Author: UncleLar

The head orphan and eldest surviving member of the Fall Family Clan.
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Four Nations Soccer Tournament

An UncleLar niece will be making her overseas debut with the US National Soccer team in a few hours (3AM Friday to be exact). Joanna Lohman, who was a two time Hermann Award finalist (Soccer’s equivalent to the Heisman Trophy) while she was at Penn State, plays midfield for the US. J-Lo, as she is not so surprisingly known, has played in seven matches for the US team here in the states but this is her first trip overseas with the team.

The Four Nations Tournament is being held in Guangzhou China and is considered a warm-up for the World Cup later this year. The #2 ranked in the world US women open the tournament against the #1 world ranked German squad. They will follow this match up with one against England on Sunday, then face the host Chinese on Tuesday.

Here’s a photo of J-Lo with the we’re-in-China obligatory ping pong pose (she’s the one on the right)

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The right place… the right time…

A good friend of mine just went through a most harrowing experience. Tom Minsker is one of my regular golfing partners. We usually play together 3-4 times a week. Two weeks ago today, he returned to town from 10 days down in Myrtle Beach. When he got up on Monday his back was bothering him. Tom didn’t think much of it. He’s had some hip and back problems recently and just figured the long drive back from Myrtle just exacerbated something.

He had a regular check up with his doctor scheduled for Monday morning to make sure there were no complications with the steroids he’s taking for his hip. He mentioned the back pain to his doctor and the doctor agreed that it was probably from the drive but said if it got worse to come back in.

After the doc said the meds looked like they were working well, Tom headed back home. But the back pain persisted. By about three in the afteroon, Tom decided to head back to the doctors. After getting in his car and pulling out of the driveway though, he decided the pain was enough he ought to just head to the emergency room.

When he got there they signed him in, got his personal info, and directed him to the triage nurse. The nurse took a quick look at Tom and could see he was in considerable pain so she called him in ahead of a couple of other patients. A doctor looked at Tom and sent him to get a CAT scan, saying that he’d be back with the results in about 30-35 minutes.

15 minutes later the doctor came hurrying down the hall and told Tom he had a problem that needed immediate attention but that they weren’t prepared to handle it at the local hospital. He said that the nearest hospital with the right facilities was Geisinger in Danville which is about 75 miles away. Tom asked who he should get in touch with at Geisinger and how he should go about scheduling an appointment. The doctor replied that “when I said “immediate attention I wasn’t referring to scheduling anything”. He added “we have the helicopter warming up and you needed to be in the air 5 minutes ago”.

Tom said with that they started wheeling him down the corridor and loading him on the helicopter. That’s the last thing that Tom remembers until he woke up in Geisinger two days later.

It turns out that Tom had an abdominal aortic aneurysm. That’s a condition where the aortic artery, as it passes behind the stomach, swells into a bubble. If the bubble is small, it can be treated with drugs and carefully watched to make sure it doesn’t rupture. If the bubble is large it needs to be treated surgically, either by inserting a stent through an artery in your leg or by full abdominal surgery where the open your gut up and put an artificial artery in you bypassing the bubble. Whatever approach that is taken it’s important to treat the aneurysm before it ruptures. Only 40% of aortic aneurysm patients survive an abdominal rupture. For comparison purposes about 60% of heart attack victims survive.

In Tom’s case, the aneurysm was already starting to rupture. It was leaking, which was what was causing the back pain, and full blown rupture was imminent which is why they had to immediately helicopter him to the other hospital. As it turns out, it did rupture shortly after they got Tom in the air. His heart stopped and they had to perform CPR. The helicopter actually returned to the local hospital where they were able to stabilize Tom then get him back in the air and to Geisinger where he underwent six hours of surgery.

Had Tom been anywhere else but right next to some emergency medical personnel when the rupture happened he probably would have been a goner. It’s doubtful that anyone would have been able to reach him in time to save him. He was incredibly fortunate that he decided to head to the hospital with his back pain.

He’s back home now with few restrictions – no heavy lifting and no driving for a few weeks but other than that (and one big scar on his belly) he’s no worse for wear. He’s quite fortunate.

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I feel redemption

You may remember my ill fated campaign to name the local State College baseball team a couple of years ago. I nominated Sliders and my idea made the cutoff from 5000 suggestions that the team received. I was pumped and started encouraging my friends to vote for Sliders in the contest. I thought I had a pretty good chance of advancing to the final round when the list was to be shortened and a re-vote held.

Not everyone saw it that way however. A writer for the local paper (not a sports reporter by the way) published the following column where he ridiculed ALL the names on the ballot. He choose my nominee for the headline of his colunn “Race for local baseball team name slow going — a turtle!” (note: Sliders is a breed of turtles – the ones that you find in pet stores are typically Slider turtles).

When the time came for the finalists to be announced, I was devastated. Not only didn’t I make the finals but NONE of the semifinalists did. The ball club threw out all seven names and came up with five new ones. What the?

Eventually, the name Spikes won out. While I thought the name was ok, I was still a firm believer that Sliders was equally good.

Now comes my redemption. Slippery Rock PA has just announced the name of their new minor league baseball team. You guessed it – the Slippery Rock Sliders. Sliders was the winning selection picked from 92 unique entries.

Here’s their logo:

I have ordered a Slider hat from their official supplier and will be wearing it proudly around town.

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Thank You Shannon

Friday afternoon, I was down at Tony’s Big Easy for their annual customer appreciation holiday party, when the owner, Tony Sapia, called me aside. He had an envelope in his hand and told me the following story.

He said

I got a phone call the other day and this girl asked me “Do you know Uncle Larry?” My response was “Sure, everybody knows Uncle Larry”. Her answer was “Well I’m his niece”. My answer to her was “Sure” and she replied “No really. My name is Shannon and I’m his REAL niece.”.

With that Tony handed me an envelope with a gift certificate in it and said “Merry Christmas from Shannon”.

So thank you very much Shannon and Merry Christmas in return.

I hope to hear from others what they received in the Secret Santa exchange.

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Santa Crawl 2006

We had our third annual State College Santa Crawl last Friday. I was so busy trying to keep the group organized that I didn’t get my normal quantity of photos so I had to wait a few days to collect photos from others on the tour before making this post.

We started at out normal spot – Hooters. Hooters is located on the east end of the College Avenue, the main drag in State College. For those who haven’t been to town College Ave is actually the divider between the town on the south side of the street and the University which is on the north side of the street. Most of the downtown bars are located on or between College Ave and Beaver Ave which runs parallel to College. We traditionally start at Hooters and “crawl” our way westward ending the evening at Cafe 210.

This map should give you an idea.

The bars that we hit on our route and their block number on the map are as follows:

Hooters – block #12
The Lions Den – block #9
Gingerbread Man aka G-Man – block #24
Adam’s Apple at the Tavern – block #5
Shandygaff – block #5
Bill Pickle’s – block #3
Allen Street Grill – block #3
Cafe 210 – block #2

Here’s a photo taken at Hooters as we started

and here’s one of the group onstage at the Cafe at 2:00 am.

I was particularly proud of how many managed to make it to the end. I usually lose control of the group as we cross Pugh Street (that would be between the Shandygaff and Bill Pickle’s) as people decide to branch off to other bars not on the planned itinerary.

We probably had upwards of 35 people participate at one time or another and seven people actually made it all the way through.

To see more photos of our crawl, try this link.

To see photos from past crawls, try the links at this page.

To see photos from SantaCon events worldwide, try this link or this link.

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Horny Manatee

Crazy story in Today’s New York Times about the wild world of the internet. A week ago, Conan O’Brien at the end of a skit about absurd college mascots adlibbed a line about one of the band members watching this a non existent web site called www.hornymanatee.com.

After taping ended around 6:30, somebody realized that the show could get into FCC trouble if somebody actually created a website of that name and put porn on it. So Conan’s team rushed off and purchased the rights to the website for $159 before the show actually aired that night.

Well now that they owned the rights they decided to do something with it so they created a porn site spoof. Given the comedic minds on the staff, it’s no surprised that the site is pretty funny. Low and behold the have an internet hit on their hands with over three million hits in the last week.

Check it out.

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African Water Hole Webcam

Click here for a live webcam that’s focussed on a water hole somewhere in Africa.

When I first went to the site about 8PM yesterday I was convinced it had to be a fake. There were literally about a hundred water buffalo wallowing in the water. I couldn’t believe the moment that I would pick the webcam would just happen to be the time the place was full of animals so I figured it had to be a tape. I kept looking at the thing trying to detect if it was looping (I also fully expected some screaming face to appear on the screen making me jump out of my chair). But it looked real to me.

I even logged off and logged back in to see if the scene would start all over anew at the beginning shot. Nope. It really did appear to be live. The shots had that eerie night vision look that’s so common on the cops and robbers reality shows but they sure seemed real.

Not wanting to look like an idiot if I immediately posted it here, I decided to wait a while and investigate a little further.

My research uncovered that it really is a live webcam. It’s located in the Sabi Sands Private Game Reserve, in South Africa. South Africa is eight hours ahead of Eastern Standard time so when I was looking at the water hole it was about 3AM. I have since learned that from that time on, i.e. the early morning hours over there, is really the best time to probably see some wildlife (second best time is supposedly around dusk).

I have gone back to the site about a half dozen times today to check it out. About half the time the camera has been on something. Once I saw a deer or antelope drinking and the camera followed him around as he nervously left the pond. The camera is obviously controlled somehow – most likely remotely (in fact I found one site that indicated that the cam could be controlled by the viewer but I haven’t found details of how that works quite yet) but the mikes sometimes pick up ambient noises that make me think that someone is there (oops – the camera just zoomed in one some birds curiously standing on one leg in the water).

I have also been able to determine that the camera is somehow affilated with the Nkorho Bush Lodge. How close the water hole is to the lodge I haven’t yet figured out.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did and let me know if you see anything unusual. I’m dying to get back on tonight but I’ll be at a basketball game during prime viewing hours.

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I figured out photos!


Now that I’ve figured out that the photo feature doesn’t like when there is punctuation in the name of the file, I can upload pictures of the house. Unfortuately, a lot were lost when my camera phone bought the farm. Here’s one of me ripping down wallpaper and plastering in one of the rooms in the house (I torn down wallpaper in 6 rooms). I think it’s my bedroom.