Philly Today

A proposed new skyscraper for Center City Philadelphia passed its first hurdle on Tuesday as the City Planning Commission allowed the zoning changes necessary to go ahead with the project. The plan is to build the American Commerce Center at 18th and Arch Streets, on a 1.5 acre site taking up half a city block. The previous zoning stated that you can’t build anything higher than 125 feet at that location. Well, try 1,510 feet tall, which is what is proposed. It is an office building at 1,210 feet plus a 300-foot spire, and would be 50 percent taller than the tallest building in the city now, the Comcast Center (975 feet), and a block away from it. If plans for larger buildings in New York and Chicago follow through, this building will be the third-tallest in the U.S. Not too shabby.

My alma mater, Drexel University, is located literally a block away from the University of Pennsylvania. As far as college basketball teams, it is the closest geographical rivalry in the country. But until this year, the two teams have only ever played at Penn’s storied arena, the Palestra. This year, they decided to bring the action to Drexel’s DAC, which is more like a high school gym than an arena. But as someone who has seen his share of games there, it is a loud place thanks to fan group “The DAC Pack” and can be pretty intimidating for visiting teams to play.

The game was played today as part of ESPN’s 24-hour basketball marathon of games. As a result, it started at 10AM. No fair. How come I never got to skip class to watch basketball on a weekday morning? Not only that, but I’m pretty sure the DAC never hosted a national televised game during my college years. In any event, the Drexel Dragons defeated the Penn Quakers 66-64 to kick off their season. It was a close contest the whole way, although the only time Penn had the lead was when it was 1-0. I’m happy my team won; I just wished I could have been there to see it.

It hasn’t happened in six years, but an NFL game has ended in a tie. The Eagles and Bengals played to a 13-13 deadlock, in a train wreck of a game that I can’t believe I spent nearly four hours watching. I am actually a little depressed about the fact that the Eagles won’t make the playoffs, so I won’t talk about the actual game, rather the concept of a tie itself. A tie is a result that nobody is happy with, and yes, I know they’re rare in the NFL. According to my research, there have been 17 ties in the 34 years since overtime was put into place. If my math is correct, that is once every two years on average. But it still sucks. Reason enough for the NFL to consider eliminating ties. Whether it’s a sudden death format, or the alternating possession thing they do in college football, I feel that it would improve the game. C’mon, even hockey got rid of ties, surely the NFL can do it.

For many years, people in the Philadelphia region have been calling for a veterans cemetery to be constructed. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has established 125 national cemeteries in 39 states and Puerto Rico. But currently, the closest cemetery to Philadelphia is over 100 miles away in Lebanon County. After lengthy discussion, a site in Upper Makefield Township, Bucks County, was chosen for a new cemetery. It is right near Washington Crossing Historic Park. Today a dedication ceremony was held at the site by Sen. Arlen Specter and VA officials. It is good to see that construction will be starting soon for a cemetery in the Philadelphia area honoring our veterans.

Edward Anderton, one of a pair of Philly identity thieves who stole over $119,000 over a year, was sentenced to four years in federal prison without parole. Last month his ex-girlfriend, Jocelyn Kirsch, was sentenced to five years, a longer sentence mostly because of her history of retail theft both before and since getting caught on identity theft. Anderton gave a 15-minute (!) statement in court apologizing to anybody and everybody. He’s also been working to save up for the money he will have to pay back to the victims. The Penn grad seemed headed for a life of success until he got caught up with this crazy chick. Now he must do the time.

Eagles fans have complained for years about Andy Reid’s coaching, analyzing every decision he makes, as fans often do. Now the word has gotten out around the league that Reid has not been doing a great job this season. According to Jason Whitlock from foxsports.com, in which he talks about his top 10 best and worst coaches of the NFL season, he named Andy Reid the worst coach in the NFL. Considering his first few years in Philly, Reid could have been named coach of the year several times (he did win it in 2002), this serves notice that a lot of people have been noticing the decline. According to Whitlock, “Here’s a coach who loves to throw on damn near every down except when the game is on the line.” And when he tries to run the ball at crunch time, it just doesn’t work. The fans’ patience with Reid has been wearing thin more so this season. He’s been the coach for 10 years, but I wonder if he will be back next year if the Eagles don’t make the playoffs.

A guy trying to rob patrons at a bar got more than he bargained for. This happened at George’s Bar in Claymont, DE at about 1 AM on Thursday morning. The armed man worked his way down the bar, robbing each person as he went, including the bartender. That’s when a whole group of drinkers jumped him, and one patron hit the robber with a pool cue and got him to drop the gun. The group held him until police arrived. Every once in a while you hear about a story like this, where the people who are getting robbed at gunpoint fight back and end up catching him. In this case, it seems like this group of patrons had the help of a little liquid courage.

Bad news today out of Medford, New Jersey. It turns out that somebody tampered with candy that was given out to trick or treaters on Halloween night. The candy is Peanut M&Ms that come in the small, yellow packages. Some packages were discovered that had the candy replaced with small pellets that look like rabbit food or something similar. The pellets have been sent to a lab to see if it is anything hazardous. The candy was given out in the Hoot Owl, Tintern Mills and Taunton Trace neighborhoods. Police are asking parents to check any leftover candy and report any suspected tampering.

Hello? It’s November 12 and we’re just finding out about this now? What are the odds that there is any leftover candy? At this point, I had eaten everything except for Whoppers, Mary Janes, and whatever other candy I didn’t like.  And I love peanut M&Ms. But if I had encountered M&Ms that tasted like rabbit food, I would probably stop eating it. I don’t understand who would do something like this, but when they find out who’s responsible, there won’t be too many visitors to that house next year.

We used to drink some sweet beverages when we were kids. In our family, Kool-Aid was big. So much so, in fact, that we saved enough Kool-Aid points to win an awesome Kool-Aid R/C car. There were great flavors like Purplesaurus Rex and Rainbow Punch. We drank juice boxes like Ssips and Hi-C Ecto Cooler, the green drink associated with Ghostbusters. Or was it “The Real” Ghostbusters? We drank Sunny Delight before they changed the name to Sunny D. In the old commercials, Sunny D was just slang: “Ok… we have OJ, milk, some purple stuff (?), Sunny Delight?” “Yeah, Sunny D!!” and the kids cheered.

Speaking of purple stuff, there used to be a drink only available in the Philly area (I think) called Grape on Tap. We were obsessed with it. I am pretty sure it was just regular grape flavored drink, maybe some of it was actually juice. It came from a carton, not a tap, and to this day I have no idea why a drink geared towards kids would be given such a name. The other flavor was called Punch on Tap. All of the stuff I just mentioned is way too sweet for me to ever attempt to drink now. As I drink my 10th glass of water today, I can sit back and reminisce about the good old days. Oh yeah!

There haven’t been too many people commenting on this blog lately. That leads me to believe there aren’t too many people reading it, either. Maybe you can prove me wrong. Today I’m posting a little exercise in the hopes of some audience participation. Yes, I am a total dork, but I had a little time over the weekend to take one of my e-mails and translate it. I’ve decided that I’d like to start using bigger and fancier words in order to sound smarter, so I took a random e-mail in my inbox and translated it using Microsoft Word’s thesaurus.

Here were my rules: For each word, if the thesaurus did not offer any suggestions, I left it alone. Otherwise, I changed the word to the first suggestion on the list (sometimes it was a phrase replacing a single word). I changed plurals and tenses where appropriate. Post your guesses on here, and the person that gets the closest to the actual original words will receive, ummm….. a great prize. Actually, probably just a congratulations and a hearty (virtual) handshake. And a big… thing… of riches. This particular e-mail was written by someone on my softball team explaining why she couldn’t make it to the previous game (which we won, by the way, making it our first victory in 18 tries this year!!) If you don’t feel like decoding the whole thing you can just post whatever sentence you think you know. Here it is:

Well done!

I’d feel affection for in the direction of approach absent intended for the after that final tournament pastime. Now allow me be acquainted with stipulation you require me and I’ll exist present. I contain rejection additional Monday nighttime disagreements.

Good luck!