Cary, NC (PRWEB) May 18, 2012

Family Paws Parent Education (FPPE) offers new and expecting families information about dog behavior and communication BEFORE there is a concern or problem. One way FPPE is reaching families is through webinars like “The Inclusion of Family Dogs for Success: Building Dog-Child Bonds” being offered for free for dog bite prevention week.

The challenge of dog bite prevention education is reaching families that believe that their dog would never bite their child. Their dog is a “good” dog and “good” dogs don’t bite…right? Not necessarily. “Good” dogs “communicate” like dogs. They are masters at using many parts of their bodies for subtle communication. Communication that is present, but often missed in a household busy with a baby or toddler.

Babies and toddlers do not come with a parent guide or manual, but when they are stressed, tired or fearful they do communicate in ways that parents can naturally understand. Dogs can’t ask for space or use words to communicate fear, anxiety, stress or pain but dogs do communicate using their body language. Many people are not familiar with and do not naturally understand this type of canine communication. These important topics are covered in the FPPE programs and online webinars. Most bites are a result of a combination of incorrect expectations and lack of awareness about the many subtle signals dogs do offer to indicate stress, conflict, discomfort or a need for space.

Parents are encouraged to be open to learning about their dog’s communication. The more education parents receive about the body language of canine communication, the easier it will be for them to keep both their dogs and their children safe and happy.

These differences between dog communication and human communication are a main cause of conflict and stress in homes where dogs and newly mobile babies live together. Through Family Paws Parent Education classes in communities and webinars online, FPPE is making a difference in the lives of families and dogs worldwide!

The creator of the programs, certified dog behavior consultant Jennifer Shryock, has been involved with dogs since a very young age. She has a Bachelors Degree in Special Education and is the mother of four children. Shryock is also the U.S. VP for Doggone Safe a non-profit dedicated to dog bite prevention and victim support. Along with her private dog behavior consulting business, Family Paws, the Shryock family has fostered over 70 dogs and many cats over the years providing ample hands-on learning opportunities. It was through fostering and becoming active in dog rescue that Jennifer saw the need for dog education specific to new and expecting families.

Frequently dogs are abandoned or re-homed due to lack of knowledge of available resources and support. Education and preparation make all the difference in the world when it comes to safe interactions between babies and dogs. Dogs Storks® and The Dog and Baby Connection™ provides consistent and current information through qualified, licensed presenters. By addressing concerns or behavioral challenges up front, families can set proper expectations and practice new routines both well before and after baby arrives. Providing this resource is what motivated Jennifer Shryock to create the programs Dogs Storks® and The Dog and Baby Connection™ “I want to make education available even before they know they need it!” FPPE offers ongoing support for new and expecting families with dogs! Jennifer believes by offering Dogs Storks® and The Dog and Baby Connection™, this type of education will become as common as other parenting and childbirth classes. That is tail wagging news for dogs everywhere!

Jennifer Shryock B.A. CDBC
Family Paws Parent Education
(919) 961-1608
Email Information

Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/dog-baby-expert-offers-parents-free-webinar-dog-071137976.html

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What would Liam Neeson do without a gun and a scowl? Those are his favorite things now that he’s decided to become an action star instead of a Serious Actor. I mean, he’s serious in his action movies, but not actorly serious. Anyway, he’s just signed on to grab another gun and put on another scowl in the cheerily named A Walk Among the Tombstones, about an ex-cop who is hired to track down a kidnapped woman and in the process uncovers a string of murders. One hopes/assumes that Maggie Grace will play the kidnapped woman and that the villains will be played wolves. They won’t be wolves, they’ll just be played by wolves. And, of course, the little boy from Love Actually (who is now 22, jesus christ) will cameo as a drummer. [Deadlline]

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Yay! Landry has made good. Or, rather, made Bad. Jessie Plemons of Friday Night Lights has secured a big role on the next season of Breaking Bad, arguably TV’s best show. He’ll play a nice, normal guy who maybe isn’t so nice and normal on the inside. Sounds intriguing! Apparently Plemons also scored a role in Paul Thomas Anderson‘s next movie, so seriously way to go Landry. In related news, Matt Saracen made me eggs this morning and then we just cuddled in bed for a while and it was a nice way to start the day. [TV Line]

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Uh oh. Angel-blessed dust mote Gwyneth Paltrow is looking to join Antonio Banderas in Guernica 33 Days, a movie about Picasso painting his famous war painting. From the article: “Paltrow speaks Spanish, having lived as an exchange student for a year in Spain at age 15.” Oh god, so she’s going to be speaking Spanish in this? Remember how that was on that Mario Batali show? Won’t it be exciting to watch a couple hours of this?? Maybe that video is her audition! Who knows! We don’t speak Spanish! It could be anything! [Variety]

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The CW has released teasers of its new shows, and whoooo boy. They’re not very good teasers? They’re just kind of muted clips that abruptly end. The most coherent one is for Beauty and the Beast, because yes The CW is opening that old chest again. Gone is Linda Hamilton and in is Kristin Kreuk, who has a way deeper voice than you expect? I know she was on Smallville for a million years, so I should have heard her voice at some point, but I hadn’t and I was expecting a little birdly squeak but instead it’s low and scratchy and, I dunno, kinda works! We barely glimpse whatever hunk The CW found to play the Beast, but you can bet he won’t be that beastly. Because they couldn’t do that. We’ve embedded that preview, the other two are at the link. [Deadline]

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And here is a trailer for The Words, a sort of fable-looking kind of thing about a frustrated author who passes a long-lost book off as his own and things begin to unravel. It has an interesting cast — Zoe Saldana, Dennis Quaid, Jeremy Irons among them — and the filming looks kinda cool, but I don’t know. Bradley Cooper, y’know? Bradley Cooper. It’s a problem.

Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/liam-neeson-kill-more-people-221948502.html

We had to go more than 2,000 miles to track down Stephanie, former NBC2 News Today anchor.

Lucky for us, we caught up with her via Skype video chat.

“You know, the morning shift is not the funnest shift when it comes to the hours, but I honestly loved that show. There are times Trent and I got to show our personalities, have a great time and there were times where we needed to be serious and it was the best of both worlds. I loved it.”

The anchor known for her great style and charity work left NBC2 in 2006 for KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh.

After five years in the steel city, the California girl went back to her roots, Newport Beach, California.

“I moved back home a few months ago because one of my family members has some medical things going on. It’s actually my mom. She has early Alzheimer’s.”

The trip back home has her thinking about a family of her own one day.

“I think when you come back home and regroup and you realize, wow you know, family is really important and sometimes even though you love what you do, it takes a precedent over other things in your life and your priorities change and I think I’m at that point in my life, so my next move I’m taking a little more time to try to figure out what my next move is.”

She says she will still stick to broadcasting.

“What we do for a living can impact people’s lives every day. And that’s so important.”

And when that time comes, will she be bringing along a plus-1?

“I’m still single. Oh my goodness, I keep trying to meet the right guy and it just doesn’t happen!”

Article source: http://www.nbc-2.com/story/18474459/2012/05/17/where-are-they-now-stephanie-watson

The cover of Thick as a Brick by Jethro Tull.

Spin me back down the years and the days of my youth.
Draw the lace and black curtains and shut out the whole truth.

How would Gerald Bostock have gone in his NAPLAN tests? He was, it was said, something of a wizard with the pen and ink, back in the days before computers. Would his parents have allowed him to sit them?

Perhaps they might have thought there was a political agenda going on in the background. Can’t have political meddling in the playgrounds of young minds. Perhaps they didn’t mind; they were, it has been shown, ambitious for their son.

But then, whatever happened to Gerald Bostock? And should we care?

First, who is Gerald? Forty years ago, he was a young scamp, dubbed “Little Milton”. He won an award for his poem Thick as a Brick, presented by the Society of Literary Advancement and Gestation.

His parents, David and Daphne, however, lied about his age. He was really nine when he wrote it and 10 when he won. His local village newspaper, The St Cleve Chronicle Linwell Advertiser, profiled him and his family, printed the epic poem, and ran a second more scandalous story on how a local lass blamed Gerald for getting her pregnant. Poor Gerald also had his award rescinded after four psychiatrists, upon hearing his poem on the BBC, concluded it was the result of someone with “an unwholesome attitude towards life, his God and country”.

Ostensibly, it was because he was alleged to have said an offensive word after reading the poem. The word, the paper reported, was “g–r”, which didn’t exist. It created a furore. The judges twitched, and gave the award to Mary Whiteyard, aged 12, for her poem He Died to Save the Little Children.

But Gerald didn’t exist, either. He was the product of that constantly imagining mind of Ian Anderson, singer-songwriter, flautist and guitarist of Jethro Tull. Thick as a Brick (a poem more than 3000 words in length) was the lyrical canvas upon which Anderson set his prog-rock opus. One can use that last phrase without embarrassment, for it was at the time progressive rock and it was long: Side 1, Thick as a Brick Part 1; Side 2, Thick as a Brick Part 2.

Little Gerald was the locus of Anderson’s view of the struggle between the individual and the state, the mainstream and the conforming moulds of society. And surely, the winner of the poetry competition, little Mary Whiteyard, was Anderson’s shot at anti-filth crusader Mary Whitehouse in Britain in the 1970s).

Really don’t mind if you sit this one out.
My words but a whisper, your deafness a shout!

Forty years on, Gerald is 50. How has life treated him? Which roads has he travelled? It’s here that Anderson has made the concept interesting, for he gives Gerald five alternative lives: different shifts in the wind that shape a person’s destiny. The “what ifs, maybes, might have beens, soft petals on a breeze”.

Says Anderson on his website: “The theme of this anniversary “Part Two” album is to examine the possible different paths that the precocious young schoolboy Gerald Bostock might have taken later in life, and to create alter-ego characters whose song-section identities illustrate the hugely varied potential twists and turns of fate and opportunity. Not just for Gerald, but to echo how our own lives develop, change direction and ultimately conclude through chance encounters and interventions, however tiny and insignificant they might seem at the time.

“In the development of the piece, the divergences of life’s infinitely forked roads finally give way to an almost gravitational pull which results in convergence to, perhaps, a pre-ordained, karma-like conclusion.

“As we baby boomers look back on our own lives, we must often feel an occasional ‘what if’ moment. Might we, like Gerald, have become instead preacher, soldier, down-and-out, shopkeeper or finance tycoon?

“And those of more tender years – the social media and internet generation – may choose to ponder well the myriad of chance possibilities ahead of them at every turn.

“Odd chap, life …”

TAAB2, as the sequel is called, is purely Anderson’s vehicle. Indeed, the CD labelling is “Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson TAAB2“. His old Tull chums do not appear, not even guitarist Martin “Lancelot” Barre, with whom he toured just a few months ago in Australia. (And a jolly fine show it was too in Melbourne even if Anderson’s voice was straining in the upper register.)

The CD packaging echoes the newspaper design of the original, but updated, thus the newspaper is now www.stcleve.com. (Go to it to find all that’s happening in the three parishes of St Cleve, Linwell and Little Cruddock.)

For instance, there’s this:

Headline: “New life for the Old Library?”

Antique Book-seller Matthew Bunter, purchased the Old Library in Linwell village last month in the hope of reopening in due course as an online book download centre and erotic literature emporium. “It will perfectly supplement my more traditional range of literary wares,” said Mr Bunter, former church warden at St Olive’s. “Got to move with the times before the times move with you,” pondered Matthew, with wry humour.

The music, in parts, also echoes and samples the original. They’re a necessary link in the chain for the narrative, for this is a work that doesn’t instantly draw you in. Without the startling freshness that imbued TAAB1, Anderson has had to use the same paints and brush as are now well-recognised in rock, but layer it as one would a novel. Hence, it needs to be listened to without distraction. (In fact, a few years ago Anderson told this writer that there was no new rock music any more, nor would there be; all the parameters had been set.) TAAB2 reveals itself slowly and, because of that, for those accustomed to instant gratification, it could be considered a difficult work.

Anderson acknowledges this: “The conceptual and heavily lyrical nature of the beast, however, might be out of place in the attention-span-deficit world which we seem to occupy these days. But, having toured in 2010 and 2011 in Italy, Latin America, Australia and other countries where passions run high, I decided that maybe the world – or our little corners of it – was, in fact, ready for a bit of more substantial and weightier fare.

“Starting with lyrics and then thinking of the music is not normally the way I work, but it was here. A title, a few words or a verse or two and then the acoustic guitar was immediately to hand to conjure up a full song section out of the growing lyrics. Having a plan was important. Stories to tell made it all easier. The imagination-filled process of thinking how things might have turned out for the young and older Gerald kept me fascinated. Maybe you will be too. And maybe not.

“Ah, well – you can always go and watch The X Factor and the Eurovision Song Contest.”

What would Gerald be doing now? Would he be having tea and biscuits, cardigans and small comforts in the ‘burbs or champagne and cocaine in the City? How much of life is luck – there-but-for-the-grace-of stuff — and how much is destiny? In his various ways, Gerald is everyman. How did we get to this place where we stand now? Do we remember the turning points, or even recognise them, while measuring out coffee spoons?

Was there a plan? Were those building blocks of Gerald’s youth merely bricks?

Follow the National Times on Twitter: @NationalTimesAU

Article source: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/blogs/wokkapedia/jethro-tulls-little-milton-at-50-20120516-1yqe3.html