We are the mundane
We had our annual Santa bar crawl last night. While I didn’t make an official tally, I’d say we probably topped 100 people on the tour. We had an absolute blast. This was our seventh one and it’s really taken off these last couple of years.
Here’s a bunch of photos from the evening.
Ginger Woolridge’s seven game shutout streak came to an end as Norwin HS scored on this play to defeat State High 1-0 to eliminate the Little Lions, as they are called, from the PIAA playoffs.
A fraction of a second after this picture was taken, Ginger collided with the other State High girl (in white) which left the goal wide open for the Norwin girl to score. Game story here.
Ginger was also the centerpiece of a game preview article in the paper on Saturday that talked about the 600+ minute scoreless streak that she had going.
Most of the State High team, including Ginger, will be back next year and they expect to contend for the State title.
Now that Central Bucks is split into three school districts, does anyone know where Chalfont kids go?
Tuesday night, the State College high school girls soccer team met Central Bucks South in the state soccer playoffs. State High’s goalie is my buddy Randy Woolridge’s youngest daughter Ginger. The game was played at Central Mountain HS which is about 40 miles from here so I headed over to watch it.
Ginger had a great game including a spectacular save with just minutes to go that preserved a 1-0 win for State High. It was her seventh straight shutout. They will now face a Pittsburgh area school in the state quarterfinals at 1 pm on Saturday. The game is in Hollidaysburg PA about 45 miles from here at 1 pm and I’m going to try to squeeze it in.
I say squeeze it in because the day is a very full one. Penn State hosts #4 Syracuse at 11:30 am Saturday in the opening round of the NCAA Field Hockey Championships. Barring OT, the game will end about 1 PM and I’ll be able to rush to Hollidaysburg for the State High game. That game should end about 3 PM, which will give me just enough time to get home to watch the Penn State at Ohio State football game (I’ll miss the first 15 minutes but that just means I’ll be able to skip all the commercials during the first half as I use TiVo to catch up). Then I’ll rush over to Rec Hall to catch the PSU women’s volleyball team taking on Illinois in a huge match (Illinois defeated Penn State in a match earlier this year – PSU needs the win to reclaim first place in the Big Ten). I absolutely love the opportunity to catch all these sporting events.
Note to Gary and Charlotte: The Big Ten Network will have the PSU/Illinois match on live at 6PM Saturday. Should be a good one.
Check out the video.
Just saw this movie trailer and it reminded me of something.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM-0Ywc7wNY
Last year, Penn State opened their basketball season up with a home game against Penn. As usual, I was at the game. My seats are located behind the visitors bench and just across the aisle from the visiting teams section (visitors get about five rows of tickets immediately behind the team bench.
During one of the timeouts, there was a Subway promotion. For the promotion the cheerleaders encourage fans to stand and cheer while they throw wrapped subs into the stands. For some reason I must have been particularly hungry that night because I was up cheering for a sub and I don’t even like Subway. As I’m standing there, one cheerleader breaks away from the bunch and comes running up my aisle. She stops a couple of rows in front of me and actually hands her sub to a guy sitting on the end of the row in the visitor’s section.
When I see this I start half complaining to my buddy in the seat next to me saying “you know, it’s bad enough that sometimes, when they have promotions like these, they wind up throwing the item into the visitor’s section, but it’s downright stupid of them to actually hand something to a visitor; I really would have liked that sub”.
A minute or two later, my buddy nudges me and says “I think I know why that guy got the sub.” “Why?” I ask. “Take a close look” he says, “I think it’s Denzel Washington”.
Sure enough, it was. All of a sudden, I didn’t feel so bad that the cheerleader chose Denzel over me. 🙂
It turns out that Denzel’s son, Malcolm (guess who he was named after), was a reserve on the Penn basketball team. Denzel was actually in the State College area filming the above “Unstoppable” and took time out from the movie to come over and watch the game. FTR, Penn State won and Malcolm didn’t play (he did get some time the rest of the year averaging 4 mpg).
I stopped by a local music festival this morning to see Natalie Berrena sing with one of her groups, Pure Cane Sugar. To my surprise, I ran into ex-girlfriend Diane Wooding at the show (you can catch her in the lower left corner of the video)
Diane is back in town this weekend for her high school reunion and stopped down for the show because she knows Natalie (they were roommates for a week at Pat Daugherty’s place in St Martin – remember this post and photo?)
Organizing a bar tour. The A-Z bar tour worked well in Philly. I’ve got my Santa Crawl going like gangbusters in State College (approaching 100 people now). And now I’m about to start another one.
I had this inspiration about 3 weeks ago. Are you familiar with Foursquare? It’s the current hot thing that some are predicting to be the new Twitter/Facebook. It’s a location based game/social network where you check into establishments via your smart phone. If you meet certain criteria, you earn a virtual “badge”. The person who checks into a location the most number of times over the last two months is that location’s “mayor”. The NYC based company was founded a year ago and has really taken off in the last few months (they have more users signed up than Twitter did in the same time frame). They are going through a second round of capitalization and the VC companies are throwing money at them Rumor has it that Yahoo wants to buy them for 100 million (not bad for a year’s work) but I don’t think they’ll sell.
Businesses love the concept because it helps them identify and reward their best customers so there’s a natural business related side to it. It doesn’t have the monetization issues that things like Twitter have struggled with.
I’ve been playing with it since they opened it up to the world a couple of months ago (I’m the mayor of about ten places in town) and have become addicted. One of the things that the company is looking for is ideas for badges. They offer badges for reaching certain clip levels – check in at 1, 10, 25, 50 places and you get a badge for each level attained. They have a super mayor badge (mayor of ten or more spots). They don’t always tell you what you have to do to earn some of the badges, so, sometimes when you get one, you’re a little surprised – check into bars four nights in a row and you get the Bender Badge, check into four bars in one night and you earn the Cronked Badge, check into a place with three members of the opposite sex and you get a Player Badge, check into ten places with another person and you get a BFF Badge. You get the idea (the best badge might be the North Pole badge which you get by checking in at the North Pole – there were two guys who were actually racing to be the first to do it last week – the one who won was a 16 year old kid).
For some reason, I got this idea (and it actually happened in the shower one night) for a badge. Four seemed to be a magic number that some of the badges seemed to revolve around (not surprising for a company with four in their name). My though for a badge: a minimum of four friends, four bars, in four hours equals a FourCrawl Badge (short for a Foursquare bar craw). I rushed out of the shower dripping wet and registered the domain name. I then spent the rest of the afternoon setting up a website, grabbing the Twitter name, creating a Facebook page, starting a Facebook event, contacting Foursquare to sell them on the badge idea, and recruiting some of my friends to do one the following weekend (target date was to be April 3rd).
I was pretty proud of what I had accomplished in just a few hours.
But my accomplishments paled in comparison to what this optometrist in Tampa was pulling off.
The day after I set all this up, and fortunately before I had promoted it too much. I see a blog post from a guy in Tampa who’s trying to sell people on the idea for a Foursquare Day to be held on April 16th (4/16 naturally). Holy Mackeral – what a great idea and I’m pissed I didn’t think of it. I immediately change the date of the Fourcrawl to 4/16 and sign up for his Foursquare Day idea.
Within days, his idea EXPLODES. It is unbelievable how quickly people embraced this idea. Within less than a week, the Foresquare people are officially on board. With in two weeks, people are organizing things all over the world – there are well over 100 cities worldwide signed up for this thing. It’s now being called the world’s first global social media holiday. Here’s a story that the local Tampa paper did on the guy ten days ago. A couple of days ago, the mayor of Tampa proclaim Friday officially Foursquare Day in Tampa (I saw a blurb that the mayor of Manchester NH did the same today – Shannon – are you in, Manchester can’t be too far from you?).
Here’s the complete official list of locations doing something. At least my State College Fourcrawl was one of the early ones.
Next year I’m going to follow the lead of the guy in Tampa and aim a little higher with my Fourcrawl (although given how freaked out this town gets over people drinking, the mayor is never going to sign off on it).
What’s a Withings you ask?
It’s an internet connected scale.
The scale is wirelessly connected to the internet with Wi-Fi. Everytime I weigh myself the scale connects to the internet and updates my weight and body fat content (it uses electrical impulses sent through my feet to measure my fat) on the Withings website and on my Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault accounts. It also sends a tweet out via my UncleLar twitter account which is connected to Facebook so my Facebook status is automatically updated too.
The Withings site also provides widgets which I can put on websites like this one to track my progress. Here’s how I’m doing so far (although I’ve only had the scale for a couple of days, I’m about a month into a campaign to lose a lb a week so I can get back down below 200 by around the end of September).
My annual post in support of THON, Penn State’s student run Dance Marathon that raises money to fight pediatric cancer.
History of THON
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N58ZnuXQwl4
2010 Promo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykgilcll4cg
Love Belongs Here Promo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKVa6UngyfQ
2010 THON Logo – Love Belongs Here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WibrrZRydUI
Here’s an absolutely cute video of Tucker Haas, a former Four Diamonds kid who has been cancer free for a couple of yars now, doing the Black Eyed Peas “Boom Boom Pow” before 10,000 or so kids at THON earlier this afternoon.
They just announced this year’s amount raised: $7,838,054.36
This little piece was broadcast on the local public TV station earlier today.
Some of the girls in the video had a message for one of their newest fans.