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September 04, 2006
Wet 'n Windy Welcome Weekend
Ernesto most definitely made its presence felt this weekend. The rain started a bit earlier than I had originally forecast on Friday, at about 3pm. The rain didn't stop us from throwing a welcome picnic for the new meteorology grad students at Holmes-Foster Park. Booo Ernesto's rain; hooray Clem's BBQ! 
Since it was a bit damp and chilly we didn't stick around all that long before bringing everyone back to Mt Nittany Apts for the welcome party upstairs at Steph & Shannon's place and Moyer's as well. It was fun getting to know some of the new grad students better, and playing a bit of flip cup was nice too. The party started out a bit slow, but after about half an hour or an hour it really got going and people loosened up a bit and stopped talking about weather. Well, except for when someone pulled up the radar of Ernesto's rain on my laptop around midnight, hehe. :-)
After a brief nap it was time to get going again -- we had a tailgate party to set up at 10am! It was still cold and raining, but the forecast was for it to stop by 11am, so we weren't thinking much of it. We all bought ponchos in the previous week, and they sure came in handy, particularly when we were working on setting up our two tents/shelters. 
Having a couple tarps to hang on the sides to block out the prevailing wind and some of the driving rain would've been nice too, but we managed. Once we got the tents set up and everything we grilled up some tasty breakfast food to warm us up a bit -- 
some scrambled eggs, sausages and bacon, yum! Gradually more and more people rucked up to the tailgate, and despite the crummy weather we were all having a blast! One would've thought that with Ernesto once having been a tropical system and everything, that it wouldn't have been such a cold rain, and that the temp might've been a bit warmer than 53 degrees, but then again it just seemed like Ernesto wanted to make us miserable.
I hadn't originally been planning on going to the game, but Moyer's friend Pat couldn't go so he sold me his ticket, which made me even more glad I'd bought that poncho, since now I was gonna be standing out in the rain for hours in Beaver Stadium. There were quite a few of us meteo grads that had tickets, and we even got reasonably good seats too. Despite the persistent heavy drizzle to moderate rain, the 106,000-strong crowd was fired up for the start of the college football season. Penn State's first offensive drive sent everyone into an absolute frenzy, as on Morelli's first pass he threw a laser into the end zone for a 42-yd TD. 
The rest of the game was rather sloppy, but Penn State managed to jump out to a 17-0 lead en route to a 34-16 victory over the pesky Akron Zips. Ernesto was probably the player of the game though, he could certainly be credited with several tackles and a few bad punts and a couple botched field goal attempts. Once the Nittany Lions pushed the score out to a 31-9 lead midway through the 4th quarter we all decided it was time to leave though, we had enough of being soaked to the bone, and there was no end in sight to the rain. After drying out a bit and getting something to eat, I went over to Jacob's with Steph for awhile, as Andrew & Luna were already over there playing some MarioKart. All in all it was a very enjoyable, if wet, day. Ernesto's rain FINALLY stopped around 10 or 11pm, more than 30 hours after it first started. I think it's safe to say we're not in a drought or anything like that. Curse you Ernesto!!
This afternoon a bunch of us congregated up at Jeff, Vic & Bob's place in Houserville for the BASF II -- the Bad American Swill Festival. It's a bad-beer taste-test that they'd organized to find out just what was the worst beer in the land. The price of admission: a 12-pack of the worst beer we'd ever had. We'd been planning this for a few months so when I was home this summer I picked up a 15-pack of La Crosse Lager, on the recommendation of my good friend Mike (those of you who were at the BASF, feel free to email him what you thought about his recommendation, haha). 
Anyway, there were 11 beers that were entered, and they were being ranked on a scale of 0 (atrocious) to 10 (perhaps not toooooo bad), and there were three separate tests that contributed to determining the overall winner: a smell test (10%), cold taste test (65%), and a warm taste test (25%). So that our opinions wouldn't be biased unnecessarily, this was done as a blind taste test, where all 12 of us were given small amounts of beer in a numbered plastic cup, and the numbers were switched up between the smell/cold test and the warm test, further eliminating potential biases. So after tabulating everyone's rankings for both tests and weighting them appropriately, here are the results, with their average score:
11. Schlitz - 5.77
10. Jacob Best Ice - 5.25
9. Gennessee Cream Ale - 5.03
8. Old German - 5.00
7. Stite Lite - 4.48
6. Black Label - 4.35
5. Southpaw Lite - 4.32
4. Utica Club - 4.17
Starting out the medal winners was the inaugural BASF champion from last December:
3. Koch's Golden Anniversary - 4.13
2. Old Vienna - 3.98
And finally, the clear-cut winner was...
1. La Crosse Lager - 3.30
Yes, that's right, I brought the absolute worst beer any of us managed to find. Am I proud? In some sick way, yes, I am, at least a little bit. But seriously, we all thought it tasted like aluminum. In my scoring, it netted a zero in both the cold and smell tests, and a 2 in the warm test. In fact, La Crosse Lager turned out to be the second beer sample I sniffed, and it was so awful that after that moment I really couldn't smell any of the other beers at all. Actually, maybe that was a minor blessing in hindsight.
And in a bit of sad and shocking news, Steve Irwin, The Crocodile Hunter, was killed a few hours ago by a stingray off the Queensland coast near Cairns today. Apparently it was a freak accident, but with all that he's done it's a miracle he didn't have a freak accident with wildlife previous to this. It's still sad that he's dead now, no more of his famous "Croikey" or crazy antics...
Posted by Jared at September 4, 2006 12:49 AM
Comments
Nice Pictures, I was a little shocked to see myself there. Congrats on taking the worst beer.
Posted by: luna at September 8, 2006 12:04 PM