Carpet

The Franklin Township School District last night continued discussions regarding the mold-infested carpeting at the Mary F. Janvier Elementary School that has been sickening students and faculty. Since July 1992, less than four years after the school opened, many of the 725 students in kindergarten through second grade have complained of dry throats, headaches, stomachaches, dizziness, drowsiness, burning and itching of the eyes, blurred vision, and difficulty breathing at the school.

What had been a cold war involving New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and manager Lou Piniella exploded yesterday into open warfare when Steinbrenner issued a lengthy statement in which he chastised Piniella and reporters, provided his account of recent personnel developments within the Yankees and challenged his players to "put up or shut up. " Steinbrenner said he was upset with Piniella for failing to keep a telephone appointment, initiating...

Marge Cavallo has lived alone in the same Pennsauken apartment for 12 years, with the same sofa, the same chairs and the same wall-to-wall carpet. She wants to keep it that way. But she's about to lose her carpet. Cavallo and residents of about 100 other apartments at the Cooper River Plaza are embroiled in a fight with their landlord, the Bleznak Organization, over the firm's legal right to force residents to replace carpet that is more than five years old. In each apartment, the landlord owns the carpet, which the tenants rent at varying monthly rates, usually around $20. Bleznak is now condemning the aging carpets in many of the 110 apartments, giving tenants three options: they can have Bleznak install new carpet and pay rates the landlord sets; they can buy their own wall-to-wall carpet, or they can pay Bleznak to tear out the carpet and restore the old floor tiles underneath.

Capt. Lymus Middleton was fully at ease. He was inside Regent Shoes yesterday afternoon checking out a rack of alligator shoes - "skins," he calls them - when a nervous young voice said: "Get down and don't move. " A small handgun was waved in his direction for emphasis. And Lymus Middleton - Army logistics officer, Cobbs Creek native, and certainly no wimp - did just that. "Most definitely," he said. "I love life . . . I was eating carpet. " Minutes earlier, he had stopped into Regent Shoes in the 200 block of Market Street to buy his "skins.

An unusual form of worship will be on display starting next weekend, when the Cistercian Monastery of Our Lady of Fatima in Mount Laurel opens its doors and invites the public to view a 6-by-90-foot carpet depicting religious scenes and symbols. The carpet is made of flower petals, twigs and beans. The display is a European monastic tradition dating to the Middle Ages, when the Cistercians first created carpets for the monks to walk on during the Catholic Church's Feast of Corpus Christi, according to Father Julian Bruni, a monk at the monastery.

The Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority, which threw out bids for carpeting last month because they were too high, voted yesterday to buy $840,000 worth of carpet and decide later who will install it. The bids last month were for the carpeting and installation of 35,000 square feet of rugs. The lowest of four bids was nearly $1.6 million, and the authority said its maximum budget was $1.2 million. At its meeting yesterday, the authority board voted to buy from the manufacturers.

When you have a carpet stain that won't come up, or if there's a hole in your carpeting, you can often solve the problem by cutting out the bad spot and replacing it with a patch. To patch, you must first have carpeting that will match. Leftover scraps might not be the same color or texture if your carpeting has been in use for a long time. Check other areas such as closets or an out-of-the-way spot in the hallway where you might "steal" a patch piece. Before cutting the patch or the damaged spot out, you may wish to stabilize the existing carpeting.

After struggling briefly to remain independent, C.H. Masland & Sons has agreed to be acquired by Burlington Industries Inc. for $117 million. The two companies said yesterday that they signed a definitive merger agreement after Burlington boosted its tender offer for Masland stock to $73 per share in cash. Burlington, the country's largest textile maker, launched the takeover attempt three weeks ago with an unsolicited offer of $68 per share. Masland, based in Carlisle, Pa., manufactures automotive, residential and commercial carpeting.

Canceled due to carpet. That's the obit for the Eagles-Ravens preseason opener, which should have happened Monday night at the Vet. But no. Something was wrong with the NeXturf, the brand-new $2 million artificial turf at the stadium, so officials and players deemed the field too dangerous to play on. Football is a violent sport, so the situation had to be serious for officials to cancel a game on account of player safety. One encountered the word embarrassment in Tuesday morning's papers quite a bit. Another good word would have been comedy.

On the second floor, in the room they call "The Cerebral Getaway," there's a babbling brook splashing down artificial rock. The garage is carpeted. The ceilings are hand-painted. And in one bedroom, the shag carpet is so long that a child could get lost in it. For $1.4 million, you can live in it. Or, for $15, you can look at it for the afternoon. The 11th annual Designers' Show House, a benefit for the Zurbrugg Health Foundation, opened the doors to its 8,000-square-foot museum of interior design this week.

Lindsay Lohan 's P.R. rehab continues apace with a sweet coup: LiLo on Thursday chatted on no less a forum than Today , a preamble to an even bigger score - hosting Saturday Night Live this weekend. Much heart, truth, sorrow, and joy poured forth over Today cohost Matt Lauer . "I still need to go through the process of proving myself," LiLo told Matt, "you know, with SNL , being on time [for rehearsals], being, you know, keeping my . . . stuff together.

Now that the 2012 red-carpet hoopla is over, another high-drama fashion season is under way. Prom. If teens take their cues from this year's awards shows, high school gyms will be chock-full of old-school Hollywood glamour. Along with the latest blush tones, I'm predicting a plethora of frocks in fiery reds like the peplumed Louis Vuitton Michelle Williams wore Sunday night at the Oscars. (My absolute fave.) Bluish greens and cobalt blue will be important, too, and we can't forget black.

The color of the night at the 84th annual Academy Awards was winter white, as celebrities from Jennifer Lopez to Octavia Spencer worked the red carpet in delicate and sparkling ecru gowns. After a 2012 award season that popped with saturated reds, greens, and blues, Sunday night's gown choices were on the pale side. But on Hollywood's classiest night of the year, we'd expect nothing less. The Oscars are about playing it radiant but low key, so nudes and creams are the obvious choice.

As the Hollywood glitterati gather Sunday night in Tinseltown to honor the movie industry's best, L. Di Caprio will be among those walking the red carpet. In Malvern. No, not the hunky actor - he doesn't spell his name with a space before the "C. " Starring at Malvern's Oscar Night festivities will be one Lisa Di Caprio and her business partner, Darci Henry. Owners of Kiss and Makeup cosmetics boutique on King Street, the pair have organized a black-tie Academy Awards bash with help from nearby Restaurant Alba.

I'm checking the mail every day, waiting for a gorgeous ivory envelope of considerable heft to fall out of the mailbox. And there, in perfect script, will be my invitation to the Academy Awards. I deserve it. As someone who papered her childhood room with pictures of movie stars, and who more recently has plunked down unconscionable admission prices to see movies of questionable merit, I think it's payback time. So I stand ready to take my seat at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday.

Gowns in sparkling nudes and vibrant shades were the major red-carpet trends Saturday evening at the 155th Academy of Music Anniversary Concert and Ball. Off-the-shoulder gowns seemed just as popular as strapless ones. And A-line silhouettes were preferred to ball gowns. In fact, Philadelphia's doyennes stepped up the glamour quotient to such heights that some of the dresses were dead ringers for gowns worn by celebrities on red carpets past. For example, first lady Lisa Nutter was particularly radiant sailing up the Academy of Music steps in a deep purple Nicole Miller gown.

Menu: All vegetarian, mostly Middle Eastern, totally filling. Two locations: 34th Street between Walnut and Spruce, 10:30 a.m.-4 p.m.; Spruce between 35th and 36th, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday-Friday. Look for: A dark-green awning and a line about 10 deep. How long: Family-owned and -operated since 1984. Web: magiccarpetfoods.com. Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Magic-Carpet-Foods/130251873665043 . The old-fashioned way: 215-334-0948. Order: Magic meatballs.

When he had a job, Todd Molloy thought of himself as the go-to guy. Now he's the one who needs help. "It's hard to accept," says the Riverside resident, whose family was on the verge of homelessness - until its church stepped in. Over the weekend, a dozen friends from A New Hope Bible Church in Riverside began fixing up a new home for Molloy; his wife, Tamara, 31; and their daughter, Laura, 5. "We're starting to see some light...

SPECIAL THE OSCARS. The Grammys. The Emmys. The VMAs. The Geek Awards? You're reading right. Local geeks - as in nerds, dweebs, dorks and brainiacs - walk the red carpet and take home engraved plaques tonight at the first Philly Geek Awards. The sold-out event takes place, not surprisingly, at the Academy of Natural Sciences. It was dreamed up by the guys behind Geekadelphia, a local blog for - you guessed it - geeks. Blog co-founder Eric Smith noticed his fellow, um, technophiles getting cred nationally for their tweets, podcasts, viral videos, science festivals, etc., and asked himself, "Why was no one honoring our local comic artists, video-game developers, Web designers . . . ?"

At an age when most of her peers were riding bikes and playing dress-up, Laura Riedel was decorating. As a third grader, she kept a notebook full of design ideas, and she remembers the moment she walked into a friend's house whose living room was decorated "just right. " In her own house, she didn't have it as easy. When her mother told her she could choose the carpet for her bedroom, Laura requested a specific yellow hue, "but when I came home from school, the carpet was gold, and I really had a fit. " "I painted the walls apple green anyway, but it really mattered to me that the carpet wasn't the right color, and that my mother wouldn't replace it," she says.