High Life / A WEEKLY FORUM FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS : Student Gets $2,000 for Study of Poe

Stephen Tsoneff, a junior honors student at Huntington Beach High School, was recently awarded a $2,000 independent summer study grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Tsoneff, 16, will be investigating Edgar Allen Poe’s influence on Herman Melville’s maritime stories, Jules Verne’s science fiction and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective stories.

To receive the scholarship, Tsoneff was required to develop a subject of personal interest and worthy of in-depth research in a nine-week study plan.

He will be supervised by Huntington Beach English teacher Harry Gordon.

Foothill High School students won the top three spots in the annual Knights of Pythias poster contest, which emphasized highway safety and the hazards of drug and alcohol abuse.

Justin Bower won a $300 savings bond for finishing first. Joyce Hwang ($200 bond) and her sister, Laurice Hwang ($100), finished second and third.

Honorable mentions went to Robert Shaw, Caroline Shaw and Tamara Khala of Foothill; Kristin Haglund of Los Alamitos High, and Adrian Montero of Tustin High.

Dana Hills High School students Denyn Pysz, Rick Simon and Mike Jenson appear in Weird Al Yankovic’s new rock video “Smells Like Nirvana,” according to the Paper, the Dana Point school’s student newspaper.

The popular video is a parody of grunge-rock band Nirvana’s video “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”--George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)