If you’re down on the bayfront you can’t help but notice that there is a large ship (nearly 700 feet long) is docked at the Erie Shipbuilding facility. A barge called Buckeye arrived in Erie over the weekend. Erie Shipbuilding is a joint venture of Van Enkevort Tug and Barge and K and K Warehousing. The company recently leased the dry dock and ship facility from the Erie-Western Pennsylvania Port Authority. Along with reparing vessels, the company will also build barges and tugs. Erie Shipbuilding will be hiring around 100 workers this week and has plans to employ over 200 by mid 2006.

On December 5th, 1843 the USS Michigan was launched at Erie, PA. Michigan was America’s first iron-hulled warship, as well as the first prefabricated ship. She was 167 feet long, displaced 450 tons, and was powered by side-paddlers and sails. In 1905, she was renamed USS Wolverine when a new battleship was commissioned as USS Michigan. Her prow is on permanent display at the Erie Maritime Museum.

Artist Richard Anuszkiewicz will receive the Career Award Lorenzo il Magnifico during the Florence Biennale 2005 being held in Florence, Italy. As a student at Erie Technical High School, he took art classes every day from Joseph Plavcan. Anuszkiewicz, born in Erie, Pennsylvania, was educated at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Yale University, and Kent State University. A student of Josef Albers, he shares Albers’ fascination with shapes and their relationships to color. Considered a major force in the op art movement, Anuszkiewicz is concerned with the optical changes that occur when different high-intensity colors are applied to the same geometric configurations. His work is included in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Fogg Museum of Harvard University in Cambridge, and the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Erie based RaceQuest, a company dedicated to providing race teams and promoters with sponsorship marketing tools, will host its first free sponsorship webinar for the 2006 racing campaign on Thursday December 8th, 2005, at 7:30 PM Eastern Standard Time, and again at 7:30 PM Pacific for those on the west coast. The theme of the webinar is “Becoming a Tour Guide in the Sponsorship Hunt”. “We hope to put racers in the mindset for being proactive about sponsorship”, stated RaceQuest’s Bill Catania. “Race teams and promoters alike get into a routine of selling the same product, over and over. When that happens, it is common to hear the same answer from prospects over and over. The goal of the webinar is to leave with a new mindset, new ideas, and with more marketing artillery for the hunt.”

The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) will be in Erie PA today adn Tuesday to ask refugees from Bosnia to donate a couple of drops of blood for DNA testing in an effort to identify some of the more than 26,000 victims found in mass graves or dumped in forests. Since November 2001, the ICMP has made 8,652 matches between victims and surviving relatives. Well over 1,000 Bosnian refugees have settled in the Erie area with the help of the excellent work of the International Institute of Erie.

Beauty and the Beast will be performed at the Erie Playhouse December 7-11 and 14-18, 2005. For more info or tickets call the box office at 454-2852.

Anne Murray is coming to the Warner Theatre on Thursday December 8. Some tickets for “What a Wonderful Christmas” are still available. Call 452-4857 or visit Ticketmaster.com.

Stephanie Jones’ goal with 1:10 left in regulation gave the Mercyhurst College women’s hockey team a 4-3 win over Yale Sunday afternoon at the Mercyhurst Ice Center.