Jan. 25, 2012 Hi-Line

THE Veggie Tales, page 2

VOLUME 52 ISSUE 1

1015 Division St. Cedar Falls, Iowa 50613

Speech team competes at Districts Katherine Mayhew Staff Writer

Students involved with the CFHS speech team competed in the District Large Group Speech Contest at UnionLaPorte City High School last Saturday. Ten groups from the CFHS speech team, including the one-act play, achieved the highest possible Division I rating, allowing them to advance to the state competition. Five other groups earned Division II ratings.

According to the original schedule, the team was supposed to leave Cedar Falls High School at 7 a.m. Saturday morning. However, due to snow removal and weather conditions, the contest was delayed two hours and the bus to Union City left around 9 a.m. Speech team coach Karen Franke was grateful for this turn of events. “I’m really happy we had a delay because my actors got to sleep longer so they’d be more fresh [for their performance]. So the delay works for me,” she said.

The speech team also encountered difficulties on the bus ride, causing them to switch buses. On the

Juniors Josh Ochoa and Ann Fienup hone their improv skills in preparation for the district competition in La Porte City, which was held on Saturday, Jan. 21. initial bus, a high-pitched alarm sounded periodically, sometimes repeating after a few minutes or a few seconds. This alarm most likely stemmed from an engine malfunction due to the cold.

Despite getting off to a rocky start, the speech team arrived at Union-LaPorte City High School on time to give incredible performances.

Speech team coach Nick

Chizel described speech team as “a creative explosion of awesomeness.”

Team participants were equally satisfied with how district contest went this year.

Senior Michaela Oehler said, “It went amazing. Absolutely, positively amazing.”

Also pleased with this year’s competition, junior Jillian Ross said, “Today [Saturday] was wonderful. It

went really well. Everything I saw was excellent.”

The speech team began preparing for competition in October, practicing pieces from different branches of acting such as improvisation, film, ensemble and one-act plays. This year, the speech team had a much larger number of freshman participants than in years past. Coaches were able to split speech

team members into groups composed entirely of freshmen, something that could not be done last year due to much smaller freshmen numbers.

“I think we have a great freshmen class. It’s going to be a blast going to State, and All-State because we’re cocky,” sophomore Noah Miller said.

Overall, freshmen enjoyed speech team and plan to compete again their sophomore year. Freshman Becky Ochoa said, “I love speech team. Yes, I’m going to do it next year.”

The groups which earned an overall Division I rating included the one act play, choral reading, short film, improv groups Bruss, Feinup and Bruess and ensembles “The 15-Minute Hamlet,” “DMV Tyrant,” “Mr.Fritz” and “Sure Thing.” These groups will compete again in the Large Group State Competition at Dubuque Senior High School on Feb. 4.

Speech team coach Rebecca Kauten said, “I think folks who’ve never done speech had a wonderful time, and I am very proud of how CFHS is presented as a team at contest.”

DECA takes home 4 first place wins Hannah Roethler Staff Writer

The 2012 DECA districts competition was held at the College Square Mall on Thursday, January 19.

The group won three out of their eight competitions, along with several second and third place finishes and honorable mentions.

DECA is a businessoriented group that meets on Thursday mornings and competes in conferences throughout the year, such as the fall leadership conference, Districts, State and

potentially Nationals.

To prepare the group, advisor Ryan Flaherty stresses the importance of work outside of school hours. “We have meetings to talk about how the competition will go, but most preparation is done outside of school on their own time,” Flaherty said.

As one of the stronger chapters in the state, State President of DECA, senior Ben Challgren, worked together with his younger sister, sophomore Jane Challgren, on the Sports and Entertainment event, bringing home a first place. Sophomore Samatha

Schildroth and junior Natalie Rokes were also awarded a first place win in their event, Team Travel. Patrick Sesker and Colby Creger both won their individual events as well.

Although doubtful of himself, Creger had fun at Districts overall. “I thought Districts went very well for Cedar Falls DECA as a whole.

Personally, I thought I did really bad and was really surprised that I got first in my category of Business Management,” Creger said.

All participants of DECA would agree that it provides a fun way to gain insight into

the real business world. “I chose DECA because I want to own a business with my brothers when I’m older,” Jane Challgren said. Similar to Challgren, senior Lauren Bannon uses DECA to help her prepare for college. “I stayed in DECA because it’s fun and I want to major in business in college, so it’s good practice of what to expect in the real world. DECA’s taught me a lot about business and helped me decide that I do want to do something with business in the future,” she said.

The event is normally hosted at Hawkeye Communi-

ty College; this year a change of venue left DECA members with mixed opinions. Bannon said, “It was nice changing up the location of Districts, but I think overall I like it better out at Hawkeye. It was kind of loud and a little cramped at the mall, but still enjoyable.”

Other participants enjoyed the more relaxed environment of the mall. “I thought having Districts in the mall was cool because we got to enjoy some pizza during break, and we also got to go to Scheels and other stores during down time,” senior Colby Creger said.

Opinion

Jan. 25, 2011

hiline.co.nr

Where’s the tofu?

How to save the world. . . one vegetable at a time.

Ellen Gustavson Editor-in-Chief

“Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances of survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”

You know who said that? Albert Einstein. Yep. That whole E = mc2 thing? So not genius. I’ll let you in on the scientific community’s best-kept secret: Einstein’s true genius was not his Theory of Relativity, but his insight towards the benefits of vegetarianism.

I may or may not be kidding.

One thing is for sure though: Americans love meat. It’s what makes America, well, ’Merica! Generally speaking, ’Mericans have absolutely no problem eating meat; few things in life can amount to the same kind of satisfaction that a delicious steak brings. However, for a whopping three percent of the country, the idea of digesting the flesh of a slaughtered animal brings nothing but paroxysms of revulsion.

Granted, killing animals was indeed the only way for humans to survive back in the Stone Age. But it’s safe to say that society has made some advances since then. We have become mainly gatherers, not hunters . . . unless you define hunting as pitching pre-packaged food into your cart at Walmart. Meat no longer serves as the base of our food pyramid--in fact, it no longer needs to be included in our food pyramid at all. In this day and age, the consumption of meat is more of a hindrance than a help.

True vegetarians cannot complete their quota of tree hug-age without

making the argument that vegetarianism demonstrates a better use of resources: the amount of water needed to produce one pound of meat is hugely greater than the amount needed to produce a pound of wheat, while it requires 20 times more fossil fuel to produce meat than it does for plants such as soy. If I wanted, I could bore the pants off you with endless statistics about the environmental effects of meat production. But I won’t.

If logos just isn’t your cup of tea, we vegetarians can also resort to playing the save-the-children card, which no human being with a conscience can ignore. As the obesity issue in America grows, world hunger remains a pertinent issue for the rest of the world; this is not helped by the carnivorous diets of Americans. We produce more than enough grain to feed starving children in third-world countries, yet a great deal of that grain is used for, ahem, “producing” livestock. If Americans reduced their meat consumption by ten percent, there would be enough grain to feed an additional 60 million people. To put things in perspective, which seems worse: no meat, or death by starvation? Tough choice.

However, not everyone decides to become a tree-hugging, tofu-scrambling vegetarian because they are secretly advocates of PETA or because it’s the trendy, hipster-y thing to do.

Numerous health benefits are also high on the (extremely long) list of why people choose the vegetarian lifestyle.

Research has proven many times that eliminating meat from one’s diet reduces the risk of cancer, diabetes, heart

disease and high blood pressure. The conclusion? While you’re chowing down on that oh-so-delicious steak at Texas Roadhouse, your cholesterol is busy building you a personal Hoover Dam, right inside your arteries. So now do you think you’d ever give up meat?

I don’t care if you still say no.

I mean, let’s be realistic here. I am painfully aware that all you meat-lovers out there are not going to change your ways. Obviously, you love your meat and it’s not going anywhere-except in your stomachs. Only in a perfect world would everyone make the switch and make some beneficial

sacrifices.

In fact, if everyone in the world woke up tomorrow and decided to stop eating meat, it would change the world. All the starving children would be fed, livestock would live long prosperous lives, and the arteries of every person in Texas would unclog.

The world is not perfect, though.

Children die of starvation, livestock die in slaughterhouses, and Texans die of heart attacks. But if this somehow touches a nerve in some meat lover out there (unlikely), I’d like to let you know that you can do your part in saving the world by going vegetarian.

Apocalypse 2012 is coming, after all.

Reflections on a life with vegetables Karl Sadkowski Opinion Editor

On many an occasion has someone taunted me by holding a chicken leg four inches from my face and eating it, reveling in its succulent magnificence.

I am a vegetarian, and proud of it, and won’t give in to putting the dead flesh of some animal in my mouth. I continually disappoint that someone with my obstinacy.

My transition to a meatless diet

came quite painlessly, actually. I stood in my kitchen watching my mother prepare meatballs and thought, “Hang on. First a cow was slaughtered, then cleaned and its meat ground into one unintelligible mass. This unintelligible mass went to a supermarket, where a deli employee intermittently grabbed chunks of it and placed it on a scale to sell off. Then, when my mom brought one chunk home, she pulled it apart into even smaller pieces and

rolled them into balls — balls of meat, completely defiling the dignity of the cow whose body was sacrificed for our consumption.” Standing next to my mother I thought again, “Those balls of meat will be fried into little brown objects that give no resemblance to the once-living animal they composed and, to make that point even more clear, will go cold unless heated properly by an external source. I doubt that cow knew about, or gave consent

to, facing such shameful mutilation.”

Reflecting on this experience, I now know that those meatballs didn’t only contain the meat of one cow; that unintelligible mass sold by the deli employee probably contained the meat of several, all mashed together into one irresistible combination.

So indeed, my transition to vegetarianism did come without drooling at the sight of some untouch-

Vegetables, page 3

Opinion

Jan. 25, 2012 hiline.nr.co

SOPA, PIPA face the public gallows Lucas Hamilton Entertainment Editor

The Internet, full of free and easily accessible knowledge, is at risk of being censored. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a piece of legislation that puts many websites at risk of being shut down if found to be enabling illegal activity such as downloading music and file sharing. But this potential law does so in a way that puts the actual integrity of the Internet and its unending information at risk of being censored. This completely ignores the people’s right to expression.

The jump-starting for this bill came from media companies who urged the Senate and House to protect their work

Vegetables From Page 2

-able piece of meat. My thoughts of meat disgusted me so much I simply stopped eating meat by preference (this did not please my mother). I suppose its hideous notion just got to me after a while.

The scrutiny many vegetarians receive for their eating choices really does deserve more scrutiny itself. I’m not just talking about the meat-toting barbarians who wave chicken legs in our faces; more broadly, I’m talking about the barbarians who feel sorry for us, as if vegetarianism were a terminal disease that develops without warning or mercy.

from the Internet where TV shows and movThey continue to entice teenies agers for their legality, though can be as horrifying as they are.

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streamed, and music can be even easier to obtain. The legislators listened and drafted SOPA in the House and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) in the Senate. Both had the best of intentions when writing the bills, but as large corporations started looking into the details of the bill, the freedom that the Internet provided was

It surprises me that so many people marvel at vegetarians, commenting on how “meat is just too delicious to give up” and “you’ll fall ill from not getting your daily serving of meat.” But a meat-free lifestyle really does offer an excellent choice of eating options and can be just as nutritious as the alternative, all if you know what you’re doing. Don’t dupe yourself into thinking vegetarians are insane; on the contrary, in consideration to all the animals we save from slaughtering each year, we are the more conscientious ones.

It is my belief that people should eat whatever they want. People must

Contact the Tiger Hi-Line

The Tiger Hi-Line is a weekly publication of the journalism classes of Cedar Falls High School, 1015 Division St., Cedar Falls, Iowa 50613. Our website is www.hiline.co.nr.

The Hi-Line is distributed to CFHS students on Tuesdays to read in their free time.

Columns and letters do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Hi-Line or Cedar Falls Schools. The Hi-Line editorial staff view is presented weekly in the editorial labeled as Our View.

Reader opinions on any topic are welcome and should be sent to the Tiger Hi-Line staff or delivered to room 208. All letters must be signed. Letters must be submitted by 3 p.m. on Thursday for publication the following Tuesday. Letters may not exceed 300 words and may be edited to meet space limitations. Include address and phone number for verification.

Editorial Staff

Editors-in-Chief: Sara Gabriele, Ellen Gustavson, Meg Lane News Editors: Maya Amjadi, Sara Gabriele, Chandal Geerdes Opinion Editors: Meg Lane, Karl Sadkowski Sports Editor: Jared Hylton Feature Editors: Ellen Gustavson, Sandra Omari-Boateng Entertainment Editor: Lucas Hamilton Hi-Line Online Editor: Martha Hall Staff Writers: Sarah Church, Lindsey Davis, Chase Eremieff, Mikayla Foland, Isabelle Hayes, Trevor Johnson, Kathrine Mayhew, Diamond Spann, Rhydian Talbot

being pushed aside in order for major media companies to have their work protected from piracy.

Less than a week ago, the major file sharing site Megaupload suffered a fatal blow in which its owners were arrested and the website shutdown.

Activists against bills like SOPA and PIPA called this the single largest

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eat to survive, and depending on the location or culture they grow up in, a very narrow menu may exist to achieve that survival.

I went vegetarian in June 2011.

Since then, eating at restaurants has become more difficult, people scoff at my dietary decision and barbarians wave chicken legs in my face. I also forgot about the prospect of buying my lunches in the high school cafeteria thanks to its poor meat-free accommodations for people like me.

But despite all this, I continue my personal crusade against eating meat.

Although it originally began because I

Internet attack in history.

The Internet isn’t intended for being used as a tool for piracy. The bill was designed with the right intentions, but Congress took it too far. If the bill were to pass as it stands now, websites that allow illegal activity would be shutdown, and people who were to be found engaging in illegal activity via Internet sites would be kicked off and never allowed to return. So that means if someone were to be suspected of breaking copyright infringement on a site like Facebook or Twitter, they would be swiftly escorted off the site and never allowed to return. The new generation, so accustomed to technology, would be required to relearn everything about Internet conduct in order to simply exist on some sites.

found meat disgusting, it has developed into an adamant belief that if farms begin producing less meat and more wheat, there will be more food to go around for everyone on this planet of 7 billion people, more than 1 billion of which suffer from malnutrition.

Since last June, this belief has grown and become a central moral in my meatless odyssey.

Regardless of your reason to quit meat--mine was repulsion--you will indirectly contribute to increasing the availability of food in the world.

Animals (including fish) are friends, not food.

our view Snowball production freezes from disinterest It’s pretty ironic, really. Take a poll of the student body and you’ll find no shortage of students requesting formal dances. Just this fall, students expressed outrage at the student senate proposal for an informal homecoming dance. But even when the student senate attempts to answer such complaints, you’d still be hardpressed to find someone who doesn’t moan and groan about “the lack of things to do” around school. More often than not, the student senate’s efforts are met with total disinterest.

Last week, the student senate was forced to cancel its new winter formal because the necessary 10 percent of the student body required to fund the dance failed to buy a $5 ticket in advance. Student senate spent over two weeks actively recruiting ticket buyers during their lunch periods; a meager 82 students responded.

It would be easier to brush off if students expressed no interest in a formal dance, but this event was planned in compliance with the numerous requests coming from the student body. Students, if you ache for formal dances, don’t sit out when the opportunity arises. It’s a slap in the face to the student senate who devoted its time to booking a DJ and boosting publicity while giving up its lunch periods.

But the blame can’t lay entirely on students. Since high school students are notorious for leaving money at home or hesitating to commit to events in advance, it might be time for student senate to consider more innovative ways to sell tickets. One thing is for certain: students and their peer leaders need to stop dancing around the issue of informal soirees and find common ground.

Sports

Jan. 25, 2012 hiline.co.nr

Division one-bound athletes Cedar Falls students that have committed to Division I schools for athletics give insight on recruiting process Jared Hylton Sports Editor

Being a student-athlete isn’t a walk in the park. Finding the right balance between school, sports, friends and other extra-curricular activities can be challenging. But for those who are lucky enough to turn the heads of college scouts, the admission process becomes a lot trickier, and eventually, more rewarding too.

For many student-athletes, the first step to putting themselves on the map is to put together a highlight reel of their previous season and send it to coaches around the nation. Many of these athletes saw varsity playing time as sophomores, or in rare cases, as freshmen. One of the few people to successfully make the transition is sophomore Ross Pierschbacher, who started at left tackle for the football team as a freshman.

And turn heads Pierschbacher did. He has successfully landed himself on the radars of many Division I college teams. Pierschbacher isn’t the only one to get himself national attention though.

Senior Kelsey Abbas has chosen to commit to the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee for the upcoming swim season. She said the process has been unique in many ways. “It’s different because you’re trying to keep your possible majors in mind along with your sport and the programs, plus the process starts a lot earlier because you get recruited by coaches sooner than most people put in apps,” Abbas said.

Abbas intends to major in education at UWM. Even though the recruiting process was exciting, Abbas said it’s a relief to have it over. “I think the most exciting part was finally signing because it’s such a relief, and it’s so nice to

know where you’re going and to just be able to relax for the rest of the year,” Abbas said.

Ben Challgren is another senior to commit to Division I from the Tiger football team.

Challgren is a linebacker and Duke-bound for the 20122013 school year where he plans on majoring in economics. “[In the recruiting process], you’re a piece of meat just being run through the system and processed,” Challgren said.

Challgren will be the only Iowan on the team next season.

“Being a football recruit made the admission process a lot different for me than most students. I had the benefit of the football team backing my application, so it really helps when trying to get into a top-tier academic school,” Challgren said.

Besides having the opportunity to play Division I football and have the opportunity to compete for a national championship, Challgren chose Duke for its academic prestige. “The whole process was really fun. I got to see some of the best academic institutions in the country.

It’s the kind of opportunity kids dream about.” He said he hopes to maintain a high GPA

Athlete Week of the

Shelby McKenzie Bowling

Kelsey Abbas Women’s Swimming

Ben Challgren Football

1. How has the season started? It started off a little rocky but it’s gotten a lot better.

2. What is the team chemistry like? Most of the team gets along very well. Practice is fun and you get to bowl with friends.

3.What are your expectations for the season? To bowl a 200.

James Harrington Track

and play four or five years of football.

For student-athletes, college athletics is the next step. It increases one’s overall maturity, teamwork and how to react in pressure situations—all skills that will help later in life. For most, it is the first time they have the opportunity to compete on the national level. For these select athletes, college athletics is

Barkley Hill Football

the building block for what is yet to come.

Senior James Harrington has also recently commited to the track program at the University of Alabama and is scheduled to sign the papers next week. Senior running back Barkley Hill has committed to Iowa for next season. Both declined to comment on the recruiting process.

Barkley Hill and Ben Challgren celebrate a touchdown against Muscatine.

Tigers in Action

MEN’S BASKETBALL- Jan. 27 @ Waterloo East 7:30 WOMEN’S BASKETBALL- Jan. 26 @ Dubuque Hempstead 7:30 MEN’S SWIMMING- Jan. 28 @ Cedar Rapids Jefferson WRESTLING- Jan. 26 vs. Dubuque Wahlert 6:00 MEN’S & WOMEN’S BOWLING- Jan. 31 vs Linn-Mar 3:45