Archive for November, 2008
Elm Thoughts
When I was a freshman at Altoona campus, I took a history course with William Rodner, an outstanding teacher. It’s been 25 years, but bits of info from the class still pop into my mind when I least expect them. One entry in my class notes went something like this: “King George III—he talked to trees.”
The mad old king isn’t the only one. When I pass doomed trees at construction sites, I sometimes make them a promise: “I’ll remember where you stood and what you looked like.”
Photo by Laura Stocker Waldhier/Penn State Department of Public Information
I was thinking about that the other day while waiting for my bus in front of Deike Building. One of the elms across the street has a bluish paint dot near its base; I assume the marking was put there by Penn State’s tree crews. They’ve had to cut down a lot of elms around campus lately—including another tree near Deike—because of an incurable disease called “elm yellows.”
I don’t know whether the bluish dot signifies something bad or good for the elm I saw.
Writing about this made me think of a poem by Robin Becker, who teaches at Penn State. It’s called “The Grief of Trees” and describes the aftermath of an ice storm. I haven’t read it for awhile, but when I get home, I’m going to find it and read it again.
Chas Brua, contributing editor
Making Us Look Smart
I was channel surfing Sunday (while simultaneously folding laundry — I’m exceptionally coordinated!) when I landed on the Big Ten Network’s daily sports/news show. The hosts were doing their wrap-up of preseason conference basketball action, and among their talking points w
as a “surprise” pick for the best point guard in the Big Ten. The analysts’ choice? Penn State sophomore Talor Battle.
This made me smile.
Talor Battle is the subject of the student-athlete profile in our Nov/Dec issue. As the editor in charge of the magazine’s sports coverage, I pick the athletes we profile in each issue — though I do have some help: Our editor Tina Hay, likes to remind me not to be too obvious about whom I choose. We could easily go with the star player every time, but we try to find student-athletes with compelling stories to tell. Occasionally, as in Talor’s case, we’re able to combine the two.
The other thing I aim for is timeliness, which, as we try to assign stories well in advance, basically means guessing which athletes might have an impact on the court (or field, or track, or pool — you get the picture) before their season ever starts. I didn’t have to be a seer to pick Talor as an impact player for Ed DeChellis’ squad this season, but so far, he’s looking like a great pick. Through the Nittany Lions’ first four games (all wins), the 5-foot-11 Battle is averaging 20.5 points, 4.8 rebounds, and 4.3 assists per game (good enough for Big Ten Player of the Week honors). He was also named a co-captain this season, a rare honor for a sophomore.
Things get tougher starting tonight, when Battle leads the team against Penn in the first of four straight road games. The Nittany Lions’ preseason took an ugly turn last Thanksgiving — they went 0-3 in something called the Old Spice Classic, the sort of record that could make a guy swear off aftershave for life — and I’m sure DeChellis hasn’t forgotten. Here’s hoping Battle’s got a long memory, too.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
That’s Our Joe
Former Kansas State football coach Bill Snyder comes out of retirement to become the team’s head coach again. He quotes Joe Paterno as warning him about retirement:
“He told me I’d get awful sick and tired of seeing Little League baseball games,” [Snyder] said.
Tina Hay, editor
Clearly I Should Have Paid More Attention in French Class
I love it when readers e-mail me with story ideas from all over. We get some great ideas that way. The e-mail that came the other day from an alumnus in Belgium, however, was a bit of a challenge.
The subject line of the e-mail read “Prof. Schuster, P.S.U., and the mammoth’s revival.” And I was OK with the first sentence of the e-mail itself: “From the important French newspaper Le Monde, Nov. 22, 2008.” But it went downhill from there. Here’s the rest of the e-mail:
Ressusciter le mammouth laineux, un rêve de généticien
Certes, il n’est pas question, comme l’avait imaginé Crichton, de créer un zoo de dinosaures engendrés à partir d’ADN prélevé dans des moustiques ayant sucé le sang des sauriens avant d’être piégés dans de l’ambre. Mais l’idée générale est la même : séquencer le génome de plusieurs mammouths retrouvés dans le pergélisol ; en tirer un génome de synthèse ; introduire ces chromosomes dans un noyau de cellule d’éléphant ; implanter cet embryon dans une éléphante porteuse ; voir ce qui en sort.
“Aucune de ces étapes n’est actuellement possible”, convient Henry Nicholls, qui, dans Nature, détaille chacune d’elles. Au Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, Pascal Tassy estime que le clonage de mammouth est une vue de l’esprit, “même si l’enjeu technologique est bien circonscrit”. Mais il reconnaît que la marche de la science peut surprendre parfois les spécialistes eux-mêmes : “J’avais dit qu’on ne pourrait pas séquencer l’ADN mitochondrial (non nucléaire) du mammouth, avant d’être démenti”, note-t-il.
Mais trêve de science-fiction : pour l’heure, l’équipe de Stephan Schuster (Pennsylvania State University) est parvenue à séquencer 3,3 milliards de paires de base d’ADN de Mammuthus primigenius, soit 70 % environ du génome du mammouth laineux. La comparaison avec l’éléphant moderne suggère que diverses espèces de mammouth ont pu diverger il y a environ 1,5 à 2 millions d’années. “Ces résultats paraissent moins “sexy” que la poursuite du clone de mammouth, commente M. Tassy. Mais la biologie moléculaire renouvelle complètement notre vision de l’évolution des pachydermes.”
Hey, I at least saw three words I recognized: Pennsylvania State University.
But in all seriousness, Penn State is getting some very cool international attention for this research, which was done by a team led by Stephan Schuster and Webb Miller of the Eberly College of Science. The researchers were able to sequence the DNA of an extinct animal—the wooly mammoth. Here is just one of the many stories that have appeared in the media about their work and its possible implications.
And by all means keep those story tips coming—in whatever language works for you!
Tina Hay, editor
Joe’s Got a Brand-New Hip
About a half-hour ago, I got a news release via e-mail, announcing that Joe Paterno underwent successful hip-replacement surgery today. You can read the short announcement here.
I thought two things were interesting in the announcement. One is that team physician Wayne Sebastianelli “led the surgery team.” That doesn’t necessarily mean he was the one wielding the knife and/or the saw. I figure a sports-medicine doc like Sebastianelli probably doesn’t have occasion to do too many hip replacements—I can’t imagine the young clientele he usually deals with are the folks who tend to need joint-replacement surgery. So maybe Sebastianelli brought in a colleague who does, say, 100 hip replacements a year to do the deed under his supervision.
The other thing I found interesting was the prediction that Joe will be able to resume his coaching duties a week from Monday. I know the guy is tough, but wow. If it were me, I’d still be taking it reeeeeeeal easy eight days post-op.
Oh, and can I just point out that Joe did not announce his retirement during yesterday’s game? There were all kinds of rumors that there would be an announcement at halftime, or after the game. I heard a store clerk at the Nittany Mall tell a customer that Joe was going to announce his retirement and that former Pittsburgh Steelers coach Bill Cowher would be his replacement. An interesting idea, but it didn’t happen. Our senior editor Ryan Jones sent me a story about Friday’s “Rally in the Valley” in which Joe makes it clear he intends to be back next fall. And the Altoona Mirror‘s Neil Rudel wrote an interesting column prior to Saturday’s game that talks about why, if Joe were thinking of retiring, he wouldn’t be likely to announce it now.
Tina Hay, editor
“If You Want to Understand War…”
I seem to be on a kick lately where I’m attending a lot of faculty talks. We on the magazine staff don’t do enough of this; we don’t get out nearly as much as we should. It’s so easy to get caught up in meeting our deadlines and skip the lunchtime concert or the late-afternoon seminar—and yet every time I make the effort to go to one of these things, I come away glad that I did.
Sophie de Schaepdrijver looks up an image for a Huddle attendee after her talk
So today I went to the final Huddle with the Faculty program of the football season, this one with a faculty member in the history department by the name of Sophie de Schaepdrijver (pronounced, as nearly as I can tell, as “shepp-driver”). She’s from Belgium and has been on the Penn State faculty for eight years. One of her areas of study is World War I, and her talk—called “Memories of Mass Death: the Great War in Europe”—was fascinating. I learned what an incredible impact the war had on Europe—for example, she said that U.S. forces in all wars put together (Civil War, the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, etc.) suffered 2 million casualties, while France suffered three times that many just in World War I. Can you imagine a small nation having 6 million dead and wounded in a single four-year war?
There’s been a resurgence in interest in World War I in the past 20 years. For reasons no one can fully explain, more scholars are studying it, and more people are visiting museums and cemeteries related to it. At the Menin Gate Memorial, which is located in the Flanders region of Belgium, buglers perform a Last Post ceremony at 8 p.m. every single evening to this day. Just this past month, de Schaepdrijver presented a paper at a scholarly conference on World War I, held in France.
I sat there taking notes and trying to figure out what we might do with de Schaepdrijver in the magazine. We’d need some sort of “news peg” to write about her—or, as our former senior editor, Vicki Glembocki, used to put it, a raison d’être. Maybe if de Schaepdrijver has a book coming out, that would be our excuse. The anniversary of Armistice Day would be another good news peg—except that we just missed the 90th anniversary, and I don’t think I want to wait 10 years until the 100th.
We’ll think of something.
There are certain kinds of content that I’m not especially savvy about how best to cover in the magazine. Scholarly work in history and the humanities is one of them. We don’t have a lot of experience with writing about faculty who study this stuff. But just as I was thinking this during de Schaepdrijver’s talk, she mentioned that she also studies war diaries of that era, and oh man, did my ears perk up then. Something tells me that a story based on some diary excerpts could be fascinating and compelling.
In particular, de Schaepdrijver told us about a 50-year-old woman who lost her son in World War I and documented her grief in a 1921 memoir called La Priere Sur L’Enfant Mort (Prayer for a Dead Child). It’s a very rare book today, but oddly enough, there’s a copy in the stacks at Pattee Library. The mother who wrote the memoir had a very difficult time coming to terms with her son’s death; she rejected religion, she rejected patriotism, she rejected consolation of any kind. De Schaepdrijver read to us some very moving excerpts from the book. The only one I got a chance to write down was this one: “The most sublime of causes cannot make me accept that my child is no longer.”
De Schaepdrijver ended by quoting Ecclesiates: “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” If you want to understand war, she said, “the house of mourning is the place to start.”
Tina Hay, editor
A Snowy View
Our offices are in what used to be the president’s house on campus, later called University House, now part of the Hintz Family Alumni Center. I just now stepped out onto our second-floor porch (don’t tell anyone—I think we’re not supposed to go out there, for safety/liability reasons) and snapped this photo.
The view is of the alumni gardens, looking toward the Obelisk and Old Main. You can’t actually see Old Main in this photo, though. That’s Sackett Building on the right, and a wee little bit of EE East on the left.
It’s been snowing all day. I would not want to be driving up for the Michigan State game in these conditions. Nor would I want to be sitting in the stands tomorrow! AccuWeather is calling for a high of 30 degrees.
Tina Hay, editor
Decisions, Decisions ….
We work on each issue of The Penn Stater from back to front. That is to say, we send sections like Class Notes, Obituaries, and Parting Shot out to our pre-press first, and then turn our attention to editing the feature well and the sections that land in the early pages of the magazine. We want those early sections (Pulse and Sports, for instance) to be as timely as possible, so they are often the last sections we pull together as the latest news, research, and sports items find their way to our desks.
We’re at that stage now, and as the editor-in-charge of our Pulse section, I begin an internal debate. There are only so many pages to this section, and I have to decide what to include, what to hold for a future issue, and what to forgo completely. It’s all about mastering the art of the perfect mix—a little bit of humor, some newsy items, some fun lists of the latest trends on campus. And sometimes it’s just a matter of space and timeliness. For instance, do I cover the near-riots that happened in downtown State College after the Nittany Lion win against Ohio State? Or will that story be old news by the time readers get the magazine in early January? Do I do a round-up of faculty-written books in this issue? Or hold off until the March/April issue? Do I have room to include a a Hip List—a fun list that documents student trends? Or is there a more news-worthy story that takes precedence?
Sometimes, just when I think I’ve got it all figured out, a new story crops up, and I have to reshuffle the whole lot. And that’s okay—it’s all just part of this little game I call work.
Maureen Harmon, senior editor
November 21, 2008 at 10:02 am Maureen Harmon Leave a comment
And in Sports News…
In addition to my role at the magazine, I’m also the public-address announcer for Lady Lion basketball games at the Jordan Center—you know, the person who says “Would you all please rise for the national anthem” and “The foul’s on so-and-so; it’s her second, team’s fourth.” So I was happy to watch Penn State blow out Stony Brook last night, 97-58. But I was also bummed to hear that a much-sought-after recruit, Skylar Diggins, announced last night that she’s going to Notre Dame. (Stanford and Penn State were also in the running for her.)
On the other hand, Lady Lion coach Coquese Washington did land four great recruits for next year, including Nikki Greene—one of the top 20 recruits in the country. The team badly needs some big players and Greene, at 6’4″, has the potential to be amazing.
While I’ve been a basketball fan since I was a kid, our senior editor, Ryan Jones, is way more savvy about the sport than I am—he used to be editor in chief at Slam magazine. He follows the Penn State men’s team a little more closely than I do, and he’ll give you updates on them from time to time, I’m sure.
Tina Hay, editor
Where Story Ideas Come From, part 2
Yesterday a bunch of Alumni Association staff piled into a van and headed to Penn State Fayette. The boss (Roger Williams, our executive director) has been taking us to various Penn State campuses over the past year or so. It helps us learn more about the campuses, their strengths, and their unique challenges—some are in urban areas and competing with 50-plus other institutions of higher learning, while others (like Fayette) are in economically distressed rural areas and have a whole other set of issues.
I’m embarrassed to say that in my 12 years as editor of the magazine, I’ve been to probably fewer than half of Penn State’s 24-some locations. So these all-day field trips are great for me—I get to see different parts of the huge Penn State system, and I bring back all kinds of story ideas for the magazine. I’m still digesting all that I learned yesterday, but a couple of things stick out.
—Coal mining is big in southwestern Pennsylvania, and Fayette’s two-year degree in mining technology is a strong program.
—There’s a pretty cool Coal and Coke Heritage Center in the campus library. Here’s a grainy shot from my iPhone:
That’s the chancellor of Penn State Fayette, Emmanuel Osagie, on the right-hand side of the photo. He told us his name is pronounced oh-SAGGY, but added cheerfully that “I accept any derivative” of that pronunciation.
The museum has some cool relics from the heyday of the coal and coke industry, like this sign:
—We also learned that Penn State Fayette students have raised close to $400,000 for THON over the past 10 years. They’re the top campus in THON philanthropy almost every year.
—They have a faculty member in art, Dave DiPietro, who travels to Italy every year. He’s got to have some good stories to tell. Here’s one of his works that I lifted from the Research/Penn State Web site. I’ll e-mail the R/PS editor later to get permission. :-)
"Pennsylvania Considerations," Watercolor and pastel, 10" by 14" by David DiPietro
—The campus hosted a “Fayette County Coal and Coke Music Festival” last September, and plans to make it an annual event.
—The campus’ facilities for students are very impressive. Several very nice auditoriums. A newly added, well-equipped fitness center. A big computer lab. A library. A new-media center of some sort, where students can do film editing. Two gyms, each with a basketball court—the bigger of the two was where Hillary Clinton made a campaign appearance last spring.
Anyway, it was a good day. In two weeks we’re off to Penn State Shenango.
Oh yeah, one last photo, just for fun. On the way back we stopped at the Sheetz in Altoona (surely the Taj Mahal of Sheetzes) and I took this shot … sort of a study in neon and twilight:
Again, it’s just with an iPhone, so I don’t think I’ll be submitting it to the Pulitzer committee.
Tina Hay, editor
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