Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania • Page 2

Oct 30 2006 PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE MONDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2006 WWW.POST-GAZETTE.COM A-2 pg connections GENERAL INFO Switchboard 412-263-1100 Mailing address 34 Blvd. of the Allies, Pittsburgh, PA 15222 Web www.post-gazette.com CIRCULATION To subscribe or for questions about service, delivery or billing: 1-800-228-NEWS (6397). www.post-gazette.com/pgdelivery ADVERTISING To place a classified ad 412-263-1201 Display ads 412-2631385 Recruitment ads 412-263-JOBS (5627) Celebrations 412-263-1236 PORTFOLIO PG Audio Patricia Breakfast With Eva Marie Saint. Tuned-In Journal Rob out a winner Comics Survey Vote for the PG comic strips like to keep or kill ONLY ON THE WEB Pittsburgh Press Copyright 2006, PG Publishing Co. Published daily and Sunday by PG Publishing Co.

USPS 434-280. Periodical postage paid in Pittsburgh, Pa. Postmaster: Send address changes to main office, 34 Blvd. of the Allies, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15222.

Mail rates for daily (all zones): 52 weeks, $230; 26 weeks, $115; 13 weeks, $57.50. Mail rates for Sunday: 52 weeks, $138; 26 weeks, $69, 13 weeks, $34.50. Mail service is not available within a 75-mile radius of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is a federally registered trademark and service mark. It cost to look all been there on an airplane at loose ends, trying to keep occupied while fending off the chatty seat-mate with the gifted grandkids.

So, you reach into the seat pocket, maybe rst dredge for spare change, cates of deposit or other valuables. Then, as your hand surfaces, there it is, beckoning. Is it an ight mag? A throw-up bag? SkyMall! Ode to SkyMall SkyMall addresses consumer needs you never knew you had. Joel Achenbach, washingonpost.com columnist: is no more purely American publication than SkyMall, the catalogue that lets people do what God intended them to do when 35,000 feet above the Earth shop. It runs 196 ultra-thin pages, with tiny type, the better to cram in thousands of uent-lifestyle objects that every sensible person should own, like a remote-control mechanical shark ($99.95) perfect for anyone hoping to scare the bejabbers out of a rubber duck.

Or a pet stroller $119.95 ideal for transporting dogs and cats that do not have legs. Ordering from SkyMall is an act of optimism. The traveler thinks: I will survive this ight and own a new CD multimedia storage Christine Kenneally, on Salon.com, called SkyMall dream come true of all mad retailers and direct-sales henchmen everywhere the of That was in 1999 when you could get an miniature golf course for only $18,999.95, almost the price of a seat in rst class now. And now SkyMaul More must-have items: the iPod Shredder, the Temper-Pedic Casket, the Crack Pipe Chess Set, The Da Vinci Code Decoder Ring (Answer: Mary Magdalene was a man), the Buddhist Racing Sandals. At this point, I must state the obvious: Reality is so hard to parody these days.

So although perfectly believable, these items are from not SkyMall but SkyMaul, a spoof available at book stores any day now. Other products from SkyMaul: The Adultery Detector your husband been cheating on you? Our steam-powered adultery detector has a nozzle that blows detective-strength steam into a jacket pants or shirt and them sucks the evidence back into a Cheater A $12 Hybrid magnet. authentic- looking badge sticks to the back of your Ferrari, SUV or Winnebago to make you look like a real friend of the Hummer 6 Post-Rapture edition. (Picture of broken down old bike.) A Forehead-Mounted DVD Player that get and hold your A Japanese Thank-You Toilet. bigger the deposit, the louder the voice.

What a perfect way to end a dinner party! Celebrity voice cartridge (please specify James Earl Jones or Reese SkyMaul endorsements D.U.I. Mask really Foster Wallace fact that the catalog is available means that the terrorists have not Willard since the days of the actual feral child named Kasper Hauser has humor writing been so nimble, hungry, wiry and covered with a ne, catlike Hodgman, contributor to Daily Show with Jon Kasper Hauser? Kasper Hauser is the name of the sketch comedy troupe that created SkyMaul. The name rst belonged to a famous feral child, a curiosity and a bit of a celebrity in 19th century Europe. (Check out his story on FeralChildren.com. Seriously.) Kasper Hauser (spelled variously) was discovered in 1828, walking in Nuremberg, Germany, unsteady and oddly dressed.

Although 16, he behaved like a child. When he did learn to talk, he said he had been kept in a small cell and given food and water sparingly while he slept. Mystery surrounded his origins there were claims that he was the heir to the house of Baden. In 1833 the mystery deepened when he was assassinated. But in his ve years in civilization, Kasper learned a lot, and, unlike other feral children, was able to talk, read and write.

In 1861, the Atlantic Monthly wrote: very extraordinary advent, life, and death of Kasper Hauser, the novelty and singularity of all his thoughts and actions, and his charming innocence and amiability, interested all Europe. He became not only a universal pet, but a sight to which people ocked from all parts to see. It became a perfect fever, raging throughout Germany and extending also to other Some of his feats: Once, somebody read him 45 names of people he know. He then repeated them back with all their titles. His night vision was extraordinary; sunlight was very painful to him.

On one occasion, in the evening, he read the name on a door-plate 180 paces away. Next up at SkyMall: a Kasper Hauser Combination Night Aid. Contact us at 412-263-1112 or Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 34 Blvd. of the Allies, Pittsburgh, PA 15222. THE MORNING Peter Leo Kasper Hauser in a drawing from 1830: Would SkyMall have helped? almanac (On this day, October 30) 1889 Mrs.

Mary E. Schenley presents the city of Pittsburgh with 300 acres of land for park purposes, and Schenley Park, the first, is developed. 1938 The radio play War of the starring Orson Welles, airs on CBS. (The live drama, which employs fake news reports, panics some listeners who think its portrayal of a Martian invasion is real.) 1951 Defense Mobilizer Charles E. Wilson tapped the first heat, putting into operation the new $70 million open-hearth shop at the South Side plant of Jones Laughlin Steel Corp.

1975 Radio Station KDKA and the Pittsburgh Pirates fire Bob Prince and Nellie King, their longtime baseball announcers. 1995 By a razor-thin vote of 50.6 percent to 49.4 percent, Federalists prevail over separatists in Quebec in a secession referendum. 2001 2001 Mars Odyssey snaps its first picture of Mars, one week after the spacecraft safely arrives in orbit around the Red Planet. Some items are from Stefan The Story of an American digital.library.pitt.edu/chronology. Compiled by Rick Nowlin birthdays: Actor Dick Gautier, 69.

Movie director Claude Lelouch, 69. Rock singer Grace Slick, 67. Rhythm-and- blues singer Otis Williams (The Temptations), 65. Actor Henry Winkler, 61.Actor Harry Hamlin, 55. Thought for today: amor no es locura, no es (When love is not madness, it is not love.) Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Spanish dramatist (1600-1681) A a gritty construction site last Monday, Dan Onorato gestured toward towering windows set in concrete block and said, to appreciative laughter: no way a hundred years ago they would have put glass in this wall to see the Behind the county chief executive was a panorama of Pittsburgh that would be transformed within days.

In the background the towers glowed in the autumn sunset, an impressive view wrought by decades of painstaking work. In the foreground were temporary towers of debris dirt, bricks and street pavers displaced for a huge new addition to the Sarah Heinz House. And smack in the middle of the foreground mess, blocking a good chunk of the stunning beauty, stood a billboard. The side visible from the Heinz House advertised a salon with the words But people were gathered because Lamar Advertising executives had decided it The company had agreed to remove a billboard near the Chestnut Route 28 intersection and donate its slice of parking lot to this century-old North Side youth development center. Perhaps the advancing chill inspired the dignitaries to make their comments brief, but whatever the reason, that kept focus on something loftier than self-congratulation: Lamar is contributing is very small compared to what the rest of you have said Stan Geyer, president of Pittsburgh office.

Or, as Mr. Onorato so simply put it to assembled Heinz House staffers and teen members: had a And that vision? Heinz House Executive Director Stan Pittman said, always about the Vision, whether literal or metaphorical, always been clear in Pittsburgh. The with the lid phase lasted for a century or so, and cleaning up the hellish mess was all the harder since those sooty fires had once stoked the local economy. As the skies cleared, North Siders in particular could see their devastated neighborhoods losing ground to ever-widening highways. Though they connect suburbanites to Downtown office jobs, those highways separate the Sarah Heinz House from the often struggling children its Boys GirlsClub exists to serve.

felt so isolated, surrounded by nothing but asphalt and Mr. Pittman said. whole intent of the design is to tie us into the An important tie was established with construction in the late 1990s of a pedestrian footbridge crossing Route 28 between the Heinz House and the Spring Garden neighborhood. As a newer neighbor who lives just blocks away, I shudder to imagine children ever having braved this pulsing traffic artery. But the nearly completed foot addition takes community connection onto a different plane.

The whole enterprise seems to say: Broad windows and dozens of skylights illuminate the gymnasium and cafe upstairs, and the fitness center and dance studio downstairs. The west wall, where last billboard farewell took place, features a great view of the Golden Triangle. The south open-air dining terrace offers vistas of Downtown and the Strip District. wanted to capture the renaissance of Mr. Pittman said.

But all these sights supposed to cre- ate only passive enjoyment. The views also include, of course, the Sarah Heinz House grounds, where a rainwater-cistern system will irrigate kitchen and learning gardens, soften the harder edges of city landscapes like a working, elevated railroad track and provide new hands-on opportunities for the young clients. Input from the childrenwent into the $11.3 million building program, which is through and through, Mr. Pittman said. feel an obligation to be environmentally conscious, but practical too.

save on utility bills of all If the open campus-like design shows children their birthright a vibrant cityscape burnished to greater brightness with every passing year it also shows the Heinz House staff, volunteers and donors their mission. so visual throughout the building so we can see the Mr. Pittman said. want to be inviting the community in. We want to be even more community-based than we already The addition will allow a 50 percent increase in membership; right now the century-old facility accommodates 800 members, a third of whom live below the poverty line.

They attend least once or twice a week he explained, we see most of them four or five times a On Thursday, The Heinz Endowments announced a $3.1 million grant to the Heinz House board to help with its expansion and operating costs. The same day, the Lamar billboard came down. The children will be able to see their city, and the adults will be able to see the community devoted their lives to serving. This is one time everyone can hope that what they see is exactly what they get. Ruth Ann Dailey can be reached at or 412-263-1733.

Expanded Heinz House all about community RUTH ANN DAILEY Page One. Deputy Sheriff Conor Mullen was hired in 1999 under Sheriff Peter R. DeFazio. paper indicated he was hired under a previous sheriff. corrections clarifications Conservancy and other groups, Dr.

Ali has helped form the Orangutan Rainforest Health Initiative, dedicated to training village health leaders among the Punanpeople who live in the forests. The only way the Punan will resist the incursions of logging companies that are threatening the orangutan habitats, Dr. Ali said, is if their own leaders tell them to do so. decisions about what happens with that land rest with the leaders of that and the best way to influence them is to help them on such vital issues as fighting child mortality and infectious disease, he said. He takes the same people- centered approach to environmentalism at Peabody High School.

you go into Peabody High School and say you guys need to think about air pollution or diesel fumes or lead in the environment you ask them to think about that unless their good why building those friendships through mentoring is the main purpose of the Peabody program, which this year will involve more than 100 Pitt student volunteers, he said. His focus on Peabody is tied to his own experiences growing up in one of the few poor neighborhoods in Shadyside. In eighth grade, he said, he was in trouble a lot, smoking marijuana and missing 50 days of school. But then, as he began his freshman year at Peabody, friends of his noticed the way he studied subjects that interested him on his own, and offered to let him live with them in the Carlynton School District. From then on, he never missed a day of high school and went on to get a biology degree at Cornell University and an M.D.

at Columbia University. was a key experience in my he said, so I have a very strong empathy for people that age and a feeling that if people are given the right break, it can really make a difference in their The Peabody program began small two years ago, but has now grown to include four focuses: linking Pitt pre-med students to Peabody pupils in the Health Careers Academy; a it program in which Pitt mentors help Peabody students become mentors to elementary school pupils; a program to help students with the nuts and bolts of applying to college; and a to program designed to let a Pitt mentor and Peabody student work with each other through all four years of school. Dr. Ali minimize the challenges facing the mentoring program. The many low-income students at Peabody face a host of academic, social and health problems.

And as much as he wants them to eat healthy food and learn to appreciate the environment, he knows that first, he and his mentors must tackle other issues. best thing you can do for the health of a high school student in East he said, to get them to go to college. Because all of their health risks are behavioral, whether violence, or drugs, or pregnancy, or alcohol, or accidents or diet. if they can think about how to take care of themselves in ways that set them up to be healthy for the program will have achieved its aims. When he was floundering in school at the same age, one of the things he clung to was his interest in the exotic animals of Madagascar.

In 1988, when he was a senior in medical school, he finally got a chance to go there. It was an eye-opener. He visited a camp run by Duke University researchers studying lemurs which had built houses and solar panels to provide Directly across the river, he said, lived native people who had no road, no electricity, no medical care and no clean water. As he continued his volunteer work in ensuing years in Haiti, Jamaica, India, Australia, Papua New Guinea and China, Dr. Ali came to the realization that many of the wilderness areas that were worth preserving were also home to people mired in the deepest poverty.

He began to look for ways to help the environment while also meeting their needs. One project that combined both goals led him to Rwanda in 2001, where he helped provide health care to the native trackers who monitored the endangered mountain gorillas in that part of Africa. By keeping the trackers from becoming ill, he could prevent them from sickening the slowly recovering gorilla population with such diseases as tuberculosis or upper respiratory infections. The risk facing the 20,000 orangutans left in Borneo and Sumatra comes from a different kind of human threat. There, loggers are destroying the rainforest at a frantic pace, despite efforts by the government to stop them.

like a gold rush for Dr. Ali said. realize cash in those trees and cutting them down as fast as they The orangutans spend most of their lives in the canopy of those trees, and even before the loggers arrived, their survival had been at risk because the apes reproduce an average of only once every eight years. If he and other environmentalists go into Indonesia and try to attack the logging directly, they might fail at the outset, Dr. Ali said, because the loggers build roads and provide jobs.

Preservationists stand a better chance by improving native health care while also resisting overcutting of the forests, he said. In Borneo, he recalled, companies said to the chief, these Nature Conservancy guys down, because interfering with our But the district chief said helping us with health Even if the quest to save the orangutans proves futile, Dr. Ali will draw some solace from having helped cut down on the horrific 30 percent child mortality rate among the Punan people. It helps him to think on a longer time scale. have a vision of the world 1,000 years from now, where it would have fewer people, nature would be better protected and the quality of human life would be better.

want to live my life to push things just a little bit in that direction. If the human race is a brain, and my life is one cell in the brain, and if I send out a certain neurochemical signal and enough other cells do the same, then someday, the brain may get this new Mark Roth can be reached at or at 412-263-1130 He attacks social woes to save the environment ALI, FROM PAGE A-1 Name: Robbie Ali Position: Director, Center for Healthy Environment and Communities; visiting professor, University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. Residence: Shadyside Education: in biology, Cornell University, 1981; in public health and M.D., Columbia University, 1988; in public policy and management, University of Pittsburgh, 2002. Previous positions: Emergency medical and family physician in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, 1989 to now; research fellow, environmental and occupational medicine, Harvard University, 2003. Volunteer work: Public health projects in Haiti, Madagascar, Taiwan, India, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Jamaica, China, Rwanda and Indonesia, 1986-2005; founder and coordinator, school health team, Peabody High School.

2004- now. Publications: More than 30 papers, book chapters and articles in various journals and other publications. The is no island commentator Andy Rooney has been called a lot of things during his decades on television, but he can remove geography expert from the list. Just three weeks after saying on the show that he ought to return to school to learn the subject again heard recently that there are more than 48 now, so I need to go back to school to learn what the two new capitals are he suggested last night that our fair city sits on, of all places, an island. In a piece pondering the names of towns and places across America, Mr.

Rooney said he decided to look at an atlas. of the biggest surprises to me is Pittsburgh. I know on an island, like New York he said on last CBS broadcast. Of course, a reason he know that Because it Perhaps Mayor Luke Raven- stahl should invite Mr. Rooney for a visit.

KDKA-TV reported there were no calls to the station questioning Mr. remark..