The FOX ani­mated sit­com “Family Guy” knows how to push the but­tons of pub­lic figures.

During the Feb. 14 episode, the char­ac­ter Chris had a crush on a girl named Ellen with Down syn­drome and went out on a date with her. When he asked her about her par­ents’ jobs, she said, “My dad’s an accoun­tant and my mom’s the for­mer gov­er­nor of Alaska.”

That state­ment was meant to be a jab at 2008 vice pres­i­den­tial can­di­date and, yes, for­mer gov­er­nor of Alaska Sarah Palin. Palin did not take the “joke” very well. Palin’s one-year-old son Trig has Down syn­drome. (more…)

A few weeks ago, I wrote a let­ter from the edi­tor describ­ing my excite­ment at the pos­si­bil­ity of emerg­ing technologies.

I described my new found appre­ci­a­tion for Twitter, though cer­tainly not an obses­sion, and text mes­sag­ing replac­ing nor­mal con­ver­sa­tion. (more…)

After the Canadian women’s hockey team won Olympic gold on Feb. 25 they did what came nat­u­rally, they celebrated.

Smokin’ sto­gies, sip­pin’ bub­bly and hors­ing around on the Zamboni machine in vic­tory cel­e­bra­tion had major con­se­quences though. (more…)

The pub­lic address announcer boomed: Ladies and gen­tle­men — There’s a car in the park­ing lot with its lights on — a pink Cadillac with leop­ard skin seats!!

Suddenly, two young men dressed in doc­tors’ scrubs leap from their seats at cen­ter ice, bump into each other, and run around in cir­cles like a crazy Marx-brothers skit.

Flash back to circa-1982 … it’s a Bulldog hockey game at Ferris State’s Ewigleben Ice Arena and the late Bill Buckingham, the beloved “voice of the Bulldogs,” has deliv­ered his ear-splitting queue to Frank Marzano and Gary “Bear” Blied, who go into their famil­iar fan-pleasing rou­tine. (more…)

Texting, Facebooking and Tweeting have opened many bor­ders in terms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and the “tech­nirev­o­lu­tion” just keeps expanding.

Being a jour­nal­ism stu­dent, it has come to my real­iza­tion that it is at times eas­ier to con­tact a source on Facebook for a story. Phone calls and e-mails are not always answered as quickly as a Facebook mes­sage. (more…)

 My e-mail inbox was vis­ited last week by a mes­sage from the University remind­ing me that the Graduation Fair was fast approach­ing; as a senior grad­u­at­ing in May of this year, that’s a bit daunt­ing. (more…)

Ferris State University com­ple­ments its edu­ca­tion with job expe­ri­ence oppor­tu­ni­ties not often found at over­sized universities.

Any col­lege stu­dent under­stands that high grades are valu­able toward attain­ing a desir­able job upon grad­u­a­tion. Academics are not the only attribute employ­ers are look­ing for, how­ever. An intern­ship or work expe­ri­ence of some kind is more often than not what sets one stu­dent apart from another. (more…)

The satir­i­cal news­pa­per The Onion sells a t-shirt on its web site that says, “The sports team from my area is supe­rior to the sports team from your area.”

This irra­tional sup­port that many peo­ple have for pro­fes­sional sports teams is some­thing that I have always been baf­fled by, and this slo­gan makes a great com­men­tary on it. Die-hard fans who have no fam­ily or per­sonal ties to a team other than geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion will get their body tat­tooed with the team’s mas­cot or riot after a big game, but why? (more…)