Mold

The city is close to completing the sale of a vacant, decrepit Center City building to a developer who would demolish it and build 110 apartments, with space for retail and a charter-school expansion. If the sale of the building - which once housed a YWCA Annex - goes through between the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority and Aquinas Realty Partners, a significant source of blight would be removed from the block. The building, at 2017-23 Chestnut St., was the subject of a Philadelphia Daily News article in March 2010 that detailed how mold, asbestos, rat feces, and pigeon droppings in the space had generated outrage among neighbors.

When Connecticut's Mohegan Sun Casino wanted to decorate using 12 six-foot-tall plaster wolves baying at the moon, it found them in Collingswood. Or rather, it found the men who could make them. Joe and Angelo Carolfi, who own and run Carolfi Studios Inc., have tackled bigger things than wolves in their three years in business together. The company, which last year relocated from Philadelphia to Collingswood, where the men grew up, has manufactured everything from a life-size plaster elephant for a New Jersey mall to the architectural moldings used to rebuild historic Yale University walls.

Spots are reserved on a space-shuttle mission for experiments by four seventh graders from East Norriton Middle School. Andrea White's experiment will examine the effects of weightlessness and radiation on mealworms sent into space. Jack Casey, Brian Letrinko and Christopher Delaney will study the growth of bread mold in space. Glenn Weber, seventh-grade science teacher, encouraged his students to develop projects and submit proposals to NASA for consideration. He participated in the NASA Educators Workshop this summer, spending two weeks in Virginia and Maryland.

Also in this column: Slave insurance in Pa.? Slave-trade claims Bilingual in Marlton With homeowners in Texas and California complaining they've been sickened by slimy stuff growing in their basements and under their siding, builders and their insurers worry that mold-related lawsuits will soon proliferate like, well, mold. The modern wave of mold litigation dates to 1995, when Philadelphia's ill-fated Reliance Insurance Co. was ordered to pay $40 million (plus $10 million for personal injuries)

Now and then, when I wake up, my life's a movie, And I'm like, "Ooh, I'm Brad Pitt! I'm Brad Pitt!" Then I'm halfway to work and suddenly I'm Urkel, And I freak, 'cause I was finally sure that I was Pitt. But the harder I try to be Pitt, the more I'm Urkel, And so my mother tells me, "Just be yourself," Which means, I think, to stumble forward more And worry less about who I am than where I head. And when the stakes are high enough, I start running, And if I fall, I get up, wipe the blood and carry on . . . Why is it so few movies feature runners falling, When it seems that's all so many of the best lives are?

Question: I have a composite deck, light gray in color, and, even though I clean it two times a year with a power washer, there still is this light green mold that appears under the railing and on the steps. Do you have any suggestions for cleaning, and what type of cleaner/detergent do you suggest? Answer: As you surmise, mildew forms where the sun don't shine, even on "maintenance-free" composite decking. Just to clarify: No manufacturer ever claims its products are maintenance-free.

When the Franklin Mint shut its porcelain-manufacturing facility at the Riddle Valley Industrial Park in Aston Township in 1985, moldmaker and ceramicist Peter Mastroianni saw opportunity amid the layoffs. He thought that he had gained enough expertise from his eight years at the mint and from other ceramics and moldmaking jobs to take the plunge into starting his own business. "At one time, it looked like the mint might keep either me or one of my co-workers," Mastroianni recalled.

Albert A. Nino, a Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not character who trained athletes, molded minds and rubbed elbows with Philadelphia's rich and powerful, as well as its poor and plebeian, died Friday. He was 88 and lived in Olney. Nino was retired athletic director at the old Philadelphia Athletic Club, formerly at Broad and Vine streets. During his 25 years at the club - and after - the "rock solid" Nino was a familiar sight running, biking or just walking through the streets of Center City.

It was dark when they arrived at the site, a mock battleground deep in the Pinelands of South Jersey. The soldiers moved slowly, carefully - under fire. They made their way across the field in teams of two. One was armed with an M-16 rifle, the other, a grenade launcher. Moving close to the ground, they maneuvered among trees and rocks, found cover in ditches, ducked live bullets. Flares went off overhead. They scrambled for cover. Hesitantly, they poked their heads out, then continued down the field.

The start of classes for more than 800 students at Cedarbrook Middle School in the Cheltenham School District will be postponed by two days because of mold discovered at the school and the need for an emergency cleanup. The school board voted Tuesday night to have students report next Thursday, two days after the scheduled start of classes. The plan is for teachers to have two days - Tuesday and Wednesday - to set up classrooms. Efforts to clean up the mold began late last week and should be completed by the weekend, according to the district.

The last time we met, I wrote about a couple in Elkins Park who were dealing with the expensive cleanup of a purported mold problem that began with a routine energy audit. In the homeowners' defense - which they failed to mention in their first e-mail to me - they had obtained other estimates and had done as much homework as civilians can do on problems that often require an impartial expert. As usual, and this is why I treasure my readership, your response to this situation came fast and furious.

ASHLAND, Pa. - Children were once punished with coal in their Christmas stockings. However, Len S. Kimmel prefers it when people give coal as a gift. Over many years, he has turned coal dust and rice coal - small pieces of anthracite - into jewelry and paperweights shaped like penguins and pigs. "I loved doing it and going out to be a vendor at shows and meeting people," said Kimmel, 79, of Fountain Springs. For more than 15 years, Kimmel has been crafting coal sculptures, using coal dust, rice coal, epoxy, and molds, and selling his work at area malls.

Question: About three years ago, the trim on my sister's house was cleaned, sanded, and repainted with the same good-quality, oil-based paint. Now, for the first time in 25 years, she's discovered what definitely looks to be mold on a door that had been cleaned with house wash and Clorox. Dirt or soot not evident before is also there. It soon spread to adjacent windows and trim and is now everywhere all around the house regardless of sun or shade and even inside storm windows. None of the neighbors has this problem.

As host of the U.S. Open on four previous occasions, the Olympic Club in San Francisco has been known in the annals of golf not for who won the championship, but for who did not. Your Open champions at Olympic have been Jack Fleck over Ben Hogan in 1955, Billy Casper over Arnold Palmer in 1966, Scott Simpson over Tom Watson in 1987, and Lee Janzen over Payne Stewart in 1998, with Fleck and Casper winning in an 18-hole playoff. Together, the four winners captured a total of seven major titles in their careers.

One of the more emotional phone calls Kevin Baggett made after being named head men's basketball coach at Rider University this week was to Tracie Daly, daughter of his St. Joseph's coach, Jim Boyle. Those weren't glory days back in the '80s on Hawk Hill for Baggett. Everyone knew it. Baggett said he sat out his senior season by "mutual agreement" with his coach. Former Hawks teammate Bruiser Flint, now Drexel's head coach, was at the Rider news conference Wednesday when Baggett's appointment, after 16 years as an assistant coach, was made.

HE'S HOPELESSLY behind in the delegate count, and his campaign is practically hitchhiking to Tampa on nickels and dimes, but make no mistake about it: Rick Santorum is still running to be president. At some point, he stopped campaigning realistically to take the oath on Jan. 20, 2013. The president who Santorum is running to be is Ronald Reagan. And here's where it gets even weirder: The Gipper role that Santorum is auditioning for is the 1976 model - the year when Reagan lost.

At first glance, the staged color photographs of Nadine Rovner and the candid black-and-white ones of Yuichi Hibi, on view in two solo shows at Gallery 339, would seem to have little in common. But a longer look reveals both photographers as exceptionally attuned to the poetry of solitariness. Rovner's pictures of solitary young women in poses suggesting indecision, reflection, and longing are reminiscent of films from the 1950s and '60s that caught the confusion and frustrations of the era's middle-class teenagers so memorably.

Patrick Murphy, Democratic candidate for state attorney general, rattled off his priorities at a campaign stop in Philadelphia's Mayfair section last week. "I'm going to fight for the middle class. I'm going to protect the environment," he told a local business owner. After a pause, he added: "And I will make sure the streets are safe. " The order was telling. For decades, candidates seeking to become the state's chief law enforcement authority have relied on a tough-on-crime message to carry them to victory.

"A Separation" is totally foreign and achingly familiar. It's a thrilling domestic drama that offers acute insights into human motivations and behavior as well as a compelling look at what goes on behind a particular curtain that almost never gets raised. The early front-runner for the foreign-language Oscar and a rare triple prize winner at the Berlin International Film Festival, this is a movie from Iran unlike any we've seen before. And it's arrived at a time when other Iranian filmmakers, like the more overtly political Jafar Panahi, are being forbidden to work.

The city is close to completing the sale of a vacant, decrepit Center City building to a developer who would demolish it and build 110 apartments, with space for retail and a charter-school expansion. If the sale of the building - which once housed a YWCA Annex - goes through between the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority and Aquinas Realty Partners, a significant source of blight would be removed from the block. The building, at 2017-23 Chestnut St., was the subject of a Philadelphia Daily News article in March 2010 that detailed how mold, asbestos, rat feces, and pigeon droppings in the space had generated outrage among neighbors.