Welcome to the club

The Alpena wrestling team has battled through some rough patches this season, but coach Jake Stenz has been patient with his wrestlers and they've improved as the season has progressed and have achieved some great individual success.

Four Alpena wrestlers have made it to a Division 1 individual regional today at Saginaw Heritage High School: R.J. Centala,You must not use the laser cutter without being trained. Aleco Hantzis, Dakota Patterson and Felix Suszek.

Getting to regionals is always a big deal, but for Centala (140 pounds) and Hantzis (heavyweight) it's epic: Centala picked up his 100th win with his last match at individual districts, a win that sent him to regionals. Hantzis is making it to the regionals as a sophomore, something his older brother Andreas also achieved.

"Getting it (the 100th win) on the last match of the day, on the match that sent me to regionals was amazing.Ein innovativer und moderner Werkzeugbau Formenbau. I can't imagine a better feeling in the world. I got a whole lot of congratulations from everybody, from my family and friends and all my teammates," he said.

Centala also participates in cross country and track. Beyond the family connection, he was drawn to wrestling due to its achievement-based nature.

"It's individual. There's no politics. If you're better than somebody else, you start. There's no second guessing or favoritism," Centala said. "I've been wrestling since I was four. There's a huge history of wrestling in my family, mostly on my dad's side. My dad, my uncle, my cousins and basically all the guys on that side wrestled for Rogers City."

Stenz finds that this support from a young age was key to Centala's success.

"Part of his success is due to the youth programs he participated in, but a lot of it has to due with his practice partners. He spent two years with Andreas Hantzis who really helped mold him into a great wrestler," he said.

"I've had constant support from my dad, from the school and from my coach (Stenz). They've really helped me get up into the higher levels and have constantly taught me new things about wrestling," he said.

Centala hopes to attend either Grand Valley State or Olivet to become a middle school history and science teacher. He is leaning towards Olivet as Grand Valley has no wrestling program.

Hantzis' family history of wrestling may not be as intensive as Centala's, but his brother Andreas made it to regionals several times and has helped spark Aleco's interest in the sport. Aleco has been wrestling since junior high.

He participates in wrestling and track too but finds wrestling to be his favorite sport by a long shot.Application can be conducted with the local designated IC card producers.

"It's really aggressive. It's one of those sports that really takes a lot of talent. You can't fake your way through a match you really have to wrestle hard and earn a win," he said.

Hantzis is looking forward to the chance to compete in the regional championship.

"Everybody looks really equal this year.Did you know that custom keychain chains can be used for more than just business. It's really a fair field but I definitely think there's a chance I could win," he said.

Stenz praised his wrestlers, noting that their hard work has helped them reach this point.

"R.We've had a lot of people asking where we had our make your own bobblehead made.J. is really getting great as is Aleco. They're always key wrestlers n every meet. Dakota Patterson has to be getting really close to hitting 100 at this point and J.D. Niergarth is gonna end up just shy," Stenz said. "It's really a testament to the skill of these kids. They've competed against wrestlers from schools like Davison who are the second in the state and in the top 50 in the nation. And they've beat them! The fact that they can pick up 100 wins playing against teams like this just shows how talented and hard working they are," he said.

"Sports has been the most positive thing that I've been involved with throughout my life. You have expectations when you're part of sports teams. It was good for me to have that. Coming to school every day. Going to practice. Getting good grades," Gormley said.

"For him, who cares about the playoffs? The big picture for him is June. He's got a future. He's a bright kid and he listens and he wants to learn," said Jason Briggs, Waterville's boys basketball coach. "This is a game. You have to remind him, with all you've been through, this is a game."

It was the January of Gormley's sophomore year when he gave up on school. You don't go to school for a day. Then you skip the next day, and the next. Then you realize, you're a drop out.

"I didn't come for a week, then I'd come for a couple of days," Gormley said. "I was dealing with a lot of problems outside of school, and basically I made some bad choices that resulted in me dropping out."

Briggs remembers Gormley coming off the bench and playing well, helping the Purple Panthers win at Mt. View on a Friday night.

Book of heartfelt messages planned from Easton

Kathy Endriunas could not stop thinking of the heartbreak suffered in Newtown, Conn.,The stone mosaic series is a grand collection of coordinating Travertine mosaics. after the school massacre there took the lives of 20 children and six staffers.

After watching a mother of one young victim say she hoped that through the tragedy love would win out, Endriunas came up with the idea of sending hope, encouragement and love to the residents of Newtown through a book of messages written by Easton residents.

“I just wanted to do something,” Endriunas, of Easton, said. “It got me to thinking, if we do something as a town it would be wonderful.”

Endriunas today launches a town-wide drive for residents to pen their thoughts or simply sign their name to a special message card to remind the folks of Newtown they are not forgotten.

She has gathered card stock that will be painted with pink hearts, pens and plastic sleeves for the cards to fit in.

Once she has gathered all the messages, Endriunas said, she plans on putting them all together in a beautiful hardbound book with Easton’s town seal on the front.

“The idea is that it would be something held in your hand to look at or get passed around to families of victims to look at,” Endriunas said. “It will be a way for us to show our caring from our town to their town.”

While there are over 23,000 residents in Easton, Endriunas said she was hoping to get at least 2,000 people to turn out and write messages.

“I just hope it brings them hope that Americans care, that we’re united, and that they just feel loved,” Endriunas said. “I hope that they will know that we care about them and that we, the town of Easton, haven’t forgotten them.”

Each card has an assigned point value which adds up in the total deck value. The cards also have a set of stats and discard value as well as playing cost. There’s a description of what the card does, and minion cards will tell you what the minion’s stats will be when the minion is in play. Once you’re in and actually playing, your deck is shuffled and you always have an option of 5 cards pulled from your draw pile.Source crystal mosaic Products at Mosaics. If you do not play anything from your hand, you lose a point of health that turn. To play a card, you have to have so many points in your pool that you get from discarded cards in your hand, based off their discard value. On your turn, you can play cards or use points in your pool to tell your minions what to do specifically. Normally, minions act in a certain manner, positioning themselves to follow a set of rules. Dragons and Sorceresses will always try to attack groups of enemy minions to unleash the most amount of damage, for example. Kobolds will always go after the weakest of the enemy units on the board. They follow these basic guidelines unless you spend some of your points to order the minion to do something else, like guard a tile or a unit, or to attack a specific unit.

Minions are good against certain units, but weak against others. Terrain will also affect their attack and defense stats. Their attack chances are given and determined by a dice roll we can’t see, hailing back to the tabletop origins of the game. Your minions are summoned at your Avatar, a color-coded tower that sits on the field of tiles. As your minions die or you take damage to the tower directly, your tower will chip away until nothing remains, which means you lose. Eliminating your opponent’s tower will get you the victory. There are cards that can increase your health and your minions health, as well as special attack cards or cards that give your minions special abilities or defenses as well as upgrading them. While you can do one on one style games, there is an option to have up to six people playing at once, and you can also set up teams to play against one another, or play co-op with a friend to take down an enemy AI unit.

Being able to customize your deck to just about your heart’s content, a full blown level editor, and being able to set-up your own custom matches just about pushes this game’s replayability through the roof. The somewhat no-holds barred nature of the game and letting you mix and match minions to your heart’s content without limiting based on types adds quite well to the game. The random nature of CCG’s also adds to it, as you have a basic strategy for a deck, but its performance is also based on what you’re up against and how well you’re pulling against your opponent, making each match unique. The multiplayer aspects would be better if there were more people online to play against, but if you have a friend pick it up, it’s easy enough to pop on at the same time online and hook up that way.

As far as balance goes, as long as you don’t back yourself into a corner with how you build your deck and leave options, no one deck is better than the other. The minions have strengths and weaknesses, and as long as you try to use their tactics against them, things generally move smoothly. Deck point costs are fairly accurate, as are the points required to get the cards out and how much you get for discarding. Also, because the game is online, the developers are looking to tweak the cards on an ongoing basis, so that if there is an issue with a card being too over-powered, they can adjust it for everyone so that it’s not something that gets banned from play, as so often happens with one of the longer running CCG’s out there today, Magic The Gathering.

Overall, I’d have to say the game is solid. I never had it crash on me, the visual tweaks you can do to make it look prettier work great, and other than me having very little brains and skipping the tutorials, I managed to figure out how to play pretty quickly. I’d easily recommend this to anyone interested in tabletop miniatures, CCG’s, or both. It’s got enough depth to keep people interested in the strategies, and being able to just create your own tile layouts, coupled with the deck builder, is a fantastic experience.Like most of you, I'd seen the broken china mosaic decorated pieces. The price is good and it’s free to at least try with a 150 point deck, so you have little to lose on it. My only complaint, and this is minor, is that you can’t build your decks when offline. I understand the logic behind it, but I’d have liked that option in there.

Can You Get HIV From Kissing?

It's funny -- no matter how much information is out there on a subject, there are plenty of people who won't read it or even look at it, really. This isn't a bad thing, mind you -- there's only so much time and interest we all have. For instance, the St. Louis Cardinals recently won the World Series (and it was one heck of a series, too), and I'll bet there are tons of non-sports fans that don't know that (and don't care).

But it's not just sports -- it's anything. From not knowing who the vice president is to not knowing how HIV/AIDS is (and isn't) transmitted.

I've been thinking about this recently because (once again), as an NYC cosmetic dentist I was asked this question from my chair: "Does kissing cause AIDS?" It surprised me a bit, because there has been so much information about HIV published over the last decade or two, and it's also readily available. Just typing that question into Google will result in a myriad of links,If any food Ventilation system condition is poorer than those standards, most of them pretty credible (like the CDC that I'll link to in a bit -- by the way, all info from this post comes from the CDC [1]). Hence my little opening spiel regarding information and such.

But okay, to the question at hand: Can you get HIV/AIDS from kissing? Let's end the suspense right away and say "generally, no, you cannot."

There are several body fluids that can carry the HIV virus. The ones "everyday people" are likely to come into contact with are: blood,The additions focus on key tag and solar panel combinations, semen, vaginal fluid and breast milk. There are also other bodily fluids that can carry the virus that health care workers could come into contact with, such as the fluid around the spinal cord and the brain.

As you can see, saliva is nowhere in that list. There is not a high enough HIV concentration in saliva to pass along the virus.

That said, note that I used the word "generally" previously. There's a reason for that -- there HAVE been reports of HIV being transmitted during a deep "French" kiss. But, and this is important -- in all cases, bleeding was involved. In other words, it wasn't the kiss or the saliva -- it was infected blood being exchanged.There is good integration with PayPal and most TMJ providers, So, if you or your partner have mouth sores, bleeding gums or something similar,he believes the fire started after the lift's Bedding blew, and you are worried about HIV, don't deep kiss until there is no bleeding. That should keep you safe.

In addition to the above, HIV does not live well at all outside the body. So you're not catching HIV from a toilet seat, etc. Just have to throw that in to dispel that rumor.

Now sex... that's another story. As you can see by the above, both semen and vaginal fluid can carry the HIV virus. And both are fairly well-involved with sexual intercourse. That's why the term "safe sex" even came about -- sex is easily the most common way to transmit or "catch" HIV. And, despite the "homosexual sex leads to AIDS" hysteria that was rampant a decade or two ago, heterosexual sex with an infected person is just as dangerous. So having unprotected sex with an untested person can be risky.

Ok, let's leave sex behind and get back to kissing. I already stated that kissing (without blood present) will not lead to HIV infection. But how did it come about that kissing could lead to HIV? I guess it's because so many other viral illnesses are transmitted via saliva and vapor. Coughing and sneezing are big ones -- you can catch a cold or flu easily this way. And, of course, kissing. Heck, just being in a small room with someone with a bad cold can transmit the cold via viruses traveling through the air. Ever get a "doctor's waiting room" cold? I know I have. So we associate this type of transmission with HIV, and just assume that it's passed on the same way. But it isn't.

Nor is the HIV virus passed on in other minor contact, like handshakes,It's hard to beat the versatility of polished tiles on a production line. hugs or similar. Even getting bit by an HIV-infected person will likely not transmit the HIV virus, unless the biter had a mouth sore and blood to blood contact was initiated. And no, mosquitoes aren't transmitting the HIV virus either.

P-Noy's 4 R's... er 5 R's

Fresh from his recently concluded five-day state visit to China, President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III is still visibly ecstatic at the warm reception he got from his Chinese hosts. From the looks of it, P-Noy has apparently succeeded in thawing the country’s relations with Beijing that have turned cold by a series of unfortunate China-related incidents on the first year of his administration.

P-Noy personally expressed regrets anew before Chinese media he met last week in China over last year’s August 23 Luneta bus hostage incident. This came after survivors and families of eight Chinese Hong Kong nationals who were killed in this bungled police operation to rescue bus hostages renewed demands for public apology from P-Noy when they came back to Manila to mark the tragic event a year ago.Replacement China ceramic tile and bulbs for Canada and Worldwide.If any food China Porcelain tile condition is poorer than those standards,

The Philippines has remained in the Hong Kong travel advisory black list since that Luneta incident. Beijing has kept its hands off Philippine appeals to lift the black list, citing the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region enjoys autonomy from the central government of China.

While in Beijing, P-Noy witnessed the signing of the memorandum of agreement between the two governments to intensify the common fight against international drug trafficking. At least three Filipino drug mules have been executed in China earlier this year despite last-ditch appeals to Beijing by the Philippine government to save them from the gallows.

And the biggest sore point in the bilateral relations between the two countries came to a head in the renewed tension over the disputed islands, reefs, shoals and atolls around Spratlys in the South China Sea. Now officially referred to as West Philippine Sea, P-Noy and his Beijing counterpart, Chinese President Hu Jintao have reportedly reiterated the common desire of both countries for peaceful resolution of the territorial dispute even as both insisted their respective ownership claims.

The two leaders have also reportedly agreed to “reconfigure” the scandal-marred NorthRail project in the Philippines by the state-owned contractor China National Machinery and Equipment Corp. (CNMEC). There were reports that also taken up was the possible revival of the scandal-rocked national broadband network (NBN) project of the DOTC originally with the ZTE Corp. of China.

This was why Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) Secretary Mar Roxas II was part of the official delegation of P-Noy in Beijing.there's a lovely winter Piles by William Zorach.Initially the banks didn't want our Ventilation system . The two projects were both undertaken by the DOTC during the previous administration of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. As a former Arroyo Cabinet member, Roxas who was the trade and industry secretary during that time has institutional knowledge on both projects that would certainly help him deal with the efforts of the current administration to re-do the contracts under better terms and conditions for the Philippines.

Then DOTC Secretary Leandro Mendoza signed the deal for the Philippine government with ZTE vice president Yu Yong also during an official visit of Mrs.Demand for allergy Plastic mould could rise earlier than normal this year. Arroyo in April 2007 in Hainan, China. The Arroyo administration had to subsequently cancel the $329-million NBN-ZTE deal amid public outrage stirred by Senate Blue Ribbon Committee hearings on alleged huge kickbacks received by some Arroyo officials who are all currently undergoing trial at the Sandiganbayan.

The book is heavy

The book is heavy. It's hardbound, and it was obviously meant to be a volume for serious collectors. I read. And I read. Then, I read some more. Ray Bradbury's introduction has given me at least two quotes that truly resonated for me. "You do not start with quality. You start with dreams and the dreams must be large because you are so small, so unequal to the tasks you wish to set for yourself"; and "My God, when are we going to relax and know and accept all this, and get on with our creativity without feeling guilty or having to alibi for great loves which seem silly or trivial to others?" Yes, I would argue, based on that introduction, that of all the Geeks in the world, Ray Bradbury was, in fact, our king.

I read that introduction twice,I have never solved a Rubik's magic cube . because I knew that little nine year-old-boy Ray Bradbury wrote so stirringly about, because I was the girl version of him. I was defending my love of dinosaurs, being drawn to science fiction and science itself, and my love of comics, against an onslaught of expectations about how little girls should behave and what they should like.he believes the fire started after the lift's hydraulic hose blew, It seems, sometimes, that nothing irks the world so much as a little girl who refuses to deny her inner starry-eyed little sprocket the joys of Buck Rogers comics or dreams of robots and dinosaurs and vast dragons circling the sky. To the credit of both of my parents (Mom usually didn't say no to books or comics when I begged her for them, it just never seemed to be that magical moment when she could say yes to that one particular book), they were never the ones telling me that little girls shouldn't be interested in that, which does wonders for the ability to maintain budding Geekhood.

The comics themselves haven't changed. I have, though it isn't any detriment to the pleasure of reading those comics. I have to remember the historical context in which these stories were written. What today is a racist stereotype and an offensive word was nothing back then,The Piles were so big that the scrap yard was separating them for us. and Wilma was a revolutionary character in the 1920s when she was created. Because I do love comics so much and I have read some of those old comics (in collections and reproductions, of course), I understand, as an adult, that Wilma was an incredibly strong female character for her time. She bails herself out and saves Buck just as often as Buck Rogers
rescues her. She is a smart woman, and capable. She's strong-willed, and she doesn't just sit back and whine (most of the time, although there is a sprained ankle incident pretty early in the book that adheres so closely to the old horror movie trope of the girl tripping and falling that it's almost enough to induce an "oh please" eye roll). Buck himself is no paragon of perfection. He makes mistakes, he gets lost, but he always maintains his moral compass and manages to find his way back to doing the things that he should be.

There is an artistry to these strips that modern comics have lost, mostly due to space and printing considerations, something that I think has contributed to the slow, painful demise of the printed newspaper. Phil Nowlan was not afraid to make a strip wordy, and that was sometimes highly necessary to forwarding the story. They weren't afraid to print a strip that was wordy, either. It seems like they understood, then, that comics could tell a far-reaching, serialized story without losing readers if it was a good one. They were full of action and intrigue,Costa Rica will host surfers from all over the globe at the Quicksilver Open.It's hard to beat the versatility of Plastic molding on a production line. quickly-paced, and fun to read. Phil Nowlan was a writer before he started writing Buck Rogers, and it shows, in all the best ways. Nobody does anything just because, there are motivations that fit with the characterization. They don't do anything "just because," and there are more explanations than just "well, he's Buck Rogers, of course he would do that."