Christina Aguilera
Allstate Arena,
Saturday, Apr 21, 2007 07:30 PM

Allstate Arena [MAP/SAT]
allstatearena.com
6920 N. Mannheim Road
Rosemont, IL 60018

Telephone: 847.635.6601 

Ricky Martin Black and White Tour 2007
Wednesday April 25, 2007  -  8 p.m.

Allstate Arena [MAP/SAT]
allstatearena.com
6920 N. Mannheim Road
Rosemont, IL 60018

Telephone: 847.635.6601

The Hale Street Group (developers of Carlyle at Stonegate) is preparing to break ground this spring near Recreation Park by introducing the Hickory Rowhome Project at the southeast corner of Miner Street and Hickory Avenue in Arlington Heights [MAP/SAT].

The development will feature two buildings with brick and stone facades. One building will have five units and one building will have six units. Each unit will have a two-car garage and rear access to the unit.

halestreetgroup.com

With five private jets, Travolta still lectures on global warming
30.03.07
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John Travolta’s House on Wikimapia
 
His serious aviation habit means he is hardly the best person to lecture others on the environment. But John Travolta went ahead and did it anyway.
The 53-year-old actor, a passionate pilot, encouraged his fans to “do their bit” to tackle global warming.

But although he readily admitted: “I fly jets”, he failed to mention he actually owns five, along with his own private runway.
Clocking up at least 30,000 flying miles in the past 12 months means he has produced an estimated 800 tons of carbon emissions – nearly 100 times the average Briton’s tally.
Travolta made his comments this week at the British premiere of his movie, Wild Hogs.
He spoke of the importance of helping the environment by using “alternative methods of fuel” – after driving down the red carpet on a Harley Davidson.

Travolta, a Scientologist, claimed the solution to global warming could be found in outer space and blamed his hefty flying mileage on the nature of the movie business.
But his appointment as a “serving ambassador” for the Australian airline Qantas doesn’t seem to have much to do with the movies. Nor does a recent, two-month round-the-world flying trip.
“It [global warming] is a very valid issue,” Travolta declared. “I’m wondering if we need to think about other planets and dome cities.
“Everyone can do their bit. But I don’t know if it’s not too late already. We have to think about alternative methods of fuel.
“I’m probably not the best candidate to ask about global warming because I fly jets.
“I use them as a business tool though, as others do. I think it’s part of this industry – otherwise I couldn’t be here doing this and I wouldn’t be here now.”
Travolta’s five private planes – a customised £2million Boeing 707, three Gulfstream jets and a Lear jet – are kept at the bottom of his garden in the US next to a private runway.
Indeed, such is his enthusiasm for flying, he persuaded his wife, actress Kelly Preston, to name their son Jett when he was born 14 years ago.
Five years ago he piloted his own Boeing 707 on a 13- city “Spirit of Friendship Tour” for Qantas, taking in Los Angeles, Auckland, Sydney, Singapore, Tokyo, London, Paris and New York and amassing over 35,000 flying miles.
More recently, a gruelling promotional schedule for his two latest projects, Hairspray and Wild Hogs, has seen him fly extensively over the past year.
This includes a country-wide tour of the US and a visit to Canada as well as this week’s appearance in Leicester Square.
Such prolific mileage means that, over the past 12 months, he has accumulated around 800 tonnes of carbon emissions.
According to a recent study by the government-funded Carbon Trust, this means he boasts a carbon “footprint” nearly 100 times that of the average Briton, who is responsible for 10.92 tons of Co2, from his flights alone.
One of the world’s leading climate change businesses, the Carbon Neutral Company, has written to Travolta, suggesting ways he could reduce these alarming levels.
He has yet to respond to their advice. Environmental groups were quick to criticise Travolta for “discrediting the cause”.
John Buckley, managing director-of CarbonFootprint.com, said: “John Travolta has such a high-profile celebrity status, so what he says carries an extraordinary amount of weight.
“So it is such a shame when someone of his standing is so outspoken about green issues, yet fails to practise what he preaches.
“Unfortunately someone of his standing ends up discrediting the cause itself, because he is saying people should protect the environment on one hand, yet travelling on a private plane on the other.
“Green issues are serious and should be treated as such.
“It is vital for celebrities to toe the line when they speak out in support of it.”

COMMENTS
Here’s a sample of the latest views published.
This article is hilarious. You have the idiot “carbon credit” companies making a fuss and trying to extort a public figure for millions of dollars because he acts like a public figure who’s earned millions of dollars should.

John as a fellow Floridian I’ll help you out, man. I will sell you carbon credits at half the price those daffy Brits want. In exchange, I will give you a certificate stating emphatically that neither I nor 99 of my friends will buy a four engine 707 in the next 10 years. So feel free to fly the world buddy, guilt free!

Or better yet, you can really help the “environmental cause” by promising to star in a screen adaption of Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear”. I’ll produce it. With you attached to the project I’m sure we can set up a deal where it is 100% funded by the sale of “Carbon Credits” from people sick of this global warming hysteria.

- Mike Moran, Orlando, FL
Response to Trevor.
What does that have to do with him being a HYPOCRITE. Just like Al Gore.
Also a lot of supplies from different people and groups were flown down to New Oleans, what does that have to do with the article?

- Fred, Colorado, USA
Let’s see, get famous in the movie biz, make lots of money and buy lots of stuff, do some charity work and become an expert on everything and tell how us commoners best behave… how wonderful.

- Al Underwood, Jackson, Mississippi, USA
This is part of being a liberal. You say one thing and lecture to others how things should be. Then you just go ahead and do what ever you want in your personal life.

- Bill Johnson, Dayton
As far as I’m concerned he can own as many jets as he wishes. Global warming is a total hoax, always has been, there is absolutely, right, absolutely, no scientific evidence that man made gasses have one iota to do with this subject. There are a growing number of scientists who debunk this notion, who have the credentials that their opposition lack. If the global warming nuts want to gain respect, let’s put the literal billions that they’re all asking for into worth while needs. Al Gore with his carbon buyback is a joke, just check out who he’s buying from, talk about inside trading.

Let’s get real people, remember the ice age, hell that was only 20 years ago.

- Peter Polstein, Somers United States
Another Hollywood lib saying rules are made for regular people not for him. I bet he will run out and buy some “Carbon Credits” to get rid of all that guilt… I mean carbon.

- Anna Faris, Miami, America
I notice that there’s no mention of Travolta being one of the first to ferry down supplies he’d bought from his own money using his own plane for transportation to New Orleans after Katrina?

- Trevor Roll, London

MORE ABOUT JUMBOLAIR — the Arthur & Teri Jones Connection

OCALA — The runway at Jumbolair flows in a broad river of asphalt across undulating pastureland in the green heart of Florida’s horse country. Like a river, it exerts a pull on all who have spent time along its grassy banks: Arthur Jones, the millionaire inventor of Nautilus exercise equipment, who envisioned it; the pilots who land on it; and now the families who are building homes overlooking its expanse.

But no one is more enthralled by it than Terri Jones Thayer, the green-eyed beauty queen who married Jones when she was just 18 — and he was 55.

The runway has been the one constant in her mercurial life: familiar, rock-solid, safe.

It was the springboard for her adventures as the youngest woman to fly a Boeing 707 jetliner, as a model for Revlon’s Charlie Girl fragrance and as a globe-trotting collector of exotic animals — including the elephants that gave the estate its name.

It was the polestar that guided her home after divorce, a second marriage and the birth of her two children.

Now it is the foundation upon which Terri and her second husband, Jeremy Thayer, 49, a jeweler and developer, are building their future. The runway is the heart of Jumbola
ir Aviation Estates, the fledgling fly-in community the couple is developing on their 550-acre estate just north of downtown Ocala.

It will have taxiways to every back door, hangars beside every garage — and John Travolta, actor and aviation buff, is its first resident.

A time of growing

It was 20 years ago that the bulldozer broke ground for a runway at Jumbolair, the ranch Terri and Arthur bought after their marriage.

Terri, as slight and light as a jockey, would scramble aboard the hulking machine and move dirt around. She thrilled to the engine’s roar, the tang of exhaust, the power and precision of the giant blade as it carved a dark track through virgin grassland.

The runway started out as little more than a simple airstrip — a place for light prop planes to touch down. But as Jones acquired bigger, faster aircraft, the runway expanded to grandiose proportions: 7,550 feet long, 220 feet wide and stretched to handle his three Boeing 707 jets. It eventually cost him $6 million, he says.

Terri grew apace with the runway. The tomboy bulldozer-driver soon found herself sitting in on her husband’s business meetings, entertaining his clients and starring in his promotional videos. The country girl who grew up riding horses bareback on her family’s 10 rural acres near Tampa was becoming a poised and confident young woman.

She had met Jones when she was 17. She was in a beauty pageant in Miami; he was filming the event for TV. Afterwards, he piloted her home to Tampa in his jet. She had landed her first modeling gig at age 11 and dropped out of school at 15 to run her own modeling school.

A few months after that flight with Jones, she sold her modeling school and went to work for Jones as his Nautilus model. She married him the following year in Las Vegas — just days after he divorced his fourth wife.

Under his tutelage, Terri spread her wings. She learned to fly — first in small prop planes at the DeLand airport, then in Arthur’s Citation jet and 707 at Jumbolair. Her instructors were a pair of retired airline pilots.

As she practiced maneuvers, she had her home runway all to herself. There were no other students on the asphalt, no other voices on the radio. And the huge runway was “very forgiving,” she says. “There was a little more room for error.”

She also learned to run their estate — though with a management style far gentler than the dictatorial Jones’.

“She’s sweet, soft-spoken, unassuming. But smart too,” says Kirk Phillips, manager of the bed-and-breakfast inn that now occupies the five-bedroom Jumbolair homestead. “Every guy who works here has a crush on her. She tells me she can be ugly when she’s mad, but in almost two years, I’ve never seen her mad.”

Those early years living alongside the runway-under-construction were a time of unbridled freedom, recalls Terri. “I found myself flying to Tampa to get my hair cut or to Texas with a plane full of girlfriends to shop.”

She and Jones were guests on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson — where Terri, sizzling in a strapless red dress, adopted an air of sweet innocence while quizzing Johnny on the effects of a rhino horn she’d given him on an earlier occasion.

They appeared with Robin Leach in a segment on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. And a reporter from 20/20 traveled with them to drought-stricken Zimbabwe, where they rescued 63 orphaned elephants and flew them back to their ranch in their 707.

Along the way, she palled around with the rich and famous, including actress Bo Derek, who shares her love of animals, and aviation legend Chuck Yeager.

Terri doesn’t mention love when she speaks of Arthur Jones, who is retired and living in Ocala. But she does acknowledge his energy, intelligence and the opportunities his millions afforded her.

“He was my mentor. He taught me I could do anything,” she says. “The only college I attended was Arthur Jones College.”

There were times, though, when life with Jones — a brusque and demanding man — seemed more like the school of hard knocks. After nine years together, the couple divorced in a bitter court battle.

Terri retreated to a small house in the woods near Lake Helen. The runway at Jumbolair went quiet. So did Terri’s life. “After all the fast times, I yearned to get back down to earth,” says Terri. “I played with my horses. I read a lot of books.”

But as her 30th birthday approached, she started yearning for a family — a husband and children.

“I was over at my beach house one weekend. I asked my hairdresser, ‘Do you know someone to take me to dinner?’ “He took out his little black book and gave me a name: Jeremy Thayer.”

Three months later they married, bought homes on Florida’s west coast, and immersed themselves in Thayer’s jewelry business for seven years. But in the end, Terri couldn’t resist the allure of Jumbolair. She wanted to raise her children in the country, to have her horses grazing in her own back yard.

Most of all, she longed to own an airplane and fly again.

New ideas for new life

The runway is older now, but still rock-solid. Airplanes are again touching down on its expansive surface.

Terri is older too — 41 last birthday. But she’s still cover-girl lovely, with high-angled cheekbones, wide smile and a mane of chestnut hair.

She and Thayer are parents to Bryce, 10, Jourdan, 8, and Jeremy’s daughter, Natalie, 15, from his previous marriage.

Four years ago, she returned to the place she still loves with her new family and a new plan: to develop an aviation community at Jumbolair.

She and Jeremy bought out Arthur Jones’ share of the property and started drawing up plans. Travolta and his wife, Kelly Preston, were among the first to select a home site.

Two years ago, Terri and her family moved out of the estate’s oak-shaded homestead, converting it to a B&B — which eventually will become a country club, complete with private dining, a tennis court and equestrian center. Until their Mediterranean-style villa is built just a block away from Travolta’s spread, the Thayer family is making do in a modest rental house nearby.

The Jumbolair master plan for provides for about 125 homes, most on sites of 2 to 4 acres. So far, 13 sites have sold for an average of $400,000 each. Construction will begin on about seven homes this year.

“We’re progressing slowly,” says Terri. “We’re really just a mom-and-pop operation, not a huge construction company.”

“They’re dedicating their lives to this place,” says Steve Ring, a pilot who owns a Cessna 310, and an air traffic controller at Jacksonville International Airport.

“I’ve been looking for a fly-in development for 10 years,” he says. “When I flew in here last year and saw the runway, that was it: It’s the most spectacular private runway anywhere. And the surroundings are idyllic.”

Houses with wings

Travolta’s $3.5 million mansion sits atop eight wooded acres overlooking the runway. Designed to look like an airport terminal, the 21,000-square-foot structure is topped with a mock control tower of blue glass. The main house is flanked by a pool, eight apartments above a 10-car garage, and open hangars for the actor’s 707 and Gulfstream II jets.

Farther down the hill, on a property separated from the runway by a small lake, New York lawyer Sanford S. Asher plans to build an equally spectacular residence.

“The concept for the house is to make it look great from the sky, because that’s the first view people have when they fly in,” explains Asher’s wife, Line Grosjean Asher, a 21-year-old architecture student at the University of Miami.

“It will have three wings, like a propeller of a plane. In the center will be a glass elevator with a bar and lounge chairs. It will go up through the roof into a dome of glass,” she says in a phone interview. “It will be a great place at night to have a drink and watch the planes on the runway.”

Brunch and business

An air of anticipation rises with the mornin
g fog off the Jumbolair runway. Men in red polo shirts and khaki shorts pace along its verge, talking into radios and eyeing the sky.

It’s the first Sunday of the month — the day the Thayers host a brunch for aviation fans, potential property buyers and anyone else who will fork over $25 for a late-morning feast in the country.

Shortly after 10 a.m., the first jet comes screaming in — a Gulfstream from Sarasota. Then, with a roar, a T-28 Navy trainer, orange and white. Followed by a Cessna Skyhawk, a Citation Bravo, a bright-blue Grumman.

Surprisingly, the horses in the nearby pastures ignore the commotion. “The first few times they looked up and did a little dance,” says Terri. “But now they’re like, ‘Ah, this goes with the territory.’ “

The aircraft taxi into the Bowl, the 15-acre turnaround at the runway’s south end. They park in a wide semicircle, sparrows on the rim of a birdbath.

Golf carts ferry pilots and passengers to the estate’s ballroom, beside the B&B, where a pianist provides background music to the lavish brunch.

The Thayers circulate, pausing at each table to greet and chat. Jeremy is country-casual in black jeans and cowboy boots. But Terri, in a flowered chiffon blouse and pale-lemon pants, looks more like a model in an ad for an upscale resort. She wears a strand of gumball-size South Seas pearls around her neck and 11 carats of diamonds on her ring finger.

“They’re not mine. I just wear them until someone else wants to buy them. That’s what it’s like when your husband’s in the jewelry business,” she says with a laugh.

After brunch, some guests examine the plans for the fly-in development or take a spin in a six-seater carriage drawn by two large Percherons. But most head back to the runway, where they gather in groups to talk airplanes, examine airplanes, admire airplanes.

Terri strides onto the asphalt with them, a pilot in her element. She and her runway are back in business.

Jean Patteson can be reached at jpatteson@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5158.

Tornado video north of Silverton, Texas on March 28, 2007 (from TornadoVideosdotnet).

Death count of four from tornadoes in Texas, Colorado and Oklahoma after a tornado outbreak of 65 tornados occurred in six states Wednesday night. More damage from the storms could be discovered.

Two people died in rural Oklahoma neighborhood near Elmwood when their house was demolished.  The married couple who lived in the house was found in an open field near their  destroyed house. The husband was still alive, but died right after he was found.

One woman was killed in Holly, Colorado after she was blown into a tree and found entangled in the tree with her children. Her children were injured.

An oil field worker was killed near Amarillo, Texas when a tornado struck his trailer.

Dundy and Perkins counties in Nebraska reported heavy damage.

States reporting tornados included Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska and Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado.

Most tornadoes were in a straight north-south line along the Kansas-Nebraska border.

More video …

Large tornado in Texas panhandle video (mickeyptak)

I guess there are just people that like to warn people about stuff …

Maybe a good reason to think the global warming people are whacked …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRDbu5VHTmc