Almost a year ago, I posted a proposal concerning creating a memorial statue of Joe Paterno in downtown State College. I’ve had people ask me where it came from but I never really knew. Now, this idea is heating up again, and as one would expect, not without its share of controversy, vitriol, and dare we say warm acceptance.
The proposed location for the $300,000 statue, which will be created by the sculptor Zenos Frudakis, is outside The Tavern restaurant, an old eatery and watering hole we used to reserve for special dates or otherwise for rich kids back when we were students. It is centrally located on College Avenue, a focal point for returning alumni. The target date is 2015. Funding will be generated through Kickstart.com, among other sources.
(Now I launch into a tangential rant about “alumni“. You are not “an alumni“. Alumni is the plural of alumnus, the Latin masculine noun. Alumnae is the plural of alumna, the Latin feminine noun. Do we want to get into neuter? I guess so — we have to be all-inclusive, for diversity’s sake. Alumnum would be the singular and alumna would be the plural, the same as the feminine plural, if there was indeed such a thing as a neutered alumnus or alumna. However, to describe a mixed collection of masculine, feminine, and neuter ex-students, we use alumni, because the Romans hadn’t yet been curtailed by the Feminazis into butchering their language for the sake of so-called political correctness, as it were. End of grammar Nazi rant coupled with male Chauvinist piguousness.)
But I digress. 🙂
Here are some links where you can view various versions of this story.
- New York Daily News
- Washington Post
- Sports Illustrated
- Onward State
- Daily Collegian
- StateCollege.com
- PennLive.com
That’s enough, already!
If I could get Twitter to do its thing properly, I’d show you some of the negative reactions I observed there, but I cannot seem to get it to generate the “embed” code today.
