This evening Caitlin Zankowski, THON Overall Chair, emailed all Organizations' THON Chairs notifying them of some significant changes to the canning procedures for this weekend.
Because of the snow, all canning must be done in front of stores and other businesses. Any organization found violating these procedures will not have their canning total be credited to their organization, in addition, violators will see their pass lists revoked for the entirety of THON weekend. In the event of serious breaches of procedure organizations could have their total canning amounts uncredited, their dancers removed or their entire fundraising total uncredited.
Everybody knows Penn State rarely cancels classes at University Park because of snow. We've been told this since before enrollment and it's been repeated since. Yet, like clockwork, every time a snowstorm comes into Happy Valley, the students start clamoring for classes to be canceled. The Office of the Physical Plant works very hard to ensure that campus walkways and roads are safe for students to traverse, same can be said for the State College Department of Public Works. Now, I'm not going to discuss whether or not I think classes should have been canceled, I am going to discuss the issues that Penn State had with their Facebook account regarding the snow.
First off, stop complaining on Facebook, I'm tired of my feed being filled with people moaning that they have to get up and go to class, as if they haven't been doing that since age 5. It's State College, it snows, buy some boots and deal with it. Secondly, posting angry profanity-laced messages on Penn State's Facebook page isn't going to get anyone anywhere. While moderately unfair that several of the commonwealth campuses got their classes canceled, complaining on Facebook isn't going to change anything. It's immature, unnecessary, and inappropriate.
Did you enjoy all the snowfall we got over the weekend? Good, because State College is about to get whacked again. The National Weather Service is reporting that a snowfall will enter Happy Valley tonight and deposit another 5-10 inches of snow by Wednesday. Sound exciting? It should, there's a possibility (however slight) that if the storm hits late enough Wednesday morning (2-3am) that Penn State might experience something even more rare than a winning season for the basketball team, a snow day.
Click through to see your chances.
In case you've been living under a rock for the past couple of days, the Wienermobile is here on campus. Or I should say one of the Wienermobiles is here (there are 6 total). The 20-foot long hot dog is in town to recruit new Hotdoggers, the recent graduates who drive the vehicles around the country. Every year, around 1,500 people apply to become Hotdoggers and twelve are chosen. Penn State has been pretty successful in getting graduates into the program, with a Penn State grad being part of the program almost every year. This year there are 2 Penn State grads in the program. One of them, Mary Kate DeCoursey (Class of '09) is here with her colleague John Dobson (from the University of Missouri) to hold an information session for interested parties. I was able to sit down with them yesterday and ask them a few questions about their experiences driving a giant hot dog around the country.
Want to see what hard-hitting questions I ask these Hotdoggers? Read on to find out!
I'll be frank - I hate State Patty's Day. I feel as though it's an unnecessary excuse to partake in destructive decisions. That does not, however, mean that I am opposed to the actual Saint Patrick's Day, which as a person of Irish decent, I am required to celebrate.
State Patty's Day was created four years ago when Saint Patrick's Day fell during spring break, which, I will admit, created an issue. However, since 2007, the holiday has safely fallen after Spring Break, allowing for us to dress in green, line up at bars for poor quality alcohol with green food dye in it, and pretend to actually like gingers. Personally, I think that one of those days is enough, and the Town of State College will agree with me.
Read on to find out more.
Anybody who has a Twitter account probably knows about the big day that the THON Public Relations committee had on Friday. For the unenlightened, THON PR has been tweeting celebrities for the past few weeks asking them to help get the word out about THON. Their hard work paid off on Friday when Khloe Kardashian, of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, first tweeted about THON. She then promised to tweet back anybody who donated to the philanthropy. Jay Sean and Lindsay Lohan also helped out the cause be retweeting Kardashian's comments. Not surprisingly, this had a huge impact on the number of followers THON had on Twitter as well as hits on THON.org.
I was able to get a hold of Elyse Adams, PR Overall, who gave me some information about how Khloe helped out THON. "It's extremely exciting to have the support of someone like Khloe. She is helping us spread awareness about THON and pediatric cancer," Adams wrote in an email. She elaborated by saying that, "on Friday, January 29th, @THON gained 1001 followers on Twitter between the hours of 1:29 p.m. and 11:59 p.m. (plus a few hundred more on Saturday)! Our makeshift video to thank Khloe received more than 6,000 hits in one day. And our YouTube channel received more than 5,000 hits."
Read on after the jump for some more statistics from the day.