Wednesday, September 24, 2008

OTHER NEWS



GREAT MOMENTS IN MILITARY EDUCATION

Daily Princetonian - The University band faced physical abuse, harassment and taunting on Saturday while accompanying the football team to its away game against The Citadel, a military college in Charleston, S.C.
Following the game, Citadel commanding officers and the president of the Citadel student body apologized to the band for the cadets' behavior, several band members said.

The altercation began when the band marched, with prior approval from The Citadel's administration, through a guarded entrance onto the campus. The band's traditional march through the home team's campus brought the performers into contact with The Citadel's cadets, who were outside for field activities.

"Some of [the cadets] started running towards us and ran back . . . but it didn't seem threatening at all," Simon Fox Krauss '11 said.

Yet when the band tried to continue its march, Krauss said, the cadets surrounded the Princeton students and began booing loudly, linking arms to form a line blocking their path.

In response to the blocked path, Lucas Giron '09, the band's drum major, gave the order to "scramble" - break formation and leave.

Band conductor R.W. Enoch '09 said that at this point, "a number of cadets broke ranks and got into physical altercations with some of our members."

In the skirmish that followed, several band members were physically attacked and spit on, band members said, adding that at least one member had his instrument broken. . .

Jordan Bubin '09 said he was tackled by "three or four cadets" and pushed up against a tree.

"The booing was so loud, [and] the cadets who were on the field were yelling at us, ‘Cut your hair, long-haired faggots' and ‘You go have fun in college, I'll go fight the war,' " he said.

The cadets also stole band members' hats and spit on female members of the band, some members said. . .

Barnard said his immediate response was to direct the band to leave campus.

Several of The Citadel's commanding officers, however, brought the situation under control asked the band to continue its pre-approved march.

The band was escorted on the rest of its march around campus by commanding officers without further altercations, Barnard said. Bubin said, however, that the band was "pursued and taunted" in spite of the escort.

Later in the day, when the band appeared on the football field to perform its halftime show, the taunting continued.

"During the halftime, there was booing as soon as we went onto the field," Enoch said. Though the cadets avoided any further physical confrontation, Enoch noted that for the entire nine-minute half time show, the jeers were so loud that the band's act could hardly be heard. . .

"During the game itself, somewhere between 50 and 70 cadets circled the band in plain sight of an Army captain and Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel," Dan Jaffe ‘10 said in an e-mail. "When ordered back to their seats by [higher ranking officers] they were slow to obey."

Jaffe, who has trained in the Marine Corps, said he found the behavior of the cadets "astounding."

He added that he thought the fact that the cadets "lacked the discipline to maintain proper military bearing should, at the very least, make their superiors question the wisdom of awarding them commissions in the United States Armed Forces."

SANDISK'S NEW SLOTMUSIC

Wired - As the world seems to march toward downloaded or streamed digital music, SanDisk today is unveiling a new physical medium for music. It's called slotMusic, and it's basically an album on a thumbnail-size microSD card. Four of the major music labels -- Warner, Universal, Sony, EMI -- are supporting it with MP3, unprotected music. So you'd go into a Wal-Mart, pay about $10 for the card, and slip it into your cell phone or any other gadget with a card slot. SanDisk says it will be almost as simple to use as putting a CD in a player. The MP3 songs can be moved around or copied anywhere. . .

I talked to SanDisk executive Dan Schreiber about slotMusic. Unable to imagine the iPod generation wanting anything to do with going to a store to buy music on anything made of atoms, I asked if this is aimed at, like, old people. "Some of it is an age thing," he said. "But it's about instant entertainment. Downloads continue to thrive, but not everybody wants to spend half their day curating playlists." He added that slotMusic "tested well with young guys who liked the gee-whiz factor." Although, I always take those kinds of results with a grain of salt. Young guys can think a lot of things are gee-whiz ... for about five minutes. Whether they'll actually buy it or not is a whole different question.

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