We are the mundane
Supercategory to hold miscellaneous subject categories
in my never ending crawl through the depths of the internet I occasionally find a gem – and this is one of those times.
Here are the original rules for the Fall Family Cup competition at the Battle of Battle Creek.
Thanks go to Gary for the wonderful header photo (and me for sanitizing it).
Just in case they didn’t know it, I thought I’d update Ken and Gary on the whereabouts of a couple of old friends of theirs from our Chalfont days.
I’m sure most of us second generation Falls remember Conti’s Cross Keys Inn in Doylestown. I had my high school graduation dinner there with the family shortly after the graduation ceremony and shortly before I rear ended a car on 611 on my way to a party – which not surprisingly I never made.
Walt Conti, was the proprietor of the Inn, and I got to know Walt later through my association with the Tavern Restaurant in State College. Walt was one of the original Tavern waiters hired while he was a student at Penn State in the late 40s early 50s. Walt maintained close contacts with the original Tavern owners and even helped train the first Tavern bartenders when State College finally allowed liquor sales in the late 60s (people used to have to drive 10 miles to Bellefonte to buy a drink or a bottle of booze).
Walt was quite successful in the restaurant business rising to head the prestigious National Restaurant Association. He was remained connected with Penn State serving as a long time Board of Trustees member and even chairing the Board for several years. Walt is now retired and living in South Carolina. However, Walt isn’t the reason that I’m making this post. His two sons, Joe and Mike, are.
Joe Conti was good friends with Ken in high school. Ken can provide more details but my understanding was that at one time Joe and Ken had talked about going to Penn State, majoring in Hotel and Restaurant Administration, then opening a restaurant together. As it turns out, when the family made the move to Illinois following Ken’s senior year in high school, he decided to stay closer to home and enrolled in Illinois State instead.
Joe continued the family tradition and enrolled at Penn State. He also followed in his fathers footsteps by working at the Tavern Restaurant where I got to now him. Joe eventually took over management of the Cross Keys Inn from Walt. But like his Dad, Joe wasn’t content to just run the family business. Joe got involved in politics eventually getting elected as a State Senator from Bucks County. The demands of his new political career forced Joe to sell the two family restaurants – the Cross Keys Inn and the Pipersville Inn – in 1999.
In 2006, as is wont in politics, Joe got caught up in a political football (state legislators voted themselves a 2005 midnight pay raise that became to be known as a greedy money grab by the public – Joe made an ill fated joke about the pay raise that came back to haunt him and he fell out of favor with the Bucks County Republicans). Joe elected to retire from the Senate rather than fight what appeared to be a losing battle (even if he had won the fight against his fellow Bucks County Republicans he might have lost the war when many Republicans were swept out of office by the Democrats in the 2006 election).
Don’t worry about Joe though. He landed on his feet with a nice appointment as the head of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board aka the LCB. Pennsylvania maintains an archaic system (maybe even more so than Utah) where all liquors sales are controlled by the state. You can’t buy a bottle of booze in this state anywhere other than one of the 600+ State Stores scattered around the state. So Joe is now effectively the manager of those 600+ stores that bring in a staggering $1.6 billion in sales. Nice gig Joe. Oh yes, also like his father, Joe served on Penn State’s Board of Trustees.
That brings us to Mike Conti. Mike and Gary were friends in junior high school. Mike followed in his brother and fathers footsteps by also going to Penn State, working at the Tavern where I got to know him, and also becoming a friend of mine (I even went to Mike’s wedding in 1978).
After graduation, Mike went to work for his dad at the family inn back in Doylestown. However, like many of us, Mike couldn’t get Penn State out of his blood. In 1992 he returned to work for the University as part of the University’s Hospitality Services. Hospitality Services runs Penn State’s two on property hotels, the Nittany Lion Inn and the Penn Stater Conference Center.
Mike started out as the Food and Beverage Manager for the restaurant at the Nittany Lion Inn. Today he is the General Manager of the entire hotel. The Nittany Lion Inn has been an on campus fixture since it was built in 1929. It features 220+ rooms and is the place to stay to for alumni returning for campus visits. During it’s 75 year history, many notables, including numerous presidents, politicians such as Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King, actors like Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman, and entertainers as varied as Billy Joel and Brittany Spears, have been guests at the hotel.
My hat’s off to the Conti’s – one of Penn State’s most highly regarded families.
I just finished reading this interesting article on moral principles. A Harvard researcher hypothesizes that evolution has provided us with a base moral compass. As evidence he offers these three intriguing questions on morality.
Question One:
A trolley is coming down a track and it’s going to run over and kill five people if it continues. A person standing next to the track can flip a switch and turn the trolley onto a side track where it will kill one person but save the other five. Is is morally permissible to flip the switch?
If you answered yes, then you have responded the way that most people do – they feel it’s morally permissible to harm one person when five are saved.
Question Two:
A nurse comes up to a doctor and says “Doctor, we’ve got five patients in critical care; each one needs an organ to survive. We do not have the time to send out for organs, but a healthy person just walked into the hospital – we can take his organs and save the five. Is that OK?”
Not surprisingly, no one says yes to this question.
Question Three:
What’s the difference between these two situations?
According to the Harvard professor, people of different ages, people of different religious backgrounds, people of different educations typically cannot explain why those cases differ. He proposes that there is some sort of hard wired unconscious process at work during moral judgments.
I found that quite intriguing and I certainly couldn’t rationally distinguish between the two hypothetical situations.
If you are interested, here’s the online version of the article.
I spend a fair amount of time on a sports forum called PennStateHoops.com dedicated naturally to Penn State basketball. There was a thread today that was off on a tangent where someone mentioned a couple of famous Fordham basketball players/coaches. In that thread it came to light that the poster didn’t know John Bach who coached at Fordham before he came to Penn State as their coach. I decided to educate the guy a little on Bach (see my post).
Since Natalie Berrena is John Bach’s granddaughter I couldn’t help but include a quick paragraph, and a little commercial, about her. I wanted to put a photo in the post so I naturally Google “Natalie Berrena” for images. Low and behold what popped up on the Google results page but this photo:
Needless to say I did a double take.
Google found one of my posts in our blog and I guess Natalie’s name was fairly close to our image so it tagged the image with her name.
Try it yourself – Google image search for “Natalie Berrena”.
A friend of mine, Matt Emmerling, was just honored by the Carnegie Foundation’s Hero Fund. Honorees receive the Carnegie Medal
and a financial grant ($5000 in Matt’s case).
The award was established in 1904 by Pittsburgh Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. His deed commissioning the establishment of the fund noted:
We live in a heroic age. Not seldom are we thrilled by deeds of heroism where men or women are injured or lose their lives in attempting to preserve or rescue their fellows.
Matt’s story, as told in last week’s press release announcing this year’s award winners.
Matthew J. Emmerling and Kevin J. Mahoney saved Seth L. Mattleman and others from burning, State College, Pennsylvania, April 2, 2006. Mattleman, 20, was asleep in the 2.5-story house he shared with other university students, some of whom were also inside the building. Fire broke out before dawn on the back porch of the house and, spreading rapidly, entered the structure, including into Mattleman’s first-floor bedroom. Emmerling, 21, university student, was nearby when he saw the fire. He and Mahoney, 22, lifeguard, who was walking nearby, responded to the front of the house, where they entered through the front door, shouting to alert any occupants. Two of the residents fled the building. Although dense smoke limited their visibility, the men entered Mattleman’s room and shouted for him to leave, but Mattleman was disoriented. Emmerling grasped him about the arms and pulled him to the front door and outside, Mahoney following. Emmerling and Mahoney then re-entered the house, through a side entrance, and went upstairs, where they evacuated the second floor of at least one occupant. Finding a disoriented man in a bathroom on that floor, Mahoney pulled him by the arms to the stairs, and they stumbled partway down before exiting the house along with Emmerling. Flames soon engulfed the interior of the structure and destroyed it. Mattleman suffered burns and was treated at the scene. He recovered. Emmerling suffered smoke inhalation, for which he sought medical attention the following day, and Mahoney sustained a minor ankle burn. They too recovered.
The actual incident took place a year ago and was written up in a couple of local newspapers including the Penn State student newspaper, the Daily Collegian, where Matt works.
Here are some of them:
The Penn State Daily Collegian on the original incident:
After seeing smoke coming from the back of a house at 700 West College Ave., Emmerling ran into the burning building and was able to fight off the heavy smoke to wake the sleeping residents and, with Mahoney’s help, get everyone to safety before flames engulfed the house.
The Centre Daily Times on the Carnegie Hero Award:
Matt Emmerling, 22, and Kevin Mahoney, 23, didn’t even know each other when they spotted a fire about 4:30 a.m. April 2, 2006, at 700 W. College Ave.
They just happened to be nearby.
Together, they dashed inside and helped wake the eight college students sleeping there. The house ended up being a total loss, but no one was seriously hurt.
The Daily Collegian on a fund raiser to help the kids in the house:
For Brian McHale, this week has been hectic, to say the least. But the fire that brought his house down could not bring his spirits down, especially not last night.
“Without those two heroes, there wouldn’t be a celebration tonight at all,” McHale (senior-supply chain management) said.
Those two heroes are Matt Emmerling and Kevin Mahoney, who saved the lives of several of the students whose house burned down in a fire last weekend.
Photo of Matt with the mother of one of the kids he saved:
Last night, I was chatting with Danny Morrissey, an UncleLar nephew and shooting guard for Penn State’s basketball team. Danny went to prep school at the Pendleton School in Bradenton FL. Pendleton is part of the IMG Academies, a world renown collection of training academies for youth athletes. Some of the academies you have undoubtedly heard of – the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, the David Leadbetter Golf Academy, the Chris Evert Tennis Academy.
Pendleton creates a unique educational environment where kids go to class in the morning at the prep school, then attend training sessions at one of the academies in the afternoon. As Danny described it “This was not your typical high school. Taurean Green (starting guard for two time national champion Florida) was my point guard, Maria Sharapova (world renown model/tennis player) was a classmate of mine, and Freddie Adu (soccer phenom) lived in the dorm room below me.”
All of a sudden my high school experiences seemed quite boring.
This is going to break Gary’s heart, but I set foot in Yankee Stadium (in full Red Sox gear) on Sunday to see the Red Sox beat the Yankees. It was a great game, Manny hit a homer as soon as we were walking to our seats. The bus picked us up in Portsmouth, NH at 6am and dropped us back off around midnight. Thank God I took the next day off of work!
Last year we had the Mother’s Day Flood that caused millions of dollars in damage. This year, it seems we’re having a repeat spring. I will be posting pictures of Dover, NH (where I live) shortly (that is if my cable is back at my house- I currently don’t have internet). Here is Hampton Beach which is 20 minutes south of me along the Atlantic. I guess I should say this where Hampton Beach used to be! YIKES!
It’s simply amazing how Google continues to introduce new technologies that no one else seems to come up with!
Check out their latest new product.
http://www.google.com/tisp/