Decided it was time this handsome devil joined the rest of the family.
Elliot’s Halloween Pics
After seeing everyone else’s Halloween photos, I figured I had better sign up for this blog thing and show off some of my own.
And by the way, no that was not my alcoholic beverage in the first picture. It was being consumed by an individual of a legal drinking age.
P.S. – Uncle Larry, I’m hoping that your Nittany Lions win out and go to the Fiesta Bowl. I’m trying to convince my Dad that we should make our second straight trip to Tempe on New Year’s if they do.
Belated H’Ween Pix
Just saw Larry’s post busting me for not putting a shot of Charlotte up.
I didn’t get home that night till the kids were already trick-or-treating. When they got home no-one was willing to pose. So I didn’t have good shots, so I didn’t put one up. I now realize my transgression and hope to make amends for it.
Enjoy Your Trip! See You Next Fall!
When Charlotte started walking, whenever she fell I would let out a cheerful “Enjoy your trip! See you next fall!”, as a distraction. It became an automatic response for me, and by now I’ve probably said it to the 2 of them a thousand times.
The other night Lex and I were in the kitchen, Charlotte was in the dining room. Lex tripped and I blurted out “Enjoy your trip! See you next fall!”
10 seconds later I heard Charlotte laughing hysterically.
Five years and 1000 repetitions…. She got the joke.
NA-TA-LIE
Two weeks ago, the Penn State women’s field hockey team had their final home game of the season against Ohio State. The weather was kind of miserable, damp and overcast with a slight drizzle, but I went up to the game anyway because it was senior day – i.e. the day when they honor the graduating players – and it would be the final game that Natalie Berrena would play at home for Penn State plus she was going to sing the National Anthem for her fellow seniors before the game.
When I got up there, I ran into one of Natalie’s friends, Lisa Plesko, who was on the phone when I got there. As I walked up, she snapped her phone closed clearly irritated. When I asked what was wrong, she shrugged her shoulder and shook her head saying she was really pissed at her friends. When I asked why, she pulled up her jacket revealing a shirt with a big NA on it saying that she had made up these shirts to wear for Natalie but her two friends were hung over and complaining about the weather so she didn’t think they were going to make it to the game. I told her not to worry, I’d fix the problem.
I was quite willing to don a shirt plus I knew another kid, Jason Mattia, at the game who I was sure I could talk into it without any trouble – he had graduated last year but had been a PA announcer for the field hockey team the year before so he knew Natalie and a bunch of the girls. Plus one of the gigs that he had here at PSU was to dress like Captain Morgan for various promotions around town, so I knew he would be an easy sell. It took all of two seconds for him to agree. We all decided to wait until halftime to put the shirts on.
As it turns out, one of Lisa’s friends did show up right at halftime, so we did need Jason’s services (you really didn’t think I’d be the one to sit it out did you?). We changed into the shirts just before the start of the second half and stood by the fence at Penn State’s end of the field hoping she would notice us. As luck would have it, just seconds into the second half there was an out of bounds play right in front of us. The ball was off a Penn State player, so Ohio State had possession and had to inbounds it right in front of us. Natalie stood defending about 15 yards away and, since we were right behind the inbounding Ohio State player, had a direct view of us. Right in the middle of the play, she spots us and just starts shaking her head laughing. We couldn’t have planned it any better.
She called me this afternoon and told me that someone had sent her a photo of the three of us. She had copies made for us and I went over tonight and picked up mine.
Here I am, just living a “LIE”.
PS – Natalie received another honor today when she was named to the National Field Hockey Coaches All Region first team. She has an excellent shot at making All-American and it would be a fantastic way to end her field hockey career.
Penn State vs. Notre Dame?
UncleLar (BroLar),
So what are the odds and what has to take place for Penn State to end up playing Notre Dame in a bowl game? I’ve got a household full of “golden domers”, not to mention Mary Ann’s entire family. I’d like nothing better than to watch Penn State beat Notre Dame somewhere on New Year’s Day.
Ken – remember this?
First a little background:
Dick Harmon of the Deseret News (out there in Ken’s neck of the woods), a voter in the new Harris Poll, which is part of the BCS ranking system, voted PSU the #17 football team in the country this week. That has raised the ire of many PSU football fans (see this Centre Daily Times Blog post), caused numerous rants and rages on PSU internet forums, generated a plethora of emails to Harmon and his superiors, and even inspired this column by a local sportswriter, Dave Jones.
This paragraph by Dave caught my eye (my emphasis added)
Harmon writes for the Deseret News, one of two papers in Salt Lake, is 52 and has been writing about college football for three decades. He also exposes his ballot every Monday on the Deseret News site, deseretnews.com, which is more than you can say for most Harris voters, let alone the opaque coaches who let underlings fill out their ballots every week on the other poll with understood directives never to vote that Son of a Gun from So’n’so State above No. 24.
The underlings line hit home.
Back in 1972, a friend of mine was a sportswriter for a local paper here in State College and was a voting member of the Associated Press Basketball poll (he shall go nameless because he’s still in the business and just might want to regain his AP vote some day). Right around this time of year he was supposed to submit his ballot for the preseason AP poll. Just like this year, PSU was hot in the middle of the football national championship picture (at the time we were 8-1 and 7th ranked – we wound up 10-2 losing to #2 Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl – USC won it all at 12-0). Just to show you some things never change, basketball took a back seat to football and my friend asked me to put together a preseason ballot for him because he was too tied up with football coverage. I quickly agreed.
At the time, the AP’s list was a top twenty and you only voted for the top 15. I quickly dove into my research (if only the internet existed back then I could have been much much more thorough). I came up with fourteen teams without too much trouble but was having a hard time settling on a 15th. Then I had a brainstorm – Ken was going to school at Illinois State and he had told me they had a pretty good team, why not do him a favor and plug them in at #15. So be it. I then called him up and told him that as long as his team kept winning I would guarantee that they would appear in the “among those also receiving votes” category.
Damn, if that little school didn’t keep winning. For the first couple of weeks, my little vote meant that they were at the bottom of the “others” category but, after a while, lo and behold they started getting votes from others. They eventually got to about 11-0 and were getting close to the top twenty when their bubble burst and they lost. I would like to think that my original vote caught the attention of other voters and they started to pay attention to the Redbirds as they maintained their winning streak. If it weren’t for me maybe they wouldn’t have gotten any national exposure that year.
Without that exposure, maybe no one would have noticed their 6’6″ guard that was lighting up the conference, eventually earning him a consensus All-American spot and a first round draft by the Phila 76ers which he parlayed into a long time basketball playing, coaching, and broadcasting career. Yup – if it weren’t for me, Doug Collins wouldn’t be where he is today. He owes it all to me. 
All kidding aside, I actually had a lot of fun watching Illinois State make me proud of that vote that I initially cast for them. That year also gave me an appreciation for how difficult a job it is to be a voter, particularly in those days when there was no way to see most of the teams you actually were voting for. The only thing you could base your vote on were scores that rolled across the wire services. Even finding a game story was extremely difficult then.
It is easier now but it’s a daunting task and I don’t envy the guys that try to do it (that’s why I am a fan of the computer polls – that and because I’m a computer geek to begin with). At least guys like Dick Harmon put their vote out there for all to see (and thus get some feedback). It’s the secret votes that bother me the most. You can also bet that some of those votes, particularly in the preseason, have as much validity as my “my little brother goes to school there” vote.
Bride of Chucky II
Chucky was out prowling Monday night looking for a new bride.
Some of the contenders were:
| Chiquita Banana | Aunt Jemima |
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| Catwoman | Pocahontas |
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Chucky even had to fight off the Burger King for this one:
For more photos of Chucky’s exploits, go here.
Birthday Cake
Now that winter has arrived…
it’s time to shift to my “other job”.
I’m fortunate in that my two passions don’t overlap their seasons. Warm weather months get dedicated to golf – I’m a little off this year with only about 80 rounds played, normally I’d hit over 100 but the asthma knocked me out for a month. Cold weather months see my focus switch to Penn State basketball (practice started 12 days ago).
A friend of mine, Tim Beidel, runs a website, PennStateHoops.com, dedicated to the Nittany Lion basketball program. Tim resides in Portland Maine and started the site years ago as a way of remotely keeping up with the basketball program. He was frustrated that he had a really hard time finding information anywhere about Penn State basketball team and realized that others must be in the same boat so he started the site.
I started buying season basketball tickets when the school built our basketball arena, the Bryce Jordan Center in 1995. Like Tim, I lived in New England and couldn’t find any info on PSU basketball. I started trolling around the web and stumbled onto his site then. It was a godsend for those of us looking for PSU BB info. I started hanging around the site then, occassionally posting to the site forum.
A few years down the road, I met Tim and we hit it off (90%+ of the people on these boards I wouldn’t want anything to do with but Tim is an exception). We’ve been able to get together once or twice a year since then, either for a summer golf tournament, fall football game, or winter basketball game. Despite Tim being a married non-drinker and me the polar opposite we get along quite well (in addition to sharing a common perspective on Penn State basketball, our political and social views seem to jibe 100%).
Tim runs the website as a hobby and it’s become quite popular among the PSU hoops community. Fortunately, Tim has been able to keep the lunatic fringe often found on internet boards at bay (he even got some nice props in a story by a Harrisburg sportswriter). Penn State has numerous former players playing professional ball in Europe who use the site to keep up to date with the team. We also have recently been recruiting heavily in Europe – we have three players on the squad from overseas – and their friends and families use the board to keep track of their hometown heroes.
Over the years my contribution to the board has grown. In addition to regularly posting on the aforementioned forum, I have assumed responsibility for tracking our recruiting efforts by maintaining the “UncleLar Recruiting Matrix”. The matrix is a compilation of published reports of whom Penn State is targeting with their recruiting.
By NCAA rule, a school’s coaching staff can’t comment on anyone that they are recruiting. That creates a huge void which is filled by numerous internet recruiting services (for both football and basketball). The two biggest are the Rivals Network and the Scout Network. Each of these networks is a conglomeration of individual school sites which are run by local professionals. Blue White Illustrated runs the Penn State site on the Rivals Network while Fight On State is the Scout Networks Penn State site. Both of those websites are run by local professionals who also publish local magazines.
However, this area is so football oriented that staffs of BWI and FOS give short shrift to basketball, even during basketball season. That has opened up a niche within a niche for Tim’s board and he is able to put together a better product as a hobby than either of the professional organizations can. As evidence,
Tim’s board receives 10 times the traffic that either the BWI basketball board or the FOS basketball forum does and my recruiting matrix is also more complete that either the BWI recruiting table or the FOS table.
With basketball season just around the corner (we have an exhibition game next Thursday), basketball recruiting activities will pick up and I can settle into my “second job” just as my golf “job” winds down.