani may still be wrapping red-carpet stars in their latest rags while host Chris Rock practices comedy in a tux, but something feels off.

After weeks of anticipation and frantic last-minute shopping, the day after Christmas usually brings with it a kind of pleasant, plump stagnation. This respite is welcome, for sure, but the post-holiday hangover can prompt a certain kind of restless languor that longs to be disrupted. So when my dad asked me if I'd like to go to Joel Schumacher's big screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, I peeled myself off the couch and drove with him to our local movie theater.

I am Charlotte Simmons. This ambiguous refrain repeated continually by the protagonist in Tom Wolfe's latest novel lays the groundwork for a story exploring an ambitious and fascinating subject: the chronicles of collegiate life.

A number of outstanding individual performances were not enough to carry the men's track team to victory on Saturday. The men lost a hard-fought battle to MIT, Springfield, and Tufts. Previously, the men had been unbeaten.

The Bowdoin Women's Basketball Team suffered an unusual loss to Bates College in Alumni Gymnasium on Tuesday night. Bowdoin fell to 16-2 on the season.

Since edging Babson at home in early January and improving the team's record to 7-4, the Bowdoin men's basketball team has fallen a great deal, especially in the NESCAC. Since then, Bowdoin has lost six of their last seven games, including five important conference games. Bowdoin has fallen to 8-10 overall and have not yet earned a NESCAC win, with a 0-5 record in conference games.

The last time most fans saw their Bowdoin men's hockey team play, the Black and White had just dropped a crushing home overtime game against rival Colby. In the final two minutes of the game, Bowdoin scored two goals, only to fall in overtime. Instead of mourning a missed opportunity, though, the team has responded brilliantly to the loss. Over Winter Break, the team skated their way to a 6-1-1 record, including a five-game winning streak following the Colby loss and a victory over then top-ranked Middlebury.

The Bowdoin women's indoor track team returned to campus two weeks early for preseason training and faced Brandeis and Colby in its first two meets of the season. The team ran past Brandeis in dual-meet action, while dropping a home meet to Colby.