Lou O'Geen, the 2008 Ray Ladd Memorial Pool Tournament champion, didn't get an opportunity to defend his title Saturday at this fall event held in the 400 Towers community room. Lou, a yearly participant, was home recovering from oral surgery.

Dan Gretzinger, Pat Larson, Carol Gozdziak and Joe Greene fell to the tournament leaders in double elimination play.

Joe Battaglia lost his bid for a trophy to Hank Larson. Larson finished third.

Bob Clark faced tournament leader, Dennis Meyers winning the first game but Meyers held on to win the top spot and bragging rights for the year.

Ray Ladd Jr. sponsors the event in memory of his father who was a long time resident of 400 Towers.  Mr. Ladd was known for his sense of humor, his delicious apple spice cake, and for contributing to the neighborhood spirit of the 400 Towers' community.

Louis Johns was a breath of fresh air.  He was the master of silly sarcasm and loved 'off the wall' humor.  Louis was an adventure in the making.  God hold him in the palm of His hand and make this next adventure for Louis the most thrilling.

Rest in peace.

400 Towers' Election Day Baked Good Sale

The vote is in, the best bakers live at 400 Towers.  The popular Election Day Baked Goods Sale is back by popular demand.

Where:  400 Towers' Lobby

When:   Tuesday, Nov. 3

Time:     6am - 9pm

Also, check out the Residents' Craft and Gently Used Sale in the 400 Towers' Community Room.

The 400 Towers' Baked Good Sale and Residents' Craft and Gently Used Sale sponsored by the 400 Towers' Residents' Council.

Invitations were extended to all Council at Large candidates and those running for County Legislature.  No speeches but just the opportunity to listen to the concerns of seniors and to offer suggestions or promises of help.

What do you think?  Should clothes lines be banned?

I say, no way!  

http://www.care2.com/causes/environment/blog/join-the-fight-to-legalize-clotheslines/

Anyone know who had the fireworks and why?  I watched them from my window, so they were south east of Main St.  Any ideas?

This is good with wings, but this week I am using drumsticks.

1/2 cup butter, melted

1 teaspoon garlic powder

1/2 teaspoon onion salt

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

1/2 cup parmesean cheese

"nude" baked chicken (can be wings, drumsticks, breast, etc)

1.  In a small glass bowl, melt butter in microwave

2. Whick into butter the garlic powder, onion salt and pepper

3. Arrange hot, fresh baked nude chicken  on a serving platter and drizzle with butter mixture

4.  Top with parmesean cheese and serve immediately

We went to Main St. Pizza tonight for dinner.  The kids had a ball making their own pizza.  Angel made a halloween pumpkin pizza and Troy a square pizza (with some help from Dad).  Scotty, Eric and I shared a small pizza.  Had we known our Florida kids would have received a t-shirt from Main St. Pizza if we each ordered two pieces of pizza instead of an entire pie, we would have done that.  Bummer.

However, the kids enjoyed the evening.

My son, Eric and his children, Scotty, Angel and Troy  (from Florida) and I went to Letchworth today.

       Scotty                        Angel                       Troy

It was a brisk, but wonderful day to soak in the beauty of the park and appreciate time with family.   Scotty, who you have met on these pages before, is a gifted athlete and has an artist eye with a camera.  Below are two of the photos I liked best.

The 400 Towers Residents'  Council is sponsoring a Snack Shop staffed by resident volunteers.

Featuring a variety of snacks and beverages, available at reasonable prices.  The net proceeds will benefit the Residents' Council General Fund.

Today is our kickoff day and shake down cruise day.  One thing we discovered, we could use a display rack that holds small bags of chips and other snacks.  If you know of any used display racks for sale (or even better, donated), please let me know.

A big thanks our volunteers: Bill Benedict; Bob Clark (purchasing), Alan Galton, Joe Greene, Marie Greenlees, Judy Hale, Bill Heany, Henry Larson, Pat Larson(staffing and purchasing), Dennis Meyers, Barb Odachowski and Barb Villa(staffing and purchasing). 

Also, a big thank you to Sharon in the BHA office and George in maintenance who worked extremely hard to help us get the project off the ground.

Bea McManis, Chairperson - 400 Towers Snack Shop

Last month, I asked Chris Charvella to write a "short" essay for the Genesee Blues.

The message Chris sent was a little longer than I anticipated, but so sincere, I printed it anyway.  Chris gave me his permission to share it. 

What We Can Do
I had intended to give you a quick piece about how great my campaign is going, about how I intend to win in November and, most importantly, about what an honor it is to have been given the opportunity to get involved in local politics. I can’t do that though. It’s not because all of those things aren’t true, as a matter of fact they’re truer than I’d ever dreamed they would be, it’s because I’ve found that win or no win, there’s real work for Democrats to do in the City of Batavia and it’s about time we put our noses to the grindstone.

By RAPHAEL G. SATTER, Associated Press Writer Raphael G. Satter, Associated Press Writer – Thu Sep 24, 7:12 pm ET
 

LONDON – It's an unprecedented find that could revolutionize ideas about medieval England's Germanic rulers: An amateur treasure-hunter searching a farmer's field with a metal detector unearthed a huge collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver artifacts.

The discovery sent a thrill through Britain's archaeological community, which said Thursday that it offers new insight into the world of the Anglo-Saxons, who ruled England from the fifth century until the 1066 Norman invasion and whose cultural influence is still felt throughout the English-speaking world.

"This is just a fantastic find completely out of the blue," Roger Bland, who managed the cache's excavation, told The Associated Press. "It will make us rethink the Dark Ages."

The treasure trove includes intricately designed helmet crests embossed with a frieze of running animals, enamel-studded sword fittings and a checkerboard piece inlaid with garnets and gold. One gold band bore a biblical inscription in Latin calling on God to drive away the bearer's enemies.

The Anglo-Saxons were a group of Germanic tribes who invaded England starting in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire. Their artisans made striking objects out of gold and enamel, and their language, Old English, is a precursor of modern English.

The cache of gold and silver pieces was discovered in what was once Mercia, one of five main Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and is thought to date to between 675 and 725.

For Terry Herbert, the unemployed metal-detecting enthusiast who made the discovery on July 5 while scouring a friend's farm in the western region of Staffordshire, it was "more fun than winning the lottery."

The 55-year-old spent five days searching the field alone before he realized he needed help and notified authorities. Professional archaeologists then took over the find.

"I was going to bed and in my sleep I was seeing gold items," Herbert said of the experience.

The gold alone in the collection weighs 11 pounds and suggests that early medieval England was a far wealthier place than previously believed, according to Leslie Webster, the former curator of Anglo-Saxon archaeology at the British Museum.

She said the crosses and other religious artifacts mixed in with the military items might shed new light on the relationship between Christianity and warfare among the Anglo-Saxons — in particular a large cross she said may have been carried into battle.

The hoard was officially declared treasure by a coroner on Thursday, which means it will be valued by experts and offered up for sale to a museum in Britain. Proceeds will be split 50-50 between Herbert and his farmer friend, who has not been identified. The find's exact location is being kept secret to deter looters.

Bland said he could not give a precise figure for the value of the collection, but said the two could each be in line for a "seven-figure sum."

Kevin Leahy, the archaeologist who catalogued the find, said the stash includes dozens of pommel caps — decorative elements attached to the knobs of swords — and appeared to be war loot. He noted that "Beowulf," the Anglo-Saxon epic poem, contains a reference to warriors stripping the pommels of their enemies' weapons as mementoes.

"It looks like a collection of trophies, but it is impossible to say if the hoard was the spoils from a single battle or a long and highly successful military career," he said.

"We also cannot say who the original, or the final, owners were, who took it from them, why they buried it or when? It will be debated for decades."

Experts said they've so far examined a total of 1,345 items. But they've also recovered 56 pieces of earth that X-ray analysis suggests contain more artifacts — meaning the total could rise to about 1,500.

The craftsmanship was some of the highest-quality ever seen in finds of this kind, Leahy said, and many British archaeologists clearly shared his enthusiasm.

Bland, who has documented discoveries across Britain, called it "completely unique." Martin Welch, a specialist in Anglo-Saxon archaeology at University College London, said no one had found "anything like this in this country before."

Herbert said one expert likened his discovery to finding Egyptian Pharoah Tutankhamen's tomb, adding: "I just flushed all over when he said that. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up."

The collection is in storage at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, where some of the items are to go on display starting Friday.

It's unclear how the gold ended up in the field, although archaeologists suggested it may have been buried to hide the loot from roving enemies, a common practice at the time. The site's location is unusual as well — Anglo-Saxon remains have tended to cluster in the country's south and east, while the so-called "Staffordshire hoard" was found in the west.

In the meantime, archaeologists say they're likely to be busy for years puzzling out the meaning of some of the collection's more unusual pieces — like five enigmatic gold snakes or a strip of gold bearing a crudely written and misspelled Biblical inscription in Latin.

"Rise up, O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face," reads the inscription, believed to be from the Book of Numbers.

Also of interest is the largest of the crosses, which experts say may have been an altar or processional piece. It had been folded, possibly to make it fit into a small space prior to burial, and the apparent lack of respect shown to such a Christian symbol may point to the hoard being buried by pagans.

"The things that we can't identify are the ones that are going to teach us something new," Leahy said.

For England, a country at the edge of Europe whose history owes an enormous debt to the Anglo-Saxons, the find has the potential to become one of its top national treasures, according to Webster.

Caroline Barton, assistant treasure registrar at the British Museum, said objects over 300 years old and made up of more that 10 percent precious metal are only offered for sale to accredited museums in Britain, so the collection will not be leaving the country.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090924/ap_on_re_eu/eu_britain_anglo_saxon_gold

Geoff Clough, a talented entertainer from Geneseo performed a Tribute To Bob Hope at 400 Towers Thursday night.

He began with a brief biography of Mr. Hope which included:

Leslie Townes Hope was born in London in 1903, the fifth of seven sons. His father, a stonemason, moved them to Cleveland, Ohio in 1907. Hope performed locally for several years and was discovered by comedian Fatty Arbuckle in 1925. A year later, he met George Burns and they traveled the vaudeville circuit with a pair of tap-dancing conjoined twins. He performed on several musicals and by the mid-1930s had begun doing films. It was around this time Leslie Townes Hope changed his name to Bob Hope, in response to a persistent nickname following him around: “Hopelessly.” Most of Hope’s fame came from his long tenure with radio and television (his relationship with NBC lasted over 60 years). Though never an Oscar winner, Hope is remembered as one of the great hosts of the Academy Awards, hosting or co-hosting 18 in all.

Quotable: “Welcome to the Academy Awards or, as it’s known at my house, Passover.”

Songs and stories filled the evening as we remembered Bob Hope in films, radio and TV.

"Do you know how many Presidents sat in office during Bob Hope's lifetime?"

The answer, 18. 

Residents enjoyed the sing-a-long, remembering songs that Bob Hope made famous.

The evening ended with Irving Berlin's "God Bless America".

If a man is standing in the middle of the forest speaking and there is no woman around to hear him, is he still wrong?

Randolph E. Schmid, Ap Science Writer –
Mon Aug 24, 9:38 pm ET
WASHINGTON – The people who multitask the most are the ones who are worst at it. That's the surprising conclusion of researchers at Stanford University, who found multitaskers are more easily distracted and less able to ignore irrelevant information than people who do less multitasking.

"The huge finding is, the more media people use the worse they are at using any media. We were totally shocked," Clifford Nass, a professor at Stanford's communications department, said in a telephone interview.

The researchers studied 262 college undergraduates, dividing them into high and low multitasking groups and comparing such things as memory, ability to switch from one task to another and being able to focus on a task. Their findings are reported in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

When it came to such essential abilities, people who did a lot of multitasking didn't score as well as others, Nass said.

Still to be answered is why the folks who are worst at multitasking are the ones doing it the most.

It's sort of a chicken-or-egg question.

"Is multitasking causing them to be lousy at multitasking, or is their lousiness at multitasking causing them to be multitaskers?" Nass wondered. "Is it born or learned?"

In a society that seems to encourage more and more multitasking, the findings have social implications, Nass observed. Multitasking is already blamed for car crashes as several states restrict the use of cell phones while driving. Lawyers or advertisers can try to use irrelevant information to distract and refocus people to influence their decisions.

In the study, the researchers first had to figure out who are the heavy and light multitaskers. They gave the students a form listing a variety of media such as print, television, computer-based video, music, computer games, telephone voice or text, and so forth.

The students were asked, for each form of media, which other forms they used at the same time always, often, sometimes or never.

The result ranged from an average of about 1.5 media items at the low end to more than four among heavy multitaskers.

Then they tested the abilities of students in the various groups.

For example, ability to ignore irrelevant information was tested by showing them a group of red and blue rectangles, blanking them out, and then showing them again and asking if any of the red ones had moved.

The test required ignoring the blue rectangles. The researchers thought people who do a lot of multitasking would be better at it.

"But they're not. They're worse. They're much worse," said Nass. The high media multitaskers couldn't ignore the blue rectangles. "They couldn't ignore stuff that doesn't matter. They love stuff that doesn't matter," he said.

Perhaps the multitaskers can take in the information and organize it better? Nope.

"They are worse at that, too," Nass said.

"So then we thought, OK, maybe they have bigger memories. They don't. They were equal" with the low multitaskers, he added.

Finally, they tested ability to switch from one task to another by classifying a letter as a vowel or consonant, or a number as even or odd. The high multitaskers took longer to make the switch from one task to the other.

This particularly surprised the researchers, considering the need to switch from one thing to another in multitasking.

"They couldn't help thinking about the task they weren't doing," lead author Eyal Ophir said. "The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can't keep things separate in their minds."

The next step is to look into what multitaskers are good at and see if the difference between high and low multitaskers is one of "exploring" versus "exploiting" information.

"High multitaskers just love more and more information. Their greatest thrill is to get more," he said. On the other hand, "exploiters like to think about the information they already have."

The research was funded by Stanford Major Grant, Volkswagen Grant, Nissan Grant and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant.

___
http://www.stumbleupon.com/s/#1t1jyu/news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090825/ap_on_sc/us_sci_multitasking_mayhem;_ylt=AvUx3_Il1E30_qUa6hOTFHUDW7oF;_ylu=X3oDMTMwNXBmdTlhBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMDkwODI1L3VzX3NjaV9tdWx0aXRhc2tpbmdfbWF5aGVtBHBvcwMxMQRzZWMDeW5fYXJ0aWNsZV9zdW1tYXJ5X2xpc3QEc2xrA2Z1bGxuYnNwc3Rvcg--/
 

This is why thebatavian is working.

Great Game!!!

Thinking ahead to the holidays, the residents of 400 Towers will attend an Art Class led by local artist Lorie Longhany.

Two projects, a wooden Christmas tree wreath and hand painted Christmas cards are on the agenda for Sat. Sept. 26.

Sponsored by the 400 Towers' Residents Council, the art class is open to all residents at 400 Towers. 

Lorie reunited with fellow LeRoyan, Lou O'Geen.  Mr. O'Geen, a talented artist in his own right, shared several drawings he did a few years ago.

Lorie Longhany and Lou O'Geen

Post WW2 pen and ink drawing by Mr. O'Geen.

Every once in a while an occasion comes up when you want to make something just a little different.

I played around with a chocolate cake mix (from Aldi's no less) and ended up with this moist, rich, cake.  At the end of the evening, the piece in the picture was all that was left of the cake.

Pre-heat oven to 350F   Prepare baking pans according to directions on box.  I use cocoa instead of flour in my pans when I make a chocolate cake.

1 box chocolate cake mix

1 pkg. instant chocolate pudding

1 cup brown sugar

Mix dry ingredients

Add:

1 cup sour cream

1 cup oil

1 1/3 cups water

3 eggs (one at a time)

Mix batter, on medium, for 3 minutes.  Pour into prepared pans.  Baking time will vary according to oven.  I did a sheet cake and it took just about 50 minutes.

I frosted with a butter cream frosting, but the last time I made this, I just sprinkled confectioners sugar on it. 

Caught this on the fly this morning.  The pumpkin vine goes up the porch column, and the pumpkin is growing on the porch roof.  It is supported by a board so it won't tumble off.

Kind of cool, don't you think?