kimblr.com

By Matthew Piechalak
The Oak Lawn Park District has revived its plans to build a dog park and may be close to securing a site near Oak Lawn High School
Park district officials have been in contact with Oak Lawn Community High School District 229 about leasing school district-owned property near the northeast corner of 93rd Street and Kilbourn Avenue. The location, adjacent to railroad tracks about one block north of Advocate Christ Medical Center, would be a good location, according to park district officials.
The park district presented the plan to the District 229 board of education at a meeting earlier this month, School District 229 Superintendent James Briscoe said in a phone interview. Briscoe declined to comment on the likelihood of a deal because the school board plans to discuss the matter in closed session, he said.
The park district hopes to speak with the school district after graduation about the possibility of establishing a lease agreement.
"Hopefully we can get some type of agreement worked out in the next month," Park Board Commissioner Mary Margaret Wallace said.
The park district has allocated $30,000 in its capital improvements fund for the creation of a park for dogs and their owners. Wallace describes the plans as "pretty simplistic" and "in-line" with other dog parks complete with a double-gated entry, closed garbage bins and benches with kiosks. The park district would be responsible for maintaining the park and would assume all costs.
Oak Lawn and Hometown residents who wish to use the park would be charged a $40 annual fee, while non-residents would pay $100.
News content published by The Reporter. Copyright 2008
All Rights Reserved. Reproduction prohibited.

thereporteronline.net

According to the Web site, the day “was created to celebrate the great companions dogs make and to encourage their adoption from humane societies, animal shelters and breed rescue clubs.”
Since that’s exactly where I adopted all three of my pooches, I agree they would all be excellent ambassadors and if my co-workers saw what great dogs they are, they would run out and adopt a sweetie of their own.
I have had all three of my dogs in my office at one time or another for very brief visits, but I doubt even my most persuasive argument would convince my boss to let me bring just one of my pooches to work for a whole day. The point is moot anyway: I am out of the office next Friday for a weekend in Nashville.
But in case you would like to give it a go at your workplace, here’s a Letterman-style top ten list of reasons the Web site suggests you use to convince your boss to let you participate:
10. The squirrels in the neighborhood deserve a break.
9. Wagging tails work great when the a/c is on the fritz.
8. With a dog as your passenger, you’ll be able to use the car pool lane.
7. It’s a great way to lick the work day blahs!
6. My dog thinks you’re grrrrrrreat!
5. Meetings end as soon as Rover starts staring at the conference room door.
4. You can blame those missing reports on one of your employees’ dogs.
3. It’s the leash you can do.
2. Finally, someone at your office will actually be working like a dog.
AND THE NUMBER ONE REASON TO TAKE YOUR DOG TO WORK…
1. Friday, June 20, is Take Your Dog To Work Day®!
Good luck and post a comment if you plan to participate or if you have experience with taking your dog to work.

blogs.roanoke.com

‘88. Steven Seagal. A Chicago policewoman helps her cynical partner rid his working-class neighborhood of cocaine dealers. (R) (2:00) TBS: Wed. 1 A.M. (CC)
• Adam Sandler’s Eight Crazy Nights
‘02. Voices of Adam Sandler. Animated. During Hanukkah, a temperamental lout drinks, gets in trouble with the law and performs community service. (PG-13) (2:00) COMEDY: Mon. 8 A.M. (CC)
‘01. Haley Joel Osment. In the future a cutting-edge android in the form of a boy embarks on a journey to discover its true nature. (PG-13) (3:00) TBS: Sun. midnight (CC)
‘97. Michael Jeter. Abandoned by a disagreeable clown, a golden retriever with a knack for basketball befriends a lonely boy. (PG) (1:40) DIS: Thu. 7 P.M., Fri. noon, ENC: Sun. 7:50 A.M. (CC)
‘94. Brendan Fraser. Attention-hungry musicians decide to grab the media spotlight by taking staffers at a popular radio station hostage. (PG-13) (1:40) ENC: Thu. 10:50 A.M. (CC)
‘04. Jude Law. A Londoner continues his womanizing ways while working as a chauffeur in New York. (R) (2:00) TBS: Sun. 3 A.M. (CC)
• Ali G Indahouse
‘02. Sacha Baron Cohen. A gangster becomes a member of Parliament and tries to prevent the closure of his favorite building. (R) (1:35) MAX: Fri. 5:10 A.M. (CC)
• Alien Hunter ‘03. James Spader. Government agents find evidence of extraterrestrial life at the South Pole. (R) (2:00) SCI-FI: Sun. 10:30 A.M.
• All the King’s Men
‘06. Sean Penn. A Southern politician’s idealism and good intentions give way to corruption after he becomes governor of Louisiana. (PG-13) (2:15) ENC: Thu. 3:45 A.M. (CC)
• All the Right Moves
‘83. Tom Cruise. A Pennsylvania steel-town high-school coach tries to spoil a football hero’s scholarship dream. (R) (2:00) AMC: Sat. 2 A.M., CMT: Mon. 8 P.M., Tue. 2 P.M., Sat. 9 P.M.
• Alone in the Dark

post-gazette.com

Thousands of dogs will join their owners this Saturday, May 17, for the chance to break a world record and raise money for service dogs.
The Mighty Texas Dog Walk will hold its 10th annual event, with the goal of breaking the Guinness World Record for most dogs walked at once.
The event has won the world record twice, but now they must try to regain their crown from British challengers.
Dogs and their owners will start at the Congress Avenue bridge and make their to the State Capitol building and then along Lady Bird Lake.
The other goal is to raise money for the Texas Hearing and Service Dogs’ Assistance to Military Personnel program, which trains service dogs for those injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The event starts at 10:30, and you can register online or call (512) 891-9090.
To Email is Required. A valid email address is required.
Your Email is Required. A valid email address is required.

keyetv.com

Sands Woody and Mary Fitzgerald open the door to their garage to find three tails wagging.
Bogie, Oliver and Mugsy, the couple’s three dogs, head to the hook holding their retractable leashes; Fitzgerald and Woody stuff baggies in their pockets.
Out the door goes the pack, strolling on the sidewalk of Church Avenue in downtown Roanoke. All three dogs avoid stepping on the sidewalk grates.
“It hurts their feet,” Fitzgerald explains.
They cross the street and make it to the soft lawn in front of the Norfolk and Southern building. There the dogs are dogs. They roll in the grass. They sniff. They play. And they deposit what the baggies are intended to collect.
Woody has lived above his Market Street restaurant and wine shop, Trio Bistro Bar Bottle, with his chocolate Lab Bogie since late summer 2005. A year ago Fitzgerald, a nurse anesthetist at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital, moved in, bringing her two dogs, 3-year-old Yorkshire terrier Oliver and 10-year-old Jack Russell terrier Mugsy.
Walking three dogs, especially on the east end of downtown where green space is limited, can be a challenge. The couple wants to be good neighbors. They always tote their own bags.
As Roanoke’s downtown area expands to include more homes mixed in with offices, retail shops and restaurants, more families moving into those condominiums and apartments include pets.
But city dwelling, even in a relatively calm area like downtown Roanoke, can create challenges for dog owners whose pooches must tread the sidewalks in search of green space to do what a dog must do.
Cleanup is a must
Artists Suzun Hughes and John Wilson moved to Roanoke from San Francisco a year ago with their two 5-year-old American Eskimo dogs Sugar and Sefka. After a year of renovations, they settled into their Campbell Avenue studio, gallery and condo in April.

roanoke.com

Re: “Dogs and cyclists can mix,” Editorial, May 6.
Calgary’s pathways closely hug the Bow for most of its length from Fort Calgary on south. The exception is Southland Park which is one of the few areas where off-leash dogs are allowed into the river. So all the recreational users cited in your editorial (cyclists, hikers and runners) have much more access to the Bow than do off-leash dogs. When an off-leash dog west of the proposed pathway in Southland smells water on a hot day, it’ll make a beeline toward the river. Dogs must be under control at all times, but having to leash dogs to cross that pathway will cause far more inconvenience to far more citizens than would routing the pathway to the west of the off-leash area. I think it’s other recreational users who should, as the editorial writer so eloquently put it, “stop crying a river and start sharing the green space.” Dog owners are citizens, pay taxes and licence fees and are entitled to use a fair share of Calgary’s green spaces — and not just the steep hills or berms beside busy roads which no other user group wants.

canada.com

Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression
by Sally Brampton
How good does a book about depression have to be before the reader becomes too depressed to read it? The further I got with Sally Brampton’s utterly involving memoir, the harder it was to turn the pages. By the end of it, I was mightily relieved: the author had survived and so had I.
In her happy heyday, Brampton was the founding editor of Elle and a paragon of progressive women’s journalism. She lived the aspirations of her readership, the archetypal juggler of catwalk afternoons and warm domesticity with husband and daughter. She also wrote novels, and even during her less successful launch of Red magazine you wouldn’t have figured her as a candidate for mental institutions and the morbid confessional. She looked too spunky and too resilient and, absurd as it sounds, too attractive: her byline photograph showed cropped blonde hair, a childlike snub nose and a wide smile.
But there she was for almost four years, in and out of institutions, on and off the pills, sobbing to her friends on the phone that she was worthless. For a while, vodka and red wine seemed the answer; later, there were more desperate measures.
What switched this on? A divorce. A house move. A tough work stretch. A thyroid problem. The turn of the millennium. And perhaps none of the above. Her mood swung down at the start of 2000, but it took her a year of darkening confusion to seek help. Initially, she made vague attempts to take the advice of well-meaning friends to pull herself together, to be grateful for all the privilege and opportunity in her life. She found that each stab at normality brought with it only more profound depression, where ‘every contemptuous glance, every irritated sigh from family and friends’ drove her ’still further into the cold, black night’.
She writes of her despair with such fluidity and lyricism that it is sometimes difficult to imagine her as the stumbling and empty figure she describes, clinging on to walls lest the ‘throat monster’ gets her, unable to prepare a proper meal or sign a cheque, walking around London in dark glasses to conceal her tears.
She has ’suicidal ideation’ for months, but her two attempts, both by overdose, appear quite late in the book and are described as almost incidental, a final marker of anguish, when even the life of her daughter is not enough to keep her afloat. ‘It’s the worst death,’ a friend in hospital tells her of her own attempt with 400 paracetamol. ‘It takes weeks, and then your liver packs up.’ Brampton underdosed and her failures are marked by anger. Her distrust of the healing power of drugs is so sure that at one point, she ignores strict professional advice and jettisons all her medication in one go.
She has been criticised, unfairly I think, for commenting on her therapist’s dress sense - an unusual choice of shawl, perhaps - as if she could never divorce her sense of gloom from her sense of style. But depression lumps everything in, heightening some observations as it dulls others, and Brampton’s account is at its best when it roots itself in the everyday. This is her message: out of the sky comes unexpected universal disaster and it will smother the successful and the outwardly buoyant without discrimination.
Her story comes at a busy time for popular accounts of depression and derangement; it is almost a phenomenon for writers to compete with Dan Brown spinoffs and abused childhood miseries. As Brampton’s publisher claims brazenly on the jacket of the book’s proof copy, ‘there is a huge niche market’ for this kind of thing. Unfortunately, it seems to be getting bigger: the World Health Organisation has forecast that by 2020, depression will be the leading health challenge in the developing world.
How can they possibly know? And why the recent publishing rush? It may be that we are more willing to admit to what was once regarded as the last taboo, alongside those other last taboos of prostate cancer and sexually transmitted diseases. Depression can seem less of a hidden burden these days and more of a communal affliction - a GP’s caseload is dominated by the illness, while the drug companies grow fat on discovering new anxieties for their panaceas. Brampton’s stated aim is modest and clear, to hint at what may help, to offer hope of recovery and to connect with fellow depressives. She has already had some success: she writes that after her account of a suicide bid appeared in the Daily Telegraph in 2003, she received about 2,000 letters.
In Shoot the Damn Dog, the title a reference to the depressive ‘black dog’ days logged by Winston Churchill, Brampton attempts the difficult trick of fusing the personal with the general. Her writing is accessible, occasionally to the point of hokey clumsiness (’It’s no picnic, a psychiatric ward’). But her story is compelling and unflinching and she makes no claims that her descent and slow recovery will match those of others. She is on less firm ground with her fleeting analysis of current scientific understanding of the disease, a conclusion she comically reaches herself: ‘In my entirely subjective research into what makes happiness, or freedom from depression, I’d say that the single most effective habit is an open and receptive mind.’
She is supported throughout her ordeal by two friends, journalist Sarah Spankie, and a fellow depressive, Nigel Langford, to whom she jointly dedicates her book. With Langford, she shares gallows humour, while Spankie gets the calls at all hours and provides the reassuring breeze of the outside world (Brampton is strong on the notion that the clinically depressed will only benefit from visits by close friends, no matter how much one believes that solitude may be beneficial).
A third friend called Tom offers her a more volatile relationship and passionate sex. But he has children from an imploding marriage and a custody battle. They could not be together and they could not stay away, fleeting joy merging with desolation, and it ended in Brampton striking him. Or almost ended: the reader learns that after three years of distance, they recently reunited and wed, leaving Brampton in what she calls, ‘in its own particular way, bliss’.
The qualifying phrase is a vital one, as if she doesn’t quite trust her happiness or believe it will last. Depression, like addiction, and like wild love perhaps, is not a disease to be cured. It is managed and contained, in Brampton’s case by brisk walks, the trust of friends, gardening, transcendental meditation, yoga, acupuncture and cognitive behavioural therapy (though it took her a while to value this). She is already blessed with a skill for communication. ‘Sometimes, I wish I was in a full bodycast,’ a fellow depressive tells her, ‘with every bone in my body broken. Then maybe people would stop minimising my illness because they can actually see what’s wrong with me. They seem to need physical evidence.’ Sally Brampton’s memoir provides further valuable proof.

books.guardian.co.uk