Adventures with Travel with a Beveridge

CALIFORNIA, Pa. – This was adhered to the driver's side window of my car while it was parked all of 10 minutes today in what appeared to be a private driveway to a friend's apartment in California, Pa.

There were a number of odd things to note, including the fact that the sticker does not indicate who put it there or why the car was illegally parked. There wasn't even a traffic ticket under any of the car's windshield wiper blades to further explain the warning.

This comes nearly two weeks after someone left half the air out of all four of my car's tires while I spent much of that day doing some investigative journalism in this small college town.

P.S. A subsequent web search revealed any fool can buy these stickers and use them to deface cars. It also requires a razor blade and hard work to remove them.

There is a California Pennsylvania

It's been said many times before that new students occasionally show up for the first time at California University of Pennsylvania and ask for the location of the ocean.

The best alternative to the Pacific Ocean the school in Southwestern Pennsylvania has to offer them is the nearby murky Monongahela River.

Maybe this old clip from a former student's appearance on the "Late Show with David Letterman" will held to dispel the notion among naive students enrolling from a distance at Cal U. the school is on the West Coast. Maybe not, but the video, above, is pretty funny.

It shows a smiling Jon Reed, who hopefully has learn better driving skills since the show first aired a couple years ago, taking Letterman's challenge to parallel park a car in a tight space. Reed bumps his car several times into other parked cars, after Letterman takes a few shots at his school.

"I've never heard of the California University of Pennsylvania," Letterman quips. "There is a California Pennsylvania? I'll be darned."

After the car-parking is over, Letterman pulls out a map of Pennsylvania showing the small town circled in red along the Mon south of Pittsburgh.

Letterman said - probably jokingly - that his show's switchboard "lit up" from people wanting to know more about the borough.

What the show didn't mention was the town was founded and named after the 1849 California Gold Rush.

Random local music

The Depressionaires perform at the Black Cat Bar in California, Pa., on a Thursday open stage. The alternative-country band members are: Todd Edwards, vocals, guitar and harmonica; Bob Houston, bass guitar; Scott Kennedy, banjo, guitar; and Tom "Catfish" Johnson - drums.

Seniors jingle in Christmas with German song

CALIFORNIA, Pa. – Members of a German choir at the Center in the Woods senior citizens center welcome Christmas with a song, "Ihr Kindelein, kommet," during the opening number in a concert today.

As reported today in the Observer-Reporter newspaper in Washington, Pa.:

The group formed in 1994 and remains popular for several reasons, including the fact that there is a high concentration of World War II veterans living in the area who served in Germany, said Ernst Jung of Uniontown, the class leader.

“A lot of them went over and married German women and brought them back,” said Jung, 69, who emigrated at age 11 from Germany and went on to teach the language at the university level.