Category: Ministrivia

OK – so I made up a word. Just a catch all category for off-the-wall and weird stuff

Posted on

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.

Posted on

We old f*rts should get a kick out of this…

The Penn State Nittany Lion has earned himself a local reputation for some of the dances skits that he puts on every now and then during timeouts at the football games. Last year he had two that were classics that the student went absolutely nuts over. One was Nittany Dynamite, a reenactment of the dance sequence from Napoleon Dynamite. The other was Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which he did with a couple of Penn State Blue Band members.

Two weeks ago, he managed to top himself. His bit was called “The History of Dance” and a dozen or so dance steps that I’m sure we all can remember well. The video in this piece is much better than the others. The professionals have gotten wise and when the Lion comes out on the field during a timeout they have their cameras ready now. To see the “The History of Dance” click here, then choose “Lion Dance” on the right hand side.

So how many songs and dance steps did you recognize?

Posted on

I’m dead

evidently.

A week ago Saturday, I ran into a couple of my old college roommates, “Doc” Scarborough and Dave Hannum, down at the Tavern after the football game. In the course of our conversation, Doc said to me “Well, it’s good to confirm with my own eyes that you’re still alive”.

When I gave him kind of an inquisitive look he said “Didn’t you know that the Penn State Alumni Assocation published an obituary notice about you in their magazine a few months ago?” Doc added that he was shocked to see it and had emailed Dave about it. Dave replied back to him that he had just seen me a few weeks before and that I looked “remarkably healthy for a dead guy”.

That comment got me thinking. I hadn’t remembered getting the Alumni magazine recently and I had just received a bill from the Alumni Association for annual membership fees even though I am a paid up lifetime member. I jokingly told Doc that maybe the Alumni Association had killed me off to void my liftime membership so they could get me to rejoin.

I called the Alumni Assocation to get to the bottom of the issue last week. They told me that I had received the “dues notification” because I wasn’t flagged on their records as being a lifetime member. When I complained that I’ve been a member for over 20 years, they went into my detailed records and where able to find my payment so they adjusted my membership status.

When I suggested that perhaps the “obituary notice” might have been the cause of my getting dropped from the roles, the representative responded that my old roommate must have been mistaken because there was no indication on my record that I was deceased. When I replied that while I doubted that he had made a mistake, I couldn’t confirm it because I hadn’t been receiving my issues of the Alumni magazine. The rep offered to send me the last few back issues.

Those back issues arrived this weekend and I just got a chance to go through them. Sure enough, in the issue from last March, there I appear in their “In Memoriam” section.

What’s interesting is that I’m listed with our old Rolling Meadows address even though I’ve never lived there. What’s doubly interesting is that, even though I haven’t been getting the Alumni Magazine, I’ve continue to get all sorts of other mailings from them. Also, their online information about me has been correct because I check it every now and then. Strange indeed. I doubt I’ll ever get to the bottom of how it happened but I will be asking them to correct my obit.

Posted on

UncleLar mWow VI – That Girl Emily

Haven’t done any mWow’s in a while but when I ran across this one I thought it deserved a link.

It just goes to prove that there’s nothing like a women scorned.

That Girl Emily is a blog by a “29” year old woman who was cheated on by her husband. Shortly after she started her blog she found out about his philandering and detailed her revenge in her blog. She got him back pretty good and I almost feel sorry for the guy. She was a communications major in college so she actually writes pretty well and the whole saga is quite entertaining.

The above link is to the last blog post but the blog really should be read from the first post on so just here which is the first post in the blog, then click on the July archive (or here) remembering to read from the bottom up.

I don’t know what sucked me into the blog – maybe it’s because my ex’s name is Emilie. But the first few posts are just Emily rambling on about herself and her husband with a few hints about their boring sex life when all of a sudden she finds out hubby is cheating with her best friend. Then the fun begins.

She starts out saying:

They think they can just walk away from this. Their games have been played for the last month. Months? My games are just starting. They don’t know what kind of shit they’ve just stepped in. Flies everywhere. I have friends in high and low places. It’s time to call in some favors. It’s time to draw up my own games. It’s time for them to feel what I’m feeling. Everyone reading this blog will have front row seats.

and she wasn’t kidding.

She even includes photos of some of the things she did:

How about packing up her husband’s porn collection and sending it to his parents – just a classic.

Hope you find the blog as entertaining as I did.

Posted on

Arts Festival Roadrace Photos

Found some old Arts Festival 10 Mile Roadrace photos taken in my running days.

Here’s Randy Woolridge with my ex-wife, Denise, and I before the start of the race in July of 1983. Notice the horns on my headband. Even then I liked to attract attention to myself.

Here are shots of Randy and I as we are finishing the race. If Randy seems to be more in stride and moving a little faster than me, it’s no optical illusion. Randy got pretty serious about his running and ran in a few marathons every year including about 10 times in Boston where I often accompanied him (TO Boston that is, once we got there, he did all the running).

Here’s Randy and Dennis Gildea replacing precious bodily fluids post race. Dennis was the writer for the Pennsylvania Mirror article that I linked to in a previous post (also one of the instigators of the Phi Psi 500 Hall of Fame hoax). He is now a professor of journalism at Springfield College in Springfield MA.

Here’s a post race shot of Randy Woolridge, Heather Carmichael, Katie O’Toole, and somebody whom I don’t remember.

First a little remeniscing about Heather. When I was in my running prime, I ran in several major road races around the country. For a few years in a row, Tod Jeffers and I would golf out way down to Atlanta for the Fourth of July and then run in the famed Peachtree Road Race, the largest road race in the country. 1979 happened to be one of the years that Tod and I ran the race. The day after the race, on our way out of town Tod and I picked up the Atlanta Constitution to read all the race stories. The talk of the race was the young unknown female runner from New Zealand who had won the women’s title.

This race attracted the top runners in the country. Famed marathoner Frank Shorter won it in 1977. Mary Decker was the women’s winner in 1978. Craig Virgin and Greta Waitz each won three Peachtree titles. But the 1979 female winner was an unknown recent high school graduate from New Zealand named Heather Carmichael. It turns out that Heather was a protegy of Arthur Lydiard, a famed New Zealand coach and trainer of legendary New Zealanders like world record miler Peter Snell. Here’s a story noting how Lydiard had prepped Heather and her teammate Karen Petley, who place third, for the Peachtree. When Heather won the race, nobody knew who she was. By the time the papers came out the next day, a couple of enterprising reporters had been able to piece together some info on her including the fact that she was headed to Penn State on a track scholarship. Tod and I immediately bemoaned the fact that we hadn’t known that the day before figuring we probably could have used that to our advantage somehow.

Scene shifts to four years later. By this time, Heather is a senior at Penn State and she’s renting a room in Randy’s house (which naturally now makes her good ole buddies with Tod and me). Unfortunately, injuries had derailed her Penn State career. She was a track All American as a freshman, taking 6th in the NCAA Indoor 5000M and 5th in the NCAA Outdoor 3000M races (she still holds the Penn State 3000m record). But as a sophomore stress injuries had taken a toll on her body and she was forced to drop from serious competition. That didn’t stop her from running in fun races from time to time including this Arts Festival race which she won handily.

The other women in the picture is Katie O’Toole. Katie is a long time friend of mine. I knew her when she was a student here at Penn State in the early 70s. She is one of many who has never left town. She is the host and writer for the award winning Penn State TV show “What’s in the News”. I’m pretty sure that I’ve mentioned Katie in the blog before, probably when I was talking about my long time friend former Penn State football player and Katie’s husband, Gary Gray. Or, if not then, then when I was talking about UncleLar “nephew” Penn State soccer player and Katie and Gary’s son David Gray (Note: Elliot and Chris, because they are Facebook friends of mine, can check out David and the rest of the Gray clan – Ali, PSU grad living in San Francisco; MoMo, student at Southern Cal; John, freshman at Penn State, and Claire, junior at State College High).

Hope you all enjoyed the old photos. Now if I could only drop forty lbs and get back to that weight. 🙁

Posted on

Arts Fest Roadrace

Traditionally, local road runners celebrate the Arts Festival with a Sunday road race. The race is now a 10K event coupled with a 5K fun run but in its early days was a much more demanding 10 miler. It’s been a long long time since I ran it but it used to be one of things that I always looked forward to. Once I got past the Phi Psi 500 in April, the next running event that I looked forward to was the Arts Festival 10 Miler.

The race was actually one of the first things that really bonded Tod Jeffers and I. I’ve related to many the story of how Tod and I met before the Phi Psi 500 (I’ll save documenting that story for another day) but I’m don’t think I’ve told too many in the family about our Arts Festival races.

The very first Arts Fest race was held in 1976 and was a large 10 mile loop that started and finished on campus. When I showed up at the start of the race in 77, Tod was the honorary celebrity starter for the event. When Tod saw me warming up before the start, he ran over and said “Are you actually running in this thing?” When I responded affirmatively, he said “Well if you can do it, I can too.” He then added that as soon as he started the race he was going to rush home, change his shoes and meet me out on the course.

Sure enough, about 15 minutes into the race, Tod pulls up behind me in his car, parks it and jumps out. In those days, Tod didn’t have a pair of real running shoes but he changed into a pair of “sneakers”. At this point we were two miles into the race and far enough out of town that he could just leave his car parked on the side of the road. That left eight miles to go – and if you aren’t a regular runner eight miles isn’t an easy thing to pull off.

I slowed down a little in order to not stress Tod too much and things went well – for a while. After about another 4-5 miles, Tod was in noticeable pain. When I asked if he was OK, he said he was having trouble with his legs rubbing together and chaffing. I told him that was typical and that I and many runners put vaseline on our legs to avoid that. That immediately started Tod thinking.

At the time, the race course ran through a little small town just outside of State College called Houserville. Many of the Houserville residents were outside on their front lawns supporting the runners as they ran by. Tod spotted this old couple sitting on their lawn chairs right outside their front doors and turns to me and says “wait here a second”. Tod ran up to the couple and politely asked if they had any vaseline available. The old man pulled himself out of his chair, disappeared into his house for a minute and reappeared with a BIG jar of KY Jelly. Tod dipped his hand into it, slapped it on his thighs and rejoined me (I had been jogging in little circles in front of the house waiting for him). He remarked to me “I took one look at the couple and just knew that they had a bunch of petroleum jelly around”.

The jelly worked wonders and Tod bounded forward with newfound energy. That newfound energy lasted about a mile or so and then he started dragging again. I will give him credit though. He did manage to gut it out and finish the race though but he was really hurting. He actually missed work the next morning for the first time in over 10 years when he was so sore that he couldn’t even get out of bed.

That experience did turn Tod into a more serious runner though. From then on he started training a little more seriously and he and I would run the Arts Festival 10 Miler every year.

That leads to another Arts Fest story. While Tod and I would run every year we weren’t very serious about it. We would always show up at the start of the race with a cooler of beer and hydrate with a beer before the start (Tod and I subscribed to the George Sheehan theory of beer being the perfect replenishment fluid for runners). After a couple of years of the 10 mile loop, the course was changed to two laps around a five mile loop. That worked perfectly for Tod and I because we could now stop at our beer cooler after 5 miles and down another beer before continuing.

In those days the race was dominated by a former Penn State runner, Greg Fredericks who was a two time Olympian. Greg would run away with the race every year and used to have to find new ways to motivate himself. One year, Tod and I, as would be our norm, completed the first five mile loop right around our standard 43-45 minutes. We stopped, had a quick beer, chatted with our girlfriends and took off for the second lap, leaving sometime around the 46-47 minute mark. By the time we finished it was sometime a little after the 90 minute mark.

When we asked who had won the race, we were told that Fredericks won in a runaway as usual but that he wasn’t happy with his finish. The first thing that he asked as he crossed the finish line was “Where’s Fall and Jeffers?” When told that we had just left, he responded “Damn, I wanted to lap them”. Greg’s fastest time for the 10 mile race was 47:37 but this year he was a couple of minutes off that pace.

Here is a report on the race the year that Greg Fredericks set his personal record time. The article is by another friend of mine Dennis Gildea who some in the family may remember from my wedding. He’s the guy who wrote the story “Mr Fall of Fame” and was one of the instigators of the Phi Psi 500 Hall of Fame hoax pulled on me (second generation Fall Family members will have to wait for another time for me to detail that incident). Dennis sums up how we all approached road running in those days when he ends his article with this quote

Quite a bit more can (and will) be said about this race, but it will not be in today’s sheet by your Mirrow track scribe. Your Mirrow scribe finished 102nd in 69:10 and then got on the business side of several Tuburg Golds to replace the precious bodily fluids that seeped out of him over the 10 miles.

My running days are far behind me now. Given the current condition of my knees I will be ecstatic if I ever reach a point where I can just walk eighteen holes of golf again. Nevertheless it was fun reminiscing about the old days.

Posted on

Arts Fest Poster


The Arts Festival promotes itself with a collectible poster that is a work of art in its own right. For the past thirty years, the poster has been created by Lanny Sommese, a Penn State graphic design professor and an internationally known poster artist.

Here area some of Lanny’s past Arts Festival posters:

And some other examples of his award winning posters:


Coexistence: A Bridge To Understanding

Coexistence is an annual traveling exhibition started in Jerusalem dedicated to spreading the message of diversity and acceptance. Lanny is one of only three artist to have more than one poster in the exhibition. Here is his other one:

Click on the photos for the poems that go with the artwork.

Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet won first prize in the International Triennial of Stage Poster in Sofia Hungary in 1995.

No!

No! is part of the Library of Congress’s Witness and Response collection of materials related to the tragic events of 9/11.


HELP

HELP is Lanny’s contribution to the Hurricane Poster Relief Project, an effort dedicated to raising funds for Hurricane Katrina victims.

By now it should be evident that social consciousness plays a big role in Lanny’s art. Lanny teaches his students that their art should first and foremost have a message to convey. In this article about design heroes, one of Lanny’s former students says

The approach to graphic design was conceptual, always about communication, and always with an idea.

Why this sudden interest in poster art you might ask?

Because, in addition to being a famed artist, Lanny is also my partner in the Toftrees Men’s Golf League. While my knee probles have severely limited the amount of golf that I play (I’m down to a round and a half a week), I still make sure I get my 9 holes in on Wednesday nights. So far, Lanny and I have managed to have a decent season in spite of my injury. Halfway through the season, we currently sit in 7th place out of 24 teams.

Lanny has had an interesting life. He went to college on an athletic scholarship to play basketball at the University of Florida, last year’s national champions. I first met Lanny in the early 70s here at Penn State. At the time, Lanny had quite a reputation as a lady’s man and most certainly did not fit the image of a staid college professor. Quite the contrary. He was recently divorced and was often seen with a beautiful girl on his arm.

That’s all changed now. He’s quite settled down, happily married, albeit for the third time, and raising two cute young kids. Here’s a photo of Lanny (he’s in the red tie) and his wife Kristen (she’s the blond). Of course, the fact that she’s a former student of his and younger than his first daughter only adds to the Lanny legend. That age disparity also leads to his grandchildren actually having an aunt and uncle younger than them.

Lanny’s first wife, Donna Gibbons, actually appeared in one of my all time favorite movies “About Last Night” starring Rob Lowe and Demi Moore (pre boob job when she was a cute youngster). “About Last Night” really captured the Chicago singles bar scene in the early 80s. Several scenes in the movie took place in Mothers on Division Street just across from my favorite Chicago haunt, the Lodge. If you remember the movie, Donna Gibbons played Alex, the older women who seduces Rob Lowe.

This seems like a good place to end this post before I start telling Lodge stories. I will make sure to update everyone on Lanny and my’s performance coming down the stretch in our league.

Posted on

Arts Fest

This is THE big weekend of the summer in State College. 40 years ago, the borough of State College and Penn State joined forces to create The Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts, an event that would showcase the visual and performing arts. The event quickly became embraced by all. Arts
Fest, as it became known colloquially, soon spread well beyond the town. It is now one of the largest Arts Festivals on the East Coast and attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors to the area each July.

The first event consisted of primarily local artists that hung their art on a snow fence that was strung along a stone wall on College Avenue, the main drag in town, in front of Old Main, PSU’s main administrative building.

From those humble beginnings, the event has taken over the town for pretty much the whole second week of July every summer. While the first event just took place on the block long wall mall, the event has now spread across both the campus and the downtown area. Several downtown streets are shut down to handle exhibits, performance stages, and food stands. Pretty much every venue in town that can handle an audience (Beaver Stadium excepted – JoePa doesn’t allow anyone on HIS field) is utilized at some point for the event.

To give you a feel for the extent of the festivel, here’s a schedule of today’s performing artist events. Other days schedules can be viewed by the links at the top of the page. And here’s a list of the over 300 exhibiting artists by media type (the event is now juried so you don’t get near the crap that showed up in the early days of the festival).

The variety of stuff that you can see here is just amazing. Some examples:

Comedy Juggling –

Michael Rosman, a former Ringling Bros clown who is now out on his own. He does a lot of corporate and cruise ship entertaining and has also appeared on Letterman. He actually makes a smoothie by juggling fruit into a blender on top of his head. Check out his video for a glimpse of what he does.

Puppetry –


The National Marionette Theater will be performing their award winning production of Peter Pan (shown here on the right). Their shows are nationally reknown for the detail and complexity of their puppets and the flair of their performances.

A Trash Can Band –

Lidz – is a is a five-man trash can band from Altoona. They make music using trash cans, buckets, paint cans, and other things you can buy at the hardware store. Parents with empressionable young children might want to pass on this show if they ever want to sleep in on another Saturday or Sunday morning.

Musical Variety –

Country – Poverty Neck Hillbillies
Brazilian – Minas
Acapella – The Bobs
Zydeco – Zydeco-a-go-go
Gospel – D’vine
Folk – Patty Larkin

plus many more.

One of the neat things about Arts Fest is that it has become a defacto reunion weekend. The university has tried to artificially create Reunions Weekends with very little success. But the Arts Fest has become the weekend of choice for old friends to reconvene in State College (I can’t remember an Arts Fest weekend that I ever missed even after leaving town – heck I even missed a Phi Psi weekend once – something about getting married got in the way – but I never missed an Arts Fest). Old local bands take advantage of that by getting back together for once a year appearances back in State College. The members obviously love getting together for a set or two and their old fans back in town love seeing them.

I’ve got a few other Arts Fest stories to tell but this post could go on forever. I cut it off here and break my other stories off into other posts.

Posted on

New words

From the Washington Post via by buddy Tod Jeffers

The Washington Post’s Style Invitational asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are this year’s winners:

1. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

2. Foreploy (v): Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

3. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.

4. Giraffiti (n): Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

5. Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.

6. Inoculatte (v): To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

7. Hipatitis (n): Terminal coolness.

8. Osteopornosis (n): A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

9. Karmageddon (n): It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like, a serious bummer.

10. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

11. Glibido (v): All talk and no action.

12. Dopeler effect (n): The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly .

13. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.

14. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

15. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you’re eating.

And the pick of the literature:

16. Ignoranus (n): A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.