Threads:  The Teens Letters written by me, updated February 2012 to include the period beginning 2010   Background:  Since I launched this website in the year 2000, I haven't written many letters detailing my adventures in broadcasting.  Some of those adventures have been described in articles on the website itself, and I write my friends advising them to go online to find out what I've been doing. Another factor is that since 2001, I haven't traveled to exotic locations as often as before.  But I told a few tales in the previous thread, Century XXI, and here are a few more.   Saturday, May 15, 2010 For the Pittsburgh Penguins, the 2010 hockey playoffs ended this week. Two weeks ago, while they were hosting Montreal in the second round, I was hired to work the graphics machine for two telecasts by RDS, the French Canadian version of ESPN.  I had not worked for RDS for years, and I don’t speak French.  Fortunately, the graphics coordinator is used to dealing with this problem when they televise games in the U.S., and he spelled everything out for me.  Also fortunately, I’m a quick learner.  There was one full-page graphic called something like “The Numbers Game” that we had to build rather rapidly.  After we did so, he told me that I was the first non-French-speaking operator who had been able to do it.  Usually, he has to wave the operator away and take over the keyboard himself in order to get the thing typed in time. French pronunciation remains incomprehensible, but I can more or less read French if the subject is sports stats.  However, I had to type one phrase whose meaning eluded me.  Although teams only play 82 games in a season, I could tell this phrase referred to a team this season that somehow had 237 games of a certain type.  The word blessé was in there somewhere.  Eventually I discovered that blessé means “injured,” so the stat must have been “man-games lost to injury.”  But I didn’t discover that until later in the game, when a couple of players were blesséd.   Monday, February 6, 2012 I’m working on a big college basketball telecast this Wednesday:  Indiana at California.  But it’s not what you think.  It’s not an intersectional game between the Hoosiers of the Big Ten and “Cal” of the Pac-12.  I’m not flying to the West Coast. No, Indiana and California happen to be two towns in Western Pennsylvania, 73 miles apart by car.  Each town has an institution of higher learning that bears its name:  Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) and California University of Pennsylvania (CalU).  Each of those schools plays in the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference.  And they’ve had some success in basketball:  CalU’s women were the Division II national champions in 2004, and IUP’s men reached the Division II championship game in 2010. The Vulcan Sports Network will tape both games of Wednesday’s women/men doubleheader, to be aired Saturday evening starting at 5:30 pm on the CW affiliate in Pittsburgh. We were at CalU on January 28 as well, and those games aired live on the CW station.  However, we doubt that many viewers were watching us, because on another channel Pitt was upsetting Georgetown. Not many fans watched in person, either, even though it was Alumni Day.  The official attendance for the women’s game was 353.  There were 743 in the stands for the men’s game, but it went into overtime and a lot of spectators had departed by then. The visiting team that day was Mercyhurst University.  (One of our announcers repeatedly mispronounced it as Mercyhouse.) And the venue was CalU’s brand-new Convocation Center.  (The same announcer tried to call it the Convention Center or even the Conversation Center.) Did the university overextend itself in spending $59 million to build this fancy new facility?  According to an article in the March 21, 2012, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the annual balance sheet looks like this: Operating revenue $0.4 million Operating costs - $1.1 million Debt payments on construction bonds - $2.5 million Net annual loss - $3.2 million Of course, the Convocation Center benefits the university in many ways that don’t directly bring in cash.  Also, as more events are booked, revenue is expected to increase.  But it will have to increase 800% just to break even. The building seats about 5,000 people, and 3,128 were in the stands for the first game there on December 3.  However, after the opening weekend, attendance had never topped 386 until our January 28 men’s game. Even the pep band didn’t show up, which left the “student section” in the end zone completely empty.  There were plenty of better seats available. But our HD telecast looked good.  Maybe the big rivalry with IUP will encourage enough fans to visit the “Conversation Center” this Wednesday to boost the attendance into four figures.