plus 3, Concussions imperil Wenger's ND career - Chicago Sun-Times

Concussions imperil Wenger's ND career - Chicago Sun-Times
She's got a job: Her career is mapped - msnbc.com
Veteran Japanese politician battles PM for top job - AP - msnbc.com
Follow these pointers to make first day on the job a good one - St. Petersburg Times

Concussions imperil Wenger's ND career - Chicago Sun-Times

Posted: 08 Sep 2010 10:01 PM PDT

September 9, 2010

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- Center Dan Wenger's football career at Notre Dame is in jeopardy after the fifth-year senior suffered his second concussion in three weeks during practice this week.

Wenger, a starter in 2008 and a backup at guard last year, was expected to move back to center. But he was limited in practice after suffering a concussion Aug. 13 and lost the starting job to junior Braxton Cave.

Wenger suffered another concussion Tuesday, coach Brian Kelly said after practice Wednes-day. Kelly, Notre Dame's medical team and Wenger and his family will determine if he can play again, probably by the end of the week.

''We have to be extremely conservative when we have a young man who hasn't had game contact and has suffered two concussions,'' Kelly said.

Junior Mike Golic Jr. and sophomore Chris Watt of Glenbard West are taking second-team reps in Wenger's absence.

Slaughter still out

Safety Jamoris Slaughter, who sprained an ankle in the victory Saturday over Purdue, did not practice Wednesday but might play this Saturday against Michigan.

''He had a procedure that requires 72 hours of absolutely no walking, and he was jogging at [pre-practice],'' Kelly said. ''So he's a day ahead.''

Fleming feeling salty

Junior linebacker Darius Fleming of St. Rita promised to watch his diet after missing a chunk of the second half against Purdue with leg cramps.

''I feel great now,'' said Fleming, who was credited with one tackle but also had two quarterback hurries. ''I didn't have enough salt in my body. My quads cramped up. I'm eating salt every day now.''

Playmaker rewarded

Freshman wide receiver Bennett Jackson was on the scout team early in preseason practice but made four tackles on special teams in the opener and will get an opportunity on offense ''because now he's obviously going to be a player for us,'' Kelly said.

The 6-foot, 172-pound Jackson made all four tackles on kickoffs.

''He lasted about two days [on the scout team],'' Kelly said, ''[until] all my defensive coaches were knocking on my door saying, 'Coach, this guy's too fast. He can't be on the scout team.'''

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She's got a job: Her career is mapped - msnbc.com

Posted: 10 Sep 2010 05:16 AM PDT

IRVINE Tract Map No. 17360 is spread out on Melissa Gruner's desk, 18-by-26 inches of a new Irvine subdivision with curved roads leading to streets named Ranchland, Arrowhead, Distant Star.

A hand-drawn red-penciled circle is the one shot of color on the black-and-white map. That's where Gruner will change the name of the street from Seedling to Jackrabbit, correcting an error in inches that represents real miles.

On her computer is what's called the check letter, the notification to the subcontractor that some changes have been made to the map. This letter, dated Sept. 1, is the official record of a small event. But for Gruner, 43, it marks a long personal path. It's her first day as a full-time employee at Fuscoe Engineering, Inc., as part of the land survey team, and she has to make another correction

"I've been told to change my title underneath here to the 'Surveying Mapping Technician' instead of 'Survey Intern,'" she said, breaking into a smile.

She hits the backspace button, deleting the old title, and presses 'print' on her new letter.

Gruner's new desk is a long way from the World Trade Center in Long Beach. That's where she had worked for a couple of years, starting in 1999, as a paralegal, assisting the giant Dow Corning breast implant class action lawsuit, a years-long litigation worth billions.

Gruner loved the law, and had worked for some of the best firms in Southern California since 1990, including stops in Newport Beach and Irvine. But she began to hate her task on the Dow case -- investigating the health records of women who claimed the silicone implants made them sick and looking for other possible health problems in hopes of decreasing or denying settlements.

"I didn't feel like I was making a really great contribution to society," Gruner said. "People said 'Wow, why would you leave that?' I just didn't feel very good about the work."

So in early 2001 she quit the job and took off for Arizona, where she sold antiques at her boyfriend's shop at Lake Havasu for a few years, until the relationship ended.

Back she came to California, and she settled in at her older sister's home in the Moreno Valley, where the family raised quarter horses. She didn't have any idea what she would do, other than knowing that she wanted to be outside. Besides, her legal experience was a bit outdated and she didn't want to head back to school. One day while driving in Beaumont, she literally saw a sign -- it was posted near the road.

"I knew that I wanted to be outside and I just drove by and (the sign) was over there," she said, pointing ahead. 'Will train. No experience necessary.'

"And I thought: That's good."

The sign was posted by Robertson's Ready Mix, a family-owned concrete company.

To say the tall, leggy 36-year-old with rock-star hair was well-received at her first meeting... well, let's just say there was only a slight delay in her hiring. "I went in there wearing a pair of nice jeans, probably some heels, and my jewelry on. I put down my legal resume and I said, 'I'd like to drive.' And they looked at me and said: 'What'?"

When the plant manager stopped staring, he said, ""What makes you think you could do this?"

"I said: 'My dad was a steel mill worker, and he always told me I could do anything I wanted to do and I believed him. Do you have any openings?'"

The manager called a week later. and, after three weeks of that promised training, she was driving the mix trucks, the big rigs carrying tons of fluid concrete. The first time she got up in the rig to drive she had to open the door again to throw up, her anxiety at driving a vehicle that inside looked like the cockpit of an airplane getting the best of her.

But even tougher than the work was the workplace. When she started, in 2006, one of the male drivers told her it was too bad that she was on the job site since they couldn't "take a leak" by the water tanks anymore.

"Being a woman on a job in an industry that's definitely male dominated, you're doubly scrutinized," Gruner said. "You've got to work twice as hard as the new-hire guy because everyone's watching you and they're just waiting for you to screw up."

So she stepped up. If the boss yelled and asked who wanted to catch a load, she would take the job, no matter the exhaustion. She worked hard and she got good at the job, ultimately carrying loads of what's called "the mud" into the tiniest neighborhoods in tony areas of Los Angeles, Marina del Ray, and Redondo Beach, or out to the new casinos in the Inland Empire. Every day was an adventure -- her daily load ticket laying out her route, what type of mud she would carry and what kind of structure she would pour. Her commercial driver's license, which she still carries, was a proud achievement. That's even though her ID has a picture of her wearing a red bandana, a grimy T-shirt and doing what she calls her Bret Michaels impression.

"It was one of the greatest days of my life when one of the old-timers came over to me and he said, 'I gotta tell you, kid, you drive circles around some of these numb nuts,'" she said. "That was a big thing."

Why would a young woman want a job like that? She shrugged and said, "Daddy's girl."

Daddy was a worker at the Kaiser Steel Mill in Fontana, where Gruner grew up the third of her parent's children. She was late -- her mother was 40 when she gave birth -- and the oldest sibling has 20 years on her. Gruner is proud to say that her father was also a violinist, and that she grew up riding and showing horses, sometimes at the Orange County Fairgrounds.

She drove the mix trucks for three years and the job allowed her to see all aspects of the construction business. She quit the Robertson's job in March 2009 and thought about a job inspecting concrete, but could see that working in Southern California's distressed new housing industry was not be the best idea.

Seeking what she calls "a cognitive challenge," Gruner found herself at a crossroads. Before becoming a paralegal, she spent a year and a half at Cal State-Fullerton as a biochemistry major and she loved science. She wanted, again, to be outdoors. She had good math, analysis and communication skills, yet needed an industry that had a good chance of getting a job.

The answer? She signed up for the land surveying program at Santiago Canyon College. By June 2011, she will have earned her state survey and mapping certificate (called Land Surveyor in Training, or LSIT certificate), allowing her to work as a land surveyor to find property lines, perform boundary adjustments, prepare maps and perform surveys on construction.

So far, so good. With the exception of one B, she's earned all As and has done enough volunteer work to get herself noticed by a good firm, Fuscoe Engineering. After a stint as the company's summer intern, she was offered one of the rare, coveted full-time jobs there. She continues to go to school two nights a week and also serves as the president of the student chapter of the California Land Surveying Association.

She's heard a lot about how rare it is for a woman to work as a land surveyor. She's even had some women in the firm high-five her in the bathroom, congratulating her on being one of the few females to work in the survey department. She smiles and says it's a lot more polite than her last job, which she politely calls "the mud industry."

Serendipity being what it is, it has led her here, Gruner said, to this point on the map. Landing this job has been a dream -- she had to turn down another internship to take it -- and she's grateful every day for the opportunity. She's surprised to find that she's married her love of the law -- now dedicated to easements and boundary lines and historical markers -- with surveying. She's thrilled to be learning CAD, computer-aided drafting, and likes to think she's now working at building productive things, that will be sustainable and helpful to people.

The letter printed and other documents ready, Gruner gets ready to take the package down to the client in Newport Beach. She figures she'll take the side streets, here on her first day, since it's after 5 p.m., with traffic and all. She takes a look at the large map still open on her desk, checking some of the final details.

"Hopefully at the end you have all the pieces of the puzzle together," she said, "that demonstrate the map."

Contact the writer: plowe@ocregister.com or 714-796-7969

Veteran Japanese politician battles PM for top job - AP - msnbc.com

Posted: 10 Sep 2010 03:43 AM PDT

TOKYO — Veteran Japanese lawmaker Ichiro Ozawa is widely unpopular and could be indicted for political finance violations next month. He also could become Japan's third prime minister in a year.

The 68-year-old powerbroker is trying to topple his own party leader — who became prime minister just three months ago — in an internal ruling party leadership vote Tuesday. If Ozawa wins, experts say it could be a step backward toward the corruption-tainted politics of the past and exacerbate political gridlock at a time Japan badly needs strong leadership.

The yen is spiking to 15-year highs, the economy is in a slump and Japan's public debt is growing by the day — all of which are bad news for faltering global recovery. Instead of pushing a strong economic agenda, the ruling Democratic Party of Japan is preoccupied with leadership struggles.

Ozawa has championed deregulation and bureaucratic reforms, but has also been dogged by scandal and is widely seen as an old-style back-room wheeler-dealer.

Opinion polls show the public prefers Prime Minister Naoto Kan, a plainspoken fiscal conservative, by a four-to-one margin over Ozawa, who quit as the party's No. 2 leader in June amid a funding scandal — although he denies wrongdoing.

Ozawa's unpopularity doesn't seem to phase him. A master strategist, he is credited with orchestrating the Democrats' landslide victory in August last year that unseated the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party. He was on track to becoming prime minister before getting ensnared in the scandal.

Tuesday's vote is being decided among Democratic Party members, a chunk of whom back Ozawa or are beholden to him for helping start their political careers. Because the Democrats control the more powerful lower house of the Diet, or parliament, their leader will almost certainly become prime minister.

If Ozawa wins, "it would take us back to the older, LDP-style politics," said Takehiko Yamamoto, a professor of politics at Waseda University in Tokyo. "The public backlash will be strong, and opposition parties will hammer on Ozawa's problems with money and politics."

Those distractions could make it even harder for the Democrats, who lost control of the less powerful upper house in July elections, to pass legislation and tackle critical problems. Increased gridlock could hasten snap elections, predicts Yamamoto, further perpetuating Japan's leadership merry-go-round.

Ozawa could be indicted as early as next month for violating political finance laws if a citizens' panel demands for a second time that prosecutors charge him. If Ozawa becomes prime minister, he would have constitutional immunity, but he has said he would not "run away" from any charges.

Kan, 63, has a cleaner image, but faces discontent within his party for proposing a sales tax hike just before the July elections — seen as a major reason for the Democrats' defeat.

By all accounts, Tuesday's vote will be close. Kan and Ozawa each have the support of about 170-180 national party lawmakers, media reports say.

Ozawa was a rising star in the then-ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party early in his career and a protege of former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, one of Japan's most powerful politicians who was felled by a corruption scandal.

But in the early 1990s, Ozawa broke away from the Liberal Democrats to create a reform-minded opposition party and wrote a best-selling book, "Blueprint for a New Japan," his manifesto for national renewal that called for deregulation and decentralization. He joined the Democrats in 2003.

Yet many believe Ozawa still hasn't broken free from the older, back-room style of Japanese politics.

An Ozawa victory "would be a victory for the pattern of politics that Japan doesn't need anymore ... a pattern of politics that the Japanese public as a whole is profoundly discontent with," said Thomas Berger, a professor of international relations at Boston University. "I just can't see this as the wave of the future."

The political infighting has added to the frustration of many Japanese.

"It's embarrassing," says Seiichi Kato, a Tokyo taxi driver. "I think Kan should stay on. If the prime minister changes again, people overseas will wonder what's going on here. They should be tackling the strong yen and falling stock market instead of bickering with each other."

Follow these pointers to make first day on the job a good one - St. Petersburg Times

Posted: 10 Sep 2010 01:27 AM PDT

Working | A new job

Associated Press
In Print: Saturday, September 11, 2010

The first day on a job can be overwhelming. The new hire has to interact with unknown co-workers, customers or clients, figure out the responsibilities that go with the job, and learn the layout of a work space. Career coaches offer tips on how to have a first-class first day. Associated Press

Be open and friendly: Present yourself well to co-workers in an effort to form bonds. Walk around and introduce yourself to everyone. Keep conversations brief and polite and listen more than you talk: Ask questions about workplace operations and culture.

Follow the "rules that they teach us in kindergarten. Play nice, share, be cooperative," said Paul Bernard, an executive coach with his own consultancy in New York.

Connect and learn: By being cordial and curious, you begin to form relationships that may help you later. Your goal is to turn co-workers into allies or mentors within the organization, said career coach John McKee, who has run a business strategy firm since 2001.

Being friendly and asking questions also helps new hires figure out how the office works and what their role should be.

"There are informal power brokers in all organizations," McKee said. Learning the unofficial structure of the workplace can help you achieve your goals.

Dress the part: Overdressing on the first day can appear arrogant, McKee said. Underdressing, on the other hand, is just as bad: It looks sloppy and disrespectful.

Still, slightly conservative is more appropriate than too casual, said career strategist Daisy Swan, the owner of Daisy Swan & Associates in Los Angeles.

"Don't go overboard with anything: jewelry, perfume, cologne."

Adapt and stay positive: Often the reality of a new job will include more responsibilities than were presented during the interviews, especially because companies cut costs during the recession. If that's the case, the new hire needs to be ready to grin and bear it, Bernard said.

"(It is) dangerous to complain … people mess themselves up by being negative," he said.

There's also no need to refer to an old employer. "The way you did things at a previous job may not apply to where you are now," Swan said.

[Last modified: Sep 10, 2010 04:30 AM]