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Gregorio's Trattoria - Reston
Top Tags:
Great food
Food was decent but service lacking as were seemingly understaffed. At that price point, I feel there are better options out there.
What a disappointment. First, I didn't need a reservation which is not a major concern but they don't even use a hostess - seat yourself. That's still not a problem but after seating myself, I got the feeling I was interrupting something. I never felt welcome and seemed urged to leave as soon as possible. The cheese sticks were tasteless, the marinara was like water, the pasta carbonara was not thoroughly cooked and the tea was like pool water. Don't go. The Mall Friday's for lunch the next day was 100 times better.
Very handicap and family friendly. The lasagna is great. Sis & BiL loved their salmons. Nephew enjoyed his personal pizza. I enjoyed my Fettucini Alfredo. Reasonable prices are a bonus.
We avoided this place since it looked like a chain restaurant. It isn't but the food and service are just like one. Prices are higher than a chain though. Salads are good. Good drink selection. Food is varied. But the execution is just not good. Flavorless. Have you heard of spices other than salt? We won't be back.
Always wonderful and such a great family spot!
Gregorio's is my husband's and my absolute favorite place to dine. The food is always fresh, delicious and exceptional.
Another great experience. Food was delicious. The only thing is they brought adult size drinks for our kids and I sent them back for kid sized.
Only 2 servers. Service was pleasant but very slow
The waiters has very kind, food was delicious. It was not noisy, we loved the pizza too.
This was our first experience at this restaurant. It was a lot smaller than I thought it would be BUT the food was amazing. Everything was sooo good. We left with full bellies even my 9 year old who is always hungry. If it wasn't 30 minutes away from our house, we would be visiting it a lot more. We were surprised at the bill though. The side salad wasn't included with the meal and that was not told to us beforehand. The waiter just asked if we wanted a side salad. Even though we were only a family of 4 a 20% gratuity was automatically included. This will not stop us from going back. We will keep all of this in mind.
it was okay. service was good, food was alright. not sure if it was worth the price or the drive
This is our second time visiting Gregorio's. The food is good -- the appetizers were great (muscles and calamari). The muscles in marinara on both occasions were some of the best around. Saturday is also half price bottle of wine night -- unheard of for a weekend so thanks for that! The portions are huge -- too much for almost anyone to eat in one seating so plan for leftovers. The place is kind of big and seems more like a post-soccer game hangout, but it is good for a Saturday night dinner with friends too. The servers are all working hard, but there's something wrong there -- not enough of them or they are overstretched so that items come slowly and requests for more water, etc. happen regularly. Grated parm was never offered (same for coffee and dessert -- not that we had room, but it would have been nice to be asked). It's symptomatic of a pizza post-soccer place that they're under staffed. We will go again though so as long as you are aware, enjoy!
I have recommended Gregorio's Trattoria to family and friends, and will continue to do so. The staff is friendly and efficient, and the food is terrific! Gregorio's is one of my favorite places.
Should not be missed. Real Northern Italian food that will satisfy beyond words. My favorite is the Veal Piccata . My husbands is the Bolagnese. We also love the meat tray appetizer. One of these days (5 years later) I will make it to dessert.
Although e arrived last for reservation we were seated promptly amid a mostly full restaurant. The doors came timely and we delicious. We would try this establishment again.
We had the Valentine Special. The waiter could not explain the choices.
we were charged extra for our choices. We had to ask for plates twice and water twice.
Waiter was in a hurry most of the time and never asked how we were doing. When we needed sometime, we had to flag him down.
Great little place, with wonderful people. Great for a casual dinning. The veal was great as well as all the appetizers that we had. The only knock, we wish they had a better wine list.
Food, as always, was good - and our server was particularly attentive, friendly, and courteous. It has a neighborhood feel and it is easy to unwind there after a tough day. This remains our local "go to" place for casual Italian comfort food.
We've been looking for a neighborhood Italian restaurant that is friendly, decent food, professional servers at a reasonable price that is not in RTC. Gregorio's fits the bill nicely. A group of 5 of us went on a recent Saturday night after some other reservations fell through. Seated promptly -- dining room is a bit bright and loud but nicely decorated. We tried several seafood appetizers (fresh and not overcooked), pasta dishes and pizza as well as a white and red wine selection. All of it was good -- nothing great, but all worth a trip back. We will try it out again; might become our new local favorite!
Excellent Italian food and a very healthy wine pour! Great service and value!
Poor service. Bread was hard the first time. Then they brought bread which was hard and cold. Main entree was ok.
Nice surprise. Pleasant location, good food for moderate price. Service was good; waiter was professional and friendly.
a True hidden gem. we were on Vacation and wanted Italian Food. From the outside it is very unassuming, but the inside is well decorated. The Staff is very friendly and good. The food was excellent, true Italian Cuisine and executed wiht perfection.
The food was delicious - I had spaghetti and meatballs and the marinara sauce was great! The service was also good. Great value - huge portions.
Sauces on pasta and salad dressings were both too sweet.
This is the se one time we have been here with our grand kids - six and eight. The food is AMAZING, however the service really sucks!!! We put in the kids orders and one pizza came out in twenty minutes and the other took 45 minutes!! Drinks took forever. The restaurant was not full. Seems they do a big carry out business and maybe the kitchen can't keep both running smoothly.
Great experience. Temperature was a little chilly but otherwise a very nice experience. Will definitely return.
Second time around didn't disappoint. Celebrated my birthday a month ago and returned to enjoy another delicious meal with friends as we celebrated my husbands birthday. The meal starts with a bread basket that is out of this world with dipping sauce that is great. Next the four of us shared a generous portion of calamari which was cooked perfect. For our main course my husband and I had the pork chop which will have again and again and our friends ordered a shrimp dish and chicken marsala which they loved too. The night was complete with a slice of Tiramisu. We all agree this is the best Tiramisu we've ever had so be sure to check it out the next time you go 😋. Thanks Adrienne for welcoming us with open arms.
Tonight my husband and I together with our friends and their daughter celebrated my birthday. From the bread basket through the dessert everything was delicious. It was our first time, but not our last. I loved my salmon and my husbands pork chop was awesome. Our friends had veal parm, lasagna and another salmon option. Looking forward to going again soon.
First time here. Food was delicious and very large portions, even the kids meal. The kitchen was annoyingly slow. 45 minutes to get served but our one kids pizza came out in 15 minutes so he was done before everyone else was served. Other than that the food was amazingly delicious. Will go again.
I had a friend visiting from another country and was hoping to have a pleasant Italian meal. From the beginning the experience was horrible. First, they told us that we had canceled our reservation which was definitely not true.
I then asked for a split of wine and the waiter brought an unopened bottle and walked away. When I finally got his attention after 10 min, I asked him for a glass and he brought one soon after but didn't even apologize. He did not open the bottle. We ordered food which was overcooked and seemed like it must have been a frozen product to start as it came to fast as to have been made after we ordered. We ate very little of it. I also ordered a salad which I never received. We complained to the manager about the service and the food. He proceeded to take 20% off of a 60 bill. I think this was ridiculous as he could see we ate nothing. I will not be returning to this restaurant.
Unfortunately we were pretty disappointed with our experience. The restaurant is extremely bright for dinner and the service was disorganized. They must of come at least 3 separate times to our table with someone else's food and when our food came out, we watched them bring it around the restaurant before we hailed them down saying it was probably ours. The food was decent (I'm Italian and it's not authentic Italian in my opinion) but the prices were high for the quality.
Very professional staff, great service and the food was delicious. So reasonably priced too!
Gregorio's is a true neighborhood gem! It's a quiet restaurant with great Italian food. The service is friendly and efficient, and the ambiance is cozy and comfortable.
We had a lovely lunch celebrating a friend's new job. Gregorio's is comfortable, cozy, and relaxed. The staff is very friendly and knowledgeable, and there is a varied menu selection. Food is delicious!
Waiters care.
They hustle.
I ordered the chicken parm and I am not sure if it was veal.
Overall, some of the dishes were good-pork chop, veal picatta, but soup, risotto, linguini with vegetable were tasteless. I've noticed the decline in the food taste over the past year. Sorry but it's not good Italian food. I do think their pizza is good. Not worth the price of admission.
We went to Gregorio's for Valentine's Day. Our drinks came promptly as did the salad. The salad was wilted and not very appetizing. The entrees were very delayed in coming and our server appeared to be actively avoiding our table. We were only offered a second drink after the entrees arrived. When the entrees finally arrived, they were good, but I had to give my husband my water as his water glass did not get refilled and we couldn't catch the server's attention. Although it was Valentines Day and we had planned on ordering dessert, we didn't feel like staying any longer and called it a night. The experience was not particularly enjoyable, which is disappointing as the food was not bad overall.
Dinner was good but dessert was not. The tiramisu was covered in cinnamon instead of chocolate. The layers had barely any (if any at all) espresso, chocolate, or liqueur flavor. It was definitely not a traditional Italian tiramisu, although it was a tasty cinnamon cream cake.


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Northampton LTC
Summer19 Adult Improvers Sat
27th Apr–27th Jul 2019
Please note: No session 1st June
NLTC is a thriving, busy club, located just off the Wellingborough Road in Northampton, with 6 floodlit courts and a mini-court with a practice wall, alongside a recently built clubhouse with a bar, lounge area, changing rooms with shower facilities and, most importantly, a friendly atmosphere.
Premier Tennis is pleased to be working in partnership with Northampton Tennis Coaching (NTC) to get more people playing tennis across the town. Led by Simon Gallo, the NTC team is committed to ensuring players of all ages and abilities feel welcomed and get the most from their tennis – physically, mentally and socially. Find out more about opportunities to play in Northampton's parks, Northampton LTC, Rushmere TC or Local Tennis Leagues.

subset: commoncrawl


text: hmmm sounds strange. I did have a Naish helix 14 and that one had realy light bar pressure, a bit like my switch elements. The closest ive been to an Epic kite is the old Eclipse Thruster 16 (2008 version), wich was a fantastic kite, in book anyway. I would rate the barpressure at "medium" on that one.Fragger wrote:Dont know if another bar fits the kite. You can mail Seb.Cattelan for it,hes the designer. @telekiter,bar pressure is high indeed. Ive ridden Epic kites and that was medium. Maybe bit like Ocean Rodeo and Naish. So i can not reccomend the kite for you, sry!


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Want to meet the world's top trail runner and hear him share his experiences? Now's your chance as Kilian Jornet is on tour.
Over 1200 people attended two presentations held in Aosta Valley, Italy recently. The events were the second stop of the Summits of My Life World Tour that will visit different cities around the world
The Aosta Valley was an obvious choice, Kilian said: "We are at the foot of the Matterhorn, which is one of the summits of the project and where we broke the record last year. This experience is widely portrayed in Déjame Vivir and we thought it would be the perfect place to thank the people of Aosta Valley for their help the day of the record."
Besides Jornet, the event was also attended by Bruno Brunod, a pioneer in sky running and former record holder of the Matterhorn. After a brief conversation among them, the audience was able to enjoy the movie and they could finally exchange some words with Jornet.
He explained: "It has been a beautiful night. I met the guides who helped me with the record as well as many people who came to cheer me up. It has been a great evening and I hope that other presentations will be just as great."
This presentation is part of the Summits of My Life World Tour, which started last month in Barcelona and made several stops around the world to present the new film. The next stop will be on 11th August in Diablerets (Switzerland) at 6 pm.
The film can be downloaded here.


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Decide.com Answers the 'Buy Now?' Quandary
It's a question that confounds most online shoppers. Should you buy now or try to guess when the price is right? Katie Boehret joins digits with a review of Decide.com.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.
... I ... so sir I'm not ... aam or some other e-commerce a ... one question we all face is ... to buy that ... product right now would you wait and see if the prices fall for get better prices from other side well there's a new website that helps people decide on is called the SA dot com ... thank you to read from Washington is with us today ... and she has actually ... tested in the service ... and she's here to tells all but as a welcome Katie was they decide the calm ... and there ... I've ... been around for a couple years now but airlines are regionally focused on consumer technology gadgets ... anything fixed and it just yesterday they released this entire new category to triple the number of products they offer ... an as category B E and K Fed is of a particularly difficult category for people to buy ... products from because they don't know what you're doing if it never had a kid before ... and DIS Einstein's in there and they tell people especially ... when they're not the product is going to go up in price that down embrace ... the OS and river views from across the lab that all sorts of retailers ... see don't have to do the legwork yourself though ... the year ... to compiling price is interviews from friends and a Kieron spreadsheets this is a place that she gotta find all those reviews in one spot the fish and so it's not just the ... classic price comparison site but it's more of a price ... prediction are forecasting site ... to have any sense for like how accurate these protections are because ... they are I've read Nate Silver ... a lot of forecasting is just plain wrong ... yes ... they say are over eighty percent accurate this is a company that ... could be the founder created fair past ... an out of the company that Micra soft bought a few years ago ... it incorporated that into being travel and with their assets is it predicts whether or not your ticket for an airline will dial up or down and whether now's a good time to buy a run recently ... so this is based on hundreds of data planes they really have worked hard on this to get it right it was like a ten year process to create this algorithm ... and Daddy steadied things like new now say the entire product lifecycle fell from when the stroller originally alliance three years ago to now that's a great start with specific dates ... or something like a badass Apple MacBook Air which people get really frustrated by buying ... it they bought it last weekend CNN just ... be on Monday they announced a new MacBook air ... and really people off the difference they can look at this I can see that in the product lifecycle this is actually a normal time for Apple to bring out and not another ... bad math but in this area so if they could save some money right ... so were you able to actually ... do some tests and purchase some product and then what ... in a later date to see if they actually ... give you an actor production ... yet well at eight zero in fable guarantee you that I am drops so if you buy it at a high rate saying goes down even further enable a new different stuff and you'd be at the difference via PayPal when they hit send units that ... sell out I didn't have that acts and CEO in the past two weeks of buying something frankly I was traveling a little bit but I did set up alerts over the past two weeks that I would be notified if the price is going to drop ... or a lot at the end I found it fascinating that for example there's the Bob stroller that the very high and running stroller ... those offered for three hundred and twelve dollars I website I've never heard of but is perfectly with chance ... and that Nordstrom dot com it was four hundred and ninety nine dollars so ... that's quite a difference there for people who if they just were familiar and Nordstrom ... they might not know any better they might think that this is the price of the stroller for is that okay so it sounds like this awesome potential value ... isn't isn't growing quickly is going fast is it is a developing the um pretty good business based on this ... yes they found there at twenty six am to one hundred million projects by the end of this year ... and early next year the claims data cars into next year so it should be interesting to see where decide as ... all right well hey thanks for fellas and on that and ... a ... full foot will make some smart decisions now ... claims to despise dot com


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Yamaha Fascino On Road Price in ShikohabadChange
|On Road Price
|Ex Showroom Price
|RTO + Others
|Fascino Darknight Edition
|Rs. 68,808
|Rs. 57,523
|Rs. 5,752.00
|Rs. 5,533
|Fascino Standard
|Rs. 68,808
|Rs. 57,523
|Rs. 5,752.00
|Rs. 5,533
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Yamaha Fascino Price in Shikohabad
Yamaha Fascino price in Shikohabad starts from Rs. 57,523 (Ex-showroom) on 16th December 2019. Check on road price (Ex-showroom + RTO + Insurance) of all Fascino variants in Shikohabad. The top-end variant Yamaha Fascino Standard is priced at Rs. 57,523. Yamaha Fascino's top competitors are TVS Jupiter (price starting at Rs. 55,121 in Shikohabad) and Yamaha Alpha (price starting at Rs. 53,102 in Shikohabad).
Price of Fascino Competitors
Honda Activa 5G
Rs. 55,470Activa 5G On Road Price Compare with Fascino
Honda Dio
Rs. 53,777Dio On Road Price Compare with Fascino
Suzuki Access 125
Rs. 57,909Access 125 On Road Price Compare with Fascino
TVS Jupiter
Rs. 55,121Jupiter On Road Price Compare with Fascino
Yamaha Alpha
Rs. 53,102Alpha On Road Price Compare with Fascino
Vespa VXL 125
Rs. 79,783VXL 125 On Road Price Compare with Fascino
Yamaha Ray ZR
Rs. 54,881Ray ZR On Road Price Compare with Fascino
Rs. 62,137NTORQ On Road Price Compare with Fascino
Hero Duet
Rs. 48,280Duet On Road Price Compare with Fascino
Hero Maestro Edge
Rs. 53,730Maestro Edge On Road Price Compare with Fascino
Yamaha Fascino Overview
Best Scooters in India
Honda Activa 5G Price
Rs. 55,470
Honda Dio Price
Rs. 53,777
Suzuki Access 125 Price
Rs. 57,909
Honda 2019 Activa 125 BS6 Price
Rs. 67,490
TVS NTORQ 125 Price
Rs. 62,137
TVS Jupiter Price
Rs. 55,121
TVS BS6 Jupiter Price
Rs. 69,782
Honda Activa 125 Price
Rs. 61,186
TVS XL100 Price
Rs. 29,990
Must Read Questions & Answers Before Buying Fascino
- Following articles will help: - Two Wheeler Tyre Guide: https://www.zigwheels.com/guide/four-wheeler-tyre-guide/two-wheeler-tyre-guide/19093/ - The do-it-yourself bike cleaning/polishing guide: https://www.zigwheels.com/guide/two-wheeler-maintenance-guide/the-doityourself-bike-cleaningpolishing-guide/12958/ - Bike electrical system care and maintenance tips: https://www.zigwheels.com/guide/two-wheeler-maintenance-guide/bike-electrical-system-care-and-maintenance-tips/14670/ - Bike battery maintenance tips: https://www.zigwheels.com/guide/two-wheeler-maintenance-guide/bike-battery-maintenance-tips/14667/ : By Zigwheels | 10 months ago
- That's all depends on how much you love your scooter : By Mamar | 4 months ago
- I don't know about hero pleasure. Fascino is good with great pickup and mileage. Maintance lil high after 10k Km's : By Subscribers | 3 days ago
- According to my view of point Fasino is ruling th market as I found out with the new design and class look. Pleasure is also good. But in the long run you can choose to stick with fasino. Thanking you : By Chiranjibi | 1 year ago
- In mileage pleasure will get 50km and for facino you will get 45-55 range. In performance facino is better : By Jijo | 1 year ago
- Honda Dio is the best. : By Smruti | 6 months ago
- Dio : By Harsh | 6 months ago
- Dio : By Pravin | 7 months ago
- Yes, you will be able to handle it but still, we would recommend you to take a test drive before making a final call. Moreover, you may also have a look at TVS Scooty Pep Plus. Here is the link to the dealer details according to city: https://bit.ly/2MDfKdm : By Zigwheels | 1 year ago
- It will be very easy to handle. It's suitable for unisex so no problem. : By Subscribers | 3 days ago
- Yes go for it , it is an light weight champion : By Mayank | 2 weeks ago
- If you are planning to buy a new bike on finance, then generally, 10 to 30 percent down payment is required on the on-road price of a bike. However, exact confirmation regarding EMI, down payment, interest, loan period and its procedure will be discussed by the bank only, as it depends upon an individual eligibility. We would suggest you to get in touch with the nearest dealership to get exact information. Click on the given link and select your desired city to get details for the nearest dealership: https://www.zigwheels.com/bikes/dealers/Yamaha : By Zigwheels | 7 months ago
- Which paper will be required to take Yamaha scooter? : By Abhisek | 6 months ago
- Which paper will be required to take Yamaha scooter? : By Hans | 7 months ago
- If comparing mileage the other available option to name a few Yamaha Alpha, Yamaha Ray ZR and Honda Activa i have the same ARAI claimed mileage of 66 kmpl. However, the actual mileage figures vary depending upon the factors like road conditions and riding pattern. Maintenance cost for a vehicle differs from one authorized service centre to another due to the factors like labour cost and the service part being serviced.To get details regarding the available options may check the following options: https://www.zigwheels.com/new_bike_search.php?bypricerange=0-70000&bybodytype=scooters&bymileage=50-70&sortfield=mileage&sortdirection=desc : By Zigwheels | 10 months ago
- Fz16 is good in terms of comfort and durability and good efficiency with yamaha vlue core but lacks puncy performance compared to its rivals. And new fz15 v3.0 looks beast!!!! : By RESHUL | 10 months ago
- If you want to buy a scooty then fascino is best one. : By 9835450460 | 10 months ago
Yamaha Fascino Price in India
Calculate Yamaha Fascino EMI
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This half-day Fire marshal training course covers the role of
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NASHVILLE, Tenn. - The Golden Eagle men's basketball team will root for history to be on its side in Friday evening's showdown against the Bisons of Lipscomb. Tech owns a commanding 40-5 all-time series lead over its in-state rivals from Nashville and will look to bounce back from a two-game skid.
Tennessee Tech (3-2, 0-0)
Lipscomb (2-3, 0-0)
Friday, Nov. 30, 2012 / 6:30 p.m. CST
Allen Arena - Nashville, Tenn.
The Broadcasts
TV: none
Radio: Fox Sports Radio, 106.1 The Eagle (Rob Schabert)
Webcast: ASUN.TV (Atlantic Sun)
Setting the Stage
The Golden Eagles will look to right the ship against the Bisons and end a two-game losing streak following a heartbreaking, three-point loss against Loyola Chicago on Wednesday. Tech will meet Lipscomb for the 46th time in program history, a history that has been a one-sided story since the beginning with the Golden Eagles owning a 40-5 lead.
In their previous 10 outings against the Bisons, the Golden Eagles have defeated their in-state foes nine times, including dropping 100 or more four times in that span. The only loss, which came in 2010-11, was a four point affair in Nashville. Tech won last season's meeting 89-87 in a thrilling overtime finish in Cookeville.
The Tennessee Tech defense will focus on stopping sophomore forward Malcolm Smith, who leads Lipscomb with 14.3 points per game and is coming off an impressive 22-point performance against OVC foe Murray State.
Also on the Golden Eagles' radar will be senior guard Deonte Alexander and junior guard Khion Sankey. Alexander, who ranks second on the team with 11.6 points per game, dropped 18 points against the Racers in the loss. Sankey nearly record a double-double against Murray State, pulling down 12 boards and scoring eight points in the contest. He leads Lipscomb with 9.4 rebounds per contest.
The Lipscomb defense is allowing opponents to shoot a measly .289 from the three-point line, a mark that the Golden Eagles will look to blow up with its 39% shooting from downtown.
Tech junior guard Matt Marseille had a coming out party against Loyola, scoring a career-high 21 points, including a whopping 19 in the second half alone. The Brooklyn, N.Y. native, who sat out the 2011-12 season with a knee injury, led a Golden Eagle comeback that shrank a 13-point deficit to just one point with seven seconds to play.
Junior guard Jeremiah Samarrippas also scored a Tech career-high, adding 15 points in the game, including 13 in the first half. The transfer from Nebraska shot 100% from the field, including going 3-3 from behind the arc in the first 20 minutes of action against the Ramblers.
A third Golden Eagle improved their career mark in points, as redshirt freshman Lanerryl Johnson scored 12 points in the Windy City.
To read more about the upcoming game and the TTU men's basketball team, click here.


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NEW ORLEANS (AP) An oddity for this Super Bowl has both teams' former owners as finalists for the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
The late Art Modell, who owned the Cleveland Browns and then moved them to Baltimore to become the Ravens, and Ed DeBartolo Jr. of the San Francisco 49ers could enter the hall on Saturday. They are among 15 modern-day finalists, of which as many as five can be elected.
Modell bought the Browns in 1961 and took them to Baltimore in 1996. He was president of the NFL under then-Commissioner Pete Rozelle from 1967-69 and played an instrumental role in negotiating television contracts for the league. Modell contributed to the creation of Monday night football, too.
``That is always one of those situations that you really try to stay out of, because you don't know how they vote,'' Ravens star linebacker Ray Lewis said. ``You can only tell them about the man who I knew myself: a true legend in his own way, a real visionary who changed thousands and thousands of lives. For the impact he's had on this business and what he's done for so many in this business, for me - I am a little biased - I would say, `Why wouldn't he be in the Hall of Fame?'''
DeBartolo purchased the 49ers in 1977. Soon, they were winning championships: five Super Bowls in as many tries.
During DeBartolo's tenure, the team made 16 playoff appearances, won 13 division titles and played in 10 conference championship games.
But he also was suspended the 1999 season by the NFL after being found guilty of failing to report a bribe by a government official, a felony. He divested ownership of the 49ers to family members.
``I'm hoping Eddie gets into the hall because any time you can accomplish winning five Super Bowls and what he brought to the game of football, he deserves to be in the Hall of Fame,'' said former 49ers great Jerry Rice, the most accomplished receiver in NFL history and a Canton enshrinee. ``I think this society's supposed to be about forgiveness and stuff like that. It's time for Eddie DeBartolo to get into the hall.''
BATCH HONORED BY UNION: Pittsburgh Steelers backup quarterback Charlie Batch was presented with a $100,000 donation for his charity on Thursday as the winner of the NFL Players Association's Byron ``Whizzer'' White Award.
The annual honor recognizes exemplary community service.
Batch's foundation helps children in the Pittsburgh area through sports and education.
Past recipients of the union's award include Peyton Manning, Drew Brees, Franco Harris and Gale Sayers.
REMEMBERING WALSH: Jim Harbaugh remembers it well, that initial phone message from late Hall of Fame coach Bill Walsh asking if he would leave San Diego and come coach at Stanford to turn around a spiraling program.
``He did call me and left a message on my phone to see if I'd be interested in the Stanford coaching job,'' Harbaugh said. ``I was intending to leave that message on my phone for the rest of my life, but I lost that phone or I dropped it in the toilet or something. I can't remember which it was - lost it or dropped it in the can. I don't have that message anymore, but it truly was one of the most memorable things.''
Now Harbaugh is following in Walsh's steps coaching the San Francisco 49ers, and in the Super Bowl to boot.
ADRIAN'S AID: Adrian Peterson believes his quick recovery from major knee surgery is an inspiration not only to his teammates and other football players, but to all athletes. And, especially, to all kids.
Peterson always has prided himself on being in top shape, and credits his conditioning with enabling him to coming back less than nine months after the surgery, then nearly setting the NFL rushing record, gaining 2,097 yards in Minnesota's wild-card playoff season.
He wants to make sure the youth of America are in tune with staying fit.
``Me being an athlete, I know how important it is to be active and keep your body in shape, and it is hard to get a kid outside to do that,'' said Peterson, who was in New Orleans to promote Kinect for Xbox 360's affiliation with NFL Play 60 to help kids have fun while achieving healthy, active lifestyles. The program also is designed to fight childhood obesity.
``Get off the couch and get active.''
That's exactly what Peterson said he did during his rehab. He chose the Xbox golf game.
``I played the golf game and that got my body burning,'' he said. ``They have the more active games like the track and the NFL, but the golf, it's different. It's cool and I think kids will like it.''
Peterson also is eager to promote nutrition and a healthy diet. He had a sweet tooth as a child and said he was fortunate that he could simply go outdoors and play sports to work off the calories.
``Kids today definitely get a lot of fast foods in their body and that's not good for you,'' he said. ``And now that I am older, I understand. I want young people to understand they need to eat healthy and be active. They don't have to play football, but they need to do something.''
MUM'S THE WORD: Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti says linebacker Ray Lewis decided to retire after this season several weeks before sharing the news with his team and the rest of the world.
Lewis was working to return from a torn right triceps when coach John Harbaugh told the owner that Lewis wanted to talk to him.
``He just said, `I talked to John and I talked to (general manager) Ozzie Newsome and I'm done after this,''' Bisciotti recalled Thursday. ``We spoke for a few minutes. I just said, `Mum's the word until you decide to announce it or tell the team.' That lasted, I think, a month.''
The formal announcement from Lewis came on Jan. 2. He has resolved to make the Super Bowl his final game.


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About Us
The Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of California at Riverside offers the Bachelor of Science degree in Geology and Geophysics. These B.S. degree programs are designed for students with a strong interest in various aspects of the Earth and planetary sciences. The programs in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences place substantial emphasis on fieldwork with field courses, field trips in all appropriate courses (including dedicated field courses), and excursions between quarters. The Riverside campus is ideally situated within a day's drive of exposures of nearly the entire stratigraphic succession and some of the most outstanding field localities in the world.
The Department offers a M.S. and Ph.D. in Geological Science in the Graduate Programs section. A common theme across the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences is our commitment to learning geology in its natural context - which means that our program is strongly hands-on, with a focus on fieldwork. The Department offers a program built around the core research areas listed below, and these strengths are reflected at all levels across the curriculum.
One of the strengths of the department is the diversity of active lines of research that our faculty and specialist are currently actively pursuing. With the current renovations in the Geology building and updated facilities, Earth and Planetary Science students have access to world-class laboratory facilities. Disparate interests within the department are connected in several areas of research emphasis.
Organic and Paleoenvironmental Evolution
- Paleoecology of evolutionary radiations: Neoproterozoic/Cambrian, Ordovician, Tertiary
- Biogeochemistry of ancient and modern environments
- Early Paleozoic, Tertiary, and Recent biogeography
- Deposition and geochemical control of organic-rich rocks
- Precision in biostratigraphic and lithostratigraphic correlation
- Fire ecology
- Stratigraphic and geochemical record of the biosphere in the Neoproterozoic and Cambrian
- Evolution of developmental mechanisms
- Temporal resolution in the stratigraphic record
- Evolutionary paleoecology
Earthquake Processes and Geophysics
- Observational, experimental, and numerical studies of faulting
- Neotectonics and structural geology
- Petrology, geochemistry, geothermics
- Volcanology
- Remote Sensing
Global Climate and Environmental Change
- Deciphering the record of climate change in the Sierra Nevada's
- Understanding global and regional drivers for climate change
- Isotopic studies of modern glacial lakes, Quaternary lake cores and alpine soils
- Sedimentology and stratigraphy of Cenozoic through ancient glacial deposits


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A Kick Return SystemBernie AndersonHead Coach, Northern Michigan UniversityNMU Team Clinic
Special teams are rarely covered in articles and at clinics yet play such a big role in the outcome of a football game.At Northern Michigan University, special teams are an important part of our team.In this article I will introduce our special teams philosophy, give an overview of our kick return system, and cover our off-season drilling techniques. ... To read this article, and for full access to all CLN resources, get your MEMBERSHIP NOW.
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On his last weekday in Prague Castle as the President of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel taped a brief farewell address to the nation and then took a telephone call from George Bush. Havel, who came to office thirteen years ago wearing borrowed trousers that flapped high around his ankles, now wore an exquisitely tailored navy-blue three-piece suit, a white shirt, and a tie that had undoubtedly done its duty at summit meetings and memorial services. A clutch of efficient aides scurried around his office door. A steward with a napkin folded over his arm delivered a glass of white wine. Sunlight streamed through tall windows, and chandeliers lent a glow to the flowers and the Oriental carpets.
The American President might have been surprised to learn that Havel's castle makes the White House seem inelegant, but Bush probably remembered the place well. Just a few months earlier, he had been to the Castle for a NATO summit—the first ever in a former Warsaw Pact capital. Bush, his Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and dozens of generals and other politicians were treated not merely to the usual working meetings but also to theatrical performances organized by Havel himself. The NATO visitors watched an ersatz eighteenth-century dance (complete with powdered wigs and simulated copulation) that might have been considered obscene had it not been so amusing. They listened to booming renditions of the "Ode to Joy," a souped-up "Marseillaise," and John Lennon's "Power to the People."
"I didn't understand anything," Rumsfeld remarked as he headed toward dinner. "I'm from Chicago."
When I got a chance recently to ask Havel about his NATO productions, he smiled and said, "I didn't want it to look like just another meeting of politicians and generals, so I shaped those arrangements, to a great extent. The ballet was set in Central Europe and featured Mozart's music, and it also included elements of the American grotesque, to underline the Euro-Atlantic character of the gathering. It may have been on the verge of what Mr. Rumsfeld and certain others could tolerate."
Awkward and shy, Havel is a curiously natural director. Forty-odd years ago, he started out as a stagehand and a playwright. He was an acolyte of Beckett and Ionesco—the theatre of the absurd. The sense of the absurd extends to his own life. There is surely no modern biography that is more improbable yet dramatically coherent. Havel's is the rare life, Milan Kundera has written, that resembles a work of art and gives "the impression of a perfect compositional unity." Consider: A bourgeois boy becomes a bohemian playwright; he then becomes a dissident, who, for the crime of writing subversive essays and helping to organize a subversive movement called Charter 77, is encouraged by the regime to master the art of welding in a reeking Czech prison; finally, in late November, 1989, everything implodes and he is leading demonstrations in Wenceslas Square, and hundreds of thousands of people are shouting "Havel na hrad!" ("Havel to the Castle!"); within days, he is the head of state, working in the same hilltop redoubt that served as a seat of power for dynasts of the Bohemian kingdom and the Hapsburg monarchy, for the emissaries of Berlin and the satraps of the Kremlin.
During the uprising, which quickly became known as the Velvet Revolution, and for a while afterward, there were graffiti around town proclaiming, "Havel je král"—"Havel Is King." The King tried to demystify his Castle. He ordered the costume designer for the movie "Amadeus" to create red-white-and-blue uniforms for the palace guards. (Communist-era guards wore khaki.) He himself at first refused the suits that his friend Prince Karel Schwarzenberg brought him. "I can't wear any of these!" Havel said. "I'd look like a gigolo." In jeans and sweater, he rode a scooter through the Castle halls. He threw a "festival of democracy" in the courtyards, with jugglers and mimes performing while he wandered around drinking Pilsner and greeting everyone. Later on, when he discovered that the chandeliers in the gilded Spanish Hall were outmoded, a couple of typical visitors, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, paid for new fixtures. For weeks, he drove his staff crazy as he monkeyed around with the remote control, dimming the lights, then brightening them again.
"When I first came here, there were many things that I found absurd," Havel told me in his office. A sly, can-you-believe-it smile creased his face. "For example, it seemed to us on the first day that there were three rooms, close to where we're sitting now, which you couldn't enter. When we finally got inside, we discovered a kind of communications facility for contacts within the Warsaw Pact. So we took advantage of that and sent a New Year's greeting to Mikhail Gorbachev. Later, I heard from confidential sources that the K.G.B. chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, didn't really appreciate the fact that we'd found those facilities."
Within a few months of Havel's ascension, the euphoria of the Velvet Revolution began to fade. The poetry of those winter weeks, the theatrical press conferences and the street rallies, yielded to the prose of governing a ruined state. No more scooters, no more sneaking out of the Castle for a drink at a local pub. Havel allowed that he felt "strangely paralyzed, empty inside," fearful that dissent and governing were hardly the same. "At the very deepest core of this feeling there was, ultimately, a sensation of the absurd: what Sisyphus might have felt if one fine day his boulder stopped, rested on the hilltop, and failed to roll back down," he told an audience in Salzburg. "It was the sensation of a Sisyphus mentally unprepared for the possibility that his efforts might succeed, a Sisyphus whose life had lost its old purpose and hadn't yet developed a new one."
Havel had been preceded by dictators and, therefore, had to learn to be a President nearly on his own. He borrowed from many examples, especially from the humanism of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the President of the First Czech Republic after the First World War, and from his friend Richard von Weizsäcker, the President of Germany. (The powers of the Czech Presidency are based largely on the postwar West German model; the President is secondary to the Prime Minister in domestic affairs but has great authority in making appointments and in foreign policy.) At times, Havel felt thoroughly insufficient, a fraud. A familiar Prague voice, the voice of Kafka, told him what anyone who has grown up in a police state knows instinctually—that it could all end as easily as it started.
"I am the kind of person who would not be in the least surprised if, in the very middle of my Presidency, I were to be summoned and led off to stand trial before some shadowy tribunal, or taken straight to a quarry to break rocks," he told a startled audience at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, less than six months after taking office. "Nor would I be surprised if I were to suddenly hear the reveille and wake up in my prison cell, and then, with great bemusement, proceed to tell my fellow-prisoners everything that had happened to me in the past six months. The lower I am, the more proper my place seems; and the higher I am the stronger my suspicion is that there has been some mistake."
In Havel's thirteen years as President—first of Czechoslovakia and then, after the Slovaks and the Czechs divided into two states, in 1993, of the Czech Republic—many of his advisers repeatedly begged him to delete, or at least soften, these public moments of self-doubt. What effect would they have on an exhausted people waiting for the radical transformation of their country? (Imagine Chirac or Blair, Bush or Schröder beginning a national address with an ode to his midnight dread!) Havel, however, would not be edited. The Presidential speech was the only literary genre left to him now, his most direct means of expressing not only his personal feelings but also the spirit of the distinctively human politics he wanted to encourage after so many decades of inhuman ideology. "Some aides tried to stop him, but these speeches had a therapeutic value for him," Havel's closest aide, Vladimír Hanzel, told me. And yet, at times, Havel seemed not a President so much as Kafka reading from his diaries, providing an inventory of what haunted him:
Then there is a powerful feeling of general alienation . . . an experience of unbearable oppressiveness, a need constantly to explain myself to someone, to defend myself, a longing for an unattainable order of things, a longing that increases as the terrain I walk through becomes more muddled and confusing. . . . Everything I encounter displays to me its absurd aspect first. I feel as though I am constantly lagging behind powerful, self-confident men whom I can never overtake, let alone emulate. I find myself essentially hateful, deserving only mockery.
Political gossip, to say nothing of political journalism, abhors stasis, and Havel's last days in office were on the calendar of Prague's columnists and parliamentarians for so long that it became an article of faith that he was "just like Mikhail Gorbachev"—a figure of historical magnitude who had overstayed his welcome, popular abroad but not at home. Of Gorbachev that was certainly true. On Christmas night, 1991, when he resigned his office and handed over the nuclear codes to his hostile inheritor, Boris Yeltsin, his poll ratings were in the single digits. Havel's case is quite different. His popularity rating when he took office was more than eighty per cent; he leaves with around fifty-five per cent. Even for heroes, such endurance is rare. In 2000, Lech Walesa, the Solidarity leader, ran again for the Polish Presidency. He received one per cent of the vote.
Havel surely has detractors: the "lost generation" of pensioners and workers who could not cope with the dizzying cultural changes and the rising cost of living; leftists who still resent the collapse of Communist ideology; right-wingers who find his economic thinking fuzzy and his speeches naïve and too philosophical. Some intellectuals, like the social theorist Ernest Gellner, thought that Havel's rhetoric of love triumphing over evil had been admirable, perhaps, but "absurd, indefensible" as an explanation for the fall of Communism; that softness, Gellner wrote, had allowed members of the old regime to escape unpunished and reap enormous profits in the new economy. There were also subtler, more personal forms of resentment. One morning, I had coffee with a theatre director in his late seventies, who had known Havel since he was a young man. It was clear that the director disliked Havel, not for reasons of official policy but, rather, because of Havel's "moralisms," his insistence, after the Soviet invasion in August, 1968, that Czechs try to resist the regime by "living in truth." Even now, Havel's purity stung the director; it was a lingering and deeply personal rebuke. The old man had not signed Charter 77; to do so was an almost suicidal crossing. Only hundreds of people dared go that far, he said, while "the rest just wanted to live."
Although the Czechs have suffered none of the violence that has plagued other countries in the region, especially Yugoslavia and Romania, the transition has not been purely pacific. Far from it. Despite Havel's objections, Czechoslovakia split. The "lustration" campaign to bar from certain jobs informers and other guilty people from the old era was a confused and traumatic process. "Why so much velvet?" some asked. Why appoint a Presidential team of inexperienced exiles and dissidents and tarnished Party hacks? Havel was sui generis to the end: he did not form a lasting party or movement; he had admirers, he had aides, but he has no real inheritor. In fact, as he left office, parliament could not settle on a successor.
Havel's most serious and persistent enemy through the years has been his political doppelgänger, the former Prime Minister Václav Klaus. For a decade, their relationship became the running story of Prague politics. Klaus is a technocrat and a Thatcherite—and, it must be said, a steely and arrogant man. He has always resented the "intellectuals in the Castle," and accused Havel of being a "half-socialist," in "love with state power." In 2001, he said of Havel, "I don't believe what he says, what he stands for, what he does. I don't understand his civil society. For me it is an empty phrase. . . . He is the most élitist person I have ever seen in my life. I am a normal person. He is not."
And yet, with those notable exceptions, almost everyone is quick to point out the dimensions of Havel's moral and political achievements, his importance in the reshaping of Europe. For a country that had lost so many of its best minds to deportation, Holocaust, exile, emigration, and suppression, Havel embodied a sense of the future and of Czech idealism. As a dissident and then as President, he was the most incisive Czech voice on reviving civil liberties and human rights, on restoring a sense of public responsibility at a moment of post-Communist apathy and greed. Havel was a playwright and essayist who wrote as if censorship did not exist; when he became a politician, he behaved as if his country, small as it is, were indispensable to the reordering of Europe. With his moral authority and moral glamour, he exerted an outsized influence. Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and other leaders of the major powers were deeply influenced by him. The rapid expansion and redefinition of NATO is, in no small measure, Havel's doing.
One afternoon, I went to a farewell reception for Havel at the Castle. Hundreds of Castle aides, past and present, gathered in the Spanish Hall, under the Rolling Stones' chandeliers, and milled around, drinking beer, eating sandwiches, and lining up to say goodbye to their old boss. Havel posed for snapshots, accepted advice and best wishes—sometimes with pleasure, sometimes with a grimace usually reserved for a periodontist. Havel possesses a charisma peculiar to the shy. He is rather small, with tiny hands that play nervously at his lapels. He tends to speak to the floor or to your shoulder. Everyone leaned in to listen. Everyone laughed at his jokes.
Nearby, I ran into Michael Žantovský, one of his closest associates over the years. Žantovský had been a dissident and was the author of a book about Woody Allen; after the revolution, he'd been Ambassador to the United States.
"I think this is the fifth or sixth farewell party, and there's more to come," Žantovský said merrily. "There was the so-called underground farewell, and, of course, at that one everyone got drunk." Then the diplomat waxed grand. "This is the end of an era," he said. "It means the end of transition, it means the end of changes and setbacks and new beginnings, you name it. What's going to happen now is that we will become a country like any other in Europe. Maybe I'm cynical, but these moments in history, for a person or a country, come and go. It's like Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame, and ours was Havel's Presidency—especially the first years. Sometime in the future, it may come again, but at this point we are no more glamorous than Belgium or the Netherlands. As Brecht said, 'Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.' I hope we don't need another." He drank to that.
Václav Klaus may despise Václav Havel, but he has a point: Havel is not a normal man. "I am just beginning to understand how everything has, in fact, been a diabolical trap set for me by destiny," Havel said on a recent trip to New York, his last as President. "I really was catapulted overnight into a world of fairy tales."
Havel was born in 1936, before the sellout of Czechoslovakia at Munich and the Nazi occupation, before the Communist putsch. He was born to good fortune. His father was a wealthy businessman, and his parents had a broad circle of highly educated friends. There was a cook, a governess, a maid, a gardener, and a chauffeur. The Havels wanted their sons, Václav and Ivan, to graduate from Oxford or Harvard. As boys, they went to boarding school. When the Communists took power, in 1948, the Havel family properties were confiscated, and, in an act of reverse social engineering, the regime barred bourgeois children like Václav from the better schools. Had it not been for the putsch, Havel once said, he would likely have "gone on to study philosophy at the university, attended . . . lectures on comparative literature, and, after graduation, I would have ridden around in an imported sports car without having done the least thing to deserve it."
With a spotty formal education, Havel gravitated to the theatre, particularly the Theatre on the Balustrade, which was a center of bohemian artists. His younger brother, Ivan, a cognitive scientist, said, "Coming from a bourgeois family, my brother was exposed to literature and many interesting people, but he felt bad, slightly guilty about it. In his literary circles, he was the rare bourgeois and he was embarrassed by it." This was Prague in the sixties, a more relaxed time, and Havel quickly adapted to a life of late-night discussions in smoky kitchens and the Café Slavia, beer and Becherovka, love affairs, samizdat, and rock and roll. His musical tastes ran to the Velvet Underground and, especially, to the Plastic People of the Universe. In his twenties and early thirties, he wrote a series of plays—"The Garden Party," "The Memorandum," and "The Increased Difficulty of Concentration"—that were all understood by their audiences as implicit critiques of the regime: its stifling "automatism" (a favorite term of Havel's), its inhuman language. Those plays, which were produced abroad as specimens of the cultural thaw, became emblems of the Prague Spring permitted by the Party reformer Alexander Dubcek.
In the mid-sixties, Havel, to the despair of his mother, married a poor yet regal young woman named Olga Splíchalová. Until her death from cancer, in 1996, Olga was a levelheaded balance to Havel's idealism and to his trusting nature; she was a practical intelligence and, through years of harassment and imprisonment, an indefatigable support. "Olga and I are very different," Havel once said. "Olga's a working-class girl, very much her own person, sober, unsentimental, and she can even be somewhat mouthy and obnoxious; in other words, as we say, you can't get her drunk on a bun. . . . In Olga, I found exactly what I needed: someone who could respond to my own mental instability, to offer sober criticism of my wilder ideas, provide private support for my public adventures."
After the Soviet Union invaded Prague, ousted Dubcek, and instituted a period of hard-line "normalization" that lasted for more than twenty years, the Communist Party banned Havel's works. For his part, Havel moved to a country house that he and Olga called Hrádecek (the Little Castle), and he veered increasingly toward a position of full-time dissent. Thrilling as "The Garden Party" was for young audiences in Prague, this next phase was even more important—and, perhaps, even more appropriate to Havel's real talents. "Havel has been a politician since the sixties," the novelist Ivan Klíma told me. "His plays were exciting in their time and place, they had great meaning, but they tend to lose their context now, especially abroad."
Far more ambitious, and more lasting, were Havel's dissident essays, especially an open letter to the Communist leader Gustav Husák and "The Power of the Powerless," which served as the most extensive theoretical underpinning for Charter 77 and Czech resistance. Havel's prose reached its audience in a variety of subterranean ways: in typewritten, carbon-copied manuscripts; in books that were published abroad and then smuggled back into the country; or as broadcasts on Radio Free Europe. (As President, Havel repaid RFE by making it possible for the studios and offices to move, in 1995, from Munich to Wenceslas Square.)
If Solzhenitsyn was the great witness of Communist oppression within the imperium, Havel was its most acute moral clinician. "Havel synthesized ideas that were in the air here and, as it turned out, all over the totalitarian world," Ivan Havel said. In those two essays, he describes the "entropy" of life under Communist oppression, the myriad everyday means by which every man and woman is "subjected to a prolonged and thorough process of violation, enfeeblement and anesthesia." When I visited Havel at the Castle, his aides were packing his effects, including a painting of a Communist-era sign reading, in Slovak, "Workers of the World Unite!" In the best-known passage of "The Power of the Powerless," Havel asks his reader to imagine the manager of a grocery who puts that sign in his store window, "among the onions and carrots":
What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? . . . He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life.
The power of totalitarian ideology, he wrote, is that it acts as "a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. . . . It is rather like a collection of traffic signals and directional signs, giving the process shape and structure. This metaphysical order guarantees the inner coherence of the totalitarian power structure. It is the glue holding it together, its binding principle, the instrument of its discipline."
Havel describes dissent not as an alternative political ideology but, rather, as an individual's insistence on his own humanity, on thinking and doing things, even the smallest things, honestly. In the mid-seventies, Havel had to make his living by working in a brewery, and, in "The Power of the Powerless," he recalls a dispute at the plant. A worker there spoke out to his bosses about ways to improve production. He was not an intellectual or a political rebel, just someone with an idea on how to produce beer more efficiently. But he had dared defy his bosses, and that could not be tolerated. All too often, Havel wrote, living normally "begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society."
And so it did with Havel. As an analyst, he wrote that the system could not tolerate even the slightest challenge, because its existence depended for its survival on unanimity. As a result, Havel knew that the knock on the door could come at any time. In a samizdat interview, he said, "I've put together something I call my 'emergency packet,' containing cigarettes, a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, some books, a T-shirt, paper, a laxative, and a few other small things." He took this bundle along with him every time he left his house.
With good reason. Between 1977 and 1989, Havel was imprisoned several times and in many different cells. His longest term lasted from 1979 to 1983, and his singular relief from the drudgery of those years was writing a weekly letter home. "Letters to Olga," filled with everything from complaints about his hemorrhoids and Olga's inconstancy as a correspondent to ruminations on Being and political responsibility, is his most personal book. Havel wrote the letters under terrific pressure, including that of a pro-Nazi warden who made sure the letters had no mysterious erasures or codes. Working in the laundry, he said, "I hid my rough drafts in a mountain of dirty sheets stained by millions of unborn children, and I would revise them during the noon break, while trying to avoid being seen by informers."
The only visitors allowed were Olga and Ivan. They were permitted to come four times a year for half-hour visits. When I asked Ivan about those visits, he laughed ruefully. "I saw him more often when he was in jail than I do now," he said.
One night during Havel's frenetic last week as President, there was a gala held in his honor at the National Theatre, a black-tie-and-evening-gown sort of affair with lots of television cameras outside and government ministers and pop stars in the audience. I went along to the gala with Jirí Pehe, a former exile who had returned to Prague after the revolution and become one of Havel's closest advisers. He told me that the gala had been organized by Havel's second wife, an actress named Dagmar Veskrnová, whom everyone knows, simply, as Dása. Unlike Olga, who had impeccable dissident credentials, Dása was a movie and television actress who during "normalization" appeared occasionally in productions of Shakespeare and Strindberg but more often in mediocre comedies; she once played a topless vampire. The gala, Pehe said, was controversial because the musical lineup would run more to Andrew Lloyd Webber than to Havel's favorites, Lou Reed and Frank Zappa. He was not exaggerating. Sometimes I thought I was watching a taping of a Bob Hope Christmas special. Dása had even invited Karel Gott, an oleaginous crooner who was the epitome of "coöperative" under the Communists. Some of Havel's old Charter 77 friends, including the singers Jaroslav Hutka and Vlasta Tresnák, boycotted the event. Prague is the smallish capital of a smallish republic; often enough, its politics are the politics of a village. Some Czechs, it seemed, could never forgive figures like Gott; others could never forgive Havel for marrying Dása.
"Olga was much more than a partner," Pehe told me. "Havel was a bohemian and did wild things, and there were many other women, but he always went back: she was a tough, moral lady. She treated him like a boy, in a sense, and he liked that, he needed that corrective. When she was gone, a part of his universe collapsed. He remarried too quickly, in the humble opinion of the public."
In Havel's opinion, Dása saved his life. A chain smoker and a veteran of Czech jails, Havel had suffered from pneumonias, a perforated bowel, and various other illnesses. "He's nearly killed himself in the job," Havel's friend the writer Timothy Garton Ash told me. "He's been close to death several times." The closest call came in late 1996. Havel's doctor found a spot on his lungs and treated him for pneumonia. Havel continued suffering fevers and double vision. Finally, doctors determined that he had cancer and removed half his right lung. (Just before going into the operating room, Havel was shown on television smoking with his Minister of Health.) Dása fired the doctor who had misdiagnosed Havel. (She also summoned a faith healer, but never mind.) The crisis was not over. One day at the hospital, according to Havel's biographer, John Keane, Dása went to visit him in intensive care. He was on a ventilator and seemed to be choking. Dása called for help, rescuing him. A few weeks later, Havel and Dása married.
With the image of Olga still strong in the public mind, Havel felt compelled to explain himself to the nation. "Before she died, Olga said I should remarry," Havel said. "At the time, I ruled it out categorically, and I was resolved to end my days alone. She was convinced that I can't live alone and that I shouldn't. She was right, and life itself confirmed that when I was lucky enough to get to know Dása."
At the gala, Havel sat in the Presidential box with Dása and gazed down at the stage with utter delight. He was egalitarian in his applause. He clapped for Karel Gott and he clapped for Ivan Král, a former exile who sang a ballad by the Plastic People of the Universe and then Patti Smith's "Dancing Barefoot." But Havel's greatest visible pleasure came when an actor walked to the lip of the stage and read the text of a denunciation of the leaders of Charter 77, published in the Communist Party newspaper Rudé Právo twenty-five years ago under the headline "THE SHIPWRECKED AND THE SELF-APPOINTED." At the time of that article, the Party leader Gustav Husák had confidently announced that the Charter 77 movement would collapse and Havel and "the hired puppets of these campaigns will end up in the dustbin of history." It all seemed so funny now.
Another day at the Castle, this time in the company of Oldrich Cerny, a compact fellow with perfect English. For many years, Cerny made his living dubbing Hollywood movies in Czech. When he was a teen-ager, he saw "The Garden Party" and asked to meet the playwright. Cerny eventually became friends with Havel and ran errands for the coalition of forces called Civic Forum, which was at the center of the revolution. After Havel took office, James Baker, who was then George H. W. Bush's Secretary of State, delivered to the Czechs a C.I.A. briefing book outlining everything the Americans knew about the security forces under the Communists. Havel, whose English is limited, asked Cerny to translate the documents; later, he asked him to become his national-security adviser. Every time Cerny mentioned that title to me, he smiled and made the universal sign for ironical quotation marks. "I wasn't exactly Condoleezza Rice," he said.
After the revolution, he continued, "we were babes in the woods, and so I went to the West for help." Officials from MI6 and the C.I.A. helped the Czechs rebuild the security system, ridding it, above all, of its function as a private police and army force for the government. Even now, years after leaving the Castle, Cerny, like so many others, can't forget the arrival. He said, "When we first went into the Castle, it was so strange—sparsely furnished in the Communist style of a taste for the distasteful, with huge fake-leather chairs that made you freeze in the winter and stuck to the back of your trousers in summer."
We finished lunch and took a walk to the old summer residence, a two-story villa, on the Castle grounds.
"This was Husák's house," Cerny said as we strolled past a guard and approached the front door. "I still have the key."
We went upstairs. Cerny started rapping his knuckles against the walls and the ceilings, which were unusually low. "When we first got here, I noticed that my cell-phone reception was very bad," he said. "It turns out that Husák was paranoid. He had all the ceilings reinforced with concrete. Turns out he thought someone was going to fire cruise missiles at him."
Cerny took me to the basement. And there was Husák's favorite indulgence: a swimming pool with a wave machine. "He was quite a swimmer," he said.
Early in his Presidency, Havel lived for a few months in Husák's house. Naturally, this was a torture. "I find myself in the world of privileges, exceptions, perks, in the world of V.I.P.s who gradually lose track of how much a streetcar ticket or butter costs, how to make a cup of coffee, how to drive a car, and how to place a telephone call," he said. Eventually, he got used to it all, though he never refilled Husák's swimming pool. There was too much work to do, thousands of documents to consider, a broken state to rebuild.
"From what I know, Havel cannot wait to step down," Cerny told me. "He is exhausted, and he is not a healthy man. He also takes things very hard. When it became clear that the President couldn't save everyone's life, it became a ritual for young Czech journalists—almost as a rite of initiation—to write terrible things about Havel, and he never got used to that. There was even a psychosomatic aspect to this: he would get depressed and his body began to ache."
The day after leaving office, Havel was scheduled to take a five-week vacation abroad. He is always coughing, and warm weather has been good for his lungs. At times, he has said that he might work on an "absurdist play" or a book-length conversation with Timothy Garton Ash and Adam Michnik. His aide Vladimír Hanzel told me that Havel had not kept a diary in office and so there would not likely be a memoir, or not in the traditional sense. One morning, I was eating breakfast in a café near St. Vitus' cathedral, and I read in the Prague Post that Havel in fact would write a memoir, but that it would be "somewhere between Henry Kissinger and Charles Bukowski."
In a sense, he's been writing that memoir all his life. I remembered reading a short piece of his, from 1987, in which he recalled walking near the National Theatre and, by chance, seeing Gorbachev, who was in town for a summit with the Czech Party leaders. He caught sight of the Soviet leader amid the crowds and the bodyguards:
All of a sudden I find myself feeling sorry for him. I try to imagine the life he must lead, all day long in the company of his hard-faced guardians, no doubt with a full agenda, endless meetings, negotiating sessions, and speeches: having to talk to a great many people; remember who is who; say witty things but at the same time make sure they are the correct things to say, things that the sensation-seeking outside world can't get hold of and use against him.
In my meeting with Havel at the Castle, I recalled that passage for him, and he laughed. I asked him if, in some way, he had become what he had pitied.
Havel shrugged and began speaking, all the while staring at the carpet. "I remember," he said. "Of course, I met Gorbachev about two months after I was elected President. We went to Moscow, for my first visit to the Kremlin, and we met for eight or nine hours. At first, Gorbachev looked at me as if I were some kind of exotic creature—the first living dissident he ever saw, who was coming to him as the head of a state that had been part of his realm. But, gradually, we developed a kind of friendship, which had even begun to develop at the end of that first long visit to the Kremlin." Havel lifted his head and smiled. "I used to be a smoker then, and, after two hours of our conversation, I asked Gorbachev whether I could have a cigarette. He said, 'Yes, please, go ahead and smoke.' He didn't call to his staff, but, all the same, somebody suddenly appeared with an ashtray. There must have been microphones there, I suppose."
A year after Havel came to power, there was a crisis in Iraq, and now, as he was leaving office, he was involved in another. Earlier in the month, he had spent hours with his aides at his country villa, discussing the problem, and that day, in the Wall Street Journal, there was a letter signed by Havel, along with seven other European leaders, which essentially agreed with the Bush Administration's position. I asked him why.
"I think it's not by chance that the idea of confronting evil may have found more support in those countries that have had a recent experience with totalitarian systems compared with other European countries that haven't had the same sort of recent experience," he said. "The Czech experience with Munich, with appeasement, with yielding to evil, with demanding more and more evidence that Hitler was truly evil—that may be one reason that we look at things differently than some others. But that doesn't mean automatically that a green light is to be given to preventive strikes. I always believed that every case has to be judged individually. The Euro-American world cannot simply declare preëmptive war on all the regimes that it doesn't like."
Havel coughed and took a sip of wine. I asked him why he thought a policy of containment could not work in Iraq more or less indefinitely.
He put his glass down and said, "Civilization has changed. Today, any crazy, practically any crazy person can blow up half of New York. That was hardly possible fifteen or twenty years ago. That's not the only reason. On the whole, the world has changed. There once was a bipolar world, a balance of two great powers, who made agreements on weapons reductions, so that they were capable of destroying the world seven times instead of ten. Now we live in a multi-polar world. . . . Of course, the question is: When is the best time for action? Should it have happened a long time ago? That is a political issue, a diplomatic issue, a sociological issue. But, generally, it's a matter of the functioning of the world's immune system, whether the world can deal with such a case of extreme evil before it is too late."
On Sunday night, February 2nd, Czech radio and television broadcast Havel's farewell address. He took pains to thank his wife and his supporters. To all those who felt disappointed "or have simply found me hateful, I sincerely apologize and trust that you will forgive me." Havel flashed his country the peace sign and his work was done. ♦


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Posted 05 January 2012 - 01:12 AM
That night the deity left a golden pot in the courtyard of the priests house.
The priest found the golden pot with some water in it.
He threw the water out and went to the market where he sold the pot to a merchant. With the money he received, he repaid all his debts and returned home a rich man laden with gifts for his family.
Soon after, his family fought over the vast wealth, everyone from his wife to his children to his parents and his siblings demanding their share.
Unable to bear the mental agony, the priest went back to the temple and complained to the deity. You have added to my problem not solved it with the golden pot.
And the deity said, Golden pot? What golden pot? I gave you the elixir of contentment, enough for you and your family. It happened to be contained in a golden pot. Did you not drink it?
Take my hand and we'll go riding through the sunshine from above
Posted 25 January 2012 - 11:21 AM
Offering his guests coffee, the professor went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups - porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite - telling them to help themselves to the coffee.
When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said:
"If you noticed, all the nice looking expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress.
Be assured that the cup itself adds no quality to the coffee. In most cases it is just more expensive and in some cases even hides what we drink.
What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups... And then you began eyeing each other's cups.
Now consider this: Life is the coffee; the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, and the type of cup we have does not define, nor change the quality of Life we live.
Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee God has provided us."
God brews the coffee, not the cups.......... Enjoy your coffee!
"The happiest people don't have the best of everything. They just make the best of everything."
Live simply. Love generously. Care deeply. Speak kindly. Leave the rest to COSMOS.
source: theworldunited.org
Edited by MoonChild, 25 January 2012 - 11:22 AM.
Take my hand and we'll go riding through the sunshine from above
Posted 29 June 2015 - 10:59 AM
This is a great story about how to perceive life and go about dealing with hot and heated situations so I thought it would be a good idea to share it with you guys. As we all know, happiness is generated from within our being through altering the way we see ourselves and life around us.
This story is a perfect example of that:
The Carrot, The Egg and The Coffee Bean
A women was having some troubles and was becoming disheartened with her life. Nothing was going her way and as she took one step forward it seemed as if she was getting pushed two steps back. She went to her mother and told her of her problems.
When the mother heard this, the first thing she did before saying anything to her daughter was to put three pots on the stove. She filled them with water and turned the heat up high. In one pot she put a carrot, in another she put an egg and in another she put some coffee beans.
Not a word was spoken as they sat in the kitchen waiting for the water to boil.
In about 15-20 minutes she turned the stove off. She took out the carrot and put it on a plate, she took out the egg and put it on a plate and then she ladled out the coffee and put it into a cup.
She looked at her daughter and asked her "What do you see here?". Her daughter replied "What do you mean, Mum, I see a carrot, an egg and a cup of coffee".
Her mother asked her to pick up the carrot and note how it felt, so she did. She then asked her to crack the shell of the egg and observe the egg, so she did. She then asked her to take a sip of the coffee, and so she did that too.
"So, what does this all mean?" asked the daughter.
Her mother then explained to her that all of these three items had gone through the same issues, the same adversities, but that it was down to the way that they reacted to the situation that determined their outcome.
She went onto explain that the carrot started off strong, hard and rigid, but once it had been in the boiling water for a little time it quickly became soft and weakened. She explained that the egg went in soft and fragile with just a thin protective layer, but once subjected to the boiling water it became internally hardened and stiff. She finally explained that the coffee was unique and, unlike the other two, once subjected to the boiling water had actually merged into the water and as a result changed the water.
The expression on her daughters face changed and her mother could tell that she now understood.
"So, which one are you?" she asked her daughter. "When things get hot and heated in your life, how do you react? Are you the carrot, the egg or the coffee bean?"
This is a great story and one I thought was worth sharing with everybody. So in reflection, which one are you?
– The carrot, which comes into situations hard and stiff but when adversity strikes becomes soft and weak (breaking down in hard times).
– The egg, which comes into situations soft and fragile and when adversity strikes becomes hard and stiff on the inside (becoming bitter and closed off during hard times).
– The coffee bean, which when it gets hot and heated instead of becoming weak or internally closed off, opens up even more and fully embraces the current situation and circumstances. Diving into the situation head on and influencing the outcomes, rather then being influenced by it.
So have a quick think about it. Which one are you? Or which one do you want to be? How do you handle tough times? Are you the carrot, the egg or the coffee bean?
… And don't think these are solid and unchangeable states, if you are the carrot or the egg at this present moment, you don't have to stay there. You can consciously choose to be like the coffee and remember… practice makes perfect!
Do not be hard on yourself, we are all learning and growing. Just don't give up.
All possibilities to grow and learn are only over when we chose to stop. As long as you continue trying and striving, the possibility of change is always there.
Take my hand and we'll go riding through the sunshine from above
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Richard Muller, P. J. Zondervan Professor of Historical Theology at Calvin Theological Seminary, gave a fascinating inaugural lecture in the "New Directions in Edwards Studies" series. The lecture was titled "Jonathan Edwards and the Absence of Free Choice: A Parting of Ways in the Reformed Tradition." The overall focus was on the British reception of Edwards' theology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the lecture's more provocative conclusions is that Edwards' theology of the will departed significantly from the early Reformed tradition.
Scholars may be interested in a new book that overlaps with Dr. Muller's lecture: Willem J. van Asselt, J. Martin Bac, and Roelf T. te Velde, Reformed Thought on Freedom: The Concept of Free Choice in Early Modern Reformed Theology (Baker Academic, 2010).
Others will want to wrestle further with the full implications of Muller's stimulating argument. A free audio recording of this lecture will be available soon.


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The Flying Dutchmen will use their spring schedule of five tournaments
as a tuneup for the NCAA Division III championships. By winning the
Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association (MIAA) championship last
fall, coach Bob Ebels' Dutchmen will be headed to the NCAA tournament
for the 10th time in school history. Nationals will be held May 11-14
in Hershey, Pa.
Last fall the Flying Dutchmen laid claim to the MIAA championship for
the ninth time in 11 years. Senior Steven Strock (Grandville, Mich.)
captured league medalist honors for the second straight year and was
joined on the All-MIAA first team by teammates Charlie Olson, a
freshman from Suttons Bay, Mich., and Nick Campbell, a sophomore from
Saline, Mich. For the season, Strock averaged 73.7 strokes per 18-hole
round while Olson ended at 74.1 and Nick Campbell 74.25. Other Hope
golfers who qualified for the final MIAA seasonal standings were
junior Chris Ansel of Zeeland, Mich. (Zeeland East HS), 77.4 average,
and sophomore Andy Thomson of Beaver Dam, Wisc. (Central Wisconsin
Christian HS), 80.1 average.
The Flying Dutch will be seeking to gain a berth in the NCAA Division
III championships this spring.
The Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association (MIAA) receives an
automatic berth in the national tournament which will be held May
11-14 at Howet-in-the-Hills, Fla.
The MIAA qualifier to nationals will be determined from the results of
three tournaments to be held this spring. The first 18-hole round will
be Wednesday, April 18, at The Medalist in Marshall, Mich. The second
and third 18-hole rounds will be hosted by regular season champion
Saint Mary's, first on Friday, April 23 at the Blackthorn golf club in
South Bend, Ind. and the second on Saturday, April 24 at the Warren
golf course on the campus of Notre Dame University.
The Flying Dutch were ranked 16th nationally among NCAA Division III
women's golf teams after the fall season. It is the best national
ranking for a Flying Dutch golf team in school history. Last fall
under first-year coach Greg Stafford, the Flying Dutch ended third in
the MIAA standings for the second straight year. Three Hope golfers
received All-MIAA second team recognition -- Charlotte Park, a
freshman from Grosse Pointe, Mich.; Megan Scholten, a sophomore from
Grand Rapids, Mich. and Cassie Sneller, a senior from Holland, Mich.


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Last week, South Sudan's ruling party secretary-general, Pagan Amum, won an important court battle, absolving him of allegations that he received a $30 million corrupt payment in 2006. The accusations came from former Finance Minister Arthur Akuien Chol, who alleged earlier this year that he had received orders from "above" to transfer the public money, according to local reports. The court acquitted Amum based on insufficient evidence. The money, however, remains unaccounted for, according to local reports. And the odds of any journalist in South Sudan investigating the matter further are slim.
For reporting on the corruption charges, two independent newspapers, The Citizen and Al Masir, were ordered by a court in South Sudan's capital, Juba, to pay 100,000 South Sudanese pounds (US$37,000) each in damages to Amum, local journalists told CPJ. If the papers do not publish an apology within 15 days, the court ruled, the fine would increase to 1 million South Sudanese pounds to be paid in three months.
Like most papers the world over, The Citizen survives on a shoe-string budget and couldn't withstand such fees, Chief Editor Nhial Bol told me. "We are going to appeal this decision," he said. "All we did was quote the former finance minister -- there is nothing libelous about that."
Speaking to journalists outside the courtroom, Amum said the verdict sent a clear message that freedom of expression "should be exercised in such a measured, responsible manner that ensures the rights of others are not hammered or taken away," according to local reports.
The ruling sent another message to reporters in Africa's newest country: Reporting about corruption can be detrimental to your media houses' survival. "They are trying to silence the media from reporting on corruption issues," Bol said. Many of Bol's colleagues agree. "Such heavy fines can easily lead to the creation of a state of fear in the media," New Nation correspondent Anthony Kamba told me. Simon Tongun from the critical Catholic radio station Bakhita FM agrees: "As for the performance of the media after this issue, it is honestly going to be difficult for us to publish information on corruption but we will not give up."
The problem, local journalists tell me, is that they are working in a legal vacuum without any media laws in place to assist in their defense. A proposed media law, first introduced nearly five years ago, would have provided an independent press ombudsman to mediate the case, but the law is yet to be passed. Despite pledges made to me last year by Information Minister Barnabas Marial that the bills would be tabled "soon," most journalists in South Sudan are not holding their breath. "The media in South Sudan still operates under what I have often termed playing a game of football without rules," said Jacob Akol, chair of the Association of Media Development in South Sudan, an organization that is campaigning for passage of the law. "We are told that the media is free to report anything within the law; but what law?" Akol said. While a court can use the penal code to fine a newspaper any amount providing it is not "excessive," the press has no legal means to counter such unlimited fines.
Other sensitive issues such as security are also no-go areas for South Sudanese journalists. The government of South Sudan confiscated copies of the independent biweekly newspaper The Juba Post last year for quoting a dissident group claiming it would launch an attack on Juba. Security tensions between Sudan and South Sudan have reached a boiling point along their border, with both sides targeting each other's oil fields. Accurate coverage of these events will no doubt prove another challenge for South Sudan's independent journalists.