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.

Happy Holidays!!

This is our Xmas card this year, but we’re so far behind I thought I’d put it up here. You will get the photo eventually, so don’t bother trying to print this one.

Hope everyone had a great holiday, and if you’re not back to work yet, hope it stays great.

I-Xmas!!

I-Xmas comes to The Legends of the Falls!!

Beginning Christmas Eve, after the kids go to bed (maybe late) link from the image below to spend some time with your NJ I-kin. Who knows, you might see Santa Claus!

Cartooning

While watching an old Christmas movie with Charlotte this weekend (an animated film, done in Claymation style, but with puppets) I started describing to her how animation is done. I explained the idea of lots of slightly different pictures using puppets, or clay, or hand-drawn, or computer-drawn. She totally understood, so i took it a step further and showed her how she could make her own on the computer. So she did a test (and I emphasize a test cuz she did, she wanted to test the idea, but not put a lot of effort into the drawings as it was getting to be bedtime).

Here’s her cartoon (click to link).

And Lex did one too:

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.

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.

Wonderful World of Winter


A beautiful day at Steve and Mary Fall’s on Friday the first. We had 12″ of snow which started last night and as of about 10:00 am the first day of Dec it is still snowing. I don’t have a name for my snowblower (as Gary has), but it still does the trick. Seems the last two times I have gone to a concert we have been hit by a snowfall. Last year was on the way to a Hot Tuna show. This year we were coming home from Bob Seger. Not really a fan of his, but had some friends who wanted to go and we tagged along. I will say though I was quite impressed. If you like him I suggest going to his show. It was good.

Anyway, here is my first attempt at attaching a picture. Actually, I guess if you wanted to get picky you could say my second as I tried earlier this year to attach a picture of my trip to Mesquite, but since the picture was deleted from the computer I couldn’t do it. At least this time I know the picture is here as I just downloaded it from the camera.