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Katy mom sues KHOU after false report that she left her kids in hot car
A mom who was falsely accused of leaving her kids in a hot car in Katy is suing a Houston TV station who reported the incident, saying she feared vigilantes might take action against her.
KHOU, the Houston CBS affiliate ran a news report on July 15 based on cell phone footage from a witness who claimed shoppers smashed a window to get two children out of a Jeep parked at a Katy area mall. The report alleged Araceli Cisneros left them there to get a hair cut.
Just hours later the story changed after new witnesses came forward. Cisneros had accidently locked the children and her keys inside. She could be seen in the cell phone video frantically calling for help.
Cisneros has now filed a lawsuit against KHOU claiming over $200,000 in damages after the story went viral.
The suit says KHOU and reporter Rucks Russell published the story with a "reckless disregard for its truth or falsity" and without doing the "most basic fact checking."
According to the suit, nationally syndicated TV personality Nancy Grace even picked it up, calling Cisneros an unfit mother.
"As a result of KHOU's objectively false news report, Cisneros feared that she would be subject to prosecution for leaving her children in a locked car," the suit alleges. "Based on the public's response to the article ... Cisneros also feared for the safety of herself and her family."
An editor's note since added to the story on the KHOU website says, "The witness who shot the cell phone video was mistaken when he thought the mother left the children in the car while she got a haircut. We have removed that part of the story."
The note goes on to confirm Cisneros' story. "The mother accidentally locked her keys in the car and recruited other witnesses to help smash the window," the editor's note says.


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Find Our Latest Video Reviews on YouTube!
If you want to stay on top of all of our video reviews of the latest tech, be sure to check out and subscribe to the Gear Live YouTube channel, hosted by Andru Edwards! It's free!
2012 Holiday Gift Guide: Furby
Posted by Andru Edwards - Categories: Features, Toys, Kids, Techies, Under $100, Under $250, Under $500,
Fourteen years ago, Furby was the hot holiday sensation, and now in 2012, Hasbro has brought it back with a modern update that's good enough to be featured in our 2012 Holiday Gift Guide. Changes include LED eyes, capacitive touch sensors, and an app that lets you control it remotely. Kids will love them, but so will tinkerers--the original Furby was super-hackable, which hobbyists love. You can pick up the new Furby for $60.
Read More | Furby
2012 Holiday Gift Guide: Monopoly zAPPed
Posted by Andru Edwards - Categories: Apple, Features, Toys, Family, Techies, Under $100, Under $250, Under $50, Under $500,
Next up in our 2012 Holiday Gift Guide is Monopoly zAPPed, a full-fledged verion of Monopoly that can also be considered an iPad accessory. There are gonna be a lot of iPads and iPad minis under the tree this year, and if you already know someone who owns one (or who will own one this holiday season,) consider this game as a fun gift for them. The game is played with an iPhone or iPad with two to four players, and is different from tradtional Monopoly in that the device (iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone) is the bank and there are on-screen mini games. Also, there is no money, as you just swipe your credit card on the display for transactions. Included in the box are the game board with rubber pads, 6 tokens, 28 Property cards, 32 green houses, 12 red hotels, 2 dice, 4 Monopoly Touch-banking cards and instructions. You can pick up Monopoly zAPPed for $29.99, or $26.24 on Amazon (a 14% savings!)
Read More | Monopoly zAPPed Edition
2012 Holiday Gift Guide: Star Wars Death Star tea infuser
Posted by Andru Edwards - Categories: Features, Smart Home, Movies, Techies, Under $100, Under $25, Under $250, Under $50, Under $500,
Techies seem to love tea, and this Death Star tea infuser bring both of those worlds together in a delicious way, so we're featuring it in our 2012 Holiday Gift Guide. Made of stainless steel, this tea infuser is molded to resemble Darth Vader's Death Star. Just put some loose leaf tea in there and steep it in your favorite mug. It's dishwasher-safe and available from ThinkGeek for $19.99.
Read More | Death Star Tea Infuser
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2012 Holiday Gift Guide: Apple iPad mini
Posted by Andru Edwards - Categories: Apple, Features, Handhelds, Women, Men, Techies, Teens, Under $500,
Next up in our 2012 Holiday Gift Guide is the Apple iPad mini. We're sure many of you expected to see this one here, but we weren't so sure until we got our hands on one, and realized after a couple of weeks that our full-sized iPad with Retina display was collecting dust. The iPad mini lives up the the hype that it has generated for years, and it is beautifully designed, what with its anogized aluminum shell. Battery life seem to be better than any iPad before it, and the display, while not Retina quality, is not that bad at all. You get the 7.9-inch 1024 x 768 display powered by a dual-core A5 processor and 512MB RAM in a package that weighs just 0.68 pounds. Prices start at $329, and you can get one now from Apple.
Read More | iPad mini product page
2012 Holiday Gift Guide: Knomo Saxby Business Tote
Posted by Andru Edwards - Categories: Wearables, Features, Men, Techies, Under $250, Under $50, Under $500,
We've given a bunch of gadget recommendations in our 2012 Holiday Gift Guide, and now it's time we mention a fantastic bag to carry them all. This year we recommend the Knomo Saxby Business Tote. We've been using it over the past few months, and it's fantastic. The Saxby has a bunch of pockets, allowing you to appropriately separate things like your iPad from your notebook, and having neither of them come in contact with your keys or pens, thanks to its 4 exterior pockets, 2 interior pouch pockets, 1 interior zip pocket, and 1 interior padded laptop pocket. The size is great, and the look is really classy too (we went with the shiny navy, but you can also get it in matte black, gray, and slate.) Knomo makes high-quality, well-made bags, and this is as fine a laptop bag as you'll find. You can pick up the Knomo Saxby on Amazon starting at $119.99.
Read More | Knomo Saxby Business Tote
2012 Holiday Gift Guide: DarbeeVision Darbee Darblet
Posted by Andru Edwards - Categories: Accessories, HDTV, Home Entertainment, Techies, Under $500,
If you've got a home theater nut in your life and you wanna get them a gift that they'll use on an almost daily basis with joy, you'll wanna check out the Darbee Darblet, our next recommendation in our 2012 Holiday Gift Guide. So, what's so special about the oddly-named Darblet? Well, it just makes your high-definition content look amazing. No, really, this is like nothing you've ever seen before. It adds a level of depth and clarity that is unmatched, all with a simple set-it-and-forget it interface. You can pick up the Darbee Darblet on Amazon.
Still not convinced? Check out our Darbee Darblet review, and Darblet unboxing gallery.
Read More | Darbee Darblet
2012 Holiday Gift Guide: Sony SDHC flash memory cards
Posted by Andru Edwards - Categories: Accessories, Hot Deals, Women, Men, Techies, Teens, Under $100, Under $25, Under $250, Under $50, Under $500,
We try and feature some lust-worthy gadgets in our 2012 Holiday Gift Guide, but we also like to call out great deals on things that you need for those gadgets as well, and that's why we are recommending the 32GB and 16GB Sony SDHC class 10 flash memory cards. Amazon currently has an amazing deal on these cards, sellign each at a substantial discount. The 32GB cards are 67% off, while the 16GB variety are 65% off. Of course, you can use these in anything from a digital camera, to the new Wii U, to simple file storage for your computer. Check them out on Amazon now!
Read More | Sony SDHC cards
2012 Holiday Gift Guide: Sonos PLAY:3
Posted by Andru Edwards - Categories: Features, Music, Portable Audio / Video, Men, Techies, Under $500,
We're music fans here at Gear Live (seriously, check out the Gear Live Rdio channel!) so we wanna make sure to include great music gadgets in our 2012 Holiday Gift Guide. This year, we're kicking it off with the Sonos PLAY:3. If you're unfamiliar with Sonos, it's basically the best way to get music from just about any location (your computer, your iPhone, the web, the cloud, etc.) to play in any room in your house. It's super intuitive, and even years after using Sonos, the technology still blows us away. The Sonos PLAY:3 is a wireless all-in-one music system that lets you jump right into the Sonos experience. If you have an iOS or Android device, you can download the Sonos remote control app, and you can also control the system with a computer using the Sonos Desktop Controller. Here are some other Sonos products that go nicely with the Sonos PLAY:3, which itself you can get for $299 from Sonos, or order from Amazon and get a free Sonos Bridge included with purchase!
You can use a pair of Play:3 or Play:5 units to create wide stereo sound as well!
2012 Holiday Gift Guide: Amazon Kindle Fire
Posted by Andru Edwards - Categories: Handhelds, Women, Men, Techies, Teens, Under $250, Under $500,
We continue our 2012 Holiday Gift Guide with the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet. Why the Fire, and not the Kindle Fire HD? While the HD is a fine tablet in its own right, the price of the regular Kindle Fire is just right--especially if you buy quickly! As it turns out, Amazon is selling the Kindle Fire at a 20% discount for the next 3 hours (or until it runs out of stock, whichever comes first!) Amazon's looking to disrupt the tablet landscape with the Fire, and is pricing the Fire aggressively at $129 during this sale.
Purchasers of the Kindle Fire also get a 30-day trial of Amazon Prime, which'll let you get a nice sampling of what the company's Video on Demand service offers. Other services you can access from the Fire include Amazon's Android Appstore, Kindle books, a host of magazines, Cloud Drive, Cloud Player, and the Amazon MP3 service.
You can pick up a Kindle Fire now for $129 on Amazon. If you miss the sale, it's still a good deal at its regular $159 price.
Honorable Mention: Kindle Fire HD - $199
Read More | Amazon Kindle Fire
2012 Holiday Gift Guide: Cooking for Geeks cookbook
Posted by Andru Edwards - Categories: Smart Home, Techies, Under $100, Under $25, Under $250, Under $50, Under $500,
We've hit you with a bunch of gadgets in our 2012 Holiday Gift Guide this year, but don't think we forgot about the readers out there. One of the books that we recommend this year is Cooking for Geeks. Written by Jeff Potter, the book not only includes great tasting recipes, but it focuses on the science of cooking, and includes a bunch of kitchen hacks to actually teach cooking instead of just recipes to follow. It's loaded with info, and is worthy of being gifted to your favorite geek this hoiday season. It's available in paperback, as well as on Kindle. You can get it now from Amazon for $20.23, which is a 42% discount.
Honorable Mention: What Einstien Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained
Read More | Cooking for Geeks
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subset: commoncrawl


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|Home >> Course Descriptions >> College of Arts and Sciences
|Mass Communication Processes
|Three semester hours. (SP-Odd)
A comprehensive survey of the contemporary media of mass communication and an investigation of their influence on social, political, and economic change. This course will also offer material on the origins and historical development of print and broadcast media. (Cross-listed with SOCI 4375)
Home - General Information - Student Services -
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Appendix A - Appendix B - Appendix C - Appendix D


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Nine recreational park trailer manufacturers will be displaying their latest units for the RV park and campground industry in the Park Model Pavilion at the annual InSites Convention & Outdoor Hospitality Expo Nov. 11-12 in Orlando, Fla.
The show is sponsored by the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds (ARVC) and will be held at The Rosen Centre.
The displaying companies are: Airstream Inc., Athens Park Homes, Breckenridge Park Trailers, Cavco Industries Inc., Chariot Eagle Inc., CrossRoads RV, Keystone RV Co., Skyline Corp. and Stone Canyon Lodges & Park Models LLC.
Meanwhile, in a related development, ARVC and Thor Industries Inc. announced in October that they have formed a strategic alliance to provide private park operators with exclusive prices on park models and travel trailer units specifically designed for use as rental accommodations at campgrounds.
"Three of Thor's companies, Airstream, Breckenridge and Keystone, now offer unique lines of park model cabin and travel trailer units that have been specially designed to meet the durability needs of private park operators who are anxious to expand their offering of rental accommodations," said Shane Ott, Thor's director of campground relations.
Ott, who was previously president and COO of Kampgrounds of America Inc. (KOA), joined Thor last summer and developed the company's rental accommodations initiative with ARVC.
"We welcome this exciting Thor program and feel that the favorable pricing and unique designs of these units will be very enticing for campgrounds, RV parks and resorts as they continue to diversify their business base with rental accommodations," said Linda Profaizer, ARVC president and CEO.
About one-third of the nation's commercially owned campgrounds, RV parks and RV resorts offer rental units to accommodate families and other travelers who don't have an RV, but want to enjoy the Great Outdoors – and the numbers are growing.
"Private parks have long seen the merits of investing in park model cabins for use as rental accommodations, and now they have a chance to invest in both park models and travel trailers for on-site rental use at special prices that are exclusive to ARVC members," Profaizer said. "Many travel trailer owners already leave their units at campgrounds and RV parks and use them as getaway cottages."
Ott said this strategic partnership, the first of its kind involving ARVC and RV manufacturers, has enabled Thor to develop unique units using the input and experience of campground owners across North America.
The ruggedized features along with a variety of floorplans and cozy design elements offer campground owners durable units built to withstand the rigors of high occupancy usage. The lodging units featured in the promotion include four Breckenridge park models ranging from 22- to 36-feet; two Keystone travel trailers, including one 29- and one 37-foot model; and one 25-foot Airstream travel trailer.
Ott added that while the initial promotion involves Airstream, Breckenridge, and Keystone, additional Thor companies could become involved in the promotion in the future, depending on the level of private park interest.


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Looking for a great, easy way to raise funds to help The Kidney Foundation of Canada support research investments, and provide programs and services for those people in your community affected by kidney disease? Then build your own personal online Kidney Page and start fundraising today!
To get started, simply click on one of the buttons below. Then register, create your own personal page, and send emails to friends and family asking for donations. It's that easy!
Memory PagesHave you lost a loved one to kidney disease? Celebrate their memory by creating an online page & raise funds in their honour.
Transplant Anniversary PagesCelebrate your Transplantiversary (Transplant Anniversary) by creating your own personal page to raise funds and spread awareness about organ donation in Canada.
Birthday PagesWant to celebrate your birthday but tired of the same old gifts? Looking to give back to kidney patients and their families? Then create your very own Birthday fundraising page and accept donations on line in lieu of gifts! It's easy and a great way to make a real difference.
Be A Hope Hero PagesEvery day, people like you from across Canada raise funds for The Kidney Foundation of Canada. You may be holding a BBQ, running a marathon, or hosting a kidney disease awareness event. Whatever you are doing, you make a difference, and can do so even more by creating a Hope Hero page to accept donations securely online.
Quebec Branch - 2300 René Lévesque Blvd. West, Montreal, QC H3H 2R5 - Tel.: (514) 938-4515 / 1-800-565-4515 within QuebecCharitable Registration Number: 107567398RR0001


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Top 10 Entertainers
In honour of Liverpool's exhilarating approach this term, we select our 10 most exciting sides of the Premier League era...
By Daniel Storey
Last Updated: 07/03/14 9:40am
10) Oldham Athletic, 1992/93
That Oldham ensured their survival on the last day of the first Premier League season with a 4-3 win was a fitting conclusion to a wonderfully manic season in which the Latics' 42 league matches contained a total of 137 goals, including 4-2, 4-3, 5-2 , 5-3 and 6-2 scorelines. The highlight was surely the aggregate score of 8-7 in two league games against Wimbledon, with leading lights such as John 'Awooga' Fashanu and Ian Olney amongst the goals.
They somehow avoided relegation despite losing 12 of 16 games between the end of October and late February in a time that now seems firmly planted in yesteryear. Three consecutive May victories against Villa, Liverpool and Southampton secured safety. Their three opponents might still be in the top flight but, for Oldham, it's a long way back.
9) Leeds United, 2002/03
Leeds fans will remember the 1999/00 or 2000/01 seasons a lot more fondly, but it was the 2002/03 season that sticks more prominently in my mind. The club were on the financial slide, and the departure of Rio Ferdinand, Robbie Keane, Robbie Fowler and Jonathan Woodgate, amongst others, made for a hugely interesting spectacle for the near neutral. Mark Viduka stayed and performed admirably, and the Australian duo of him and Harry Kewell scored 35 in the league between them.
Despite being second in mid-September after a 2-0 victory over Manchester United at Elland Road, Leeds only guaranteed their safety with two games remaining, finishing 15th. Only the top five scored more than Leeds' total of 58, but only four teams conceded more. Yet more proof that a club sliding towards catastrophe can actually be damn entertaining viewing.
8) Middlesbrough, 1996/97
Relegated with 39 points from 38 games, and yet they scored more goals than 14 of the other 19 clubs in the division. Middlesbrough's dabble with Fabrizio Ravanelli and Emerson (who joined fellow Brazilian Juninho) was always going to be worth watching, and so it proved.
Bryan Robson invested in his attack but a defence of Steve Vickers, Curtis Fleming, Neil Cox and Derek Whyte predictably conceded more than any other side. An opening day hat-trick from Ravanelli against Liverpool in a 3-3 draw set the tone as Boro reached two cup finals with some wonderfully attacking invention, but dropped out of the top flight thanks to a draw at Elland Road on the final day. Juninho's post-match tears will live long in the memory.
7) Liverpool, 2013/14
Football excitement should not always be judged simply by the volume of goals, but the formula of wonderful attack + shonky defence pretty much always makes for good viewing - Brendan Rodgers' side this season are the epitome of such a principle.
Liverpool have scored over 20 goals more than any side other than Manchester City in the league, and Daniel Sturridge, Luis Suarez, Raheem Sterling and Jordan Henderson have recently played with a verve pretty unexpected for a largely English group.
Crucially though, they retain the propensity for the cock-up. If Kolo Toure's shoddy passes and comical reaction won't get you, Martin Skrtel dragging his man around a penalty area will. They might not win the title, but it would be foolish to suggest that Rodgers has not generated an awful lot of love for his Anfield entertainers.
6) Blackpool, 2010/11
I sit very firmly in the camp of people that can't get on with Ian Holloway's schtick, but there is no doubting the breath of fresh air that his Blackpool side brought to the Premier League following their surprise promotion. This was naivety at its most beautiful, with Charlie Adam's complexion to act as counterbalance.
Of course Blackpool were relegated from a mid-season position in which greater pragmatism could have ensured survival, but that simply won't matter when the 5-3 defeat at Everton, 4-3 win over Bolton and league double over Liverpool are remembered by fans in two or three decades' time.
Blackpool came to have fun and, thanks to an optimistic manager and inspired group of players and fans, fun they had.
5) Sheffield Wednesday, 1993/94
A reminder of just how much football has changed. Twenty years ago, Sheffield Wednesday finished seventh in the Premier League with a squad of 28 players of which all but one were either born in or represented England.
This was Chris Waddle in his last hurrah, Mark Bright, Trevor Francis and Carlton Palmer and Chris Woods as experienced heads and Chris Bart-Williams and Gordon Watson as exciting talents. And, despite your presumed cynicism, it was utterly thrilling. Wednesday scored 76 goals including three or more goals in a game on 14 separate occasions. Halcyon days indeed.
4) Chelsea, 2004/05
It seems foolish to omit the Chelsea side that scored 103 goals under Carlo Ancelotti in 2009/10, but it was the side that dominated the Premier League in 2004/05 in Jose Mourinho's first season that actually caught the eye the most.
Chelsea's greatest strength was admittedly in defence, with Ricardo Carvalho and John Terry beginning their six-year partnership. They conceded just league 15 goals all season and won 11 games 1-0.
However, that foundation effectively allowed for the attacking elements of the side to operate at will. Even now, daydreaming about Joe Cole and Arjen Robben providing for Didier Drogba and Eidur Gudjohnsen, with Frank Lampard and Claude Makelele in central midfield, makes me tingle.
Furthermore, it was all facilitated by a summer spend on players never before seen in the English game - there was something fascinating about watching such investment come to such immediate fruition.
3) Newcastle United, 1993/94
Whilst the abiding memory of Kevin Keegan's mental Newcastle team was the side that blew a 12-point lead at the top on the Premier League in 1996/97, that side actually scored fewer goals than Manchester United and conceded only two more.
Instead, Newcastle fans will tell you that it was the 1993/94 season when the 'entertainers' tag was truly established. Newly promoted and finishing third, Newcastle scored more goals than any other team in the division in their first season in the top flight for five years. That is a fine effort indeed.
Andy Cole was the star, scoring 41 goals in all competitions and winning the PFA Young Player of the Year award, but Peter Beardsley, Rob Lee and Ruel Fox all played their part in a team that looked to counter attack at frightening pace. It may have all ended in heartbreak and a man shouting angrily live on television, but it was at least borne out of sheer beauty.
2) Manchester United, 1999/2000
Arguing over which is Alex Ferguson's greatest ever side is not a business in which I wish to get bogged down, but I'm prepared to raise my head above the parapet and suggest that the 1999/2000 team was the most entertaining.
Ninety-seven goals in the league alone (and another 21 in the Champions League) - this was Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, David Beckham and Roy Keane at their pomp, behind any two of Andy Cole, Dwight Yorke and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. They even had time to give league appearances to Massimo Taibi, Mark Wilson and Michael Clegg.
Any side that wins each of their last 11 league games and scores 37 goals in the process deserves a doff of the cap.
1) Arsenal, 2003/04
Of course the headline statistic of Arsenal's 2003/04 season is that they became the first team in 115 years to go an entire season unbeaten, but this was a campaign in which their sheer magnificence should shine brighter than any statistic.
If you've got Thierry Henry scoring 30 league goals (and many of them sexier than the naughtiest of fantasies), Robert Pires getting 14 of his own and Freddie Ljungberg supplying the ammunition, that's a pretty good basis for splendour.
Football is at its most beautiful when the technically difficult is being made to look simple, and that is the very definition of Arsenal's brilliance that season. They made the impossible possible, and the challenging breathtakingly easy - as close to Premier League perfection as we have seen.
This article first appeared on Football365


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Jeremy Evans didn't win this year's dunk contest, but he did manage to leave his mark on the 2013 Sprite Slam Dunk contest at the Toyota Center in Houston, Texas.
In his first dunking attempt in the final round, the Utah Jazz power forward brought out an easel with a large picture covered in a black cloth, according to NBC Sports. He placed it inside of the restricted area and proceeded to run and perform a left handed dunk over it.
Afterward, he removed the black cloth and revealed a painting depicting himself dunking in midair over the black cloth covered easel.
He got the idea for his creative dunk from one of his coaches.
"Actually, a player development coach helped me out with that," he said. "He knew I was a painter, so why not do that?"
Evans created the painting himself, taking a week and a half to finish. It wasn't completed until the night before the contest because he wanted to ensure the ball that appeared in the work was accurate.
Terrence Ross of the Toronto Raptors was given the trophy for 2013 Sprite Slam Dunk champion, getting 58 percent of the vote from fans. But Evans' performance will not be forgotten.


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Nightly News | June 27, 2013
>>> good evening. nbc news has learned the former number two man in the joint chiefs at the pentagon, a new retired marine corps four- star general with a close working relationship with president obama is under veinvestigation for leaking a top secret government project called the stuknet virus. it wormed its way into computers that ran iran's nuclear program . the leak of it's existence did damage to u.s. efforts against iran . the president vowed to find the person responsible. now comes our report tonight. his name is james cartwright , known as hos, his call sign as a fighter pilot. he is the target of a criminal investigation by the department of justice for a leak of intelligence. we begin with michael isikoff .
>> reporter: cartwright was in the key circle of national security for president obama . cartwright is notified he is the target of a justice department criminal investigation into a highly sensitive leak about a covert u.s. cyber attack on iran's nuclear program .
>> my attitude has been zero tolerance for these kinds of leaks, these are criminal acts when they release information like this.
>> reporter: the "the new york times" last year broke the story that president obama had secretly ordered a stepped up cyber weapon attack, using a computer virus known as stuxnet. and he conceded and oversaw the special operation from the pept dwon. he did not respond for a request for contact. gregory craig said only i have no comment, his attorney. key details about the stuxnet attack, include code word olympic games and success in disabling nearly 1,000 iranian centrifuges.
>> this leak was very damaging. clearly what was going on here was a method and should have been protected and it had devastating consequences.
>> reporter: the fbi originally focused on when the leak came from the white house , but late last year, agents started zeroing in on cartwright, who retired from the pentagon in 2011 . the motives of whoever leaked remain a mystery.
>> many reasons people leak classified information . sometimes to attack a program. sometimes to defend it. many times we just never know.
>> reporter: white house and justice department officials declined to comment on any aspect of the case, but legal sources tell nbc news, federal prosecutors have not issued subpoenas for phone records from "the new york times." brian.


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Before you begin:
- Download and install Bonjour for Windows.
- You should also install the latest printer drivers from your printer manufacturer's website.
If you use Microsoft Windows XP SP3 or later, you can print to a USB printer connected to an AirPort base station.
Follow these steps:
- Open the Bonjour Printer Wizard for Windows XP by choosing Start > All Programs > Bonjour > Bonjour Printer Wizard from the Start Menu.
- Click Next.
- Select your printer.
- Select your printer driver.
- Click Finish.


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Pledge Tas Four Leg Visitor Chair
Pledge Tas Four Leg Visitor Chair Product Information
- Perfect for training rooms, conference suites and waiting rooms
- Ergonomic double curvature back design hugs the back providing additional comfort
- Waterfall seat front alleviates pressure on the thighs while seated
- Durable 4 leg frame with a choice of a black, silver or chrome finish
- Upholstered in a choice of Camira Advantage, Xtreme+ or Nexus fabric or Chieftain Vinyl
- Advantage is a wool blend fabric which features exceptional abrasion resistance and conforms to the BS standards for cigarette and match
- Xtreme+ is a stretch crepe fabric with a difference, 100% recycled polyester which features exceptional abrasion and flammability performance
- Nexus is a sleek & stylish technical knit with 2 dimensional stretch & comfort cushioning
- Chieftain Just Colour Vinyl is a durable & sustainable wipe clean vinyl
- Coordinating operator chairs available - see below
- Delivered fully assembled
- 5 year manufacturers guarantee
For your convenience, we have offered the most popular fabrics and colours. However, should you have a specific fabric or colour requirement we can accommodate you. Please call us for assistance on 0800 2300 230
This chair is made to order especially for you and cannot be cancelled once ordered and is non returnable unless damaged or faulty, which must be reported to us immediately. Fabric swatches are available on request. Please order them if you are unsure of colours or designs
|Seat Depth
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Looks like you are using an old version of Internet Explorer - Please update your browser
The unlikely geographic relationship between these gigantic features suggests a cause and effect relationship between them. This implies a global Martian catastrophe comparable to the Genesis Flood.PDF Download
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Answers in Genesis is an apologetics ministry, dedicated to helping Christians defend their faith and proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ.


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By Kevin Haas, Rockford Register Star, Apr. 5, 2014
ROCKFORD — Aldermen are poised to approve a multimillion-dollar development deal Monday that would give new life to a century-old downtown skyscraper, but it would take just a couple of City Council members with doubts to delay the vote for a week.
Eleven of the 14 have expressed support for a redevelopment agreement with Wisconsin-based Gorman & Co. that would turn the Ziock building, 416 S. Main St., into a hotel and conference center.
Under City Council rules, however, two aldermen in favor of delay would push the vote into next week.
Despite the council's majority, there are lingering questions from some supporters and detractors who want reassurance about the city's ability to pay for its part of the deal.
The agreement would require the city to pay $16.6 million over 20 years to build parking decks and surface parking lots downtown. An additional $2 million would turn South Main from a one-way to a two-way street between Cedar and State streets and to build a pedestrian crossing along the Chestnut Street bridge.
Aldermen may decide to alter the city's 2014-18 capital improvement plan to free money to support the Ziock deal.
Some want to ensure that the city can finance the project without jeopardizing neighborhood road improvements. That could mean delaying a $15.5 million revamp of the Whitman Street interchange and could give aldermen the confidence they need to support the Ziock deal.
Doing the math
Depending on how the financial tinkering pans out, the deal could end up with support from as many as 12 or 13 aldermen.
Ann Thompson-Kelly, D-7, voted against the deal at the committee level last week but has expressed general support for the project. She doesn't think the financial model presented by city administration adds up, so she can't support the redevelopment until it does.
Frank Beach, R-10, also has doubts about the city's ability to finance the project but hasn't ruled out his support.
"I need to make sure in my own mind that we can actually sustain the cost of what we're asking to do," he said. "I think everyone honestly is trying to move toward a comfort zone that is reliable and sustainable."
Linda McNeely, D-13, is opposed to the deal. The project is at the southwestern edge of her ward.
"I don't think the city is in a position to keep spending money," said McNeely, who consistently votes against initiatives proposed by the administration of Mayor Larry Morrissey.
City administrators say the capital plan contains enough money to pay for Ziock-related parking improvements. The $16.6 million in parking improvements would be paid for with $2.8 million in new market tax credits, $9.3 million in parking fees and $4.5 million in sales tax revenue. The city's annual debt payment for the parking improvements would be about $830,000.
If the city agrees to make parking and street improvements, and provides several tax incentives, Gorman & Co. will buy the city-owned Ziock building for $250,000 and spend $52.7 million to turn it into a 150-bed hotel and conference center.
Outside support
Other developers are urging aldermen to approve the deal. Justin Fern of Urban Equity Properties acquired the vacant Hanley building, about a block away from Ziock, and is ready to sink $10 million into its redevelopment if aldermen give their blessing to Ziock.
Fern is not the only one watching the Ziock project closely to determine whether to invest in downtown Rockford. Architect Gary Anderson called the planned redevelopment a "watershed event."
"There is a whole new optimism that we didn't have before, and we've got to fuel that fire and keep the momentum going," he said. "We have not had that kind of atmosphere in downtown Rockford in 40 years."
The Ziock proposal carries a sense of urgency because aldermen must move the deal forward soon to give developers time to take advantage of historic tax credits needed to finance the project.
The project must be completed by Dec. 31, 2016, to use the tax credits. That's an aggressive time frame: Developers must apply for federal and state historic tax credits, create detailed designs, complete a financial package that includes foreign investors, begin to market the conference center to users and otherwise lay the groundwork for construction.
Parking & jobs
City officials say parking has been in short supply in downtown Rockford since 2012, when structural problems forced the closing of 400 spaces on the concourse parking deck attached to the BMO Harris Bank Center.
Making those improvements now would enable the city to leverage its parking costs to gain a $52 million private development, said attorney Michael Schirger of the Friends of Ziock, which is dedicated to the rebirth of the 13-story former factory.
"We have a parking problem. We're going to have to address it. If we address it today, we're going to get a $52.7 million bump," Schirger said. "If we address it tomorrow, those opportunities will be gone. There will be no return on your investment."
Construction of the hotel would support about 250 jobs, developer Gary Gorman said. Once completed, it would employ the equivalent of 75 full-time workers in its first year. By its fifth year, the hotel and conference center would employ or spur the creation of jobs for the equivalent of 280 full-time workers who would earn $5.5 million, according to an analysis by Hunden Strategic Partners on behalf of the city and Rockford Area Convention & Visitors Bureau.
Good for all
The development can help reduce crime by creating opportunities for employment, said Ald. Jeanne Oddo, D-8. Numerous studies link crime to high unemployment.
"People who have a job and are earning money are less likely to go out and take desperate measures," Oddo said. "It will help."
Venita Hervey, D-5, said aldermen must be certain that the financial package behind the project is viable and will have to determine what work will be sacrificed to pay for it. Still, she supports Ziock and hopes it will encourage more development on the city's south and west sides. For years, Hervey's mantra has been "so goes downtown, so goes west Rockford."
"To just say, let it die, let the buildings decay and just forget that part is attached to Rockford — it doesn't work that way," she said. "That formula has never worked for any city that has done it."


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The Texas Rangers' post-bankruptcy plan administrator and the team's former owner have settled a lawsuit over money generated from stadium parking lots.
A court document filed Monday notes the settlement of the suit filed by administrator Alan Jacobs against Tom Hicks. Jacobs had accused Hicks of improperly taking millions of dollars from parking lots he controls at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington and nearby Cowboys Stadium.
The filing provided no details, and attorneys didn't respond to messages Tuesday.
The lawsuit was filed in 2011 in state court in Dallas, accusing Hicks of ignoring team obligations to "build a real estate empire on the backs of the Texas Rangers' players and creditors and fans."
Hicks owned the club from 1998 until it emerged from bankruptcy with new ownership in 2010.


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Surfing has always played host to a cast of colorful characters, and today, Sebastian Zietz is adding to that legacy. In a matter of months, Zietz went from just a dancing, three-thumbed surfer from Kauai to one of the biggest names in the sport. He announced himself to the surfing world in grand fashion in 2012, winning the Triple Crown of Surfing (and qualifying for the WSL World Tour) and being carried up the beach by friends and family aboard a big-wave gun. It's a celebration still talked about to this day – and it was 100 percent in the character of the man the world calls Seabass.
Growing up on Kauai and looking to the likes of Danny Fuller, Dustin Barca, the Irons brothers and his own brothers for inspiration, Zietz developed the full arsenal of wave-riding maneuvers. He's as comfortable launching a massive air at Pine Trees as he is pulling in under the lip of a Backdoor bomb. After finally obtaining a passport (long story), Zietz was ready to travel the world and compete amongst the best surfers in the world. With a couple seasons on the Dream Tour under his belt, Zietz is now ready to establish himself among the best in the world – but the success isn't changing him. The guy wants to win heats and contests, and maybe even one day a world title, but he's going to have a good time along the way – making jokes on the webcast, showing off dance moves and putting a smile on the faces of everyone around him.
Oakley, Future Fins, Channel Islands, Sobe, Sol Republic, Sony
Getting the dance party started!


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Where in the world is Rihanna?!
That's a question journalists traveling with the pop star on her globe-trotting 777 tour have been asking after the singer seemingly scaled back on interviews, sparking grumblings among the press corps.
So now, they're sending out a search party!
There's a streaker on the Rihanna plane!
In a cheeky bit of ribbing, posters were handed out Tuesday on the flight from London to New York pronouncing Rihanna as "Missing."
The wink-wink flyer includes Ri-Ri's stats, birthday and physical description, along with the message: "Rihanna was last seen November 14 on a Boeing 777 giving champagne around. She has not been seen or heard from since. She sports numerous tattoos."
The sentiments certainly weren't lost on the singer: About five minutes before touching down in New York City, the songbird held a casual press conference that touched on some of the grumblings.
"This has been an experience every day--my sleeping was all done on this plane," she said. "I didn't get to spend as much time as I would have liked with you guys. I know you're tired as well."
She later added, "Thank you everybody for making this trip the s--t, honestly," saying that's she'd "do it again, but I'd sit back here so I can see the naked Australian next time."
That naked Australian, of course, would be the plane's resident streaker who dropped trou at the height of the press corps' mini-mutiny.
Rihanna's 777 tour hits Toronto
She was also psyched for her last show, which kicks off Tuesday night at Webster Hall in downtown Manhattan.
"We are going to go all the way--no mercy, that's what I mean," she said. "I'm going to put all my energy into this one show. It doesn't matter if I sleep tomorrow. "
After seven shows in seven cities over seven days? We're betting Ri-Ri could use loads of zzzzz's.


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Peter De Vries once observed that "comedy deals with that portion of our suffering that is exempt from tragedy." Few writers have understood literary comedy as well as De Vries, and few comic novelists have had his grasp of tragedy. The determination and artistry with which he approached these subjects made him hard to categorize, which may be why, little more than a decade after his death, he is pretty much forgotten—a sad note on which to begin.
De Vries was certainly a very funny man, consistently and inventively; a number of his coinages long ago found their uncredited way into the language, among them "Nostalgia ain't what it used to be" and "Deep down, he's shallow." A half century ago, his first acknowledged novel, "The Tunnel of Love," which became a Broadway play and a movie with Doris Day and Gig Young, made him moderately famous. On the basis of that and his next novel, a suburban comedy called "Comfort Me with Apples," Kingsley Amis, in the Times, called De Vries "the funniest serious writer to be found either side of the Atlantic." Soon enough, reviewers were comparing him to Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Ring Lardner, and Max Beerbohm—immensely gratifying judgments and helpful publisher's blurbs, but somehow less than apt. Looking back at De Vries's work (during nearly fifty years, he wrote some two dozen novels, along with parodies, poetry, short stories, and essays), one can see more clearly that his writing was informed as much by sorrow as by wit, and by the idea, as he put it, that "the rarer human sensibility becomes, the closer it gets to the logic of insanity." And sometimes sorrow won out.
On the dust jacket of "Comfort Me with Apples" (1956) is a photograph of a smiling man with dark hair who appears to be in his mid-forties (De Vries was born in 1910), his arms crossed in a fashionable authorial pose. He's wearing a dark tie and a checked tweed jacket, with a handkerchief poking out of his breast pocket. At the lower left is a blond girl, his daughter Emily, who was then about six, looking pleased with herself, as if she had just sneaked into the picture. It's the only dust-jacket photograph of the author in the company of someone else, and what is unsettling about this familial portrait is our knowledge that four years later Emily would be dead, of leukemia.
If it is difficult to think about Peter De Vries without his puns and wisecracks, it is impossible to do so apart from this central event, or from "The Blood of the Lamb" (1961), his sixth novel, which deals with the death of a child; the descriptions of her sickness and dying are as unbearable as anything in modern literature. There were still bursts of laughter, although darker than in any other De Vries book. (At one point, the narrator's father rants, "Black light! Antimatter! It's all around us. We're all headed for it!" and adds, "The only thing that keeps me from killing myself is the will to live.") But after that his fiction had another kind of mirthfulness. He remained a master of loopy plots and malapropisms—"I've been married seventeen years and never had an organism," one character tells an advice columnist—and an observer of spoiled middle-class white America, a place populated by comfortable yet perpetually ill-at-ease heroes. But the word "humorist" no longer seemed exactly right.
I've recently immersed myself in De Vries's books, and the temptation is to stop here for a bit and start repeating De Vriesisms, the written equivalent of nudging a companion as prelude to reading something aloud: " 'Ah, Tanglewood,' I said, hunched over my plate. 'The soft summer nights, the lovers strolling, the Brahms bursting in air.' " Or " 'So you're the new personnel manager,' I said, ogling her. 'I trust you have a little opening for me.' " Then, there are the epigrams, such as "How do you expect mankind to be happy in pairs when it is miserable separately?" or "What I hate about writing is the paperwork."
In the early books, one was carried along by De Vries's unstoppable gags, his gift for spotting cant, fatuousness, and snobbery, and his grandly silly dialogue. When a woman at a party refers to a "real sou'wester," the narrator replies, "I'm from the Mi'est. . . . I went to Nor'estern." And, later, "Have you ever been to We'inster A'ey?" His best sentences were dazzling, and his ear for bad prose was infallible. In "The Tents of Wickedness" (1959), his narrator falls into parodic reveries; in a Dreiser mood, for instance, he thinks, "Now it swept over him in a rushing billow of raw emotion that caused him to thrash on his seat what he wanted to do"; and, "He had not possessed her in the orthodoxly carnal sense, only lent his flesh objectively to her special purpose." Because many of the writers parodied—John P. Marquand, for instance—are no longer much read, some of this today may seem a little puzzling. But it is hard to regard William Faulkner in quite the same way after you read about "locking her forever in that cloistral dream from which that sex who alone must waken her must by the same token be the one most powerless to deliver her."
If humor is perishable—boy, is it perishable!—much of what De Vries wrote has a feeling of permanence; his antennae for absurdity and his verbal intelligence (like Nabokov, De Vries was reared listening to another language, the Dutch that his parents spoke) have outlasted the jokes. In many of his novels, he went over the territory explored by, among others, John Updike, John Cheever, and Richard Yates—marriage and sex, work and family, and all the agonies and pleasures of suburban life in the twentieth century. He wrote about admen and furniture movers, writers, clergymen, and academics. De Vries's men and women were not always perfectly drawn, but they were just as sad and baffled as, say, Cheever's Neddy and Lucinda Merrill or Yates's Frank and April Wheeler; the difference was that De Vries almost always made you laugh.
In 1964, in an interview for a series called "Counterpoint," De Vries made this autobiographical declaration:
**{: .break one} ** I was born in Chicago in 1910 into a Dutch immigrant community which still preserved its old-world ways. My origins would have been little different had my parents never come to America at all, but remained in Holland. I still feel somewhat like a foreigner, and not only for ethnic reasons. Our insularity was two-fold, being a matter of religion as well as nationality. In addition to being immigrants, and not able to mix well with the Chicago Americans around us, we were Dutch Reformed Calvinists who weren't supposed to mix—who, in fact, had considerable trouble mixing with one another. We were the elect, and the elect are barred from everything, you know, except heaven. **
Peter's father hauled ice in the summer and coal in the winter and became a furniture mover; he eventually opened a warehouse business. He wanted his son to join the clergy, and sent him to Calvin College, in Grand Rapids, where he studied English and played basketball. After graduation, Peter returned to Chicago and sold candy on a vending-machine route. He worked for a small newspaper and acted on the radio, sometimes playing gangster parts and, at least once, a wounded gorilla. He also found part-time work, at twenty-five dollars a week, with the magazine Poetry—first as an associate editor, then as co-editor with the poet George Dillon. During the De Vries-Dillon era, the magazine published early work by, among others, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, Randall Jarrell, James Merrill, Robert Duncan, and Karl Shapiro. (Dillon and De Vries were also among the first American editors to print poems by Dylan Thomas.) Between 1940 and 1944, De Vries also wrote three novels—"But Who Wakes the Bugler?" (illustrated by Charles Addams), "The Handsome Heart," and "Angels Can't Do Better," all of which quickly went out of print and which he later refused to list with his other books, because he decided they were "not good enough." In the fall of 1943, he married Katinka Loeser, a contributor to Poetry. Their courtship, according to his son Jon De Vries, probably formed the basis for the early chapters of his 1974 novel, "The Glory of the Hummingbird" (the title from the Eliot poem "Marina"), in which a young man embarrassed by his family commits a series of social blunders while courting a woman from Chicago's Gold Coast.
While De Vries was at Poetry, he wrote an admiring essay, "James Thurber: The Comic Prufrock," in which he seems to have been anticipating his future self. (In his novels, De Vries often referred to Eliot's poetry, and his characters, when the mood struck, sometimes quoted it in a Chicago dialect.) "It is hard to think of anyone who more closely resembles the Prufrock of Eliot than the middle-aged man on the flying trapeze," he wrote. "There is, for instance, the same dominating sense of Predicament. The same painful and fastidious self-inventory; the same detached anxiety; the same immersion in weary minutiae, the same self-disparagement, the same wariness of the evening's company."
Thurber, fifteen years older than De Vries, was flattered; he became a friend and promoter, and gave some of De Vries's shorter pieces to Harold Ross, the editor of The New Yorker. In June of 1944, Thurber wrote to De Vries, saying, "I had handed the whole sheaf of your stuff to Ross who had said, sighing, 'I'll read it, but it won't be any good.' Half hour later he called me in and said, 'Jesus Christ. It is good!' " A job offer followed, and, in the late summer of 1944, Peter and Katinka moved to Greenwich Village.
The meeting with Ross, at the Algonquin, reads like an early De Vries story, and even if it's not true, it has been repeated so often that one wants it to be. Ross, who thought that the name was French and pronounced it "DeVree," asked De Vries if he could do the Race Track department, and De Vries replied, "No, but I can imitate a wounded gorilla." To which Ross allegedly said, "Well, don't imitate it around the office. The place is a zoo the way it is."
The De Vrieses eventually settled in Westport, Connecticut; among their friends and neighbors were J. D. Salinger, Robert Penn Warren, and John Hersey. De Vries became an occasional contributor of New Yorker "casuals" (his first signed piece appeared in May of 1946), and for more than thirty years he worked part time as a cartoon doctor, improving captions and finding gags for artists—a practice that the magazine stopped some time ago. A collection of his short pieces, "No But I Saw the Movie," came out in 1952, and two years later "The Tunnel of Love," whose harebrained plot—of imagined and real adultery and the misfortunes of a gag writer who wants to be a full-fledged cartoonist—is narrated by someone who works at a magazine much like The New Yorker.
It was obvious from the start that De Vries was a student of comedy. Now and then, one of his characters, speaking for the author, would pronounce on the subject: "For with what does humor deal save with that which isn't funny. Or at least isn't funny at the time: broken bones, broken machinery, bad food, hangovers. Husbands. Wives. Brats." A little later, he adds, "Tragedy and comedy have a common root, whose name at last I think I know. Desperation."
Desperation—and the abject humiliation that often accompanies it—is perhaps the central ingredient in De Vries's best books, beginning with "The Mackerel Plaza" (1958). His hero, the Reverend Andrew Mackerel, of the People's Liberal Church, is a man of wavering faith who once preached, "It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us." Mackerel is a widower (his wife died, possibly by foul play, in a boating accident), and he's trying to publish a book with the title "Maturity Comes of Age." As time goes by, he seems less to be in a state of mourning than in one of constant sexual longing. At one point, gazing upon a woman with whom he's acquainted, he thinks:
**{: .break one} ** She was about twenty-five, and naked except for a green skirt and sweater, heavy brown tweed coat, shoes, stockings, and so forth, a scarf knotted at her throat and a brown beret. I regarded her breasts with melancholy, then my eyes began their ordained journey downward. **
"The Mackerel Plaza" was described by one reviewer as having "hasty characterizations and a plot that wouldn't tax the imagination of a Cub Scout Den" (the reviewer nevertheless liked the book); and it certainly depended on the conventions of the time. When Mackerel is spotted at a seedy hotel, his reputation is nearly ruined by gossips. But it is a real novel, and Mackerel is a real character, for whom things get steadily worse, as they tend to do for the protagonists of De Vries's fiction: Knopf rejects Mackerel's book; his prospective mother-in-law believes that he's a scoundrel; and he reaches a pinnacle of De Vriesian embarrassment when he's arrested for fighting with a street preacher. There's even a loss of faith, although Mackerel says, "It's not such a tragedy. Like losing a wooden leg in an accident."
"The Mackerel Plaza" was followed, the next year, by the parody-rich "Tents of Wickedness" and "Through the Fields of Clover," a disjointed and dispirited generational saga, which was dedicated "To Emily with love." By then, his daughter was mortally ill, and, in the summer of 1959, De Vries wrote to Salinger, "One trip through a children's ward and if your faith isn't shaken, you're not the type who deserves any faith." In what he calls a "half alcoholic screed," he went on:
**{: .break one} ** I too have moments of faith, or assurance, or beauty—or maybe just lapses in nihilism. In the morning I'm capable of hearing the music of the spheres—it's when the stars come out that I first hear the howling of eternal nothingness. **
When "The Blood of the Lamb," De Vries's most autobiographical novel, was published, the year after Emily's death, it came as a shock to his readers, accustomed by now to a few hours of amusement. Like De Vries, the narrator of "The Blood of the Lamb" was raised in Chicago in a strict religious family. There was more overlap with the author's life: a stay at a sanatorium for tubercular patients, a father who went a little crazy, a sibling who died young. It was also a novel filled with the forebodings of its narrator, Don Wanderhope, about an ailing lover, about his Chicago family, and, finally, about his daughter:
**{: .break one} ** What, I thought to myself as I gazed at [her], if anything should happen to that creature? Looking back, we seem to detect clairvoyance in certain moments of apprehension, but mine were no more than pass like a chill over the heart of any parent watching his treasure asleep in bed or taking off down the road on a bicycle. **
The novel spills over with angry admonitions. Of a doctor treating his daughter, improvising chemotherapy in its infancy, Wanderhope asks, "Do you believe in God as well as play at him?" As the end draws near, he says, "So death by leukemia is now a local instead of an express. Same run, only a few more stops. But that's medicine, the art of prolonging disease."
In no other novel was De Vries so personal, although, unlike his protagonist, a widower with one dying daughter, Peter and Katinka had three other children: two surviving sons—Jon and Derek—and a daughter, Jan, who died not long ago. And in no other novel did he speak so directly to his readers: "Happiness mellows us, not troubles; pleasure, perhaps, even more than happiness. The sentimental saw belongs among those canards that include also the idea that wisdom comes with age. The old have nothing to tell us; it is more commonly we who are shouting at them, in any case."
"The Blood of the Lamb" was followed by astonishing books, astonishing in their high and low comedy and in their rich assortment of De Vries types: "Reuben, Reuben," "Let Me Count the Ways," "The Vale of Laughter," "The Cat's Pajamas," and "Witch's Milk." These novels were complex and ambitious; it was as if De Vries wanted to announce a final break from the community of American humor writers like Benchley, Perelman, and his beloved Thurber, with whom he had often been grouped.
"Reuben, Reuben," published three years after "The Blood of the Lamb," was twice as long as any earlier De Vries novel; it had three interlocking sections, the best of these narrated by a not quite literate Connecticut chicken farmer named Frank Spofford. Spofford, who has literary ambitions and reflects that the purpose of art is "to exercise the ghost of something," gave De Vries a voice to let loose on all sorts of things, such as the changes he didn't like in his adopted home town, a place "filling up rapidly with ish women and sortof men"—women who make appointments for "five-ish" and their mates. The Spoffords are the natives; they refuse to sell their chickens to commuters, especially those who drive Jaguars and live in fancy Punch Bowl Hollow; they don't bend even when one commuter's wife pleads, "My husband gets off at Stamford." After all, as a Spofford family member points out, "If you let them have any they'll only cook them in red wine." Spofford, though, becomes entranced by the social scene, by two women named Pussy, and by a Scottish poet named Gowan McGland, who is loosely based on Dylan Thomas and sounds at times a good deal like De Vries. (Swinburne's poetry, McGland says, "always reminds me of the work of some young punk who has just read Swinburne.")
Four more novels appeared in the space of just four years, and Derek De Vries recalls the sound of clacking typewriters in Westport, a "stereo effect," as his father and mother wrote at opposite ends of the house. Katinka Loeser's short stories were admired and published in several collections; her fictional account of Emily's death, "Whose Little Girl Are You?," appeared in The New Yorker at about the time of "The Blood of the Lamb."
De Vries would sometimes revisit favored phrases. Gowan McGland, mulling the meaning of life, mutters, "Nobody will ever figure it out. The combination is locked up inside the safe," and Stanley Waltz, in "Let Me Count the Ways" (1965), perfects the line: "The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe." His central characters were becoming ever more hapless—Joe Sandwich, in "The Vale of Laughter" (1967), is a stockbroker with a reputation for recommending what "are known in the trade as laughing stocks"—and in 1968 he told an interviewer, "Why do we have to choose between cursing the gloom and lighting a candle? Why not a little of both?" That was the year he published "The Cat's Pajamas" and "Witch's Milk," his shortest books, bound together. Their sales disappointed Little, Brown, his publisher, which blamed their brevity, and some critics were mystified ("What do we say?" Hugh Kenner, in a somewhat mean-spirited review in the Times, asked). If comic, why so bleak? And, if bleak, why all the jokes? These novels were probably his masterpieces.
The hero of "The Cat's Pajamas," a jaded English professor, is introduced in characteristic De Vries fashion:
**{: .break one} ** Tattersall's most embarrassing moment was one for which any newspaper running such a feature would probably have paid the standard fee, but which he himself would gladly have given his life's savings to have been spared. It was the autumn Homecoming at his college, Chichester. He was attending an afternoon musicale, one of the campus events arranged for the weekend, when he became annoyed by a woman whispering behind him. He turned and glared over his shoulder at her—to find himself looking straight into the eye of an old flame. **
For Hank Tattersall, the sensation was "like falling through ice into boiling water," and it gets no better. His old flame's husband is an advertising man, who tempts Tattersall to leap from academe to Madison Avenue. Tattersall's inspiration is the "commercial of the Absurd," inspired by Beckett and Ionesco: "Are you tired of detergents that don't get your wash really white? Light up a Kent." Eventually, Tattersall, well along the road to self-destruction, finds himself composing an endless commercial that asks, "Have you, along with the late Isak Dinesen, come to see man as an exquisite instrument for converting vintage claret into urine?" Toward the unnerving finale (by now the ruined Tattersall is living with an idiot child and an alcoholic dog), he briefly encounters a social worker named Tillie Shilepsky, through whom De Vries connects "The Cat's Pajamas" to "Witch's Milk."
In "Witch's Milk" (a movie version, "Pete 'n' Tillie," starred Carol Burnett and Walter Matthau), De Vries revisited almost every recurring nightmare of his earlier fiction, including the death of a child. Pete Seltzer, a skilled doubletalker who calls himself "a sonofabitch manqué," is a charming guy, but one mostly roots for Tillie, who has the misfortune of falling for him. Pete, like his creator (De Vries was called Pete by friends), is absorbed by language and its possibilities, slipping at times into Jabberwockian meditations:
**{: .break one} ** They would imagine themselves to be the first family, commissioned by the Almighty the great task of nomenclature. There were no names for anything yet, in Paradise. What would they call those things with spreading boughs? The creatures twittering among them? The beasts whose skins they wore and whose haunches they gnawed as they squatted around the first of human fires, in the semantic dawn? Their yard became full of quormels and sleeths and whappinstances, all flumping through the sweem, or manganating in the queeglestocks. **
"Witch's Milk" covered an astounding range of character and emotion in just a hundred and fifteen pages—at which point Tillie is grateful to Pete for seeing her through "the disillusionments of marriage"—and in it De Vries may have reached the perfect balance of comedy and despair.
After that, De Vries's best work was behind him, although there were terrific sections in many of the dozen novels that followed—especially the first half of "The Glory of the Hummingbird." (The book was disastrously padded, at the urging of his editor at Little, Brown, who told De Vries, "Whoever heard of a novel 114 pages long? Whaddya trying to do, write 'Love Story'? . . . Is there any chance of lengthening this without destroying it?") But more often, by the late seventies, De Vries was repeating himself, and seemed less familiar with his own characters and with the world beyond Westport, which itself was no longer the same. His first-person narrators remained in many ways the children of Midwestern Calvinists, sometimes barely able to finish an adulterous liaison or even to stick with a divorce. At the same time, there was an increasing, sometimes obsessive interest in sex, though he was usually funny about it: in "Madder Music," after many episodes of athletic adultery, his unfaithful narrator confesses, "She's a great lay, but she needs an editor."
To the end, De Vries kept on being incorrect, amusing, and quotable. There are probably writers who ought to count themselves lucky that he didn't do literary criticism—not when he could write a mock reader's report saying, "Every sentence [is] like a mother cat nursing a litter of cozily squirming subordinate clauses." But the jokes did not seem so spontaneous, and it didn't help his reputation that these later novels were often overpraised, which may have had the unintended effect of persuading new readers not to bother and encouraging older ones to wonder why they loved his work in the first place.
De Vries never had much of a public face and probably subscribed to the observation he'd made in "The Mackerel Plaza": "One dreams of the goddess Fame and winds up with the bitch Publicity." Before he began to be recognized by the residents of Westport, he would sometimes wander about and stand in front of storefronts, a blank look on his face. He was eavesdropping, according to his son Jon, picking up conversations for his fiction. He was markedly shy; he hated speaking in public and wouldn't appear on television, although he was invited by Johnny Carson. "He told me, 'Do you want me to come home in a bag?' " Jon recalled.
In the early sixties, a journalist asked De Vries for help in arranging an interview with Salinger, who by then had moved to New Hampshire and was determined to avoid all such encounters. De Vries refused and wrote back, saying, "But why do I limit my feeling to solicitude for Salinger's privacy? After other sorties than your own in recent weeks, by way of my telephone and mailbox, my mood has shifted rather to a concern for my own." He wanted the correspondent to understand the "lust for privacy of some people, and the horror of interrogation." And he recalled a line of Kafka's that Salinger had once quoted, about what "a writer himself does when encouraged to flap away: 'He begins to talk a stench.' " To a question about the "wellsprings of humor," De Vries went on, a little impatiently:
**{: .break one} ** I cannot honestly recall or retrace the conception or development of a single comedic idea I ever had or developed. They vanish from memory after they are written out. Don't ask a cow to analyze milk. One sits in a corner and secretes the stuff. One— But you see how right Kafka is? You have lured me into using the word "comedic," which makes me sick. **
De Vries apparently always had a lingering sense of dread. His daughter Jan once gave him a set of oils, and he painted a tiny man surrounded by enormous dark clouds. At The New Yorker, where he continued to show up a couple of days a week until the early eighties, he is recalled as a tall, quiet, witty man, who usually ate lunch by himself—often at the Blue Ribbon on Forty-fourth Street, close to the magazine's former offices. Jon remembers going to clean out his father's office at about that time and finding what he called "the uniform"—a tan London Fog raincoat—hanging by the door. "It was there when I got there," his father told him.
His last novel, "Peckham's Marbles," came out in 1986, and after that he stopped publishing altogether. It was as if he knew he was saying goodbye to his readers in that novel's Gatsby-like concluding lines: "For we are all swimmers ephemerally buoyed by what will engulf us at the last; still dreaming of islands though the mainland has been lost; swept remorselessly out to sea while we spread our arms to the beautiful shore." Katinka Loeser died in 1991, and a Westport friend, Max Wilk, recalls that De Vries became something of a recluse in the two years before his death, on September 28, 1993. All his books are out of print—a gloomy fact of modern literary life.
"Nonsense is such a difficult art!" De Vries once wrote, and to contemporary readers he is in many ways a mystifying figure, perhaps because he used laughter to disguise so much while letting so much poke through—especially his feelings of desolation and his sense of foreboding. In a letter to Thurber after Emily's death, he wrote:
**{: .break one} ** Your words are of the kind that remind us that words are not necessary, that we are all side by side through all these things without it having to be said. We needn't look far for the cue to courage. When Emily no longer had any spine left she supported herself on her sternum. We can do no less. We all have to climb out of the pit of desolation, or what is more likely, manage to live in it, planting our flowers among the ashes and squirting them with our gaiety. **
"The Blood of the Lamb" was dedicated to his three surviving children—"Jan, Jonny and Derek." After that, the dedication page in his novels was left blank. ♦


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5/3/2011 »


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After 30 war-torn years, northern Sri Lanka is opening up to tourism. Is it too soon to visit its friendly villages and unspoilt beaches?
Beautiful, yet horrible. For much of the past 30 years, it seems to me, the island of Sri Lanka has lived in a similarly sour-sweet atmosphere. There is a smiling side to the place: a land of coconut-fringed beaches, jungled hills and a colourful culture that varying numbers of tourists have been prepared to visit, the variation depending on how much the other, much darker, side has intruded. And the other side has certainly been dark: suicide bombings, ethnic hatreds and cleansings, tales of death squads and unmarked mass graves; most of all the relentless, apparently endless, horror of a big bad war in the north.
But now that war is over. The Tamil Tigers (LTTE – Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) are defeated and their hopes of a separate Tamil state crushed. And with that defeat, millions of acres of pristine beach and jungle in the northern third of the island have opened up to the kind of tourism enjoyed by the southern part of the island for the past three decades.
A glance at a map of the north draws the eye to two obvious protagonists in the coming battle for the tourist dollar. In the far north there is Jaffna, with its huge lagoons and beaches, but that area is still tricky to access, requiring a permit. On the west, there is Mannar island, a 35km spit of sand and coconut trees connected to the mainland by a causeway. Mostly inhabited by Tamil Catholics, it was always government-held during the war, but often surrounded by Tigers territory. Both sides in the conflict committed atrocities: in June 2006, after an attack by the Tigers left 30 sailors from the Sri Lankan navy dead, the church in a nearby fishing village called Pesalai came under a hail of gunfire that killed six people. Locals and independent witnesses held the navy responsible.
It is to Pesalai that I am heading with Sidantha, for a homestay arranged by Sri Lankan specialist tour operator Experience Travel. Homestays are still a rarity in these parts, where tourism is starting from almost zero.
No tourists for 3 decades
"There haven't been tourists in Mannar for three decades," says Sid. "Someone said two Dutchmen turned up on bikes last year, but apart from that, nothing, till you." Watch out for new editions of guidebooks because change will come quickly.
It is late at night by the time we rattle across the causeway and pass Mannar town, a dilapidated former colonial outpost and the main settlement on the island. The Portuguese built a fort here in 1560, no doubt drawn by the presence of rich pearl beds in the shallow seas nearby. It's not pearls we want, however, but cold beer, something not easily found as there are no bars, only unmarked beer shops tucked away down darkened lanes. Eventually we locate one by the crowd outside: boys selling roasted chickpeas wrapped in scraps of newspaper, and tipsy fishermen who shout good-natured greetings.
We buy supplies, then negotiate the last 15km to Pesalai. Our house is a simple bungalow in a sandy lane surrounded by coconut palms. We wash in delicious cool water hauled up in a bucket from the well, say a brief hello to our hosts, who live opposite, and fall asleep in seconds.
Rohan wants me to try a local favourite, curried squid, and goes off in search. Sid and I get some breakfast: tea and rotis, all the time saying hello to people eager to talk. One man takes me to see the church: a pink wedding cake of a building pockmarked with bullet holes and shrapnel wounds. Everyone here has a story: a house flattened by explosives, a family member abducted and never seen again, or – more often – the urban-legend-tale of the man who got away and is now sending money back from Europe or America.
Out on the other side of the island, a few miles away, we find the fishermen working with beach nets: singing and hauling together on long lines to pull in a vast silvery bag of fish. I join in, at least for the pulling, not the songs. These people look wiry and fit: products of a lifetime eating just fish and rice. There has not, to be honest, been a great deal else for a long time. The beach is perfectly clean and natural, the waves gentle – unlike on the east coast of Sri Lanka, which can be dangerously rough.
Further along the broad beach we meet a community of Singhalese fisher people who spend a season here every year, living in palm thatch huts and catching the seasonal fish runs. Everywhere I'm made aware of how intertwined and interdependent the people are. There are Tamils married to Singhalese, Hindus to Christians or Buddhists. Our host family are Singhalese who came from the south 60 years ago, settled on Mannar and became – linguistically and culturally – Tamil. In a war that was driven by ethnic mistrust and racist propaganda, they suffered. Now, however, they look like a hope for the future.
Untouched by tourism
A couple more days on the island are spent eating seafood, visiting sites such as the ancient baobabs brought by Arab seafarers from Africa in the 15th century and the supposed graves of Adam and Eve at the tip of the island, near what is known as Adam's Bridge – a series of sandbanks that lead all the way to India 20 miles away. If and when a promised ferry service from Mannar to India begins, the island will undoubtedly clamber aboard the backpacker trail, losing perhaps a little of its charming naivety. For the moment, it is untouched by tourism: I've only been here a short time, but people wave and shout greetings like I'm an old friend. It's this sense of being absorbed, easily and comfortably, into a community that creates the magic in this place.
On a long beach we find the ruins of a house built by the first English governor, Sir Frederick North, in 1804. It has now mostly tumbled into the waves. In the nearby village of Arippu there are further poignant reminders of former times in the 17th-century Dutch fort. First is a grave – "Charles Lays – died of sunstroke 1878" – and then a plaque for Robert Knox, an English sailor who was held captive on the island by the Rajah of Kandy for 19 years before he managed to escape to this lonely Dutch outpost in 1679. Back in London he wrote a bestseller and the first account of the island in English, incidentally introducing the word Buddha to the English language. Knox's experiences also helped feed the newly coined ideal of a tropical island as a paradise, the very ideal that drives much of Sri Lankan tourism today.
Contrast marked
My time on Mannar is over and I head across the island, dipping south into what is, and was, tourist territory. The contrast is marked: less military and police, more traffic and bustle. The people are certainly more accustomed to visitors. I stop at two lovely eco-retreats: first the Mudhouse, a place that is gathering a reputation for superb service matched with total simplicity. I sleep under a thatched shelter and mozzie net in the middle of the jungle, waking to birdsong and a man on a bicycle with a tea tray. The second is Back of Beyond, a good wildlife and bird-watching jungle retreat at Pidurangala, equally simple and handy for visiting the mountain fortress at Sigiriya and the superb cave temples of Dambulla.
Heading north and east to the coast, I'm back into what were Tigers danger areas, but now the problem is flood-damaged roads after a particularly heavy monsoon season. Nevertheless, freedom from war has brought big ambitions for tourism. Many hotels are being proposed, some of them vast and costly. Despite the fact that most development is coming from Singhalese businessmen, often with political connections, local Tamils that I spoke to did not mind. Even at Santhively, near the east-coast port of Batticaloa, where fishermen are being evicted from the beach, ostensibly to prevent tsunami losses, but coincidentally to make way for a hotel, they are welcoming the construction. "It's good," they tell me. "We want progress." What benefit they will ever get remains to be seen.
At Trincomalee, a vibrant port city possessed of a magnificent anchorage, I bump into Mark Davis, gardener with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. "We couldn't get in here for 20 years," he tells me. "It was just too dangerous."
The cemetery holds 362 graves from the second world war. Mark's workers are young men, the sort who not so long ago might have expected to be fighting themselves on one side or the other. Now they are eagerly learning the trade of gardening, discussing plantings and turf types. For all the talk of tourism development, it seems appropriate that the most peaceful and uncontroversial first steps in economic progress that I have found are taking place here, in a war cemetery. (The Guardian)


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Hey guys, we just got back from Destin & had a terrific time. It was such a sweet time of making memories with just the 4 of us. This post has a lot of pictures, so here we go.
This was just before they walked out onto the beach. Levi had never seen the beach before.
So happy.
The entire first 10 minutes of Lincoln being out in the ocean, he was screaming at the top of his lungs. Filled with joy. It was hilarious. And also kinda embarrassing.
Taking it all in.
This is what Levi looked like while Ben had Lincoln out in the boat. So sad.
And finally, he got his chance to go with Dad.
Mom and the boys.
Water fight.
Highlight of Lincoln's day.
the boys having lunch with the lobster, AKA Ben.
I can't believe there's only about 9 days of school left. I nearly have a first grader! Unbelievable how fast this year went by. He has loved every minute of it, & Levi has loved his preschool that will end next week. I'm sad to see another year go by, but am so excited for the summer. We've got lots of fun things planned. Busy busy busy!


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Asked by Zachary, Portsmouth, Rhode Island
I'm a 14-year-old boy and I was told that I have Asperger's syndrome. The doctors told us that I have the IQ of a borderline genius. On average what are the chances of that happening?
Living Well Expert
Dr. Jennifer Shu
Children's Medical Group
Thanks for your question. In general, there is a small chance of being considered a borderline genius or better, maybe about 5% or so. But let's first talk a little about your diagnosis and then we will put that into perspective with the IQ (intelligence quotient).
As you probably learned, Asperger's syndrome or disorder is considered to be part of the spectrum of autistic disorders but by definition does not include intellectual disabilities.
Since language and social delays are often not noticeable before about age 3, Asperger's disorder is typically diagnosed later than autism -- on average around 11 years according to one study, although other reports show that the diagnosis usually occurs by age 6 -- so your diagnosis at 14 years old is not out of the ordinary.
It is unclear how common Asperger's disorder is, but estimates range anywhere from 1 in 250 to 1 in 10,000 children. It is diagnosed roughly five times more often in boys than in girls, and it's quite likely that many people in America have Asperger's syndrome without having a diagnosis.
There are many different ways to test a person's intelligence, as well as different scales for interpreting the scores. People who test in the top 2% to 3% may be considered high scorers and possibly labeled as a genius.
For example, one scale uses a score of 100 as average and follows a bell-shaped curve so that 95% of the population would test between 70 and 130 points. Some scales state that scores in the 130 to 140 range might be considered gifted or near genius or other such labels while scores above 140 might be considered genius, but these tests and scales vary greatly.
Depending on how your doctors determined your IQ status, you likely scored in one of the higher intelligence ranges, which has a relatively small chance of happening, but since people with Asperger's are, by definition, at least of average intelligence, your score is a little less of a surprise.
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Giants safety Antrel Rolle says that the Giants can't be beat.
While that sounds more like the coach of the other team that calls the Meadowlands home than it sounds like a member of the team that's coached by a man whose mantra is that talk is cheap, there's plenty of fuel for Rolle's argument right now.
The Giants have crushed four straight opponents by hitting big plays on offense and letting loose with a defense that's finally healthy after being undermanned for much of the year.
So they are playing extremely well. Does that mean Rolle is right?
U.S. & World
Not at all. The 49ers haven't exactly been backing their way through the opposition this season. They beat the Saints up on Saturday and they've been doing that to just about every team they've faced en route to this moment.
That is going to force the Giants to play differently than they've played in their first two playoff games. They easily outmuscled both the Falcons and the Packers, but that's not going to happen this time around. Jim Harbaugh has spent his entire first year installing a tough, confident identity in the 49ers and they aren't going to be cowed by facing a team they already beat this season even if that team is playing significantly better than they were earlier this year.
49ers Offense vs. Giants Defense: Winning will be much easier if they can control the pace of the game. The Giants' defensive turnaround has come about because their pass rush has been able to throw their opponents off their game and the 49ers need to do the same thing this weekend by running the ball well. Frank Gore and Kendall Hunter are both good backs, but the Niners have a creative running game that makes good use of Alex Smith and Ted Ginn to help keep defenses from keying on any one place.
A strong run game will check the Giants' defensive aggressiveness and give Smith a chance to make some throws. That's key, because the 49ers aren't a great pass blocking team and Smith will need time to make things develop. The Saints made it easy to get the ball to Vernon Davis by bringing the house, but the Giants don't blitz that often and they will likely pay special attention to Davis.
That means the wide receivers will have to make plays. They'll have opportunities against a mediocre Giants secondary, especially Rolle in the slot, but Michael Crabtree and Ted Ginn will have to actually catch the ball this week. That's not a given, especially if the forecasted rain and wind arrive at Candlestick on Sunday.
Giants Offense vs. 49ers Defense: Big plays have been playing a big role for the Giants in recent weeks. Victor Cruz and Hakeem Nicks have turned games around by making short completions into long touchdowns, usually with the help of horrendous tackling by the opposition. The 49ers, safety Donte Whitner in particular, are succeptible to that sort of thing which should give Eli Manning chances over the course of the game.
But, like Smith, Manning is going to need some help when it comes to making those plays. The Giants offensive line has not shown the same kind of improvement as the rest of the team and the Niners won't make life easier on Manning by blitzing on Sunday. They need just four players to make life hard on quarterbacks and the Justin Smith/Aldon Smith combo is going to be very hard for the Giants to stop.
Manning has been very good against blitzes this year, but his production isn't as good when facing teams that drop seven into coverage while creating pressure. There aren't easy spots to exploit in the secondary and that can lead to turnovers. Without the same likelihood of a running game checking 49ers aggressiveness, the Giants line will be crucial to their chances on Sunday.
Special Teams: The 49ers have an edge here, but it is hard to feel too confident about their chances if they keep settling for David Akers field goals. Weather is the big wild card here. If the game is played in wind and slop, field position will be a big issue, so a bad punt or short kickoff could swing this game.
Coaching: There aren't enough superlatives available for the job that Harbaugh has done with the 49ers this season, but that isn't enough to sway this matchup in his favor. Coughlin has done a remarkable job keeping his team together in the face of awful loses and has found a way to get them playing their best football at the right moment.
Key Stat: Turnovers were a big reason why both of these teams advanced to this game, and they will likely play a big role in deciding who gets to the Super Bowl. The 49ers have thrived in this department all season as they've avoided them on offense while forcing plenty on defense, as evidenced by Manning's two picks in the 27-20 Niners win earlier this season. In a game that projects to be as close as this one, a turnover could well wind up deciding who moves on to Indianapolis.
Josh Alper is a writer living in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter and he is also a contributor to Pro Football Talk.


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Jun 30, 2019
STAR Aquatics is currently accepting applications for Part Time Coaching & Swim School Instructor positions as well as a Swim School Coordinator. STAR is a year round swim program serving swimmers of all levels by offering programs in competitive swimming, non-competitive swim groups and lessons programs. STAR Aquatics is a Level 3 Program in USA Swimming's Club Recognition Program and has a history of developing young athletes. Our Mission: "Star Aquatics exists solely for the benefit of the swimmer. Our goal is to help individuals reach their full potential in life through swimming, sportsmanship, and team involvement. We strive to develop the person within the athlete." We do this through teaching and stroke development and most importantly valuing the importance of the relationship we develop with our swimmers. STAR is looking for individuals who are energetic, knowledgeable, ethical, and able to communicate with parents, fellow coaches and swimmers of all ages. Candidates should be organized, professional and understand the importance of leading by example while inspiring a love for swimming and healthy competition. You must be able to work as part of a coaching team and have or be willing to get applicable certifications (first aid, CPR, safety training for swim coaches, etc.). Responsibilities include: writing and coaching practices, communicating with parents, attending meets as scheduled, entering swimmers in events for swim meets based on practice agenda's and performance and helping to plan and organize team activities and events.. - Application Deadline – Accepting until positions are filled - Interested candidates should send resume to: STAR Aquatics, Attn. Jay Dodson, PO Box 16311, High Point, NC 27261 or email to firstname.lastname@example.com - Pay Rate will depend on experience and responsibilities - Start Date could range from immediate through the middle of June Questions should be directed to Head Coach, Jay Dodson at (336)337-0169.
STAR Aquatics Greensboro-High Point, NC Part time