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T he tooth gets short shrift in anatomy class: we spend all of five minutes on it. In the pantheon of favorite organs—I'll leave it to each of you to make your list—teeth rarely reach the top five. Yet the little tooth contains so much of our connection to the rest of life that it is virtually impossible to understand our bodies without knowing teeth. Teeth also have special significance for me, because it was in searching for them that I first learned how to find fossils and how to run a fossil expedition.
The job of teeth is to make bigger creatures into smaller pieces. When attached to a moving jaw, teeth slice, dice, and macerate. Mouths are only so big, and teeth enable creatures to eat things that are bigger than their mouths. This is particularly true of creatures that do not have hands or claws that can shred or cut things before they get to the mouth. True, big fish tend to eat littler fish. But teeth can be the great equalizer: smaller fish can munch on bigger fish if they have good teeth. Smaller fish can use their teeth to scrape scales, feed on particles, or take out whole chunks of flesh from bigger fish.
We can learn a lot about an animal by looking at its teeth. The bumps, pits, and ridges on teeth often reflect the diet. Carnivores, such as cats, have blade-like molars to cut meat, while plant eaters have a mouth full of flatter teeth that can macerate leaves and nuts. The informational value of teeth was not lost on the anatomists of history. The French anatomist Georges Cuvier once famously boasted that he could reconstruct an animal's entire skeleton from a single tooth. This is a little over the top, but the general point is valid; teeth are a powerful window into an animal's lifestyle.
Human mouths reveal that we are all-purpose eaters, for we have several kinds of teeth. Our front teeth, the incisors, are flat blades specialized for cutting. The rearmost teeth, the molars, are flatter, with a distinctive pattern that can macerate plant or animal tissue. The premolars, in between, are intermediate in function between incisors and molars.
The most remarkable thing about our mouths is the precision with which we chew. Open and close your mouth: your teeth always come together in the same position, with upper and lower teeth fitting together precisely. Because the upper and lower cusps, basins, and ridges match closely, we are able to break up food with maximal efficiency. In fact, a mismatch between upper and lower teeth can shatter our teeth, and enrich our dentists.
Paleontologists find teeth wonderfully informative. Teeth are the hardest parts of our bodies, because the enamel includes a high proportion of the mineral hydroxyapatite —higher even than is found in bones. Thanks to their hardness, teeth are often the best-preserved animal part we find in the fossil record for many time periods. This is lucky; since teeth are such a great clue to an animal's diet, the fossil record can give us a good window on how different ways of feeding came about. This is particularly true of mammal history: whereas many reptiles have similar teeth, those of mammals are distinctive. The mammal section of a typical paleontology course feels almost like Dentistry 101.
Living reptiles—crocodiles, lizards, snakes—lack much of what makes mammalian mouths unique. A crocodile's teeth, for example, all have a similar blade-like shape; the only difference between them is that some are big and others small. Reptiles also lack the precise occlusion—the fit between upper and lower teeth—that humans and other mammals have. Also, whereas we mammals replace our teeth only once, reptiles typically receive visits from the tooth fairy for their entire lives, replacing their teeth continually as they wear and break down.
A very basic piece of us—our mammalian way of precise chewing—emerges in the fossil record from around the world that ranges from 225 million to 195 million years ago. At the base, in the older rocks, we find a number of reptiles that look superficially dog-like. Walking on four legs, they have big skulls, and many of them have sharp teeth. There the resemblance stops. Unlike dogs, these reptiles have a jaw made up of many bones, and their teeth don't really fit well together. Also, their teeth are replaced in a decidedly reptilian way: new teeth pop in and out throughout the animals' lives.
Go higher in the rocks and we see something utterly different: the appearance of mammalness. The bones of the jaw get smaller and move to the ear. We can see the first evidence of upper and lower teeth coming together in precise ways. The jaw's shape changes, too: what was a simple rod in reptiles looks more like a boomerang in mammals. At this time, too, teeth are replaced only once per lifetime, as in us. We can trace all these changes in the fossil record, especially from certain sites in Europe, South Africa, and China.
The rocks of about 200 million years ago contain rodent-like creatures, such as Morganucodon and Eozostrodon, that have begun to look like mammals. These animals, no bigger than a mouse, hold important pieces of us inside. Pictures cannot convey just how wonderful these early mammals are. For me, it was a real thrill to see creatures like them for the first time.
When I entered graduate school, I wanted to study early mammals. I chose Harvard because Farish A. Jenkins, Jr., whom we met in the first chapter, was leading expeditions to the American West that systematically scoured the rocks for signs of how mammals developed their distinct abilities to chew. The work was real exploration; Farish and his team were looking for new localities and sites, not returning to places other people had discovered. Farish had assembled a talented group of fossil finders comprising staff from Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology and a few free-lance mercenaries. Chief among them were Bill Amaral, Chuck Schaff, and the late Will Downs. These people were my introduction to the world of paleontology.
Farish and the team had studied geological maps and aerial photos to choose promising areas where they might find early mammals. Then, each summer, they got in their trucks and headed off into the deserts of Wyoming, Arizona, and Utah. By the time I joined them, in 1983, they had already found a number of important new mammals and fossil sites. I was struck by the power of predictions: simply by reading scientific articles and books, Farish's team could identify likely and unlikely places to find early mammals.
My baptism in field paleontology came from walking out in the Arizona desert with Chuck and Bill. At first, the whole enterprise seemed utterly random I expected something akin to a military campaign, an organized and coordinated reconnaissance of the area. What I saw looked like the extreme opposite. The team would plunk down on a particular patch of rock, and people would scatter in every conceivable direction to look for fragments of bone on the surface. For the first few weeks of the expedition, they left me alone. I'd set off looking for fossils, systematically inspecting every rock I saw for a scrap of bone at the surface. At the end of each day we would come home to show off the goodies we found. Chuck would have several bags of bones. Bill would have his complement, usually with some sort of little skull or other prize. And I had nothing, my empty bag a sad reminder of how much I had to learn.
After a few weeks of this, I decided it would be a good idea to walk with Chuck. He seemed to have the fullest bags each day, so why not take some cues from the expert? Chuck was happy to walk with me and expound on his long career in field paleontology. Chuck is all West Texas with a Brooklyn flourish: cowboy boots and western values with a New York accent. While he regaled me with tales of his past expeditions, I found the whole experience utterly humbling. First, Chuck did not look at every rock, and when he chose one to look at, for the life of me I couldn't figure out why. Then there was the really embarrassing aspect of all this: Chuck and I would look at the same patch of ground. I saw nothing but rock—barren desert floor. Chuck saw fossil teeth, jaws, and even chunks of skull.
An aerial view would have shown two people walking alone in the middle of a seemingly limitless plain, where the vista of dusty red and green sandstone mesas, buttes, and badlands extended for miles. But Chuck and I were staring only at the ground, at the rubble and talus of the desert floor. The fossils we sought were tiny, no more than a few inches long, and ours was a very small world. This intimate environment stood in extreme contrast to the vastness of the desert panorama that surrounded us. I felt as if my walking partner was the only person on the entire planet, and my whole existence was focused on pieces of rubble.
Chuck was extraordinarily patient with me as I pestered him with questions for the better part of each day's walk. I wanted him to describe exactly how to find bones. Over and over, he told me to look for "something different," something that had the texture of bone not rock, something that glistened like teeth, something that looked like an arm bone, not a piece of sandstone. It sounded easy, but I couldn't grasp what he was telling me. Try as I might, I still returned home each day empty-handed. Now it was even more embarrassing, as Chuck, who was looking at the same rocks, came home with bag after bag.
Finally, one day, I saw my first piece of tooth glistening in the desert sun. It was sitting in some sandstone rubble, but there it was, as plain as day. The enamel had a sheen that no other rock had; it was like nothing I had seen before. Well, not exactly—I was looking at things like it every day. The difference was this time I finally saw it, saw the distinction between rock and bone. The tooth glistened, and when I saw it glisten I spotted its cusps. The whole isolated tooth was about the size of a dime, not including the roots that projected from its base. To me, it was as glorious as the biggest dinosaur in the halls of any museum.
All of a sudden, the desert floor exploded with bone; where once I had seen only rock, now I was seeing little bits and pieces of fossil everywhere, as if I were wearing a special new pair of glasses and a spotlight was shining on all the different pieces of bone. Next to the tooth were small fragments of other bones, then more teeth. I was looking at a jaw that had weathered out on the surface and fragmented. I started to return home with my own little bags each night.
Now that I could finally see bones for myself, what once seemed a haphazard group effort started to look decidedly ordered. People weren't just scattering randomly across the desert; there were real though unspoken rules. Rule number one: go to the most productive-looking rocks, judging by whatever search image or visual cues you've gained from previous experience. Rule number two: don't follow in anybody's footsteps; cover new ground (Chuck had graciously let me break this one). Rule three: if your plum area already has somebody on it, find a new plum, or search a less promising site. First come, first served.
Over time, I began to learn the visual cues for other kinds of bones: long bones, jawbones, and skull parts. Once you see these things you never lose the ability to find them. Just as a great fisherman can read the water and see the fish within, so a fossil finder uses a catalogue of search images that make fossils seem to jump out from the rocks. I was beginning to gain my own visual impressions of what fossil bones look like in different rocks and in different lighting conditions. Finding fossils in the morning sun is very different from finding them in the afternoon, because of the way the light plays along the ground.
Twenty years later, I know that I must go through a similar experience every time I look for fossils someplace new, from the Triassic of Morocco to the Devonian of Ellesmere Island. I'll struggle for the first few days, almost as I did those days with Chuck in Arizona twenty years ago. The difference is that now I have some confidence that a search image will kick in eventually.
The whole goal of the prospecting I did with Chuck was to find a site with enough bones to mark a fossil-rich layer that we could expose. By the time I joined the crew, Farish's team had already discovered such a zone, a patch of rock about a hundred feet long that contained skeleton after skeleton of small animals.
Farish's fossil quarry was in some very fine-grained mudstone. The trick to working on it was to realize that the fossils were coming from one thin layer, no more than a millimeter thick. Once you exposed that surface, you had a very good chance of seeing bones. They were tiny, no more than an inch or two long, and black, so they looked almost like black smudges against the brownish rock. The little animals we found included frogs (some of the earliest), legless amphibians, lizards and other reptiles, and, importantly, some of the earliest mammals.
The key point is that the early mammals were small. Very small. Their teeth were not much more than 2 millimeters long. To spot them, you had to be very careful and, more often, very lucky. If the tooth was covered by a crumb of rock or even by a few grains of sand, you might never see it.
It was the sight of these early mammals that really hooked me. I'd expose the fossil layer, then scan the entire surface through my 10-power hand lens. I'd scrutinize the whole thing on my hands and knees, with my eye and hand lens only about two inches from the surface of the ground. Thus engrossed, I'd often forget where I was and accidentally trespass on my neighbor's spot only to have a bag of dirt dumped on my head as a sharp reminder to keep to my space. Occasionally, though, I'd hit the jackpot and see a deep connection for the first time. The teeth would look like little blades, with cusps and roots. The cusps on those little teeth revealed something very special. Each tooth had a characteristic pattern of wear at the face where upper and lower teeth fit together. I was seeing some of the first evidence of our pattern of precise chewing, only in a tiny mammal 190 million years old.
The power of those moments was something I'll never forget. Here, cracking rocks in the dirt, I was discovering objects that could change the way people think. That juxtaposition between the most child-like, even humbling, activities and one of the great human intellectual aspirations has never been lost on me. I try to remind myself of it each time I dig somewhere new.
Returning to school that fall, I developed the expedition bug big-time. I wanted to lead my own expedition but lacked the resources to do anything big, so I set off to explore rocks in Connecticut that were about 200 million years old. Well studied during the nineteenth century, they had been the setting for a number of important fossil discoveries. I figured that if I hit those same rocks with my hand lens and my wonderfully successful early mammal search image, I'd find lots of goodies. I rented a minivan, grabbed a case of collecting bags, and set off.
Yet another lesson learned: I found nothing. Back to the drawing board, or more precisely, the geology library at school.
I needed a place where 200-million-year-old rocks were well exposed: in Connecticut there were only roadcuts. The ideal place would be along the coast, where wave action would provide lots of freshly broken rock surface to look at. Looking at a map made my choice clear: up in Nova Scotia, Triassic and Jurassic rocks (roughly 200 million years old) lay along the surface. To top it off, the tourist literature about the area advertised the world's highest tides, occasionally over fifty feet. I couldn't believe my luck.
I called the expert on these rocks, Paul Olsen, who had just started teaching at Columbia University. If I was excited about fossil-finding prospects before I talked to Paul, I was frothing afterward. He described the perfect geology for finding small mammals or reptiles: ancient streams and dunes that had just the right properties to preserve tiny bones. Even better, he had already found some dinosaur bones and footprints along a stretch of beach near the town of Parrsboro, Nova Scotia. Paul and I hatched a plan to visit Parrsboro together and scan the beach for little fossils. This was wonderfully generous on Paul's part because he had dibs on the area and was under no responsibility to help me out, let alone collaborate.
I consulted with Farish on my emerging plans, and he not only offered money but suggested that I take the fossil-finding experts, Bill and Chuck. Money, Bill, Chuck, Paul Olsen, excellent rocks, and decent exposures—what more could you want? The following summer, I led my very first fossil expedition.
Off I went in a rented station wagon to the beaches of Nova Scotia with my field crew, Bill and Chuck. The joke, of course, was on me. With Bill and Chuck along, who between them had more years of field experience than I had birthdays, I was the leader in name only. They called the fossil-finding shots, while I paid the dinner bills.
The rocks in Nova Scotia were exposed in absolutely gorgeous orange sandstone cliffs along the Bay of Fundy. The tides would go in and out about half a mile each day, exposing enormous flats of orange bedrock. It wasn't long before we started to find bones in many different areas. Small white flecks of bone were coming out along the cliffs. Paul was finding footprints everywhere, even in the flats opened by the moving tides each day.
Paul Olsen finding footprints in the tidal flats of Nova Scotia. At high tide, the water would come all the way to the cliffs at left. The arrowhead points to a spot where, if we timed our trip wrong, we would be stuck on the cliffs for hours at a time. Photograph by the author.
Chuck, Bill, Paul, and I spent two weeks digging in Nova Scotia, finding bits, flakes, and fragments of bones sticking out of the rocks. Bill, being the fossil preparator of the group, continually warned me not to expose much of the bones in the field but rather to wrap them up still covered in sandstone so that he could trace the bones in the laboratory under a microscope in more controlled conditions. We did this, but I'll admit to being disappointed with what we brought home: just a few shoeboxes of rocks, with small chips and flakes of bones showing. As we drove home, I recall thinking that even though we hadn't found much, it had been a great experience. Then I took a week's vacation; Chuck and Bill returned to the lab.
When I returned to Boston, Chuck and Bill were out to lunch. Some colleagues were visiting the museum and, having caught sight of me, came up to shake my hand, offer congratulations, and slap me on the back. I was being treated like a conquering hero, but I had no idea why; it seemed like a bizarre joke, as if they were setting me up for some big con. They told me to go to Bill's lab to see my trophy. Not knowing what to think, I ran.
Under Bill's microscope was a tiny jaw, not more than half an inch long. In it were a few minute teeth. The jaw's owner was clearly a reptile, because the teeth had only a single root at the base, whereas mammal teeth have many. But on the teeth were tiny bumps and ridges that I could see even with the naked eye. Looking at the teeth under the microscope gave me the biggest surprise: the cusps had little patches of wear. This was a reptile with tooth-to-tooth occlusion. My fossil was part mammal, part reptile.
Unbeknownst to me, Bill had unwrapped one of our blocks of rock, seen a fleck of bone, and prepared it with a needle under the microscope. None of us had known it in the field, but our expedition was a huge success. All because of Bill.
What did I learn that summer? First, I learned to listen to Chuck and Bill. Second, I learned that many of the biggest discoveries happen in the hands of fossil preparators, not in the field. As it turned out, my biggest lessons about fieldwork were yet to come.
The reptile Bill had found was a tritheledont, a creature known from South Africa as well as now from Nova Scotia. These were very rare, so we wanted to return to Nova Scotia the next summer to find more. I spent the whole winter tense with anticipation. If I could have chipped through the winter ice to find fossils, I would have done it.
In the summer of 1985, we returned to the site where we had found the tritheledont. The fossil bed was just at beach level, where a little piece of the cliff had fallen off several years before. We had to time our daily visit just so: the site was inaccessible at high tide because the water came up too high around a point we had to navigate. I'll never forget that first day of excitement when we rounded the point to find our little patch of bright orange rock. The experience was memorable for what was missing: most of the area we had worked the year before. It had weathered away the previous winter. Our lovely fossil site, containing beautiful tritheledonts, was gone with the tides.
The good news, if you could call it that, was that there was a little more orange sandstone to scan along the beach. Most of the beach, in particular the point we had to go around each morning, was made up of basalt from a 200-million-year-old lava flow. We were positive no fossils could be found there, for it is virtually axiomatic that these rocks, which were once super hot, would never preserve fossil bone. We spent five or more days timing our visits to the sites by the tides, pawing away at the orange sandstones beyond it, and finding absolutely nothing.
Our breakthrough came when the president of the local Lions Club came by our cabin one night looking for judges for the local beauty contest, to crown Parrsboro's Miss Old Home Week. The town always relied on visitors for this onerous task, because internecine passions typically run high during the event. The usual judges, an elderly couple from Quebec, were not visiting this year, and the crew and I were invited to substitute.
But in judging the beauty contest and arguing over its conclusion, we stayed up way too late, forgot about the next morning's tides, and ended up trapped around a bend in the basalt cliffs. For about two hours, we were stuck on a little promontory about fifty feet wide. The rock was volcanic and not the type one would ever choose to search for fossils. We skipped stones until we got bored, then we looked at the rocks: maybe we'd find interesting crystals or minerals. Bill disappeared around a corner, and I looked at some of the basalt behind us. After about fifteen minutes I heard my name. I'll never forget Bill's understated tone: "Uh, Neil, you might want to come over here." As I rounded the corner, I saw the excitement in Bill's eyes. Then I saw the rocks at his feet. Sticking out of the rocks were small white fragments. Fossil bones, thousands of them
This was exactly what we were looking for, a site with small bones. It turned out that the volcanic rocks were not entirely volcanic: slivers of sandstone cut through the cliff. The rocks had been produced by an ancient mudflow associated with a volcanic eruption. The fossils were stuck in the ancient muds.
We brought tons of these rocks home. Inside were more tritheledonts, some primitive crocodiles, and other lizard-like reptiles. The tritheledonts were the gems, of course, because they showed that some kinds of reptiles already displayed our mammalian kind of chewing.
Early mammals, such as those Farish's team uncovered in Arizona, had very precise patterns of biting. Scrapes on the cusps of an upper tooth fit against mirror images of these scrapes on a lower tooth. These patterns of wear are so fine that different species of early mammals can be distinguished by their patterns of tooth wear and occlusion. Farish's Arizona mammals have a different pattern of cusps and chewing than those of the same age from South America, Europe, or China. If all we had to compare these fossils to were living reptiles, then the origin of mammalian feeding would appear to be a big mystery. As I've mentioned, crocodiles and lizards do not have any kind of matching pattern of occlusion. Here is where creatures like tritheledonts come in. When we go back in time, to rocks about 10 million years older, such as those in Nova Scotia, we find tritheledonts with an incipient version of this way of chewing. In tritheledonts, individual cusps do not interlock in a precise way, as they do in mammals; instead, the entire inner surface of the upper tooth shears against the outer surface of the lower tooth, almost like a scissors. Of course, these changes in occlusion did not happen in a vacuum. It should come as no surprise that the earliest creatures to show a mammalian kind of chewing also display mammalian features of the lower jaw, skull, and skeleton.
A tritheledont and a piece of its upper jaw discovered in Nova Scotia. Jaw fragment illustrated by Lazlo Meszoley.
Because teeth preserve so well in the fossil record, we have very detailed information about how major patterns of chewing—and the ability to use new diets—arose over time. Much of the story of mammals is the story of new ways of processing food. Soon after we encounter tritheledonts in the fossil record, we start seeing all sorts of new mammal species with new kinds of teeth, as well as new ways of occluding and using them By about 150 million years ago, in rocks from around the world, we find small rodent-size mammals with a new kind of tooth row, one that paved the way for our own existence. What made these creatures special was the complexity of their mouths: the jaw had different kinds of teeth set in it. The mouth developed a kind of division of labor. Incisors in the front became specialized to cut food, canines further back to puncture it, and molars in the extreme back to shear or mash it. These little mammals, which resemble mice, have a fundamental piece of our history inside of them. If you doubt this, imagine eating an apple lacking your incisor teeth or, better yet, a large carrot with no molars. Our diverse diet, ranging from fruit to meat to Twinkie, is possible only because our distant mammalian ancestors developed a mouth with different kinds of teeth that can occlude precisely. And yes, initial stages of this are seen in tritheledonts and other ancient relatives: the teeth in the front have a different pattern of blades and cusps than those in the back.
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Istanbul-Armenian singer Maral Ayvaz, who released her first album "Maral Gibi" and her first music video, "Kuşagi Yerki" (The Song of the Fortune Teller) in June, is set to arrive in Armenia in the near future to present the album to her Armenian fans.
In an interview to Panorama.am, the singer said several meetings are planned in Armenia, but she is most excited about the meeting with poet Suren Muradyan, who has written the lyrics of 'The Song of the Fortune Teller'.
"I will be giving concerts and other performances in the homeland. My biggest dream is to be in my homeland soon and to communicate with people," Maral said.
The singer's first album features eight traditional and modern Armenian songs with new arrangements. The album also stands out with its harmonious alignment of the modern and traditional Armenian musical instruments.
Maral says the music director of the album is Istanbul-Armenian musician Ari Hergel, who arranged seven songs of the album. One of the most noteworthy songs of "Maral Gibi" is "Anverç Khavar" (Eternal Darkness). The singer has written Armenian lyrics to the song "Picture/Ağladıkça" by renowned musician Ara Dinkjian.
Asked whether she performs Armenian songs in Istanbul frequently and whether she faces any difficulties while performing those songs, Maral replied: "We have numerous colleges, churches, unions and choirs in Istanbul. We have many performances throughout the year, including concerts of Armenian music."
The singer says she has started her music career at a very young age by attending the Lusavorich Choir, an Armenian church choir, which has performed numerous concerts in Yerevan. "So, yes, I sing Armenian songs very often. I am planning to perform various solo performances to present my album," Maral says.
Meanwhile, the singer confesses it's not easy to perform Armenian music in Turkey, but it is also the case with other countries with unique local languages.
"It's quite difficult to preserve the Armenian culture and traditions and speak and create in Armenian in a foreign country. I and people like me have chosen this difficult path, striving to always hold fast to our national values and to present them to people as much as we can," she stressed.
Speaking about the upcoming projects, Maral said in winter months she is due to take part in various community development concerts, as well as in a private concert of the Lusavorich Choir marking the 90th anniversary of the choir. Subsequently, she is going to hold two concerts in Istanbul.
The singer also unveiled her plans to make another music video based on one of the songs included in the album and a dream to shoot the music video of one of her songs in Armenia. "As I already said, I am dreaming of performing in my homeland. With the help of God, I shall do that," she said.
Commenting on her Armenian roots, Maral said her ancestors were from Constantinople and Sebastia, adding her paternal grandfather was the founder of Istanbul-based Kulis theater magazine, theater worker Hagop Ayvaz.
"It's a great honor to have patriotic parents who love culture. We would speak Armenian, would listen to and sing Armenian songs in my childhood home. So, I first heard and learned our wonderful language in my family. Now I continue preserving those traditions in my own little family," she said.

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Drawing, Painting and More
The El Camino Studio and Gallery has been open now over six years. The studio offers courses and workshops in all aspects of fine art and architectural/technical drawing. The courses are offered in classroom settings as well as one-on-one private tutoring.
Custom commissions for Corporate and private clients done with quick turnaround times and reasonable rates. Artwork available in all traditional media and sizes.
The studio is also mobile, the El Camino will come to your group or organization for presentations and workshops.
Will reopen early in 2019
The El Camino Studio & Gallery strives to provide a venue to foster and facilitate the study of the human form by the artist. By maintaining a scheduled and sustained rotation of artist models, the participants can develop their craft on an ongoing basis.
GALLERY: Presently not available


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July 8, 2001, Section 3, Page 1Buy Reprints
MARC COHODES, the highest-profile short-seller on Wall Street, is getting bored.
On a warm Sunday in June, the Nascar Dodge/Save Mart 350 here has settled into routine, if the jousting of 750-horsepower cars in the hills of Sonoma County can be called routine. In a trackside tent, Mr. Cohodes and his 14-year-old son, Max, both avid Nascar fans, cheer for Jimmy Spencer in car 26. But Mr. Spencer lags far behind the leaders.
''Let's go,'' Mr. Cohodes says.
He slips Max, who has cerebral palsy, into a wheelchair. Then he leads Max and a band of friends onto a service road lined by garages. Five hundred feet later, the garages end, and only a strip of grass, a steel fence and a waist-high concrete barrier stand between the road and the track.
''No Standing,'' a sign warns.
''I can't read,'' Mr. Cohodes says.
A security guard drives by to shoo away the group. Mr. Cohodes promises to go. The guard leaves.
Mr. Cohodes stays. The whir of engines at full boil picks up. The cars come, a psychedelic centipede roaring through a corner and accelerating down a straightaway. In a mesmerizing, acrid blur, they are gone.
''Awesome,'' Max says. Mr. Cohodes smiles. The security guard returns, insisting that the group leave.
They do. A few minutes later, Mr. Cohodes leads them back again.
Marc Cohodes is a short-seller, and by all accounts he is very good at what he does.
Short-sellers sell shares they do not own, hoping to buy them back later for a lower price. By their nature, they are risk takers, flouting conventional wisdom, pridefully standing apart from the mass of investors.
While long investors want to buy low and sell high, shorts want to do the same, in reverse order.
Shorts dispense with Wall Street's niceties and break bad news to investors disposed to hear only the good. They are detectives, sifting through balance sheets as they hunt for hidden problems or inflated profits. And they must persist under pressure from executives at their target companies, who often accuse them of lying or breaking securities laws.
Mr. Cohodes, a general partner at Rocker Partners, a hedge fund based in New York that manages $680 million, is not the only short-seller who is respected, even by longs, for his ability to tear apart a balance sheet. And he is not the only short known for his willingness to rip publicly into corporate executives.
But he is among the few shorts who is both. That combination, along with his recent triumph in helping to uncover hugely inflated sales at Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products, a Belgian software company that filed for bankruptcy in November, has made him highly visible at a time when short-sellers are regaining their status in Wall Street's ecosystem.
The late 1990's, when stocks soared, were tough on short-sellers. The average short-selling hedge fund fell in four of the five years from 1995 to 1999, according to Hedge Fund Research Inc. In 1999, the typical short fund dropped 24.4 percent; Rocker rose 39 percent.
''The old bull market just about got us all,'' said M. W. Montgomery, known as Monty and one of Mr. Cohodes's partners. With longs making fortunes on technology stocks, the shorts appeared irrelevant. Investors showed little interest in hearing shorts' complaints about dubious accounting practices. By early 2000, only a half-dozen funds dedicated to short-selling remained in business.
But the Nasdaq's plunge has brought new interest in shorting. Short-selling hedge funds gained 34.6 percent last year, according to Hedge Fund Research. This year, they are up 3.5 percent, and a new generation of hedge-fund managers is moving into the practice.
Byron R. Wien, chief United States investment strategist at Morgan Stanley, said he saw strong interest in short-selling when he attended a conference last month. And short interest reached a record high on the Nasdaq market of more than 3.8 billion shares in mid-June, the latest available figure, up almost 3 percent from the May total.
More shorting will probably be good for the markets, Mr. Wien said, because short-sellers research companies more thoroughly than longs.
In the last decade, Wall Street research analysts have grown much more bullish on the companies they cover. Lately, regulators and investors have increasingly complained that analysts are too positive because they fear that their firms will lose investment banking business if they write negative reports -- and because they depend on companies they cover for information.
Short-sellers are the ultimate independent researchers, Mr. Wien said.
''I think we all have a lot to learn from the short-seller,'' he said. ''They have to be much more creative about sources of information. But that's probably an art that every analyst ought to develop.''
MR. COHODES, 41, is nothing if not creative in his research. He focuses on smaller technology companies with financial results that appear stronger than their products. Then he combs balance sheets and income statements, seeking clues that a company is inflating profits or faking sales.
Is the company making a lot of sales to buyers that are also controlled by its executives, in what are called ''related-party'' transactions? Are receivables -- sales for which the company has not yet been paid -- piling up on its books? Do a lot of its sales originate in less-developed countries, where auditors many not be as strict? Has it found ways to hide its costs by categorizing recurring expenses as capital spending? Is it reporting profits even though its cash flow is negative?
Those possible tip-offs are visible on a balance sheet for investors who know where to look. If Mr. Cohodes sees them, he will look deeper, calling the company's clients and suppliers and asking questions: Do its products work? Does it pay on time? Has it asked customers to buy more than they need now in return for discounts later?
Then Mr. Cohodes considers a company's management. Does it have a history of puffery or fraud? Have executives sold shares even though they are publicly bullish?
Of course, even a company that meets all these criteria may have great products and a good business. But the more red flags Mr. Cohodes sees, the more excited he becomes.
''High short-interest stocks -- that list, over time, is the greatest set of disasters you've ever seen,'' he says, pointing to companies like Iomega, Solv-Ex and Tel-Save Holdings, all one-time highfliers that crashed, just as the shorts predicted.
Today, Mr. Cohodes' favorite short targets include Cree Research, a semiconductor maker based in Durham, N.C. -- he thinks that prices for its products are dropping and that ''the company is engaged in a lot of related-party dealings and that to me is always a red flag.''
Rocker is also shorting Conseco, the insurer based in Carmel, Ind., because it believes many loans in its finance portfolios are in trouble, and Take-Two Interactive Software, a New York video game maker. Mr. Cohodes faulted Take-Two as having a weak balance sheet, among other problems -- and he noted that insiders have been selling their stock.
SHORT-SELLERS see Wall Street as a world of cretins and charlatans. Here is a sample of Mr. Cohodes' views:
* On what investors have learned from the Nasdaq crash: ''They've learned nothing. It's just, 'Rates are low, you don't want to hold cash, you have to buy something, it's going to get better.' ''
* On the slowdown in technology: ''No one knows where it stops. It could stop tomorrow. It could stop in a year.''
* On research analysts: ''The analysts at the end of the day are just major tools for their firms' banking business and their big holders.''
* On investors' priorities: ''People spend more time figuring out what restaurant they want to go to than they do researching their manager, their stock or their mutual fund.''
Mr. Cohodes acknowledged that he may be jaded because of the companies on which he focuses. ''We're not talking about Exxon Mobil or 3M,'' he said.
But Mr. Cohodes rarely lets his professional skepticism invade his personal life. He dotes on Leslie, 41, his wife of 17 years, and Max and Emily, 10, their children. His office, in Larkspur, Calif., in Marin County just north of San Francisco, is 10 minutes from their home, a large tile-roofed house tucked behind a gated fence on a tree-lined street.
In his home, Mr. Cohodes proudly shows visitors copies of an essay Max wrote, entitled ''Perseverance.'' Max, he said, motivates him, ''and if you're feeling sorry for yourself, he takes care of that, too.''
Mr. Cohodes grew up in Chicago, raised by his mother after she threw his father out of the family home. ''He was a drunk,'' Mr. Cohodes said matter-of-factly. He remains close to his mother, 62, and grandfather, 91, who still live in Chicago.
Mr. Cohodes likes professional wrestling and the Oakland Raiders football team, in addition to stock-car racing. Besides the house, his three cars (including a BMW sedan with 400 horsepower) are the only clues to his considerable income or wealth, which he refuses to discuss. ''I'm not into golf, I'm not a country-club guy, not a jet-set guy,'' he said. ''I'm a husband, a dad, I've got a few pals, and that's all I do.''
Mr. Cohodes and Mr. Montgomery, who also works in Rocker's California office, wear shorts at work and seem to know everyone at the local shopping center where they buy coffee each morning.
Even executives at some target companies of Rocker say they like Mr. Cohodes. ''He's a wonderful guy,'' said Cynthia Merrell, chief financial officer of Cree, the semiconductor company whose stock Rocker is shorting. ''He has really helped me out with my daughter,'' who is also handicapped.
Ms. Merrell added that Mr. Cohodes ''does really good research on most companies,'' although she said she believes he is wrong about Cree.
Bruce Nakao, the former chief financial officer of Adobe Systems, which Rocker both shorted in the late 1980's and went long a few years later, said Mr. Cohodes ''is definitely a tough guy when he's on your case, very unrelenting.''
Mr. Cohodes said he shorted Adobe because Microsoft began including fonts, Adobe's primary product at the time, in its software. After Adobe shares plunged, he went long because he retained a respect for its management and felt that its new products would succeed.
During its battle with Rocker, Adode tried to bar Mr. Cohodes from its meetings with investors. ''He was very clever about trying to get in,'' Mr. Nakao said. But Adobe's strategy was a mistake, he said: ''He thrives on that. It's best to be pretty open and upfront with these guys.''
Now retired, Mr. Nakao counts Mr. Cohodes as a friend. ''Once I got to know him,'' he said, ''I thought he was pretty much a great guy.''
A FEW weeks ago, Mr. Cohodes came upon a photograph that made him laugh.
He laughs easily, especially when he is with Mr. Montgomery. But he found this photograph particularly gratifying. He sent it by e-mail it to several pals, as he invariably calls his friends, under the subject line ''Gaston's Holiday Weekend.''
The photograph shows Gaston Bastiaens, the former president of Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products, being arrested by a pair of United States marshals.
Mr. Cohodes, has worked for Rocker for 16 years -- joining it two months after David Rocker founded it. Today, Mr. Cohodes, Mr. Montgomery and Terry Warzecha, a Rocker analyst, generate most of the company's leads. Mr. Rocker, while still involved with investing, spends more time dealing with the fund's investors from the Manhattan headquarters. The firm is typically short more than 30 stocks, focusing on about 10. It also has a few long positions. Like most hedge funds, Rocker takes 20 percent of the profits from its fund, in addition to an annual fee -- which can leave tens of millions to be split among a few partners.
Lernout & Hauspie is the stock that cemented Mr. Cohodes' reputation. The battle between Lernout and Rocker was one of the ugliest ever between short-sellers and a company and it ultimately vindicated Mr. Cohodes. Based in Ieper, Belgium, Lernout is a software company that specializes in speech translation programs. Both Microsoft and Intel backed Lernout, which was traded on the Nasdaq stock market until December; at its peak in March 2000, when it fetched $65 a share, Lernout had a market valuation of $9.3 billion.
These days, Lernout's shares trade for 25 cents. Mr. Bastiaens, Jo Lernout, Pol Hauspie, and Nico Willaert, the company's former top executives, have been charged with fraud and manipulating Lernout's stock price.
In 1998, Mr. Cohodes tried to buy Lernout's software for his son. He was told by a salesman that Lernout had shipped software that the salesman's company had not ordered. Mr. Cohodes looked deeper. He watched a Lernout demonstration at Comdex, the giant computer trade show, and concluded that it was unconvincing.
After examining the company's financial statements, he decided that Lernout had pumped up its revenue with related-party transactions. Later, he and other short-sellers helped point The Wall Street Journal and TheStreet.com to problems with the company's sales in Singapore and South Korea.
The fight intensified throughout 2000. In January 2001, after several critical articles in The Journal, Lernout filed for bankruptcy in Belgium. In April, an audit by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that 70 percent of the company's Korean sales never existed. Over all, Lernout booked $277 million in fake revenue between 1998 and June 2000, one-third its total sales, according to the company's audit committee.
''That's the grandfather of all of them,'' Mr. Cohodes said of Lernout, because the company's market value grew so large before the situation was exposed.
Mr. Cohodes was by far the most vocal short-seller who attacked Lernout & Hauspie. He lambasted Lernout on a short-lived Webcast radio program, for which he was anchor on the former RadioWallStreet.com. In turn, Lernout executives accused him of leading a conspiracy against them. On Yahoo message boards, small investors criticized Mr. Cohodes even harder. One made a death threat.
Still, Mr. Cohodes did not back down. (He does, however, own dogs, two 130-pound Rhodesian Ridgebacks named Otis and Redding, to guard his family's security.) Now he savors his victory. If the inflated sales had not been uncovered, Lernout's executives might still be raising money from investors on the basis of what auditors say were false financial statements.
''The shorts, at the end of day, protect the little guy,'' he said.
FROM the start, short-sellers work at a disadvantage to longs, because stocks tend to move higher over time. The Standard & Poor's 500 index of big United States stocks has risen by an average of nearly 8 percent since its inception. A long who outperforms that return by eight percentage points -- no easy task -- will earn an average annual return of almost 16 percent. But a short must beat the market by eight points just to get even.
Short-selling is also far riskier than going long. Long investors can lose only as much money as they have put into a stock, while their potential gains are infinite.
For shorts, the equation is reversed. At most, they can make only as much money as they receive when they initially sell a stock. But their potential losses are infinite. An investor who shorts 100 shares of a company at $10 will make $1,000 if it goes bankrupt and its shares fall to zero. But if the company rises to $110, he will lose $10,000 -- $100 a share times 100 shares.
Those are the Economics 101 reasons that short-selling is daunting. In the real world, short-sellers face more serious obstacles, as the Lernout fight shows. Many companies and investors dislike short-sellers intensely, since a falling stock price costs shareholders money and can get executives fired.
Companies whose stocks are heavily shorted often try to engineer ''short squeezes,'' pushing their stocks higher so that short-sellers face margin calls and have to cover their positions. The wave of buying from short-sellers pushes the stock's price up, leading to more margin calls and buying pressure. When a squeeze ends, the stock may drop again, but by then, many shorts may have been forced to cover at or near the peak. So short-sellers can be correct and still lose money.
In early 2000, when Lernout stock nearly tripled in two months, Rocker was forced to cover most of its position and at a cost of more than $10 million. Rocker re-established its short over the next few months, as Lernout stock sank, and wound up with a profit on Lernout, but Mr. Cohodes is still angry about what he believes was a squeeze.
And the battles can become even more personal. Death threats are rare, but companies regularly accuse shorts of spreading misinformation about them. Sometimes they threaten to sue for slander, although they rarely do. Companies and short-sellers occasionally hire private investigators to look for damning information about each other.
Yet short-sellers are far less powerful than their foes may believe. The $680 million that Rocker oversees is less than one one-thousandth as much money as Fidelity Investments manages. If short-sellers are wrong about a company, if its fundamentals are good and its business is growing, they can cause no more than a momentary disruption in its stock price.
Short-sellers are ''an ant compared to the other capital that's out there,'' Mr. Montgomery said. America Online, a favorite target of Rocker Partners in 1995 and 1996, was a prime example. At the time, Mr. Rocker and other shorts complained that AOL was hiding its marketing expenses by putting them on its balance sheet as assets, instead of expensing them as ongoing costs. In November 1996, America Online acknowledged the point, taking a one-time charge to write off $385 million in marketing costs from its books. The charge wiped away all the profits the company had ever earned.
But in their fury over the accounting, and the busy signals that plagued the service in 1996, the shorts were blind to the franchise the company was building. Since AOL changed its accounting, its stock has risen 25-fold, and it has bought Time Warner to become AOL Time Warner, the world's largest media company.
Rocker lost millions of dollars shorting America Online, ''but we learned something,'' Mr. Cohodes said. ''We learned we do not want to short these open-ended type of names,'' he added, meaning companies with unlimited growth potential.
Most top short-sellers share that attitude. Professionals rarely short companies simply because they believe that their stocks are overvalued. They prefer to focus on companies with financial statements that they believe are misleading or fraudulent, companies that may be booking nonexistent sales or selling products to themselves in sham deals.
That attitude enabled Rocker to survive -- even prosper -- in 1999, when the fund rose 39.2 percent, before fees, in a year when the Nasdaq composite surged 86 percent. But it hurt Rocker last year, when Nasdaq stalwarts that had traded at 100 or more times annual profits collapsed. Last year, when the Nasdaq plunged 39 percent, Rocker gained only 8 percent before fees.
''What made a successful 1999 was a complete and total missed opportunity in 2000,'' Mr. Cohodes said. ''But again, we do not want to short legitimate companies.''
MR. COHODES says he does not relish another Lernout-style dust-up. ''It takes a lot out of you,'' he said, recalling four sleepless nights he spent calling technology companies in Europe and Asia to see if Lernout's sales were real. But with Lernout still warm, he has found one, AremisSoft, a software company in London that trades on the Nasdaq.
Earlier this year, short-sellers raised questions about whether AremisSoft had overstated the value of a contract to overhaul the Bulgarian health information system. AremisSoft's stock plunged after reports in May in The New York Times and TheStreet.com about the discrepancy. In response, AremisSoft has announced a plan to force shareholders to trade in their stock for a new class of stock. Short-sellers say that plan is little more a thinly disguised effort to provoke a short squeeze.
Irwin L. Jacobs, a Minneapolis financier who owns 9 percent of AremisSoft, pointed out that Rocker Partners owns two million shares of TheStreet.com. ''Isn't it a coincidence,'' Mr. Jacobs asked in a posting on his Web site, ''that Herb Greenberg from TheStreet.com is also one of the biggest critics of AremisSoft and has been working overtime to try and destroy AremisSoft's credibility while one of his largest shareholders has been shorting AremisSoft stock?''
Mr. Cohodes called the accusations nonsense and said his relationship with Mr. Greenberg, a senior columnist for TheStreet.com, dated to Mr. Greenberg's days as a columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle. Mr. Greenberg said: ''I've been working overtime to try to get AremisSoft to answer some questions that they haven't answered yet.''
Mr. Cohodes also said Rocker's investment in TheStreet.com, which has fallen more than 90 percent, was a mistake. ''We don't need to lose $20 million to get quoted.''
On Thursday, AremisSoft sued TheStreet.com, Rocker Partners and several other short-sellers and brokers, contending that they manipulated AremisSoft's stock price by disseminating false information about the company. TheStreet.com said the accusations were baseless.
The suit also disputes some facts in articles in The Times.
The mere mention of AremisSoft, meanwhile, amuses Mr. Cohodes and Mr. Montgomery. The company has gone ''from announcing a $37.5 million Bulgarian contract to announcing a $575,000 contract with Shire Inns,'' Mr. Cohodes said of a recent AremisSoft news release.
And as he talks of AremisSoft, Mr. Cohodes' eyes light up just as they did at the racetrack a day earlier. ''The problem with us is that we just keep finding scam after scam after scam,'' he says. ''This is what we do, you know. This is what we do.''


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Sandwich Technology School students and staff have been celebrating a fantastic set of academic, International Baccalaureate and vocational A-Level results.
This year, as reported widely in the press, the post-16 qualifications have been harder than ever before and STS students have risen to the challenge. The wide and varied curriculum on offer at the school has provided the students with excellent progression routes into University, College, Apprenticeships and employment. The school is particularly pleased with the improved A-Level results in English, History, Psychology and Mathematics and that the recent introduction of Physics, Biology and Criminology has been successful.
A delighted Tracey Savage, Headteacher, commented: "This is a real measure of the hard work of the students and staff. The students are now looking forward to continuing their education at University, College or as they embark on their careers. I am really proud of their achievements and wish them the best of luck and success in their future lives."
Students deserving a particular mention are Hollie Townsend, who achieved a triple Distinction* through the Football Academy and who is going on to Exeter University to study Psychology with Sport and Exercise Science; Matt Gingell, Jess Guyver, and Alex Munteanu, who all achieved three B grades and are going on to a gap year, Kent University to study English Literature and Kent University to study Criminology and Law respectively. Congratulations also to Kai Glover, Emmy Midgley and Jessica Phipp, who all achieved three or more good A-Levels and are off to study at Huddersfield, Lincoln and Canterbury Christ Church Universities respectively. Once again, the majority of STS Sixth Form students have secured a place at their first choice university.
Maria Stone, the Head of Sixth Form said: "Our students continue to show how committed they are to their studies with resilience and real strength of character and I would like to congratulate all of them on their achievement. As a school we continue to have a high success rate in securing our students' access to university and other training routes and we are proud that our Sixth Form is going from strength to strength."
Sandwich Technology School is determined to help as many students as possible achieve their dream of Level 3 courses in a non-selective environment, which is why the school is excited about the introduction of a 'Transition Year' to the Sixth Form in September 2018. This new programme is designed to help students who wish to study A-Levels but need a little longer to secure their Level 2 studies in a grown up, Sixth Form environment, before successfully studying their A-Levels in Years 13 and 14.
- We have a support club in which your children are able to get help with homework or indeed,
Sandwich Technology School is proud to announce that it has achie...Sandwich Technology School is proud to announce that it has achieved the full 'Investo...


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State of scientific research in Finland
The Academy of Finland's reports on the state of scientific research in Finland support Finnish universities and research institutes in their efforts to develop their own operations. The reviews also serve to strengthen the knowledge base for policy-making.
The Academy has produced reviews of the state of scientific research in Finland regularly since late 1990s, at two-year intervals since 2012. In addition, the Academy prepares complementary analyses between the publication years. The whole review process requires active collaboration with stakeholders both in preparing the reviews and in making the best possible use of the results.
The 2018 review will analyse research personnel and funding, publishing, scientific impact and co-publishing. The analyses are broken down by scientific discipline and organisation. The bibliometric analysis will compare Finland to several research-intensive countries.


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Great experience of half hour cyclo trip and Vietnamese family meals.
Our cyclo drivers pick you up at your hotel to visit along beautiful street in Saigon center about 30 minute and then drop you at Cyclo Resto restaurant.
There, you will get full of delights with 5 famous dishes (Deep fried spring rolls, green melon soup with shrimp, Stir fired vegetable with pork, Stewed snakehead fish in a clay pot, fried chicken with lemon grass, steamed rice), from different destination in Vietnam, which have been recommended by trip Tripadvisor and lonely planet.
Price: 400.000 vnd/pax
Depart time: Every hour
Included: 0,5 hours cyclo trip, Vietnamese family meals.


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Bellevue is looking for citizen feedback regarding road safety throughout the city. As part of the Vision Zero project to reduce traffic deaths and injuries, the city has set up an online questionnaire to collect input from the community.
Vision Zero is a traffic safety project that aims to reduce traffic deaths and serious injuries in the city to zero by 2030. The project was created in Sweden in 1997, and has since been adopted in other countries like Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Franz Loewenherz, principal transportation planner and project manager for the Vision Zero Action Plan, said city staff are now working on an action plan and want the community conversation to be a part of the planning process. An online questionnaire is now available on the city's website or at www.surveymonkey.com/r/VisionZeroBellevue.
The survey asks for opinions on the safety of roads, what the most dangerous behaviors are, and provides a space for people to tell their story regarding an injury to death that resulted from a collision in Bellevue.
Loewenherz said that while Bellevue street safety records compare favorably to other cities there is still a lot of work to be done to improve safety and reduce the amount of people being hurt every year. He cited a press release from the city that notes a statistic that every 17 days someone is killed or injured on Bellevue streets.
"We are a very data driven organization," Loewenherz said. "But we recognize that behind each of those collision statistics is the story of a son or daughter, mother or father whose life was transformed in an instant."
By receiving stories from community members the city hopes to connect the data with the impact on human lives these types of policies. According to the questionnaire, the city intends to feature the stories in the Vision Zero Action Plan and recognize them at City Hall.
Loewenherz said the city is also reviewing industry best practices in other communities that have taken on the Vision Zero project and is working with other organizations such as the Washington Traffic Safety Commission.
Projects like the online questionnaire will help inform staff of the public perception of safety and will allow them to focus on the review of existing practices and policies in the city that could be applicable to improving safety.
Bellevue became the second city in Washington to be part of Vision Zero after the city council made amendments to the comprehensive plan in 2016 to pursue the Vision Zero project as part of future transportation planning.
The questionnaire will be available online at www.surveymonkey.com/r/VisionZeroBellevue until Feb. 11. Bellevue also has an interactive map that displays crash data from 2008 to 2017 for pedestrians, bicyclists and motorists. The crash map data is available on the city's Vision Zero webpage at transportation.bellevuewa.gov/safety-and-maintenance/traffic-safety/vision-zero.


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Click here for this week's specials at shoes_of_distinction
shoes_of_distinction on ebay.co.uk is a store selling clothing, shoes, boots, sandals, accessories, and more. Click the blue link above to check out what deals and promotions they are currently offering in a variety of products. At the moment, they do have a Save 25% Off of Select Items promotion.
Feedback History
shoes_of_distinction has been selling on ebay.co.uk since 2005. They have earned about 8,000 positive feedback ratings, with a current 99.7% positive overall score. So this is a very successful store on ebay.co.uk. This is also a Top-Rated ebay.co.uk store, which means they offer a really high level of item descriptions, customer service, as well as fast shipping.
It's not easy to become a Top-Rated store on ebay.co.uk. You have to provide good quality items, accurate descriptions, excellent customer service, and fast shipping. And you have to do this day after day, month after month. So shoes_of_distinction has had a very successful and positive selling history on ebay.co.uk.
shoes_of_distinction sells items like clothing, shoes, boots, sandals, accessories, and more. They carry brands like Oliver Sweeney, Prada, Loake, Jeffery West, Church's, Timberland, Tricker's, Crockett & Jones, Dubarry, Grenson, Gucci, Ralph Lauren, Paul Smith, and others.
This is one of those ebay.co.uk stores to visit when you want the retail experience. If you've been to any department store in general, you should be familiar with the brands and styles that they carry.
Items like Prada Men's White Red Leather Trainers Shoes, Prada Men's Made In Italy Black Leather Shoes, Hugo Boss Men's Black Leather Grey Suede Trainers, Gucci Men's Italian Made Brown Leather Loafers, etc.
shoes_of_distinction sells brand new merchandise, and does offer a 100% Authentic guarantee, as well as a 100% money back guarantee.
When you sell name brand products, etc., especially at a discount, a popular question is always going to be if the items are authentic, fake, or knock-offs. To answer that question…
Let's take a close look at their recent feedback history. ebay.co.uk buyers have a really good way of weeding out the good sellers from the bad. If an item even SLIGHTLY looks like it might be a counterfeit or knock-off, they will leave you bad feedback. And any and all flaws will usually be reflected in a seller's feedback. With that being said, over the past 12 months, shoes_of_distinction has received about 800 positive feedback ratings, compared to just 2 negative feedback comments. With that sort of lop-sided ratio, it definitely appears as though shoes_of_distinction is an honestly run business, selling authentic merchandise.
Click Here to View Feedback for shoes_of_distinction
All items are guaranteed to be 100% authentic, and come with all the manufacturer paper work, in their original authentic boxes as provided by the manufacturers.
What I like or don't like
Their storefront is very organized. You have a product menu on the left side with all of the brand categories available. So you just find your desired category, and go from there. Once you get into a listing page, you get a left hand menu with all of the brands available. So this store is very easy to navigate.
Another thing I appreciate is their attention to detail in their listings. Each listing has multiple clear and large pictures, so you can clearly see what is included in the listing. Their descriptions go into a lot of detail, and provide all the specifications that you might be looking for like the model they work for, size, color, etc. The quality of their listings is about as good as it gets on ebay.co.uk. You get all sorts of pictures, sizes, weights, package contents, etc.
Their attention to detail, and their excellent feedback really makes you feel secure in shopping from this ebay.co.uk store. As does their 14-day hassle free returns policy. No need to email back for a return authorization, or deal with with annoying emails back and forth. You just click on return, and send it back. And having two weeks to do so is quite convenient.
Have you shopped at this store before? If you have, leave a comment below and share your experience.


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Membership Information
Any prospective member is welcome to visit our Awatoto flying site to see what we are all about. The fields most popular day is Sunday however members can fly any day of the week with a few exceptions throughout the year.
The club has an Electric trainer model and dual control radio setup (Both Mode 1 & 2) that can be used with it as well as the option of "buddying" with a radio you may have already purchased (Depends on brand/model).
You are welcome to have a few introductory flights before deciding on joining.
To join our club:
You need to Download the membership form (this can be done by clicking HERE
Then contact our Secretary: Brett Robinson Phone 06 8764605 or firstname.lastname@example.com
The Secretary will take your details, process your application and advise you about the process.
Our financial year begins on the 1st of April. If you wish to join at different time of the year the cost will be calculated on a a full or 6 month portion for both the Club and the Model Flying NZ fees.
Once you are a member you get a key to access the gate to the Awatoto flying site. It is a condition of our agreement with the Hawke's Bay Regional Council (HBRC) to keep this gate locked at all times.
Main gate: You open it, you lock it. No exceptions
Field Gate/Shed: The gate to the pits & Shed must be closed & locked when unattended.
If you find yourself the first or last at the site your responsibilities are:-
If you are the First to Arrive:
• Turn electric fence off leaving door open
• Put out flight equipment:-
If you are the only flyer on field, it is not necessary to put out the equipment.
However as numbers on the field increase, the implementation of the equipment above is required to ensure that we maintain our safety procedures
If Last off the field:
• Clear field
• Lock field gate
• Check & lock Shed
• Turn electric fence on Close & lock
Key Your gate key MUST NEVER be loaned.
Rubbish Must be taken home with you.
Safety Requirements:
All powered planes should be restrained by the starting polls provided by the club, or a suitable restraining strop, when starting.
These poles are located in front of the pits. If starting with a restraining strop, it should be done adjacent to the starting poles in front of the pits.
If you need to run your engine for an extended period of time please take your model to either end of the field to avoid excessive noise to fellow modellers.
The Club strongly recommends the use of an observer on the flight line at all times, especially Sunday mornings.
Members wishing to fly without an observer on the flightline must have the appropriate Wings Badge accreditation for the type of model being flown.
Members that are yet to achieve a Wings Badge accreditation, MUST have a suitably qualified wings badge holder with them on the flight line as observer/mentor.
Dogs must be tethered or on a leash and kept off the field.
This is to protect our models and the animals.
It is a requirement of our lease to occupy with the HBRC that
"No dogs are allowed to run loose".
Our field is also a SMOKEFREE Area.
Awatoto Field Rules