Just in time for this months home opener, the Chicago Cubs Clubhouse Shop opened at the Schaumburg mall. Shoppers will find an array of merchandise with the Cubs logo from a $6 toothbrush to a $3,500 pool table. Perhaps the only Cubs item shoppers wont find is the team itself.

We try to be a haven for Cubs fans, said Jeff Collins, owner of Sports Avenue, the company that operates the baseball retailer. The Rock Island-based company has a licensing agreement with the Chicago Cubs organization to run the store.

Collins explained that his company has about 40 stores across the country representing various teams including the New York Yankees, St. Louis Cardinals, New York Mets, Los Angeles Dodgers, Minnesota Vikings and New York Jets.

We specialize in managing brick-and-mortar stores, said Collins, president of the 22-year-old company.

Looking for the Cubs Clubhouse? Head over to Schaumburg.

Just in time for this months home opener, the Chicago Cubs Clubhouse Shop opened at the Schaumburg mall. Shoppers will find an array of merchandise with the Cubs logo from a $6 toothbrush to a $3,500 pool table. Perhaps the only Cubs item shoppers wont find is the team itself.

We try to be a haven for Cubs fans, said Jeff Collins, owner of Sports Avenue, the company that operates the baseball retailer. The Rock Island-based company has a licensing agreement with the Chicago Cubs organization to run the store.

Collins explained that his company has about 40 stores across the country representing various teams including the New York Yankees, St. Louis Cardinals, New York Mets, Los Angeles Dodgers, Minnesota Vikings and New York Jets.

We specialize in managing brick-and-mortar stores, said Collins, president of the 22-year-old company.

As cheating abounds, critics rant and fans boo - but everyone ...

Judging from the headlines of the day, someone in the sports world is cheating as you read this. If a baseball player or linebacker isn't taking a performance-enhancing drug, a pit-crew member is putting a little extra zip in a carburetor. Either that or some Tour de France hopeful is changing his blood more often than his boxers.

While the technology to facilitate it might be new wave, cheating in sports seemingly has been going on since the first athlete broke a sweat. Today's sports figures? If all those reports are true, many bend the rules.

The story isn't so much that sports figures cheat - they have, they do, and, given the big bucks involved, they will continue to - but rather that fans are flocking to the ballpark, arena or superspeedway in record numbers anyway. And if they're not in the stands, they're in front of their big screens generating television ratings that provide the money that makes the sports world go around.

Civil War battlefield inspired Olmstead's latest novel

'What's a story?' Just good practice, you know," Olmstead said. "Just questions in abstraction, questions in theory and then very specific pencil-on-the-page kinds of things. So every week for me is a primer, and I really thrive in the presence of these people who are writers, these young people who are writers."

Olmstead joined the faculty of the undergraduate program, which is part of the Delaware school's English curriculum, in 2002.

"I thoroughly enjoy graduate students, as well, but there's something about undergraduates," he said. "The blood is still close to the skin, you know. And graduate students, of course, these are people who are a little further down the road, who have made this decision about their lives, who have decided to take a shot. And, there again, that really speaks to my heart that people in the year 2007 are still doing this really old, antique thing."

Olmstead studied under a pair of renowned authors, Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff, in the writing program at Syracuse.

Phil Lewis: Letters, on Duke and letters

“For several years now, I have made fun of the Naples Daily News, its content, and the staff of grammar and spelling challenged ‘journalists' who work for it. Today's (Thursday, April 12) edition made me realize that I have been much too kind in my opinion of your ‘newspaper.'