Jeopardy is one of the few game shows that requires actual knowledge about things. I think that’s why it might be slightly more popular among types interested in things, like, you know, eradicating ignorance.
In my High School, on a game day the entire Pep Club wore their uniforms. Cheerleaders, led the Pep Club in the cheers. Nearly every girl in the school was in pep club. So on game days, all of the girls wore their uniform. The regular members of pep club had similar, if less fancy uniforms. Yes, their skirts were just as short.
Oh and we had lots and lots of stairs.
Looking over this thread, I notice several points that weren’t completely addressed. First, for some school districts in the U.S., it would be simply impossible to get all the students to school if there weren’t school buses. In the school district where I grew up, most of the students lived on farms. There was no public transportation connecting the farms to the towns, and there couldn’t possibly be one that wouldn’t lose huge amounts of money. If you lived on a farm, someone in the family absolutely had to drive a car, and unless someone in the family had the time to drive the kids to school and home every day, the kids had to ride a school bus.
Only about 10% of all American college students ever belong to a fraternity or a sorority.
I now have competing information about whether the young men in Horatio Alger stories usually end up rich. Some books I’ve read which discussed Alger say that his heroes didn’t end up rich. The Wikipedia entry on him also says that they didn’t. On the other hand, several posters claim that they did end up rich. Has anyone here read all of Alger and can tell me if the heroes usually ended up rich?
I have a cousin in California who is a high-school teacher. He also drives a school bus, or at least one of them, and I’m not sure if it was for his own school. He was a volunteer, but you still have to have a special driver’s license. I think each school district uses a different system.
Yes, “college” tends to become synonymous with “university,” but there really is a significant difference. A college, at least in theory, tends to be field-specific, such as the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Engineering, etc., although especially with Arts and Sciences, it can be a bit of an umbrella including a lot of different subfields. Still, smaller institutes like say Saint John’s College might concentrate on only one area – Liberal Arts in the case of Saint John’s. A university – as in “universe” or “universal” – groups together a variety of colleges.
I understand that in the UK, “college” is more like what we Americans call “high school.” I thought it was like that in Australia, too, but an Australian poster above seemed to indicate otherwise?
Me too, ivylass! We have the best alumni meetings! They happen…kinda…everywhere. All the time.
I’m sorry, but the Civil War was indeed very much all about preventing secession. Slavery was merely a side issue. That’s why the Emancipation Proclamation did not occur until close to the end. Lincoln even famously said before the war he would maintain the institution of slavery if it would save the Union.
Now I grew up in Texas. This is not the place to go into excruciating detail about history, but the Texas Revolution was indeed a fight for freedom. Briefly – and you can look it up elsewhere for the finer points, much has been written – the area of Texas, which back then extended to present-day Santa Fe, New Mexico, and even on up into Colorado, was pretty empty. General Santa Ana, the president of Mexico, worried that with it sitting there unused, the US might make a move on it. He actively campaigned to attract Americans to come settle there. They had to become citizens, but they were allowed certain privileges to entice them.
Okay, that was all well and good, but once the settlers started arriving, Santa Ana – who honestly could qualify as one of the stupidest leaders in history, a reading of all of his quirks is ruly amazing – started getting all paranoid. Having invited these Americans to come settle, he then became afraid they were plotting against him, so he started issuing these weird decrees restricting their rights and freedoms. I recall reading about one get-together the settlers had that was in celebration of Sanat Ana’s birthday, but the local troops came and broke it up, fearing they were plotting subversion. These were just settler families who wanted some land and had no political or secessionist ambitions. Stephen Austin and his father had played a big role in coordinating with the Mexican government in attracting settlers, acting as agents you might say. I believe his father died before he actually went to Texas, not sure about that, but Stephen felt very betrayed, as did the rest of the settlers. They had given up everything to move there, and there was no going back for most of them. Suddenly they were being oppressed by this maniac in Mexico City who had no reason to fear these people other than what was in his imagination. The situation spiraleld of hand.
So that’s what started it, but that’s a very simplistic overview. Santa Ana and the Mexican army got much nastier than I care to get into here.
My grandmother told me a story about two British airmen who were in Canada for flight training during WW2, and who she had volunteered to host for the duration of their training. This was in Moncton, New Brunswick, near Canada’s East coast. They told her one day that they had a three-day pass coming up, and thought they would take the train to Vancouver (on the West coast) and see something of the country. She explained to them that Vancouver was about as far away from Moncton as Britain was, and they weren’t going to there in only three days.
First of all, thanks to those who answered my questions regarding New Jersey, cheerleaders and high school football. I’ve one more, if you don’t mind.
It’s about two supporting characters in the Simpsons. There’s this Spanish speaking actor in a bee costume and another character who rarely appears but when he does his lines are always, “Yeeeeeeesss” and nothing else. I just saw a rerun where the Simpsons go to Brazil and the “Yeeess” guy appears briefly as a waiter in that episode.
My question: Are bumble bee guy and “Yeesssss” guy parodies? Simpsons are always parodying pop culture but these two I don’t get. Or are they original characters of the show?
Bumble Bee Guy is a parody of some of the shows that were on Spanish only stations in America in the late Eighties when the Simpson’s started.
The “Yesssss” character is strangely enough a very old character from the days of radio shows (pre-TV) and made several appearances in Looney Toons in the 40s or 50s. I am not sure of his origins. I found the Simpson reference in wiki. It says that he is a tribute to late comedian Frank Nelson from Jack Benny and later Sanford and Son.
Jim (I found the Bumblebee man link for you)
What’s pep club? Sounds like “auxiliary cheerleaders”, just chanting from the seats with no cartwheels.
Nope - basically, a college is anything that is neither a university nor a school 
The old use of the term is that in Oxford & Cambridge, where colleges are subdivisions of a university. This also applies to the colleges which make up the University of London.
Elsewhere, anything called ‘university’ is entitled to award degrees. ‘College’ can be any number of other institutions, in particular sixth-form colleges (ages 16-18), colleges of further education (teaching non-degree-level and vocational courses), and specialist colleges (Royal College of Music, for instance). And to complicate it further, some colleges are able to award degrees accredited by a university, and a few specialist ones now award degrees in their own right.
Yeah, it’s a mess 
Yeah, but it’s not the fact of the buses’ existence that bothers me (I rode the school bus for years myself) but the way the system works. In this part of the world, the school has a contract with the local bus company, so rather than getting a yellow school bus you’ll get a regular “Joe’s Bus Lines” or “State Transit Authority” bus with a professional driver employed by that company. The state government reimburses the bus company with a bulk periodic payment, and the kids just flash a “bus pass” at the driver for free travel. The bus and driver can spend the rest of the day carting old ladies to the mall or what-have-you, and the education system only has to pay for the time used, rather than buying its own vehicles which might sit idle 22 hours of the day.
Similar to here. However, there’s been various concerns - dangerous vehicles (because the cheapest bid wins the contract :rolleyes: ), drivers not being required to have criminal record checks, etc.
I suppose not having specific laws about not overtaking school buses removes part of the need for bright yellow vehicles. Also, the stopping-at-every-kids-house thing would be laughed at - it’s one stop in each village. And entitlement to free transport only applies to those without a safe walking route to school of under three miles (two for under-8s).
(Aside - a small primary school near me has the shortest bus service in the country. The school is on one side of a very busy road, and the village on the other. It was decided that this was not a safe walking route, the road was far too busy to be held up by a crossing with lights, so the council realised that running a 1/4-mile bus service was cheaper than building a footbridge.)
Some city school districts do that, but only with with kids who are older, say 12 and up. There just isn’t any public transportation in the suburbs and small towns, and certainly not to high schools, which tend to get rebuilt in the middle of nowhere. That way they have plenty of room for parking, and also for the football field and the soccer field and the baseball field and all the practice fields and maybe a nice field house for winter sports. Oler high schools are smack inthe middle of town, of course, but any time one is due to be remodeled, it’s turned into seniors’ apartments and a new building goes up in a cow pasture.
But in a lot of American cities, there isn’t a “local bus company,” other than Greyhound (long-distance service between cities, not within cities), so there’s no one to have such a contract with. Where I grew up, in Montana, there was an obvious need for bus service to the schools – a lot of kids lived “out”, meaning out of town, out in the country – but there wasn’t a local bus line. So: school buses. The school system did stagger school openings to maximize the number of runs each bus did, so it’s not like the buses were idle all day, they probably ran from 7 to 9:30 and then 2:30 to 5 or so, plus field trips and sports trips. The only local bus service we had was called “Dial A Ride,” and it was a short little bus bought with a federal grant to provide transportation assistance to senior citizens. (Little old lady could call the little bus, and it would come and get her and take her to the grocery store.) They wouldn’t have been allowed to haul kids around, even if they had wanted to.
Thanks Jodi. That makes more sense now.
It and Milliionaire are the only intellectually-respectable quiz shows in the US. Yes, they’d be ordinary, run-of-the-mill in the UK, where there’s one on some channel at almost any time (don’t know about Oz), and a contest in almost any pub in town, but here we have to make do with those two.
Interestingly, one of the long-runners in the UK is University Challenge…which is derived from the American College Bowl.
As has been stated before, there are really two operative meanings of the word “college.” In casual conversation, “college” is an exact synonym of “university” and tends to be the preferred term – “I’m in college.” If you say “I’m in university,” you sound like a Canadian.
The second meaning is the official administrative use by universities for an administrative subdivision of the institution, and in that case, it’s an exact synonym of “school” – School of Medicine/College of Medicine – it’s fairly arbitrary as to which one any specific institution might use.
These are two completely separate uses of the word “college.”
It’s very hard to generalize here. For practical purposes, there’s really no way to tell just from a name (X University, X College) whether it’s a big insitution or a small one or whether it specializes in a particular field or is universal.
Yeah, and kind of one-sided too. Among other things, if my recollection is accurate, a key issue was that the American settlers objected to the banning of slavery by the Mexican government.