The Daily Helmsman

For everyone out there who does not know that the University of Memphis publishes a daily newspaper except on Mondays (I don't know why they do that.), shame on you. I think it's one the best ways of getting involved in the campus. Everything happening on campus from sports to politics is covered by our very own U of M students. I find it relaxing reading the newspaper between classes or while I'm slurping a mango smoothie at the FedEx Institute of Technology.

Does anyone else feel much older now that they read an actual newspaper daily? Personally, I feel much more optimistic about life. Of course, my old high school (White Station) plays a critical role. If you (referring to my classmates) went to a high school that published a newspaper, you might know where I'm coming from. White Station had a newspaper staff, yet they only published a newspaper maybe twice during my senior year. Really, how incompetent can a group of students be? Don’t answer that! There’s probably more out there but let’s keep them anonymous. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the second newspaper the staff published was when I had finished school.

So what? The Daily Helmsman isn’t The Commercial Appeal of The New York Times or a newspaper from Harvard University, but it does job. Distributed at random locations of the campus, one can get a copy if they know where to go or find one lying around. The editors of the Helmsman are very critical of the administration’s faults such as the incident in which a visitor was abused at the field house. Yet they feel as we students feel of the frustration of Spectrum not working every other day. And write touching stories of retired professors.

Can you guess what “der Steuermann” is in English? If you don’t know, you can check dictionary.com for its translation into English. But I’ll help you out by giving it away; it means “the helmsman” in German. You can sort of tell by pronunciation out loud, since English has many words fro the German language (I think. I wasn’t really paying attention in etymology class in high school.). A helmsman is a person who steers a vessel. Assuming the University of Memphis is the vessel and the students are the passengers, you can depict us going down the Mississippi River like Huck Finn had in the 1800’s finding new adventures at every stop. Then the helmsman helps us stay on a straight path away from the dangerous land (If you haven’t read Huck Finn, every time Huck went on land it was a bad endeavor.) by providing a new perspective of information so we can make better judgments than Huck Finn. That’s what I personally see in the The Daily Helmsman. It’s not too late to jump on the bandwagon.