Word: hearths
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...things in life are more attractive than an open hearth fire-or less efficient. It is messy, requires continual attention, and sends perhaps as much as 90% of its heat up the chimney with the smoke. Most homeowners learn to live with such flaws. Lawrence Cranberg, an Austin, Tex., physicist went back to basic physics to correct them. He has designed a fireplace grate that forces a fire not only to burn better but to send more of its heat out into the room...
Cranberg turned his attention toward hearth fires last winter; in an attempt to conserve oil, he supplemented his home heating with his two fireplaces. Frustrated by the inefficiency of a standard three-log fire, he studied what really happened when he poked at the logs to make the fire burn better. His conclusion: "I was opening up a furnace, prying the logs apart a bit or rotating them to expose the hot, charred surface in order to get more heat into the room." He was creating, in effect, something similar to what physicists call a "black body," a furnace-like...
Norman has a lot of cheek. So does Ayckbourn. He offers three views of the hectic 48 hours-in three different plays, which must be seen on different nights. The first, Table Manners, is about what happens in the dining room when it is not happening on the family hearth rug in No. 2, Living Together, or in the bushes in No. 3, Round and Round the Garden. Do not be alarmed. It is nothing like the Ring. The comedies interweave with the boisterous precision of a Scottish reel, and finally yield a picture of family life at once riotous...
Cher also has a way to go before her private life is a model of common sense. She owns over a thousand gowns and 500 pairs of shoes. Over her massive hearth is a big neon CHER. Her social life strikes many as excessive. "Nobody in this town lives like that anymore," sniffs an anonymous critic who was not too proud to accept the invitation. "Four hundred guests assembled, and Cher making a sweeping entrance down a spiral staircase-it's out of the great glamorous '20s." New Friend Allman, a down-home type with fairly primitive views...
...Londonderry and Bel fast, he argues, swarms of unwanted children bedevil hopeless parents: "Any body who lives in Ireland can testify to the absence of love in the average home." Fathers drink too much, then beat their wives and children with heavy, indiscriminate hands. Violence learned at the hearth is later re-enacted in the Irish Republican Army. O'Han lon cites his own unhappy home life ("a cockpit of hatred") as evidence for this generalized calumny on the Irish family. Insiders and outsiders alike may find his findings too terrible - and a bit too pat - to be true...