Verdict

Pistol Basc is upped 6lb for last month's victory at Catterick but had scored over these fences earlier and should be in the mix once again. PRINCE BLACKTHORN was also successful over track and trip on his latest start and, open to further progress on only his fourth outing over fences, gets the vote to follow up despite a rise in the weights. Cloudy Dawn has been placed over longer trips recently but just the one win in 19 starts over the larger obstacles doesn't inspire confidence and Forestside may prove a bigger threat dropping a further 4lb down the handicap.

Pistol Basc (FR) 11-2 (11-0) Tracked leaders, led 3 out, hard ridden when strongly challenged after last, just held on, won at Catterick 2m 3f hcp 0-100 (5) sft in Dec beating Moonlight Maggie (10-2) by hd, 7 ran.

Forestside (IRE) 8-1 (10-10) Tracked leaders in 3rd, pushed along before 4 out, soon weakened, 5th of 6, 36l behind Civil Unrest (11-5) at Musselburgh 2m hcp chs 0-100 (5) sft.

Prince Blackthorn (IRE) 5-1 (10-4) Held up towards rear, took keen hold, headway before 3 out, led before 2 out, clear before last, kept on well, won at Sedgefield 2m 4f hcp 0-100 (5) gs in Dec beating Farm Pixie (11-5) by 4l, 7 ran.

Cloudy Dawn 9-4fav (10-1) Chased leaders on outside, mistake 11th, jumped slowly 14th, pushed along 17th, hung left and no extra after 2 out, 6th of 8, 14l behind Great Ocean Road (9-9) at Sedgefield 3m 3f hcp 0-100 (5) sft in Nov.

Wave Breaker (IRE) 13-2 (10-7) Led, headed after 2nd, tracked leader, pushed along before 4 out, weakened before 3 out, 5th of 8, well behind Morning Time (11-5) at Hexham 2m hcp hdl 0-95 (5) sft in Nov.

Monbeg (IRE) 12-1 (11-0) In rear, stayed on from after 2 out, went 3rd run-in, nearest at finish, 3rd of 8, 15l behind Dingo Bay (10-8) at Newcastle 2m 4f hcp chs 0-100 (5) hvy.

Samtheman 20-1 (11-6) Mid-division, mistake and lost place 5th, pushed along 11th, hampered 4 out, stayed on from next, went 4th last, no impression, 4th of 13, 14l behind River Purple (10-7) at Uttoxeter 2m 4f nov hcp chs 0-100 (5) sft in Dec.

Runswick Relax 10-1 (11-9) Behind, reminders after 3rd, struggling 13th, soon lost touch and pulled up, in a race won by Matmata de Tendron (10-6) at Hexham 3m 1f hcp chs 0-95 (5) sft in Nov, 9 ran.

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PORT WASHINGTON (WITI) The Wisconsin Department of Transportation is using a tool to help keep drivers safe while battling the whipping winds of winter. Its something you probably pass every day without even noticing.

Whether its permanent snow fences or temporary snow fences, we have programs in place for some of our more rural roads, said Mike Pyritz with the Wisconsin DOT.

One fence, built on I-43 near Port Washington a few years ago was a pilot program of sorts, as the structure is much larger than a typical snow fence. The stretch of highway had a history of high winds and drifting snow.

One of the leading problems that we have with the wind and the snow is creating the black ice on the roadways, so we try to monitor and make the adjustments to keep the roadways just as safe as possible, said Pyritz.

The strategy continues to evolve as the DOT works on creating more natural barriers using plants and bushes to help block winds.Permission from landowners is needed any time fences are built on property not owned by the state.

The DOT says the more snow it can keep from blowing on the road, the less money any municipality will have to spend on snowplowing to get the snow back off the road.

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DOT creates snow fences to help keep drivers safe

January 25, 2014 AS I SEE IT: Fences bring back memories

Marjorie Anderson Special to The Sun The Edmond Sun Sat Jan 25, 2014, 09:46 AM CST

EDMOND Outside my office window I can see a portion of the second newest fence on this place. Yellow Jasmine climbs that gray fence, emerging from gaps in the low hedge that I planted myself atop a low retaining wall some time ago. The back fence I had replaced after a windstorm a couple years ago is the newest, but not so new that it hasnt also turned gray. The south fence is the oldest. Its grayer than gray and it could do with a good replacing, but not as long as its still standing. In Mending Walls, the poet Robert Frost writes of a neighbor who says, Good fences make good neighbors. My neighbors are good, but I suspect its their nature and not the fences that make them so.

Theres a lot to be said for fences. I was 2 years old when a Montana Department of Highways employee named Bob Fletcher wrote Dont Fence Me In and sold it to Cole Porter for $250. I first heard the song as a budding teen when my hero Roy Rogers sang it in the movie Hollywood Canteen. It wasnt long before even my parents and their friends were whistling along or singing the lyrics: Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above. Dont fence me in. Remember? Catchy tune, but Im personally more comfortable being fenced in.

Not fenced in claustrophobically, though. At a different place and time I had a split-rail fence built to surround my corner lot, but I had them leave a gap on the off-street side and another in the back so my neighbors could come and go.

One of my fence installers was a burly high school student. I can still see him lying flat on his belly, one arm buried up to his shoulder in the hole he had dug and was clearing of rocks to accommodate a fence post. The temperature had fallen to barely above freezing. He grinned up at me through mud-flecked teeth when I went out to check on him. Steel dont get cold, he assured me. He and the Wisteria vines that eventually covered that fence are among my finest memories.

Not so fine is my memory of the fence I burned to the ground when I was sent to empty my aunts trash into the burning bin located between the garage and the fence. Who knew live embers remained in the bin? Or that paint rags were in the bottom of the trash can I emptied into it? The fire took the fence and a spindly old apricot tree, but the garage was saved while I quaked beneath the bed where Id hidden.

Purple and yellow Morning Glory vines had always climbed the fence that I reduced to ashes. For as long as she lived, my aunt saw to it that Morning Glory vines continued to climb its replacement.

MARJORIE ANDERSON is an Edmond resident.

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AS I SEE IT: Fences bring back memories

Phoenix Rising schooling over fences with Amy
10 year old, 16.2hh, liver chestnut, branded Oldenburg gelding.

By: claritydressage

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Phoenix Rising schooling over fences with Amy - Video

Mouth To Mouth To Mouth "Consensus on the Fences" @ Just Be Cause - Ithaca Underground Jan 9 2014
Presented by Ithaca Underground Video by Chris Knight.

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Khloe Kardashian Shares A Cute Throwback Thursday Photo | Home

January 23, 2014 03:00 PM by Suzy Kerr

NeNe Leakes and Kim Zolciak are gal pals once again. The Real Housewives of Atlanta stars have decided to hug it out and end their bitter feud, which started way back in season 1 of the hit Bravo show. Four years later, the two are finally FINALLY putting their differences aside. Maybe theres hope that some of the other Housewives will follow suitLOL.

Back when Kim Zolciak was on The Real Housewives of Atlanta, she and co-star NeNe Leakes were good friends. The show was just starting, the women were getting to know one another, and things were great between Kim and NeNe. Enter Sheree Whitfield, NeNes archenemy, and things suddenly went from friendly to foe-ly between Kim and NeNe. In other words, it got all Housewifey up in there.

Fast forward four years, and while NeNe is still part of the RHOA cast, Kim has moved on and is focused on family and other ventures. Apparently, the distance and time have done the women well, as RadarOnline is reporting that Kim and NeNe have been working to restore their friendship. A source close to the two told Radar Theyve had their ups and down, but really want to get their friendship back on track theyve moved on from the on-camera drama.

And that certainly seems to be the case. Recently, Kim confessed that she missed NeNe and hoped to be friends again, and it seems that NeNe has been harboring the same feelings. The two have even been working to schedule a visit so NeNe can come see Kims new twins, and it looks like maybe that visit has already happened. On Jan. 21, NeNe tweeted about her friend-again Kim, saying Just had the best convo with @Kimzolciak. She cracks me up every time. On my way with Pampers!

Awwww..I just love a happy ending.

What about you? Did you think NeNe Leakes and Kim Zolciak would ever be able to put aside the differences we saw play out on The Real Housewives of Atlanta? Tell us in the comments!

Want more? Follow our tweets onTwitterand like us onFacebook!Click here for more informationaboutThe Real Housewives of Atlanta. For other great reality TV news, please feel free to check outSirLinksALot: The Real Housewives of Atlanta.

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NeNe Leakes And Kim Zolciak Are Mending Fences

SINNED AGAINST AND SINNING: Troy Maxson (Esau Pritchett), former Negro League baseball star, confronts death and an abundance of domestic and social adversities in McCarter Theatres production of August Wilsons Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences through February 16.

James Earl Jones was the star of the original production of Fences, at Yale Repertory Theatre in 1985 and on Broadway in 1987, where it won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for Best Play. Then it was Denzel Washington, in a 2010 Broadway revival, in the larger-than-life role of Troy Maxson, his name itself evoking the grandeur and tragic fall of the unforgettable protagonist of Wilsons drama. But in McCarter Theatres searing, deeply moving production of this masterpiece, its August Wilson, the playwright himself, who emerges as the star of the show.

This poetic drama is set in 1957 in the early years of the civil rights movement and focuses on the struggles of a former Negro League baseball player, now a Pittsburgh sanitation worker, and his family. The dialogue is at the same time natural and poetic, and so powerful, humorous, and moving. Wilson, who died in 2005 after completing his highly acclaimed Century Cycle of plays set in every decade of the twentieth century, frequently cited the influence of the blues on his work, and Fences in its sympathetic, suffering characterizations, in its bitterness and solace in alcohol, humor, language, music, and humanity resonates with the rich life and tone of a blues song that sticks in the mind and soul.

Fences depicts a family in conflict. Troy (Esau Pritchett), the middle-aged patriarch, is at odds not just with the society that barred him from the major leagues through the 20s, 30s, and 40s and consigned him to a job carrying garbage, but also with his wife Rose (Portia) and sons, 34-year-old Lyons (Jared McNeill) from a failed earlier marriage and 17-year-old Cory (Chris Myers). Troy is indeed a victim of the racism of his time and environment, but he is also a victim of his own bitterness, his personal excesses, and his wary detachment from family and friends.

Early in the first of two acts Troy and Cory clash over Corys hopes of gaining a football scholarship to college. Troy, who hit 43 home runs in one season in the Negro League but was born too soon to break the color barrier in the Major Leagues, distrusts the white mans enticements for Cory and also harbors his own resentment and jealousy over this opportunity that he never had. The conflict grows increasingly hostile as Cory attempts to assert his independence from Troys influence, and Troy, seeing his authority and control challenged, fails to accept the changing world of America on the cusp of upheaval, along with his sons entrance into adulthood and his own aging.

The shattering of the fragile family is complete when Troy comes home, early in the second act, to announce to Rose that he has fathered a child with another woman.

August Wilson and his characters are brilliant storytellers. In the tradition of Arthur Miller Death of a Salesman in particular where intense family conflict plays out its tragic drama of the common man against a background of powerful destructive social forces, Fences is a story about families, a marriage and, especially, through the generations, fathers and sons, with the sins of the fathers repeatedly being visited on the sons. It is also a play about the power of speech as our greatest weapon in shaping our stories and our lives and in battling against oppression and death.

In McCarters production, in association with Long Wharf Theatre where it opened last month, Mr. Pritchett as Troy is convincing, powerful, charismatic as a man past his prime, finding himself in a new world, on unfamiliar ground with wife and sons. Hes a storyteller, angry but loving his family, his friends, his life, and fighting, as a great athlete fights to win the game, his battle to turn back mortality. Mr. Pritchett, of course, lacks the physical magnitude of James Earl Jones (Rose describes Troy: when (he) walked through the house he was so big he filled it up) and the instant star- recognition of Denzel Washington, but Mr. Pritchett thoroughly engages the audience in his joy and loves, his frustrations, and his anguish. He radiates a gift for spell-binding storytelling, a warm humor and a virtuoso musicians gift for delivering the music of Wilsons rich poetic language.

Portia establishes Rose as a worthy counterpart and counterbalance to Troy. She is enormously sympathetic as she moves through the rich territory of emotions required as wife and mother in her fight to keep her family together. Troy and Rose may be the most finely, fully, and convincingly developed husbandwife portrayal in all of Mr. Wilsons ten plays.

Jesus, be a fence all around me every day, Rose sings as she hangs out the laundry at the start of the second scene. The fence that Troy and Cory are building emerges on both sides of the stage as the action progresses. It becomes a symbol of the security and protection from white America, from his own inner demons, from death itself that Troy seeks. And it also represents Roses struggle to keep the family together against the forces that threaten to pull it apart.

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It’s Life and Death, Baseball, Football, and Family in “Fences”: McCarter Revives Intense August Wilson Drama at Berlind

Malcolm Gladwell brings 'David and Goliath' to Michigan Theater

Malcolm Gladwell, the author of David and Goliath Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants, will read from and answer questions about his book during an event at the Michigan Theater.

The book is really about how being big doesnt guarantee that youll win, and how sometimes being small and nimble counts for more than having a large presence, said Nicola Rooney, owner of Nicolas Books, which is presenting the event at the Michigan Theater. Its classic Malcolm Gladwell in that it doesnt have a lot of statistics, but rather examples and anecdotes to illustrate points.

Gladwell will also be signing books.

7 p.m. Monday, Michigan Theater, 603 E. Liberty, Ann Arbor. Nicola's Books: 734-662-0600 or http://www.nicolasbooks.com. $35 main floor; $150 for VIP, which includes copy of the book, main floor seating, first-in-line book-signing access and a meet-and-greet with the author; $85 for Gold Circle, which includes copy of the book, main floor seating and second-in-line book-signing access. The $15 balcony tickets are sold out.

More than 100 international, regional and local craft beers will be served at the Royal Oak Music Theatres Annual Craft Beer Fest.

There also will be food and music by Yorg and Sheehanm. Proceeds will benefit Camp Casey, a nonprofit that offers horseback-riding programs and therapy for children with cancer.

7 p.m. Saturday, Royal Oak Music Theatre, 318 W. Fourth, Royal Oak. 248-399-2980 or http://www.royaloakmusictheatre.com. General admission tickets, which include 20 drink samples, cost $40 in advance and $45 at the door; VIP tickets, which include entry at 6 p.m., VIP balcony access, rare and specialty brews and 20 drink samples, cost $60 in advance and $65 at the door. $5 tickets for designated drivers at the door.

The Wayne State University Maggie Allesee Department of Theatre and Dance will offera staged readings of Fences on Saturday.

August Wilsons play exploring the African-American experience is set in the 1950s.

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Best bets: Malcolm Gladwell, Craft Beer Fest, 'Fences'

By Andrew Clarke

Last updated at 12:08, Thursday, 23 January 2014

A HERD of deer is set to be culled after being trapped between two fences at Sellafield.

The wild roe deer are to be shot after it emerged that their habitat has been enclosed in a large area between two newly-erected security fences at the sites south perimeter.

Sellafield Ltd is acting on the advice of experts from the Deer Initiative Partnership (DIP), who say that the most humane and practical course of action is to cull the animals, thought to be between five and 15 in number. The cull will take place between February and April.

However, neighbouring Seascale Parish Council has strongly objected to the unnecessary move.

Coun David Ritson said: This seems a quick, convenient and cheap fix for a problem for which there is another solution.

Would it not be a better and more humane solution to temporarily remove one section of fence and herd the offending animals back into the natural environment where they could live a free life, continuing to provide pleasure for those who seem and to enhance our beautiful Cumbrian landscape?

Sellafield Ltd says that this option had been considered by its own wildlife team and the DIP experts on whose advice it is acting.

A spokesperson said: Their advice to us was that deer are not animals which are easy to round up, as they tend to run and hide when spooked.

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Deer to be culled at Sellafield

Tearing through the fences of a Pearl neighborhood -an Wednesday afternoon grass fire is just one of many burning in the Greater-Jackson area.

Charles Fairley, who lives on Pearl's Lanell Street, said his garden hose could not control the spread of flames in his grass.

"I thought I had a safe burning place in an old stump so I dumped some ashes in there the other night and yesterday the wind had come up real strong and thrown some leaves in it and it caught afire," Fairley said.

Not far away only an hour later Pearl firefighter battled quarter-acre wide flames at the East Magnolia Place neighborhood.

And in Jackson around 4:30 p.m. fire crews needed to pull over on I-220 near the Metro Center Mall to stop a spreading fire off the exit.

Hinds county was still under a burn ban on Wednesday. It was set to expire at the end of the day.

The Mississippi Forestry Commission reported online that Rankin County burn ban is in effect until further notice.

"If we see somebody burning maybe ask them to put it out. If that's a problem then call the fire department and we'd be glad to come out there and ask them to extinguish any open fires they might have," Pearl Assistant Fire Chief Brad Thornton said.

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Wild Fire Blackens Lawns, Destroys Shed in Pearl