Lauren Rayman

    Student Council is currently preparing for the first blood drive of the year.

    The blood drive is being held on Monday, October 29 from 8-2. Students could sign up during their lunch period this past week and can still sign up at www.stowstuco.org/blood.

    Junior Abbey Staats is the chair of the committee this year. It is her first year being the chair of the committee, and she is very excited for the event.

    “This is my first year in the committee and I’m lucky to get to lead it. I love being in a committee where my committee members and I get to see all of the hard work we’ve put into that event,” Staats said.

    In previous years, American Red Cross has been the company they have used, but the committee decided to use Vitalant for the blood drive.

    “We actually went with a company called Vitalant this year because they offered us more support and easier communication and free T-shirts for every donor,” Staats explained.

    In order to promote the event, Student Council has been doing things like making posters and fliers, which can be found in the commons and throughout the school.

    Staats’s goal for the event was to have 50 donors signed up and there are currently 60. Vitalant was hoping for around 80 donors.

    The purpose of this event is to simply save lives, and each donation saves three lives. So many people want to donate blood simply because of this reason.

    Sophomore Jordan Lyle is donating blood for the first time on Monday. Lyle just turned 16 this year, so this is the first time she’s been eligible to do so.

    “I wanted to give blood because if I needed a type of blood and they didn’t have it because there was an issue I’d be a little upset,” Lyle said.

    Lyle is a little nervous to donate for the first time but is mostly excited and happy she has the opportunity.

    “I’m giving blood because I’ve always been interested in anything medical and I figured that this would be a good opportunity to try something new,” Lyle said.

    Running an event like the blood drive comes with many responsibilities. Staats had to take on many responsibilities to ensure that the event runs smoothly.

    “There are a lot of responsibilities with running any club, especially blood drive. If you left out one piece or detail, the whole event could flop. My main responsibility was staying in contact with Katy Neff, the Vitalant coordinator,” Staats said.

    Originally, the inspiration behind the event came from other schools and businesses. Many of these places do blood drives, and Stow Student Council saw how much of a difference it can make.

    Another main point of inspiration came from students just wanting to give back and help in any way possible, according to Staats.

    “Most students are so lucky to be healthy and it’s always good to help people who aren’t so healthy,” Staats said.

    Once the blood drive is over, Vitalant will deliver it to blood centers to test the blood to make sure it is safe to use. Students can learn what their blood type is once it goes through the blood centers. It is then transported to hospitals or wherever it may be needed.

    The next blood drive January 25, so be sure to look out for sign up dates.

Abby Kuhns

    Student council gave away pizza, drinks and 2 eventful rounds of trivia to five teams made by Stow high school students for a cost of $30.

    This year was the second annual ‘Trivia Night’ presented by student council was ran by Junior Will Boggs and his committee. The committee worked for almost two weeks in and out of class to put on the event and come up with a variety of questions they felt would interest the competitors.

     “I think ‘Trivia Night’ went pretty well. A few of the questions could have been a little better but overall I think everyone there enjoyed it,” Boggs said.

    Winning ‘Trivia Night’ with the highest combined total from the first and second round was the “Nerd Herd.” The team consisted of six members of Stow’s Science Olympiad team: seniors Lorna Vizmeg and Ben Borthwick, juniors Daniella Ryden and Logan Brittan, sophomore Drishti Mittal and freshman Sam Borthwick.

   Nerd Herd was able to celebrate their victory with a cake and a movie basket put together by student council containing snacks and a gift card.

Alex Chmielewski

July 20, 1969 – One small step for man, one giant lie for mankind. On this day in American history, the moon landing was faked.

The United State’s Apollo 11 was supposedly the first manned mission to land on the moon. Many people however, believe that nobody has ever actually been to the moon, and that NASA has faked all 6 of their moon landings.

In 1961, just two years after the National  Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), United States President John F. Kennedy announced that he wanted to successfully land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. The former president said that the United States wanted to go to the moon not because the challenge was easy, but because the challenge was hard.

There are many signs of evidence that point toward the moon landing being faked. Some examples are the fact that there were no stars in the lunar sky and also that you could clearly see the American flag rippling when there is no air or wind on the moon. Another piece of evidence is that you could see reflections of light in the corner of photos and shadows pointing in different directions, which both indicate that there were multiple light sources.

Another reason why people believe the moon landing did not happen is the Van Allen Zone. This is a radiation zone surrounding planet Earth that would have been impossible to go through without dowsing astronauts with lethal doses of radiation.

Some people suggest that the United States faked the 1969 moon landing to win the Space Race and beat the Soviet Union in the pursuit of spaceflight dominance. One theory suggest that the landing was faked on a secret movie set somewhere in the Hollywood Hills while others think it happened in perhaps one of the most secretive places in America, Area 51.

An 83-year-old former Hollywood cameraman, Stanley Kubrick  said in 2016 that the moon landing was filmed in North London and that he was the one holding the camera.

Real or not, the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing did accomplish the goal of helping the United States win the Cold War. While this hard to believe conspiracy theory may seem very far-fetched, it sure is a interesting idea.

Molly Richards

    The new movie Adrift is thrilling audiences across the country, however not many people know that the story told in the film is true.

    Shailene Woodly stars in this drama as Tami Oldham, a young woman of only twenty-four years old, who finds herself caught in a category-four hurricane with her fiance.

    Woodly and her co-star, Sam Claflin, play a young couple who meet in Tahiti, and on their way sailing across the Pacific, find themselves in one of the worst storms in history.

   Critics from Rotten Tomatoes said, “Adrift sails smoothly between love story and survival drama, thanks in large part to a gripping central performance from Shailene Woodley.”

    Throughout the film, the scenes go from when the couple met and was falling in love, to them trying to survive the storm and and all of the physical, mental and emotional trails they had to endure while stranded at sea.

    At the end of the film, the real Tami Oldham is recognized and shown along with information about her. The film said that, despite everything she went through, Tami is still an avid sailor to this day.

    The most interesting part of the movie in my opinion is the end, when is is revealed what really happened to Richard (Sam Claflin) during the storm, and how the movie panned out after it was revealed.   

    After her traumatic experience, Tami wrote a book relaying the details off wheat she remembered called, Red Sky in Mourning: A True Story of Love, Loss and Survival at Sea.

    Though Tami struggled for many years after the loss of her fiance, she is now married with two children, and continues to keep the memory of Richard alive through sharing her story with others.