PresRelease

If you’d like to be involved in this September’s Festival on the Green celebration in Mansfield, follow the links below.  There will be a parade at noon, booths and entertainment all afternoon.

Sunday, September 13
Noon—5:00 pm
Behind the Storrs Center commercial plazas
View a slideshow of the 2008 Festival on the Green!
How can you get involved with this annual community event?
Sign up to volunteer
Host an activity booth
Be a sponsor
If your group would like to be in the parade, contact Barry Schreier or the Mansfield Downtown Partnership at 429.2740 / mdp@mansfieldct.org

The Festival on the Green is a part of Celebrate Mansfield Weekend!

Megan Richardson
NBC30 reported the story of nurse Megan Richardson in the UConn Health Center’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.  It’s another great example of how one of us finds our life’s calling through compelling personal experience.  Megan Richardson weighed one pound, 14 ounces, when she was born ten weeks early at the UConn NICU more than 20 years ago.  Now she cares for babies (and their parents) in that same UConn Health Center neonatal unit.  Megan’s mother Maureen is very proud of her daughter’s career choice.  And I am, too.

(Blue Sky Studios)

Students at UConn and Wesleyan University will benefit from state-of-the-art animation computers donated by Greenwich-based Blue Sky Studios, the creator of a number of award-winning digital animation features, including the Ice Age series.  Blue Sky, a wholly owned subsidiary of Fox Filmed Entertainment, relocated to Connecticut from New York in January, bringing with it more than 300 jobs. The gift of computers was announced yesterday by Governor M. Jodi Rell.

Students will be able to learn on the same hardware that produced Blue Sky’s Ice Age the Meltdown and Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who. The high-speed animation computers feature 104 Centralized Processing Units per rack. Each rack has a current market value of approximately $35,000. UConn’s drama and computer science engineering departments are each receiving two racks and Wesleyan’s computer science department is receiving four donated racks.

Blue Sky’s latest release, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, the third in the Ice Age series, opens in theaters Wednesday, July 1.

We’re very grateful for the gift and for the opportunities it creates for our students.

UConn’s William Benton Museum of Art in Storrs is hosting a Summer Weekend Comedy Film Festival featuring classics from the 1930s and 1940s:

Saturday, July 11:   It Happened One Night (1934)
Sunday, July 12:   Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Saturday, July 18:   Destry Rides Again (1939)
Sunday July 19:   My Little Chickadee (1940)
Saturday, July 25:   A Night at the Opera (1935)
Sunday July 26:   Ninotchka (1939)
Saturday, August 1:   My Man Godfrey (1936)
Sunday, August 2:   Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948)

Showtime is 2 p.m. Admission is free to the films and the exhibitions, A Touch of Humor and Punch & Judy: Handpuppets, Politics & Humor. Saturday and Sunday hours at the Museum are 1-4:30 p.m. Thursday and Friday hours are 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. The museum will be closed July 3-8 and will re-open at 10 a.m. on
July 9.

Punch and Judy

And on Thursday, July 2, at 12:15 pm, Ballard Institute and Museum Director John Bell will give a Gallery Talk on the current Punch & Judy exhibition.

John Frascella
John Frascella, Class of 2008, signed a book contract just a month after graduating from UConn to write about Red Sox General Manager Theo Epstein: Theo-logy: How a Boy Wonder Led the Red Sox to the Promised Land.  John was a journalism and English major in CLAS and lead sports columnist for the Daily Campus.  His book is out and doing well, from what I hear.  You can read about it on the CLAS web page and in the Advance.
My own recent attempt to get to a Red Sox game at Fenway was rained out, not surprising given the unusually wet and cool June we’ve had here in New England.

As I write this, the Red Sox are 44-27, 5 games up on the Yankees.
And by the way, the UConn baseball team made the 2009 Big East championship game on May 11, finally losing to Louisville for a season record of 36-24.  It was the Huskies’ sixth title game appearance in program history.  This marked the most wins by the Huskies since the 2006 season.  It’s the fourth year in the last five that the Huskies have won at least 30 games, and the second time in three seasons that the Huskies have found themselves competing in the Big East title game.  Three Huskies made the all-tournament team:
Peter FatsePierre LePage Mike Nemeth
And seven Huskies: Dennis Accomando, Dusty Odenbach, John Folino, David Erickson, Dan Mahoney, Peter Fatse and Harold Brantley, Jr. signed professional contracts after the close of the season.