Senior Plaques Moved to GSU

The Senior Signature plaques, an ongoing tradition for the university, are going to get a new home in the hallway by the mail room by the end of the year.
The university uses these plaques to commemorate each graduating class. In doing so, they will finally be displayed on the walls of Gengras Student Union.
The Senior Signature plaques stem as far back as the Class of 2000.

In the upcoming weeks while in GSU, students will begin to see the plaques being placed, though there is not a set date for them to be mounted.
Kristen Sadowski, the assistant director of Annual Giving at the university, said, “After much deliberation, [we decided] GSU was the perfect space for the plaques,” and is happy they found a home.

In years past, the plaques have been stored with the Office of Annual Giving. Each year seniors have the opportunity to give back. By making a gift of $20 with a commitment of $25 for the next two years, they will have their names put on a special plaque.

The plaques, a symbol of giving, are about 18 inches high and constructed out of clear acrylic with a red background and white lettering displaying each student’s name who participates.

The Senior Signature Program was established to help promote donating back among the student body, specifically the latest graduating class of seniors.
This program is also a way for students to acknowledge the importance of giving back to the university and know that without making a gift these plaques would cease to exist.

Sadowski also coordinates and oversees the entire Senior Signature Program, and she is pleased with the move. Sadowski said, “This is what annual giving is about.”
Those who have given and those who plan on being a part of this program will now have the opportunity to see their name firsthand and know they played an active part in this new school tradition.

Another part of this program and most recent tradition has been Senior Week, a collaborative effort with the Office of Annual Giving and the Student Government Association.

This tradition is a three-day series of events, with the first night, Senior Night, being a tribute to each senior who took part in the Senior Signature Program.
Walter Harrison, president of the university and a significant role model among the student body, toasts the seniors and congratulates them for all of their efforts during their time at the University.

The assistance of Kristy Severino, the director of student centers, Jennifer Keyo, Director of Annual Giving, Sadowski and many others have all made it possible for these plaques to be a visible part of the university.

Every student has something to be thankful for, whether they have made lasting friendships, are grateful to a certain professor, or just had an overall enjoyable experience at the university. The Senior Signature plaques are a tangible showing of that appreciation.

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New England brewers win 8 medals

New England brewers had a good showing at the recent World Beer Cup championships, winning eight medals.

In all, 642 brewers from around the world entered more than 3,300 beers to be judge in 90 different categories.

Two New England breweries won gold medals. The Alchemist in Vermont won the gold in the Gluten Free Beer category with its Celia Saison, beating out nine other entrants.

Allagash took a gold in the Belgian White category. There were 47 entrants in that category.

Allagash also took a bronze in the Belgian & French Style Ale category, finishing third out of 57 entries.

Sam Adams took two silver medals, the first in the Irish Red category when its Irish Red took second out of 26 entrants. The New World Triple finished second out 53 in the Belgian-Style tripel category.

Harpoon’s UFO got a silver in the American-Style Wheat Beer with Yeast category, while Cisco’s White Woods took a bronze in Wood and Barrel-Aged Sour Beers category.

The Maple Tripple from Lawson’s Finest Liquids in Vermont got a bronze in the Specialty Beer Category.

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Acrylic Trophies

Acrylic awards are wonderful awards to be given as a corporate award, recognition award or corporate gift.  Acrylic awards can be laser engraved and customized with your logo and text. You can create a fully-branded Lucite awards system for your organization which provides a great way to increase your name recognition while simultaneously awarding your team, employees, clients and business partners with acrylic trophies and awards.

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NCCA Trophies

There are 104 NCAA Championship trophies in the J.D. Morgan Center’s Hall of Fame.

The trophies go from the ubiquitous (11 men’s basketball) to the extinct (two men’s gymnastics); from the record-setting (19 men’s volleyball) to the surprising (zero women’s soccer).

But they all come from that same NCAA trophy mold. Although the trophies have undergone a few redesigns through the years, they have the same essential shape – wooden (no pun intended) and with a glimmering golden plaque reading “NCAA” on the top. No fancy glass balls or sport-specific trophies, just a pretty hunk of wood. The no-frills NCAA – always trying to fit everything to its liking – keeps it simple with the trophies.

With No. 105 probably coming to Westwood by way of Gainesville, Fla., soon, I thought the NCAA could look at its professional counterparts for some inspiration to spice up UCLA’s brimming trophy case. The NBA has a ball falling into a golden hoop. Pro hockey has a trophy with the slightly misleading name of “Cup” that each member of the winning team gets to spend a day with. Football has some sort of flying football, while Major League Baseball has a bunch of little flags. Wimbledon gives the gentlemen’s singles champion a flowery cup and the ladies’ singles champion an equally flowery tray. The World Cup gives a beautiful sculpture that brings tears to my eyes every time I see it.

Those are all beautiful expressions of the sports to which the trophies correspond. Trophies should not only indicate some sort of accomplishment, but should also seek some artistic representation of the passion involved in achieving greatness in a sport.

Winners should not just get a big fancy piece of wood that says “Champion” – they should be able to look into that trophy and see something unique to their sport, to their special talent that they have been perfecting for years.

But one of sports’ most coveted awards has never failed to perplex me: the Green Jacket.

It’s way beyond the absurdity of a giant silver cup or the obsessive uniformity of the NCAA Championship trophies.

Phil Mickelson was awarded (is that even the right word?) his third Green Jacket on Sunday for winning the Masters. The world of sports celebrated his accomplishment while I still wondered: a green jacket? Sure, they give the winner a gold medal too, but that’s not what all the hype is for. The week-long event features people whose life’s work has been perfecting their play, and each of them vying for an ugly-looking jacket? Come on, PGA.

Imagine if UCLA had 104 garments hanging in the first floor of the Morgan Center as a testament to UCLA’s athletic prowess. That’s just silly.

But, NCAA, please step outside your rigid boundaries. Give the student-athletes who balance their academic lives with a passionate pursuit for athletic perfection a more fitting reward. Perfection for swimmers should not be represented by the same object as for soccer players.

Just make sure nobody’s “award” is a piece of clothing.

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Vonn Going for Emmy?

Lindsey Vonn is going from Olympic star to “Law & Order” bit player. Vonn, who won gold and bronze medals in the Vancouver Olympics in February, will play an administrative assistant with a vital clue in a case involving a terrorist in the program’s season finale, NBC said.

Vonn, who said at the Olympics that “Law & Order” was her favorite show, is set to film her scene next week in Brooklyn. The episode will be shown in May; the date was not announced.

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On Year Later for Citi Field

A year after opening Citi Field, the Mets have finally embraced the notion that they played this sport for 47 years before they moved all their stuff across the parking lot to a new ballpark. They have a history, after all. Better late than sever.

Here is the very good news: The Mets now recognize their own existence in fine fashion, with an airy, informative Hall of Fame and Museum that debuted Sunday adjacent to the Jackie Robinson Rotunda, and will surely go a long way toward making fans feel these Mets have something to do with the Shea Mets.

That was a real problem last season, when there was little evidence that Casey Stengel or Tom Seaver ever existed; and when Dwight Gooden's autograph was foolishly removed from a wall in an act of apparent self-hatred.

It's hard to be pompous when you have the Mets' modest history. Luckily, that isn't the feel or intent of this Hall of Fame, which has a refreshing, lighthearted feel. The Mets aren't the Yankees. They don't hit you over the head with their two championship teams, with their eulogies, or with their pronouncements about being the greatest sports franchise in the world.

That would be silly, instead of fun. And this museum is a lot of fun.

There are plaques, artifacts, video clips and precious documents. A statue of Mr. Met is there, too, to greet and freak you out with his ultra-realistic hands. Joan Payson's hat, from the 1969 World Series, is on display, along with a ticket stub from the first game at the Polo Grounds.

For those who like to gaze appreciatively at pieces of notable sporting equipment, the Hall of Fame offers the baseball that traveled inelegantly through Bill Buckner's legs in Game 6, along with the glove that Jesse Orosco threw to the heavens (it returned, apparently) after clinching the title.

 

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1st Annual PCCTC Cruisers

The 1st Annual PCCTC Cruisers Classic and Custom Car Show will take place on May 15, 2010. This spring car and truck show features 13 Students Judged Classes and 5 Specialty Plaques. There will also be raffles and door prizes, along with other activities.

There is a $15 registration fee for show cars, spectators are free. Dash plaques will be available for the first 100 entries. Registration begins at 9 am until 11:30 am and awards will be presented at 3 pm. This event is sponsored by the Automotive Technology Club. All proceeds will benefit the Porter County Career and Technical Center Scholarship Fund.

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Plaques for Essay Winners

Marisa Iafano, an eighth-grader at West Middle School in Plymouth, won first place in the America & Me Essay Contest, according to an announcement Friday from the Plymouth-Canton Community Schools. Top 10 winners in the contest are to receive plaques, medallions and $1,000 at a May 12 banquet in Lansing. Marisa wrote about the loss of her mother to cancer and of her home, which was destroyed by fire at the beginning of the school year. She compared herself to a phoenix rising from the ashes.

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Round of Plaques for San Fan

Visitors know all too well this pretty city’s sights, what with the Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman’s Wharf and the clang-clang-clangy cable cars. 

But now San Francisco’s civic boosters have decided they want to add a highly unlikely stop to the tourist itinerary: the Uptown Tenderloin, the ragged, druggy and determinedly dingy domain of the city’s most down and out.

Mr. Shaw’s plan has the backing of Mayor Gavin Newsom, who announced a city grant last month to help promote “a positive identity for the Tenderloin” and to draw tourism to the area, in part by posting hundreds of plaques on buildings throughout the neighborhood “to create great visual interest for those walking down the community’s streets.”

And oh, what streets those are. Wedged between tourist-friendly Union Square and its liberal-friendly City Hall, the Tenderloin is one of the mostly densely populated areas west of the Mississippi, officials say, with some 30,000 people in 60 square blocks, almost all of which have at least one residential hotel. The district’s drug trade is so widespread, and so wide open, that the police recently asked for special powers to disperse crowds on certain streets. Deranged residents are a constant presence, and after dark the neighborhood can seem downright sinister, with drunken people collapsed on streets and others furtively smoking pipes in doorways.

All of which, Tenderloin fans contend, is as much a part of San Francisco as flashier, decidedly less seedy attractions like Chinatown or Coit Tower.

Encouraging adventure-seeking San Franciscans to visit may be easier than selling the Tenderloin to tourists, city tourism officials say. Laurie Armstrong, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau, called the recent efforts “a step in the right direction,” but added that it was a “very, very long road” to make the neighborhood appealing.

But Mr. Shaw begs to differ, saying the area is chockablock with historical nuggets, like the Hotel Drake, where Frank Capra lived as a starving young director in the early 1920s, or the Cadillac Hotel, built a year after the great 1906 earthquake and fire and where Muhammad Ali later trained. Jerry Garcia also lived at the Cadillac, and he and the Grateful Dead recorded several albums in the area at what is now Hyde Street Studios, as did other Bay Area bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival and Jefferson Airplane.

Mr. Shaw, who plans to open a $3 million museum in the Cadillac, believes that baby boomer music fans — and particularly baby boomer Deadheads — will be a core demographic for the Tenderloin, as well as those interested in the neighborhood’s “rich vice history,” which includes gambling dens, speakeasies and pornographic-movie houses.

Experts agree that the neighborhood has historical value, in part because its entrenched poverty and the city’s own prohibitive zoning have prevented development.

And while battles over maintaining low-income housing derailed some past efforts to develop the neighborhood, even Mr. Falk, of the nonprofit housing development corporation, says a little new development would not be a bad thing.

In addition to tourism — visitors spent nearly $8 billion in San Francisco in 2009 — city officials are also trying more traditional approaches, including applying for a $250,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for public art on the neighborhood’s western border and backing a proposed 250,000-square-foot retail project on its eastern flank.

Mr. Shaw hopes to break ground on his museum by next year and will start posting promotional placards — inviting visitors to “walk, dine, enjoy” the Uptown Tenderloin — this summer. And more plaques are to be mounted on more buildings soon.

Whether posters and plaques are enough to conquer poverty remains to be seen. Chris Patnode, a ruddy-faced self-described wanderer who is staying in a local SRO, said he liked the idea of Tenderloin tourism and seemed to be willing to welcome outsiders. Just as long, of course, as they know when to come knocking.

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New York Mets Hall of Fame

A year after opening Citi Field, the Mets have finally embraced the notion that they played this sport for 47 years before they moved all their stuff across the parking lot to a new ballpark. They have a history, after all. Better late than sever.

Here is the very good news: The Mets now recognize their own existence in fine fashion, with an airy, informative Hall of Fame and Museum that debuted Sunday adjacent to the Jackie Robinson Rotunda, and will surely go a long way toward making fans feel these Mets have something to do with the Shea Mets.

That was a real problem last season, when there was little evidence that Casey Stengel or Tom Seaver ever existed; and when Dwight Gooden's autograph was foolishly removed from a wall in an act of apparent self-hatred.

It's hard to be pompous when you have the Mets' modest history. Luckily, that isn't the feel or intent of this Hall of Fame, which has a refreshing, lighthearted feel. The Mets aren't the Yankees. They don't hit you over the head with their two championship teams, with their eulogies, or with their pronouncements about being the greatest sports franchise in the world.

That would be silly, instead of fun. And this museum is a lot of fun.

There are plaques, artifacts, video clips and precious documents. A statue of Mr. Met is there, too, to greet and freak you out with his ultra-realistic hands. Joan Payson's hat, from the 1969 World Series, is on display, along with a ticket stub from the first game at the Polo Grounds.

For those who like to gaze appreciatively at pieces of notable sporting equipment, the Hall of Fame offers the baseball that traveled inelegantly through Bill Buckner's legs in Game 6, along with the glove that Jesse Orosco threw to the heavens (it returned, apparently) after clinching the title.

More interesting, at least to this columnist, are the documents. We see the 1980 report from Met scout Roger Jongewaard on Darryl Strawberry, complaining just a bit about the player's lack of speed on the basepaths; Gil Hodges' $31,000 player contract, from 1963; and some remarkably candid handwritten notes from Casey Stengel on his team's infield.

Ed Kranepool, Stengel wrote, "should cover more ground." Hot Rod Kanehl "only hits singles but is a game player. His arm is erratic."

This is great stuff, and there's more to come. David Newman and Tina Mannix, marketing executives with the club, will continue to collect and exhibit paraphernalia as it becomes available. They will also be adding four more plaques to the wall in August, when Gooden, Strawberry, Davey Johnson and Frank Cashen are inducted into the team's Hall of Fame.

"Last year there was so much going on getting the ballpark going," COO Jeff Wilpon said, explaining why these delights weren't ready for 2009. "Then we came in under budget and had a chance to do things like this. I wanted the 'wow' factor with this, that it felt like a real museum."

It does, too. The only problem for now is the acoustics. The historic clips that run on various video screens throughout the museum are difficult to understand and produce instead a jumbled wall of sound. It would be better, instead, to install headphones so we can properly hear Stengel's entertaining chatter, or Lindsey Nelson's play by play.

Some organ music from the late Jane Jarvis would be nice, too. That's the thing about a Mets museum: Maybe there are only two championship trophies, but that just leaves more room to fill in the blanks.

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Olympic Medals Ceremony

A medal ceremony is held after each Olympic event is concluded. The winner, second and third-place competitors or teams stand on top of a three-tiered rostrum to be awarded their respective medals. After the medals are given out by an IOC member, the national flags of the three medalists are raised while the national anthem of the gold medalist's country plays. Volunteering citizens of the host country also act as hosts during the medal ceremonies, as they aid the officials who present the medals and act as flag-bearers. For every Olympic event, the respective medal ceremony is held, at most, one day after the event's final.

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