Karen called me last night to let me know that the Bishop O'Reilly basketball team won the Pennsylvania state championship AGAIN! That makes it two years in a row! Tom Crossin's son, Tim, scored 27 points to make him high scorer again for the second year. If you go over to the Bishop O'Reilly site, you'll hear a midi file playing in the background. It's the Queen song, "We are the Champions." Does anyone know the year that song was released?? And what was the album's title??? Post a comment if you do.

I've included the text of one of the many articles written about the game.

3/19/2005
Queensmen ‘D’ delivers in clutch to clinch title
By dkonopki@leader.net

“I think it was tougher this year. We took everyone’s best shot.”
Tim Crossin Bishop O’Reilly star guard

HERSHEY -- With the jury still out on which team was going to win the PIAA Class A boys basketball championship, five players from Bishop O’Reilly returned to the court with 1:54 remaining in the game.

And the defense didn’t rest.

Fighting for their lives after watching Kennedy Catholic reduce a 19-point lead to two, the Queensmen forced three Golden Eagle turnovers on three consecutive possessions, riding their defense to a 65-61 win in front of 7,833 fans at the Giant Center. The win marks Bishop O’Reilly’s second consecutive state championship.

“I called a timeout and told our guys it was up to our defense,” said Bishop O’Reilly head coach Mark Belenski, whose team finished the season with a 29-4 record. “Playing good defense got us this far and we knew it was time to turn up the intensity. That (defensive stretch) was the difference in the game.”

For more than three quarters it didn’t look as if the Queensmen were going to need a late defensive stand to repeat as state champs.

The District 2 champions raced out to a 10-0 lead against the District 10 champs and took a 52-33 lead on a pull-up jumper by senior guard Tim Crossin with 4:02 left in the third quarter. Crossin finished with a game-high 27 points. Teammates Josh Aciukewicz and Mark Williams added 15 and 10 points, respectively.

But led by the play of junior David Jackson and sophomore Blair Rozenblad -- who combined for 51 of their team’s 61 points -- the Golden Eagles (25-5) stormed back. While the Kennedy Catholic defense held the Queensmen without a field goal for the last 4:02 of the third quarter, the Golden Eagle offense went on runs of 9-0 and 15-4. Jackson capped the second run on a tip-in to make it 59-57 with 1:54 left in the contest.

“After the timeout, we concentrated on our defense,” said senior guard Chris Kester. “We watched film of (Kennedy Catholic) and knew they sometimes turn the ball over against the press.”

That’s exactly what happened.

The Queensmen used their full-court pressure to create three consecutive turnovers against the Golden Eagles, who started three sophomores, a junior and a senior. In between the turnovers, Crossin made a baseline layup and connected on three of four free-throw attempts to increase the lead to 64-57 with 47 seconds remaining.

“I think our youth played a little bit of a role,” said Kennedy Catholic head coach Tim Loomis, referring to the turnovers. “Our kids looked at the first thing we called, but not the second and the third things. We panicked a little bit.”

O’Reilly pounded the ball inside to the 6-foot-5 Aciukewicz early in the first quarter. The junior center responded by scoring 10 of his 15 points in the first eight minutes, including a run of six consecutive points to make it 10-0 with 5:35 left in the first quarter.

“We came out and executed on all cylinders,” said Belenski. “We got the ball inside and they had no answer for Josh.”

On the state’s biggest basketball stage, Crossin took over the spotlight in the second quarter. The 6-2 guard scored 12 points in the quarter, including a wild spurt just before halftime.

Crossin made a steal and missed a layup before rebounding a missed tip by teammate Chris DeRojas. Crossin rebounded the ball and made the basket. He scored again with 26 seconds left in the half, then recorded another steal and a basket with six seconds remaining.

“Crossin is a (college) Division I player,” said Loomis, a former college coach at Division II California University of Pennsylvania and Division I Florida Atlantic. “He has a knack of knowing what he’s going to do with the ball before he gets it. He makes the players around him better.”

After celebrating his team’s second consecutive state title, Crossin said the experience in Hershey might be a little sweeter this time.

“This has been a great two-year run,” said Crossin, who was also the leading scorer in last year’s state championship game. “I think it was tougher this year. We took everyone’s best shot. This (championship) really feels good.”

I got a nice collage of photos from Dave Serhan and I cut out a few images so I could post them in the weblog. These were taken on a recent ski trip to Big Bear in California.

I didn't really know Dave very well in high school since I don't think we had a single class together. However, when we went to Penn State in Lehman, we had nearly all the same classes since we were both in the engineering program. We spent some time studying at his house at Harvey's Lake and we realized that we had some interests in common, like hunting, and spent many an hour 'walking through the woods with our guns'. That was a term we gave it due to our lack of success in shooting anything.

Aviation was also a common interest of ours and Dave got his pilot's license while he was still in high school. I recall flying with him at the Forty Fort Airport in a very small Cessna 150 during our freshman year at Penn State. It was the first time I'd ever sat in front of the controls of a small plane and we took off and started flying over the back mountain.



A few minutes into the flight, Dave reached in the back, pulled out a 35 mm camera, and told me to take over the controls because he was about to take some photos. I had no idea what I was doing, but I guess I did OK because we didn't crash. Dave proceeded to demonstrate stalls and wingovers and it was all great fun. I guess it contributed to my getting the aviation bug, and why I now have that airplane addiction.

Later we went to the main campus in State College and were roommates. Being roommates with a practical joker like Dave sure added a new dimension to college life and provided more stories that I would have room to print here. At PSU, Dave joined the ROTC program since he always knew that wanted to fly jets in the Navy. You can look it up in the yearbook page and see that his career choice next to his picture was 'Naval Aviator'. Just about everyone else was much less specific about future career aspirations sticking with 'safe' things like 'college', myself included. When Dave graduated from Penn State as an Aerospace Engineer, he went to flight school in Pensacola, Florida and was later assigned to the Mirimar Naval Base in San Diego.



After a 20+ year career where he was a naval flight officer flying F14's off the decks of aircraft carriers, he advanced in his career to the rank of Commander and was the Executive Officer of Fleet Aviation Specialized Operational Training Group Pacific Fleet. Dave retired from the Navy in 2003. It didn't take him long to find another job and for the past 2 years he's been working as a program manager for an IT services company doing major contract work for the military.

Dave and his wife, Anita, live in San Diego and have two beautiful daughters. Kristina, age 11 and Lindsey, age 15 whose pictures I've also included here as well.



If you want to send me some family pictures, please let me know and I can help you to put them in the weblog. Getting a posting in the weblog wasn't Dave's intention in sending me the photo collage, and I hope he forgives me for the liberty I've taken in posting them here, but I'm sure everyone else is interested in what Dave's been up to lately. Hopefully, we'll have a chance to see him again in 2007!

Well folks, another year of wrestling has been completed in the Tobias household. My oldest son, Rory competed for the 2nd straight year in the NCAA Division III wrestling tourney, and fell short of All-American. He was beaten 4-3 in the consolation semi-finals by the #5 seed from Augsburg College in Minnesota. I was able to make the trip to Minnesota to see him in his final collegiate competition. I didn't tell him I was coming, and he was very surprised to see me. He went 2-2 for the tourney. I made apoint to tell him that just making the tourney is an achievement in itself, as only 160 wrestlers qualified nation-wide.
He did, however, attain Scholar All-American status for the second straight year. That is a monumental achievement. You must maintain a 3.2 average or better, must have qualified for the national tourney, and have won at least 2/3 of the matches that you competed in (you also must have wrestled in at least 1/2 of the team's cheduled matches). That will look good on applications for grad school at Fordham and Columbia. Still a very proud Dad...

I sent out an email last night to everyone to make sure the email list for our class was still working. We have nearly 80 email addresses for our class. I got a few responses from some of you to confirm your address (Thanks!), but I also got some bounced emails, so if any of you have email addresses for the following people, I'd appreciate it if you sent them on to me:

Cindy Bishie Bauer
Dorothy Semanek Artim
Debbie Cramer Cannon
Kathleen Blaum Hannon
Kevin Borton
Theresa Miller Engel
Joan Olejnik McGough
Bee Harris Darrow
Tom Crossin


If you didn't receive an email, please send me your email address and I'll update you on our list.

Also, if you find a classmember whose email adddress you know is missing from our list, please email me and let me know.

New way to post, email!

I'm adding an new feature to the weblog. It will allow you to post simply by sending an email to this weblog! How, you ask? Well, you just email to the address yourbloggername.secretword@blogger.com. Now, when I write that, I don't mean that email address literally, but rather, yourbloggername is the name you use to log into blogger. And the secretword is something you set up in the 'Settings' menu on blogger. I've also noticed that it doesn't post instantly, so you may have to wait a day to see your posting.

In addition, I've modified the template so that any posting sent to the blog
can be permanently linked. That way, if you write something very profound
and you want to share it in the future, you can just click on the 'permanent link' and it will take you to its own page. By profound, I mean something like bringing someone back from the dead ;-). Then you can cut and paste the link and send it to someone. That will give this weblog a whole new way to be shared.

-Lee

I composed the posting below in a window so that I could cut and paste it into an updated version of the webpage that you see linked at the top of the weblog called Tips on Posting to this Website. Check out the new page, there have been a lot of improvements to Blogger over the past few years and it's easier than it used to be to make a posting, and a lot more reliable too.

This is a sample posting. You can see that above are options for Edit HTML , Compose, (which is the mode I'm typing in now and is a little easier if you don't know what HTML means), and Preview, to see what your posting will look like when it gets posted. After you're done, you can just save it with the 'Publish Post' button below.

You can always come back later and edit the posting. The little buttons going across the left top of the composing window are for making text Bold, italics, in color. Then there is the Link to add hyperlinks, then the controls for text justification, and even adding bullets. Block quoting, Spell Checking, and uploading a photo image, and way to remove formating are also included. If you are confused about what each icon means, just put the mouse pointer over them and a description will pop up.

Yesterday I mentioned I'd tell you how to syndicate this blog. There are a number of viewers that allow you to syndicate blogs, and the most popular one right now seems to be NewsGator. If you read a number of blogs, you may notice that they have little tags that look like this: If you right click on that image in a blog, it will give you the option of to 'copy shortcut'. When you do that, you place the URL for the feed into your clipboard. In the case of this blog, the address will be: http://www.k0lee.com/bor77reunion/atom.xml. You can also simply cut and paste that URL into the site that aggregates content when it prompts you for the URL of the feed.

If you have a Yahoo account, there is a feature in My Yahoo that allows you to add these syndicated feeds to your My Yahoo screen. So that's another option if you don't want to use NewsGator. This makes it a little easier to keep track of this blog without having to keep logging in to see if anything has been updated.

I'll add this little xml icon on the top of the template so that you can take advantage of syndication in case you don't want to do it now.

I have been playing around with my own blog, separate from this one because I don't feel like it's a good idea for me to continue posting items here that may not be of interest to the general audience. For a blog to be interesting, it has to be updated frequently, nearly every day, and stay somewhat relevant to the audience. If I updated this blog every day, it would become much more of a personal blog, and not a group blog which is the original purpose and I wouldn't want that to happen. I really appreciate finding someone else posting in here periodically.

I have found that there is a way to syndicate blogs, and combine them into a single newsreader and that is a feature I can add here. I'll explain how you can use it in the near future. This will allow you to combine multiple blogs into a webpage that can also combine all of your favorite news sources and it will automatically notify you when postings have been added to this blog.

In the meantime, if you want to start your own blog, I'd suggest you try out LiveJournal, since it is a little easier to use than Blogger. You don't have to be so much of a geek to figure it out. If you decide to try it, I can link it to this blog as I intend to do with mine as well. All of you who have posted to this blog have the opportunity to use Blogger as well and it will publish your Blog to "http://yourbloggername.blogspot.com" so that's another option if you have grown accustomed to this user interface.

Thought I's share these...

1. Who was the first person to look at a cow and say, "I think I'll squeeze these dangly things
here, and drink whatever comes out?"
2. Who was the first person to say, "See that chicken there? I'm gonna eat the next thing that
comes outta it's butt."
3. Why is there a light in the fridge and not in the freezer?
4. If Jimmy cracks corn and no one cares, why is there a song about him?
5. Can a hearse carrying a corpse drive in the carpool lane?
6. Why do people point to their wrist when asking for the time, but don't point to their crotch
when they ask where the bathroom is?
7. Why does your OB-GYN leave the room when you get undressed if they are going to look up there
anyway?
8. Why does Goofy stand erect while Pluto remains on all fours? They're both dogs!
9. If Wile E. Coyote had enough money to buy all that Acme crap, why didn't he just buy dinner?
10. If quizzes are quizzical, what are tests?
11. If corn oil is made from corn, and vegetable oil is made from vegetables, then what is baby
oil made from?
12. If electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?
13. Why do the Alphabet song and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star have the same tune?
14. Stop singing and read on..........
15. Do illiterate people get the full effect of Alphabet Soup?
16. Did you ever notice that when you blow in a dog's face, he gets mad at you, but when you
take him on a car ride, he sticks his head out the window?
17. Does pushing the elevator button more than once make it arrive faster?
18. Why doesn't glue stick to the inside of the bottle?
19. Do you ever wonder why you gave me your email address in the first place?