From the desk of Ren LaForme

http://www.ubspectrum.com/article/40642

This column speaks for itself. I have nothing else to say about it.

EDIT: I received a nice e-mail response to my column. I’m posting it with names removed.

Hi Ren!  My name is [edit].  I just wanted to thank you for the article you wrote in Spectrum for today’s issue.  My grandma (who is pretty much my best friend, second mother, my hero, you name it) has been in the hospital for the past 3 days and we have no idea what is wrong with her.  After an entire month of having nothing go my way, this just sent me over the edge.  It’s nice to know that I am not the only person going through this exact circumstance.  I tried not to cry while reading it, but your last line, “I just want to spend some more time with my grandpa before it’s too late,” made me lose it.  That is EXACTLY how I feel about my grandma.  Thank you so much for writing this emotional article Ren.  It really helps to know I’m not alone..

EDIT: Posting another response.

I just read your column. I don’t remember reading it before, but if I did, it must not have made an impact.
As a Christian woman, I would tell you that God allows all things to work together for good; including both arrogance and unfortunate humility. As a mom, I so appreciate the impact my parents and in-laws had on my children, now 25, 23, 21 and 20. My mom and father-in-law still do. As a granddaughter, I reminisce often about my grandparents and remember their philosophies, quirks, funny sayings, and old-school discipline. They are a part of me. As adult staff member of UB, I’m feeling kind of proud of you for breaking open your heart and spilling your guts. I had a few tears in my eyes. Go ahead and submit the column for an award—maybe it is the most real thing you’ve ever written—but, before that, find a way to be with your grandpa.

http://www.ubspectrum.com/article/40638

This was another quick article we did the morning of the second day of elections. It’s always great when the candidates come out to participate and campaign because they’re all right there for us to ask them questions. This was the start of a very tense day for some of the candidates, Alvarado and Farah in particular, and some of them seemed to be pretty worn out.

We wrote this in the Student Union lobby on a laptop so we could continue to monitor the campaigners. Things were getting pretty heated between Farah and Alvarado’s campaigns.

This was the second day we used video. More on that later.

http://www.ubspectrum.com/article/40637

This was just a short article I wrote with Keeley. We walked around the Student Union to get some quotes and threw them together in an article. It only took a few minutes but it’s good to keep the public informed.

We also took our first steps into the broadcast medium that day, but I’ll blog about that later.

The U.S. is in a pretty sorry condition when an empty balloon captures its collective attention for hours at a time.

The other day, I was surfing reddit.com, a popular news aggregation and social media site, when I saw this headline:

Balloon Boy is the perfect metaphor for cable news: America spent hours riveted by a powerful and gripping story that turned out to be totally meaningless, and will have no significant impact on anybody’s lives going forward

This is exactly right. We now have 24-hour news stations, but not 24-hour news – meaning the extra time is filled with meaningless garbage that means nothing to any of us in any way, shape or form.

Sometimes we get to see car chases happening thousands of miles away. Sometimes we wonder if the president’s choice of attire is appropriate. We even get to see Bristol Palin’s baby-daddy from time to time.

When did he become relevant again?

We are going to be watching balloon boy news for months to come. There are going to be further interviews with his family. Talking heads like Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck will discuss whether his parents are suitable and will bring social services workers on to their shows to discuss the matter.

Taken from the San Diego Union Tribune

The fact of the matter is that 24-hour news is here to stay. So instead of mindlessly watching cheesy stories about kids in balloons, we should focus on the stories that really matter.

Earthquakes in Asian countries that kill thousands of people. Tsunamis in the Indian Ocean. AIDS crises in Africa.

We need to pay attention to these stories because they matter – we can do things to help them.

The Heene family is messed up and there is nothing we can do about it.

Let’s move forward.

UPDATED: Gawker is reporting that Heene’s former assistant came forward to say that he helped set up the hoax.

It looks like there’s finally a leak in this balloon.

Reuters and the Associated Press are reporting that someone is going to be charged for something in the balloon boy case.

I don’t think anyone would be surprised if they will be going after the father, Richard Heene.

His apparent short temper combined with his bizarre desire to be on television really throws up a red flag. Add in the fact that his son openly said that they did the whole thing to get on TV and there’s a strong case to be made here.

At the very least, the family should pay for all of the emergency vehicle and salary costs for the rescue. But Child Protective Services should take a look into this family as well.

Stay tuned for further updates.

Scientists now think that the Large Hadron Collider is killing itself from the future.

In an article in the New York Times, researchers associated with the LHC said they believe that the elusive Higgs Boson — a particle that they are trying to produce with the device — is so “abhorrent to nature” that it is capable of traveling through time.

They said that the particle might actually be going back in time — from the future when the machine is working to right now — and damaging the LHC.

If this isn’t a bizarre twist in what has already been a very bizarre experiment, I don’t know what is. First, people tried to shut it down because they thought it would create a black hole that would swallow up the world. Then, the thing broke down and researchers had to figure out why — some suggested sabotage.

And now they’re talking about time travel? Is there anything this thing can’t do?

I’m not a scientist, but I don’t think that this thing is going to end the world. There are thousands of researchers associated with this project. If they aren’t afraid of it, I don’t think we should be.

The entire world has pretty much figured it out by now.

The “balloon boy” incident had to be a hoax. Look at the facts.

Richard Heene is a known media whore. His family has been on the ABC reality show “Wife Swap” twice and Heene was working on a new series with its producer before it was canned. He was also attempting to a pitch a show to TLC – but the network didn’t want it.

Heene called the FAA immediately after the balloon took off. That makes sense. The second call? A TV news channel. His third call was to the police.

The family has been all over the news channels since the incident, even though Falcon – the boy who everyone thought was in the balloon – has thrown up twice during interviews.

And let’s not forget that in one of them he told his parents “you said we did this for a show.”

When police searched the Heene’s home, they did not check the attic that Falcon was hiding in because they didn’t believe that a small child could get up there by himself.

He didn’t. His father put him up there.

I sincerely hope that Child Protective Services in Colorado starts an investigation into this family. A man that pretends his child is in mortal danger to get media attention should not be considered a good parent.

http://ubspectrum.com/article/40584

I haven’t had anything published in the paper in a while and this was a fairly easy article – so it was a good warmup.

I just watched Gov. Paterson’s presser online and then grabbed a few key quotes. I then grabbed some quotes from some opposing viewpoints and stuck them at the end. I could have spoken to some officials at UB but I wrote the story around 5 p.m. so no one would have been there.

It’s a short, straightforward article. Quick and dirty but someone had to do it.

Growing up is a lot harder than I thought. I used to worry about what I would eat in the lunch room at my high school and what to wear in the mornings.

Now I’m making decisions that could affect my life-long relationships and my career.

I’m scared for the future. I’d never admit it to anyone face-to-face, but I am. I’m will graduate in seven months. I have no idea I’m doing after that.

I could apply to graduate schools. My grades aren’t the best — but those are for my psychology major. If grad schools focus on my journalism major, it looks like I’m doing pretty good. And I got a respectable score on the GREs.

But I don’t want to leave my girlfriend to further my schooling. I don’t want us to end up in two different cities. People who give up opportunities for a relationship are stupid — I know — but this girl is the one and I’m not going to let her go. Plus I never really wanted to go to grad school. The whole thing is just a whim for me.

I could also decide to not attend graduate school and travel with her to whichever school she gets into. I really want to get out of the Buffalo area and all of the schools are looking at are in larger cities. It would be fun to live on our own somewhere exciting.

This is the option that will most likely happen. I’ll get a job somewhere — hopefully a writing job — and work while she gets her master’s degree. I like this option because it’s the one we’ve been discussing for a while and I don’t really want to continue schooling at this point.

But this option scares me too.

A lot of the schools she is considering offer internships in far-off places like New Delhi and London. Obviously, I wouldn’t be able to go and I don’t know what would happen to me if I was left alone for 12 weeks or more.

My girlfriend went to Los Angeles over the summer for five days and I almost had a breakdown. It was really hard and I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. It’s not that I don’t trust her — I do. I trust her more than I trust my own family.

I honestly don’t trust myself. I’m pretty needy when it comes to relationships. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I lean far too much on my significant other. I spend all of my time with her and all but ignore my friends. But we both enjoy all of the time spent together so it’s a non-issue.

Of course I would encourage her to take the internship. Journalism is her dream and this would be a career-making experience, and I’m not the boyfriend that holds her from her future.

I just get weird when I can’t see her. I can never seem to find anything to keep myself occupied. When she doesn’t call because she’s busy, it upsets me because it makes me feel unimportant. I’m not sure how I would react if she left for 12 weeks. I feel like I would end up doing something unnecessary to get her attention and act passive-aggressively toward her until I got it.

I don’t want to ruin this. I means too much to me. How do I deal with her being gone?

P.S. This post is a low point for me. I promise to not write anything with so much melancholy in the future.

I’ve never been to church.

I mean, obviously I’ve been to a church – but I’ve never attended church regularly.

As a result, I have no ties to any real organized religion. All I have are the beliefs in my head – beliefs that I figured out on my own.

What are those beliefs?

It’s personal. And that’s how it should be.

I’m not going to stand on the side of the road and tell people that they’re going to hell if they don’t embrace Jesus. I’m not going to explode myself in a group of innocent people. I’m not even going to draw a cartoon of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and post it all over campus just because I can.

At the same time, I don’t want people shoving their religion down my throat.

To me, the atheist that complains about the nativity scene on the lawn of a town hall is the exact same as the Christian that pushes for creationism in Texan textbooks — they’re both pushy, annoying and unnecessary.

I believe that religion, or the lack thereof, is the business of one person and one person only.

The world would be a better place if Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, Scientologists and whoever else kept their views to themselves.