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.
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).
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).
Hope you’re having a great day! Where’s the birthday banner?
If you checked out my previous post on New Year’s Eve, you’ll see that my attempt to do live video streaming didn’t work so well.
I was able to capture some halfway decent videos on my photo camera though. Here’s some of the videos I got at a couple of the bars I was in.
First some JR and Natalie videos from the Cafe 210. The videos are a little jumpy because I was zoomed in to try to prevent the lights from behind the band from overwhelming the camera sensors. For the most part I succeeded.
Van Morrison’s “Wild Nights”.
Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline”
Tom Petty’s “Free Falling” — kind of funny because Natalie grabbed the camera out of my hands and briefly turned it around on me.
Roberta Flack (and the Fugees) “Killing Me Softly”
JR and Natalie ended their last set at 1:30 and Natalie (and I) rushed over to the Phyrst before they gave their 2:00 am last call. At the Phyrst, Natalie did a couple of songs with Maxwell Strait (she’s been filling in as the lead singer with them because their normal lead, Molly Countermine, has been out having her third child). Molly, Natalie, and the third woman on stage, Kate Twoey, also perform together as a trio called Pure Cane Sugar.
Aretha Franklin’s Chain of Fools
Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s “Four Dead in Ohio”
Needless to say – I’m having fun with my new camera.
Thought I’d try this live stream thing again. This time I’ll capture some video from the First Night State College New Year’s Eve Celebration. I’ll wrestle with some of the dame dim lighting in the bar challenges that I had the last time but we’ll give it a whirl anyway.
Hopefully my videos will appear below (once I start recording that is – I see the old Santa Crawl ones are there now).
Tonight marks our sixth annual State College Santa Crawl.
Our annual romp in Santa costumes started out as a little thing that I created (with encouragement from my buddy Brian Allen) back in 2004. Our original group consisted of five of us.
This year we could have upwards of 75-100 people.
I’m also trying to ratchet up my coverage of the event by experimenting with live coverage of the goings on with my iPhone (I already know that lighting conditions are going to make it a challenge but I’m going to do the best that I can).
If things work out as I hope, the window just below will have a live feed of our activities (as much as I can without killing the battery in my phone) while the second window below will have a collection of the videos that I’ve made throughout the evening.
First – the live feed:
Live Video streaming by Ustream
There’s nothing there at the moment but the festivities will begin somewhere around 8-9 EST (I might put up one or two test videos earlier).
Come join us vicariously.
A nice local TV feature on the Tavern and some of the prints hanging on the walls.
I am dumbfounded by how good some of the videos that I shoot turn out. It’s unbelievably dark in this bar and there should be no way that a video could be shot there, much less a one taken with a PHONE.
I caught a couple of minutes of JR and Natalie doing “Stand By Me” on one of the music stages during the State College 2009 Arts Festival. I’m still amazed by the quality of both the video and the sound – I have to keep reminding myself that this is a PHONE.
Natalie used to be a cashier and cocktail waitress at the Tavern and JR’s opening remark about her learning to sing there was because Pat Daugherty was sitting in the first row.
Here’s a clip that I shot later that night from Natalie singing with another of my favorite local bands Maxwell Strait. I’m pretty amazed that anything came out of this as it was taken in a very very dark local bar called the Phyrst – the sound is distorted in this one because I was standing right in front of one of the speakers and I think it overwhelmed the little mike in the iPhone.
This little test has me convinced that I should be able to get some acceptable video of me doing some of my magic tricks around town. I just need to find someone who can work the phone while I’m doing the tricks. Every magician seems to have a gorgeous assistant – maybe I need to start a talent search for one. 