Starting in middle school I wrote an underground satirical newspaper called The Southern View. I kept it up sporadically into high school, while also writing for the school's legitimate student newspaper. One week I was short two articles, so I just submitted some pieces from The Southern View as humor articles (which didn't make a whole lot of sense, since the school newspaper didn't have a humor section at the time). Somehow, the editors actually approved it, but both articles got deleted as soon as our principal found out about it. At first the principal assumed I was some kind of cyber-vandal who had hacked the school's webpage and even tried to get me suspended. To this day I've never been clear on which article offended him. Sure, odds are it was the use of the word "horny" in a school newspaper, but I've always secretly hoped that he resented my on-the-nose message about our school's push for new technology. Anyway, here they are:
Student Council Begin to Question Merits of "Horny Hornet Dance"
After calling a press release to deal with the fallout from the homecoming game disaster, Edina High School’s Student Council has claimed their invention and encouragement of "The Horny Hornet Dance" was, “Probably not our brightest idea, exactly.”
Meekly defending their decision to create a highly sexualized school-specific song-and-dance routine, teach it to the entire student body during the pep fest, and encourage them to perform it at the homecoming game whenever the home team scored a touchdown, Stud. Co. President Michael O'Neil said, “I wish I could say we didn’t see this coming, but honestly, we knew going into this that there was a 60-65% chance that everyone would be horribly offended. But that’s the risk we at Stud. Co. are willing to take.
"At least everyone had a good time," O'Neil said, a statement which he quickly revised, "I mean, obviously not everyone did, since so many people are protesting and all that. But some people did, I think. The guy in the hornet suit sure was into it."
Edina Public Schools Continues Descent Into Tech-Driven Dystopia
Expert opinions released this week from the Minnesota Center for Apocolypse Research confirmed that Edina is continuing its long, painful decline to a twisted dystopian civilization ruled by technology.
Drawing from the proliferation of smartphones, success of the eLearning2 initiative, and new surveys on the amount of screen time for the average Edina citizen, MCAR Researcher Bree Jacobs has gone on record saying that we’re, “One or two months, tops, away from a total societal transformation into a Ray Bradbury-level dystopia where real life becomes a passing inconvenience and our lives are dominated purely by internet connections.”
According to the newest reports, Edina is leading the world in the inevitable transformation into a technotopia that, were it presented as a piece of fiction to critics in the 1950s, would be called “disturbing,” “far fetched,” and “a stark warning for what our society may be headed towards are we not careful in our consumption of new gizmos and widgets.”
“Just ten years ago, Edina of today could easily have been presented as a novel or film about how we need to be careful not to trade our individuality, tradition, and right to privacy for mobile phones and social networking,” said Jacobs. “Heck, science fiction writer Astrid Soup’s critically acclaimed 1972 short story ‘Braindead Education’ about a school in which books and teachers have been replaced by computers and electronic games is virtually indistinguishable from the EHS of today.”
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* The Edina High School mascot is a hornet. This was meant to be a take-down of the racy dancing the homecoming court did during pep fests, though really I didn't have a problem with it. I just thought the phrase "Horny Hornet" was funny.
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