Agents Try New Tricks to Entice Home Buyers
Source: Natl. Relocation & Real Estate
...... the people surrounding the marketing of them to become focused," said Linda Hodge of Preferred Properties' Greenwich, Connecticut office. The slowdown is a particular conundrum within the new-construction and higher-end markets, said Melanie Healey, ......
Bristol-Myers, Sanofi Win a U.S. Court Block on Apotex's Generic Plavix
Source: Bloomberg.com
Sanofi-Aventis SA and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. won an appeals court ruling that prevents Apotex Inc. from selling a generic version of the blood-thinner Plavix until a trial can be held.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington today upheld a lower court ruling that blocks sales of the generic drug until a judge can rule on the validity of a Plavix patent. The trial is set for January.
Prescriptions of brand-name Plavix plunged 32 percent in the third quarter of 2006 after Apotex flooded the market with a six-month supply of the generic drug during three weeks in August. Plavix, which is used to prevent heart attacks and strokes, had global sales of $6.3 billion in 2005, with $3.8 billion in the U.S. last year........
....... never, so it's nice to have the appeal upheld,'' Barbara Ryan, an analyst with Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. in Greenwich, Connecticut, said in a telephone interview. Apotex ``didn't have to remove the supplies that were shipped. Until those are all ......
Global Gold Names Ambassador Harry Gilmore (Ret) to Board
Source: Market Wire
... with mining properties in Chile and Armenia. Global Gold Corporation is located at 45 East Putnam Avenue, Greenwich, CT 06830. The main phone number is 203-422-2300. More information can be found at www.globalgoldcorp.com . Contact: Van Z. Krikorian ........
WWII Vet Recalls Drop Behind Enemy Lines
Source: Greenwich Citizen
The 65th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, marked Thursday, presented an opportunity for the Greenwich Citizen to interview Chandler Bates, a veteran of Uncle Sam's super-secret Office of .......
UPDATE:
Please search for this article in the: archive search.
Hedge funds: Secretive, lucrative and part of pop culture
Source: International Herald Tribune
Marshall Wace raised €1.5 billion on Friday in the largest initial public offering of a hedge fund, permitting individual investors to buy into a market normally limited to millionaires.
The London-based company sold shares of MW Tops, a closed-end investment company, for €10, or $13.27, each, Marshall Wace said late Thursday. The stock, which began trading Friday on Euronext Amsterdam, rose to a penny to finish at €10.01.
... huge sums of money on fast cars and fancy art, as well as magazine photo spreads of top managers' estates in Greenwich, Connecticut, and on New York's Long Island. Some might point to the fascination with hedge funds as a sign that the business has ...
George W.S. Trow, 63; Writer, cultural critic spent 30 years on New Yorker staff
Source: Los Angeles Times
By: Elaine Woo
George W.S. Trow, a writer and social critic whose dry humor and coruscating intelligence defined a 30-year career at the New Yorker, where he was a favorite of legendary editor William Shawn, died Nov. 24 in Naples, Italy, where he lived for the last five years. He was 63 and died of natural causes.
Trow, who joined the magazine in 1966, was best-known as the author of 'Within the Context of No Context,' a scathing analysis of contemporary American culture.
Originally published in the New Yorker in 1980 and later issued as a book, it was a collage of riffs, each identified with a subhead such as 'History,' 'Gossip' or 'Celebrities,' that wryly displayed Trow's mortification at the ignorance of a generation reared on television.
'Television is the force of no-history, and it holds the archives of the history of no-history,' he wrote. 'No good,' he concluded, 'has come of it.' 'Within the Context of No Context' quickly attained a cult following for its originality and prophetic insights.
'People passed that copy of the New Yorker from hand to hand,' recalled Martin H. Kaplan, a media expert and director of the Norman Lear Center at USC's Annenberg School for Communication, who knew Trow. 'It was one of those early and prescient works of cultural criticism which conveyed how troubling it was to live in the brave new media world.' It was also intensely personal and heavy with yearning for a bygone social order, when adults were adults and trivia were actually viewed as trivial.
His lamentations focused on an idiosyncratic array of what he called 'Mainstream American Cultural Artifacts,' such as People magazine, the 1964 New York World's Fair and the 1970s game show 'Family Feud.'
Civilization had declined to the point where, Trow wrote, 'a man named Richard Dawson, the 'host' of a program called Family Feud, asked contestants to guess what a poll of a hundred people had guessed would be the height of the average American woman.' To Trow, that millions of viewers could be engaged by such puerile entertainment - guessing what others had guessed, with nary a fact in sight - was alarming evidence of cultural anemia. With some disdain, he described this 'important moment in the history of television' under the heading 'No Authority.'
Authority was one quality Trow (pronounced like grow ) possessed in spades. His pronouncements were godlike, as well as abstract, bordering on mystical.
In reference to an America that had gotten too big and impersonal, for instance, he wrote: 'The middle distance fell away .
Two grids remained. The grid of two hundred million and the grid of intimacy.' But, as Trow saw it, the intimacy was a television-induced illusion. Loneliness loomed. 'What made George's piece great was the deadpan minimalism of the style, a freaky-deaky,
I Ching-like idiom that made it seem like a text carved on some future, unearthed Rosetta stone . It was a gag, but a gag about how everything you've ever cared about was just destroyed in a flashfire,' Donald Fagen, the musician and songwriter who met Trow in the 1980s after co-founding the band Steely Dan, wrote on his website this week.
'He was a kind of genius in the way he saw the world,' said author Jamaica Kincaid, who joined the New Yorker staff in the 1970s through Trow's ardent sponsorship.
Born in Greenwich, Conn., Trow was well-grounded in the rituals of the upper class, even though his old New York family was not rich........
'Day of Infamy' remembered
Source: Norwalk Advocate (home page)
... to him died. 'It's a big deal in our family,' said Breen, 52, a commercial insurance broker who lives in Old Greenwich. 'It inspired our son to go into the Naval Academy.' Along with the Breen and his wife, Jane, close to 40 people turned ...
Festive facades vie for prizes
Source: Stamford Advocate
By: Martin B. Cassidy
While more minimalist than competing displays, Sea Cloth on Greenwich Avenue wowed contest judges with its striking concept: green pillows stacked to look like a Christmas tree.
For the second year in a row, the downtown home furnishings business took top prize in the Greenwich Chamber of Commerce's Winter Wonderland holiday window display contest.
'We're very excited and it's a flattering award to get,' said Ann FitzGerald, the manager of Sea Cloth, which designs and manufactures fabrics for upholstery and other household furnishings.
In addition to naming the top three most original displays at local stores, the contest also includes separate awards in recognition of other displays which are the most traditional, festive, or show community spirit.
Greenwich Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Mary Ann Morrison said that elaborate and creative holiday window displays are an important part of bringing in foot traffic and wooing shoppers away from malls.
'It's part of the community spirit we have here in Greenwich that keeps people from going to the mall,' Morrison said. 'This type of spirit is what people are longing for.'
While primarily a fabric company, FitzGerald said that during the holidays Sea Cloth stocks up on Christmas tree ornaments and other holiday decorations.
'It's one of the most fun times of year to decorate,' FitzGerald said.
Hoagland's of Greenwich took the best traditional display award with a three-dimensional Advent Calendar, among a diorama of elaborately carved wood figurines of Santa Claus and children, and a glittering set of Nativity figurines that rotate inside a gold box.
Lynn Muscari, a sales associate, said the design and construction of the display was done on nights and weekends over several weeks.......
Puppy -- and kitty -- love
Source: Statesman Journal
... According to a 2005-06 pet owners' survey conducted by the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association in Greenwich, Conn., Americans planned to spend $2.6 billion (yes, the 'b' is correct) this holiday season. Katie Beckner, general manager of ...
E-mail: online@statesmanjournal.com
Mortgage lender sparks bid battle
Source: REVIEW-JOURNAL
By JOHN G. EDWARDS
Compass Partners, a New York-based investment company, made the apparent highest and best bid of $67 million Thursday for the assets of a mortgage loan fund managed by USA Capital and a contract to service loans for the bankrupt private lender.
Bankruptcy Judge Linda Riegle conducted a slow-paced auction in her courtroom taking bids from three companies, Desert Capital Real Estate Investment Trust of Henderson, hedge fund Silver Point Capital of Greenwich, Conn., and Compass.
USA Capital solicited investments from about 6,000 individual investors around the country and used the money to make short-term loans to developers, including USA Capital majority owners Tom Hantges and Joe Milanowski.
USA Capital controlled $962 million in assets for investors when it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy court protection in April. While USA Capital was making monthly payments to investors, many of its loans were not being repaid.
Some investors bought fractional interests in the loans. Others invested through USA First Trust Deed Fund and USA Diversified Trust Deed Fund, which served like mutual funds for these real estate-backed loans.
An interim management team led by Tom Allison has run USA Capital since the bankruptcy filing.
Silver Point Capital was approved as a "stalking horse," or first bidder, with an offer of $46.5 million to buy out investors in the First Trust Deed Fund. In addition, Silver Point agreed to take over loan servicing from USA Capital for other loans.
The auction started Thursday with that $46.5 million bid.
Compass came next with an offer of $57.5 million. The three bidders took turns usually raising their bid often in $100,000 increments over the previous bid, but sometimes by $1 million or more. Bidders often made higher bids on the spot, but they were allowed to privately confer for 20 minutes before deciding in several instances.
At the end, both Silver Point and Desert Capital passed, leaving Compass as the apparent high bidder at $67 million..........
A new pecking order
Source: Rocky Mountain News
By: Patti Thorn
Weary of reading the same old authors and their formulaic plots?
Today, we welcome some fresh faces.
This year, while big-name authors were busy stealing the spotlight, scores of titles by unknowns were hatched. Many were superb reads. How do we know? Our critics spent 2006 screening nearly 60 debut novels that weren’t reviewed on the regular books pages. They read books of all stripes: futuristic tales, family sagas, suspense stories and more. And when it was all said and done, they had uncovered a wealth of fresh talent — in every genre. Today, we offer 10 of the best, books of all types of plot and style. If you missed these titles when they were first released, here’s a hint: Don’t make the same mistake twice.
And a special thanks... To those who have dedicated countless hours to this annual project. We owe a debt of gratitude to Joan Hinkemeyer, Christine Jacques, Justin Matott, Verna Noel Jones and Vicky Uhland.
.......The Dressmaker
By Elizabeth Birkelund Oberbeck (Henry Holt, 306 pages, $23).
Author’s background: Oberbeck has written for numerous publications, including Cosmopolitan, Travel and Leisure, Glamour and Working Woman. She lives with her husband and four sons in Greenwich, Conn., and was introduced to the world of haute couture through her mother, who worked with Diana Vreeland at Harper’s Bazaar.
Plot in a nutshell: Claude Reynaud is a shy yet skilled dressmaker working in the small town of Senlis outside of Paris. He and his chatty pet parrot Pédan live a contented life, where Claude diligently designs and stitches eye-catching gowns while humoring his nephews with puppet shows. The dressmaker’s life is turned upside down, however, when he becomes smitten at first glance with the lovely Valentine de Verlay, who has come to him to have her wedding dress made. Claude then sets out on a Don Quixote-like quest to lure Valentine away from her fiancé and into his own arms. Along the way, the author composes poetic visual pictures of dresses designed expressly to reflect an individual’s outer and inner beauty.
Sample of prose: "His greatest talent — and what he was becoming renowned for beyond the small town of Senlis — was his ability to match a client’s natural colors with enhancing hues and textures. He obsessed over color classifications and names. Inadequate descriptions frustrated him to the point of fury. He would yell across his studio to Pédant, ‘That is not the color pink! Non! That is the color of dawn reflected on the yellowing marble steps of the Trevi Fountain.’"
Author reminds me of: No one in particular; Oberbeck has a unique voice.
Best reason to read: This is the kind of story that sneaks up on you. It seems simple enough in the first 20 pages or so, but as you continue reading, it quickly develops into a rich fabric of sharply drawn characters with real complications in their lives that aren’t tied up so neatly at novel’s end. You’ll relish the complexity. Verna Noel Jones
Source: Natl. Relocation & Real Estate
...... the people surrounding the marketing of them to become focused," said Linda Hodge of Preferred Properties' Greenwich, Connecticut office. The slowdown is a particular conundrum within the new-construction and higher-end markets, said Melanie Healey, ......
Bristol-Myers, Sanofi Win a U.S. Court Block on Apotex's Generic Plavix
Source: Bloomberg.com
Sanofi-Aventis SA and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. won an appeals court ruling that prevents Apotex Inc. from selling a generic version of the blood-thinner Plavix until a trial can be held.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington today upheld a lower court ruling that blocks sales of the generic drug until a judge can rule on the validity of a Plavix patent. The trial is set for January.
Prescriptions of brand-name Plavix plunged 32 percent in the third quarter of 2006 after Apotex flooded the market with a six-month supply of the generic drug during three weeks in August. Plavix, which is used to prevent heart attacks and strokes, had global sales of $6.3 billion in 2005, with $3.8 billion in the U.S. last year........
....... never, so it's nice to have the appeal upheld,'' Barbara Ryan, an analyst with Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. in Greenwich, Connecticut, said in a telephone interview. Apotex ``didn't have to remove the supplies that were shipped. Until those are all ......
Global Gold Names Ambassador Harry Gilmore (Ret) to Board
Source: Market Wire
... with mining properties in Chile and Armenia. Global Gold Corporation is located at 45 East Putnam Avenue, Greenwich, CT 06830. The main phone number is 203-422-2300. More information can be found at www.globalgoldcorp.com . Contact: Van Z. Krikorian ........
WWII Vet Recalls Drop Behind Enemy Lines
Source: Greenwich Citizen
The 65th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, marked Thursday, presented an opportunity for the Greenwich Citizen to interview Chandler Bates, a veteran of Uncle Sam's super-secret Office of .......
UPDATE:
Please search for this article in the: archive search.
Hedge funds: Secretive, lucrative and part of pop culture
Source: International Herald Tribune
Marshall Wace raised €1.5 billion on Friday in the largest initial public offering of a hedge fund, permitting individual investors to buy into a market normally limited to millionaires.
The London-based company sold shares of MW Tops, a closed-end investment company, for €10, or $13.27, each, Marshall Wace said late Thursday. The stock, which began trading Friday on Euronext Amsterdam, rose to a penny to finish at €10.01.
... huge sums of money on fast cars and fancy art, as well as magazine photo spreads of top managers' estates in Greenwich, Connecticut, and on New York's Long Island. Some might point to the fascination with hedge funds as a sign that the business has ...
George W.S. Trow, 63; Writer, cultural critic spent 30 years on New Yorker staff
Source: Los Angeles Times
By: Elaine Woo
George W.S. Trow, a writer and social critic whose dry humor and coruscating intelligence defined a 30-year career at the New Yorker, where he was a favorite of legendary editor William Shawn, died Nov. 24 in Naples, Italy, where he lived for the last five years. He was 63 and died of natural causes.
Trow, who joined the magazine in 1966, was best-known as the author of 'Within the Context of No Context,' a scathing analysis of contemporary American culture.
Originally published in the New Yorker in 1980 and later issued as a book, it was a collage of riffs, each identified with a subhead such as 'History,' 'Gossip' or 'Celebrities,' that wryly displayed Trow's mortification at the ignorance of a generation reared on television.
'Television is the force of no-history, and it holds the archives of the history of no-history,' he wrote. 'No good,' he concluded, 'has come of it.' 'Within the Context of No Context' quickly attained a cult following for its originality and prophetic insights.
'People passed that copy of the New Yorker from hand to hand,' recalled Martin H. Kaplan, a media expert and director of the Norman Lear Center at USC's Annenberg School for Communication, who knew Trow. 'It was one of those early and prescient works of cultural criticism which conveyed how troubling it was to live in the brave new media world.' It was also intensely personal and heavy with yearning for a bygone social order, when adults were adults and trivia were actually viewed as trivial.
His lamentations focused on an idiosyncratic array of what he called 'Mainstream American Cultural Artifacts,' such as People magazine, the 1964 New York World's Fair and the 1970s game show 'Family Feud.'
Civilization had declined to the point where, Trow wrote, 'a man named Richard Dawson, the 'host' of a program called Family Feud, asked contestants to guess what a poll of a hundred people had guessed would be the height of the average American woman.' To Trow, that millions of viewers could be engaged by such puerile entertainment - guessing what others had guessed, with nary a fact in sight - was alarming evidence of cultural anemia. With some disdain, he described this 'important moment in the history of television' under the heading 'No Authority.'
Authority was one quality Trow (pronounced like grow ) possessed in spades. His pronouncements were godlike, as well as abstract, bordering on mystical.
In reference to an America that had gotten too big and impersonal, for instance, he wrote: 'The middle distance fell away .
Two grids remained. The grid of two hundred million and the grid of intimacy.' But, as Trow saw it, the intimacy was a television-induced illusion. Loneliness loomed. 'What made George's piece great was the deadpan minimalism of the style, a freaky-deaky,
I Ching-like idiom that made it seem like a text carved on some future, unearthed Rosetta stone . It was a gag, but a gag about how everything you've ever cared about was just destroyed in a flashfire,' Donald Fagen, the musician and songwriter who met Trow in the 1980s after co-founding the band Steely Dan, wrote on his website this week.
'He was a kind of genius in the way he saw the world,' said author Jamaica Kincaid, who joined the New Yorker staff in the 1970s through Trow's ardent sponsorship.
Born in Greenwich, Conn., Trow was well-grounded in the rituals of the upper class, even though his old New York family was not rich........
'Day of Infamy' remembered
Source: Norwalk Advocate (home page)
... to him died. 'It's a big deal in our family,' said Breen, 52, a commercial insurance broker who lives in Old Greenwich. 'It inspired our son to go into the Naval Academy.' Along with the Breen and his wife, Jane, close to 40 people turned ...
Festive facades vie for prizes
Source: Stamford Advocate
By: Martin B. Cassidy
While more minimalist than competing displays, Sea Cloth on Greenwich Avenue wowed contest judges with its striking concept: green pillows stacked to look like a Christmas tree.
For the second year in a row, the downtown home furnishings business took top prize in the Greenwich Chamber of Commerce's Winter Wonderland holiday window display contest.
'We're very excited and it's a flattering award to get,' said Ann FitzGerald, the manager of Sea Cloth, which designs and manufactures fabrics for upholstery and other household furnishings.
In addition to naming the top three most original displays at local stores, the contest also includes separate awards in recognition of other displays which are the most traditional, festive, or show community spirit.
Greenwich Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Mary Ann Morrison said that elaborate and creative holiday window displays are an important part of bringing in foot traffic and wooing shoppers away from malls.
'It's part of the community spirit we have here in Greenwich that keeps people from going to the mall,' Morrison said. 'This type of spirit is what people are longing for.'
While primarily a fabric company, FitzGerald said that during the holidays Sea Cloth stocks up on Christmas tree ornaments and other holiday decorations.
'It's one of the most fun times of year to decorate,' FitzGerald said.
Hoagland's of Greenwich took the best traditional display award with a three-dimensional Advent Calendar, among a diorama of elaborately carved wood figurines of Santa Claus and children, and a glittering set of Nativity figurines that rotate inside a gold box.
Lynn Muscari, a sales associate, said the design and construction of the display was done on nights and weekends over several weeks.......
Puppy -- and kitty -- love
Source: Statesman Journal
... According to a 2005-06 pet owners' survey conducted by the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association in Greenwich, Conn., Americans planned to spend $2.6 billion (yes, the 'b' is correct) this holiday season. Katie Beckner, general manager of ...
E-mail: online@statesmanjournal.com
Mortgage lender sparks bid battle
Source: REVIEW-JOURNAL
By JOHN G. EDWARDS
Compass Partners, a New York-based investment company, made the apparent highest and best bid of $67 million Thursday for the assets of a mortgage loan fund managed by USA Capital and a contract to service loans for the bankrupt private lender.
Bankruptcy Judge Linda Riegle conducted a slow-paced auction in her courtroom taking bids from three companies, Desert Capital Real Estate Investment Trust of Henderson, hedge fund Silver Point Capital of Greenwich, Conn., and Compass.
USA Capital solicited investments from about 6,000 individual investors around the country and used the money to make short-term loans to developers, including USA Capital majority owners Tom Hantges and Joe Milanowski.
USA Capital controlled $962 million in assets for investors when it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy court protection in April. While USA Capital was making monthly payments to investors, many of its loans were not being repaid.
Some investors bought fractional interests in the loans. Others invested through USA First Trust Deed Fund and USA Diversified Trust Deed Fund, which served like mutual funds for these real estate-backed loans.
An interim management team led by Tom Allison has run USA Capital since the bankruptcy filing.
Silver Point Capital was approved as a "stalking horse," or first bidder, with an offer of $46.5 million to buy out investors in the First Trust Deed Fund. In addition, Silver Point agreed to take over loan servicing from USA Capital for other loans.
The auction started Thursday with that $46.5 million bid.
Compass came next with an offer of $57.5 million. The three bidders took turns usually raising their bid often in $100,000 increments over the previous bid, but sometimes by $1 million or more. Bidders often made higher bids on the spot, but they were allowed to privately confer for 20 minutes before deciding in several instances.
At the end, both Silver Point and Desert Capital passed, leaving Compass as the apparent high bidder at $67 million..........
A new pecking order
Source: Rocky Mountain News
By: Patti Thorn
Weary of reading the same old authors and their formulaic plots?
Today, we welcome some fresh faces.
This year, while big-name authors were busy stealing the spotlight, scores of titles by unknowns were hatched. Many were superb reads. How do we know? Our critics spent 2006 screening nearly 60 debut novels that weren’t reviewed on the regular books pages. They read books of all stripes: futuristic tales, family sagas, suspense stories and more. And when it was all said and done, they had uncovered a wealth of fresh talent — in every genre. Today, we offer 10 of the best, books of all types of plot and style. If you missed these titles when they were first released, here’s a hint: Don’t make the same mistake twice.
And a special thanks... To those who have dedicated countless hours to this annual project. We owe a debt of gratitude to Joan Hinkemeyer, Christine Jacques, Justin Matott, Verna Noel Jones and Vicky Uhland.
.......The Dressmaker
By Elizabeth Birkelund Oberbeck (Henry Holt, 306 pages, $23).
Author’s background: Oberbeck has written for numerous publications, including Cosmopolitan, Travel and Leisure, Glamour and Working Woman. She lives with her husband and four sons in Greenwich, Conn., and was introduced to the world of haute couture through her mother, who worked with Diana Vreeland at Harper’s Bazaar.
Plot in a nutshell: Claude Reynaud is a shy yet skilled dressmaker working in the small town of Senlis outside of Paris. He and his chatty pet parrot Pédan live a contented life, where Claude diligently designs and stitches eye-catching gowns while humoring his nephews with puppet shows. The dressmaker’s life is turned upside down, however, when he becomes smitten at first glance with the lovely Valentine de Verlay, who has come to him to have her wedding dress made. Claude then sets out on a Don Quixote-like quest to lure Valentine away from her fiancé and into his own arms. Along the way, the author composes poetic visual pictures of dresses designed expressly to reflect an individual’s outer and inner beauty.
Sample of prose: "His greatest talent — and what he was becoming renowned for beyond the small town of Senlis — was his ability to match a client’s natural colors with enhancing hues and textures. He obsessed over color classifications and names. Inadequate descriptions frustrated him to the point of fury. He would yell across his studio to Pédant, ‘That is not the color pink! Non! That is the color of dawn reflected on the yellowing marble steps of the Trevi Fountain.’"
Author reminds me of: No one in particular; Oberbeck has a unique voice.
Best reason to read: This is the kind of story that sneaks up on you. It seems simple enough in the first 20 pages or so, but as you continue reading, it quickly develops into a rich fabric of sharply drawn characters with real complications in their lives that aren’t tied up so neatly at novel’s end. You’ll relish the complexity. Verna Noel Jones