Check out the artist of the month

North Tampa Arts League’s Artist of the Month is Zoe Otero. Her work is on display throughout July at the New Tampa Regional Library, 10001 Cross Creek Blvd. Call (813) 273-3652.

Anyone for basketball

Mondays might be meant for basketball. Shoot hoops with other adults at 6:30 p.m. Mondays at Family of Christ Lutheran Church, 16190 Bruce B. Downs Blvd. Call (813) 558-9343, ext. 16.

Spend Sunday at Skipper's

Ken Block, lead vocalist of Sister Hazel, celebrates the release of a solo album at 5 p.m. today (July 12) at Skipper’s Smokehouse, 910 Skipper Road. $15-$18. Must be 21 or accompanied by a parent. Call toll-free, 1-800-594-8499.

See the Legendary JCs

Legendary JCs play at 8 p.m. today (July 10) at Skipper’s Smokehouse, 910 Skipper Road. $7-$10. Must be 21 or accompanied by a parent. Call toll-free, 1-800-594-8499.

Mosey on over to MOSI

Here are a couple ways to spend the rainy days indoors at the Museum of Science and Industry, 4801 E Fowler Ave:

The Kids in Charge fourth birthday party is from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday (July 11). The event features face painting, balloon artists and more.

The Animation exhibit opens today. Learn about the history and science of animation from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday through Sept. 7 at the . Cost is $23.95 for adults, $21.95 for seniors and $19.95 for children 2 to 12. Call (813) 987-6100.

See “Following the Footsteps of Van Gogh,” an exhibit featuring work by local artist Terry Klaaren, during regular business hours through September in the IMAX dome lobby. Call (813) 987-6315.

New Tampa Rotary breakfast meeting

View New Tampa Rotary breakfast meeting in a larger map Julian Belisle , a cardio-thoracic surgeon, will talk about “Take care of your heart, or see me!” at 7 a.m. Friday (July 10) at the Tampa Palms Golf and Country Club, 5811 Tampa Palms Blvd. The cost is $12. For information, call (813) 972-9235 or visit newtamparotary.org.

New Tampa apartment catches fire

From the Times:

By Kim Wilmath

TAMPA — A New Tampa apartment caught fire early Wednesday morning. No one was injured.

Hillsborough County Fire Rescue was called to 18002 Richmond Place Drive at about 2 a.m., according to a dispatcher. The blaze started in one of the apartment's garages.

The fire was put out in about 30 minutes, and no one was injured.

Tampa Palms couple among dead in plane crash

By Alexandra Zayas, Times Staff Writer

As investigators combed through tiny bits of plane wreckage scattered across a Virginia field Monday, a spokeswoman with Fun Bike Center Motorsports in Lakeland confirmed that its chief executive officer, Daniel J. Dorsch and his wife, Cyndie, perished in the Sunday crash.

Daniel Dorsch, 56, of Tampa Palms, was the former chief executive of the Checkers Drive-In Restaurant chain.

Also assumed to have died was Cyndie Dorsch's 23-year-old dance instructor, Stepan Matkovski of Safety Harbor, who flew with the couple to a New York dance contest where he and Mrs. Dorsch competed as partners, said Tina Waisman, one of Matkovski's students.

Waisman and her husband took in the young immigrant from Moldova two years ago. He was a clean-cut, dedicated teacher with a passion for dance and just two weeks away from getting his green card, and from seeing his wife for the first time in two years.

Waisman said he'd traveled on the Dorsch plane before, for competitions across the country.

"He was so excited," Waisman said. "He was going to see the Statue of Liberty."

Matkovski left for New York with the Dorsches on Tuesday, Waisman said. They were supposed to return Friday, but Matkovski called, saying the weather was bad. On Monday, he missed a dance class.

The flight plan listed four people aboard a Pilatus PC-12/45 turboprop plane registered to Dorsch's company, Nicholas, Elliott & Jordan LLC, when it departed from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey at 8:25 a.m. Sunday.

Got the blues? Come to Skipper's

Jason Ricci and New Blood play at 8 tonight (July 7)  at Skipper’s Smokehouse, 910 Skipper Road. $7. Must be 21 or accompanied by a parent. Call toll-free, 1-800-594-8499.

Creative ways to spend summer days

Get your game on at the New Tampa Library at 2 p.m. today (July 7). Learn new games or play familiar ones in the community room at the library, 10001 Cross Creek Blvd. Call (813) 273-3652 or visit their Web site.

Crime report June 25 to July 1

View Crime report June 25 to July 1 in a larger map

This report contains incidents called in to the Tampa Police Department for ZIP code 33647 from June 25-July 1. Please contact Tampa police for more information on individual reports. Addresses may reflect where the incident happened or who reported it.

• RENWICK CR, 6400 BLK, Domestic Violence, Thursday, 6/25, 11:22 PM
• BRUCE B DOWNS BL, 15500 BLK, Robbery, Friday, 6/26, 3:16 AM
• BRUCE B DOWNS BL 15500 BLK, Burglary, Monday, 6/29, 2:55 PM
• BRUCE B DOWNS BL, 15500 BLK, Domestic Violence, Wednesday, 7/1, 1:59 AM

Note to readers: Because of confidentiality laws, police agencies cannot report the addresses of sexual assaults, and this report does not contain those incidents.

After bulking up at the training table, college football linemen can see large weight loss when they're done playing

From the Times:

By Greg Auman

TAMPA — When Lee Roy Selmon Jr. first played football at age 13, he weighed 230 pounds. Five years ago, in his final season at USF, he played at 295.

Today, he's gotten used to having to convince people he really played defensive tackle in college.

"That's my biggest challenge nowadays," he says. "They say 'What position did you play? Defensive back? Safety? I must have had it wrong.' "

Today, Selmon weighs 190 pounds. Gone are the size-44 football pants, replaced with size-32 slacks.

"It's a huge difference," said Selmon, 28, one of several former USF linemen who have been able to shed considerable weight after their football days. Once there's no practical benefit to being huge, there's good reason to get down to a healthier weight.

"It melted away fairly quickly once I changed up my diet," said Selmon, who had three knee surgeries as a player and wanted to lighten the burden on his joints. "You look better, you feel better, so it acted as its own incentive."

The son of former Hall of Famer and Bucs legend Lee Roy Selmon estimates his daily intake as a player was more than 4,000 calories over five meals.

"The hardest thing was getting that appetite down, getting that stomach a little smaller to where I wasn't hungry all the time," said Selmon, who starting eating more grilled chicken, fish and seafood. "Steamed vegetables instead of french fries," he said.

Selmon can laugh now about his football years, when staying big was a deciding factor in what he and his linemates ate, especially at team meals.

"We'd just smother everything in ranch dressing," said Selmon, now an account executive with Ultimate Staffing in St. Petersburg. "Instead of a little cup of ranch dressing, we'd have a whole pitcher at our table. We'd drench spaghetti, potatoes, prime rib, everything, all coated in ranch. So just not doing those type of things has really helped a lot."

Derrick Sarosi started 44 games on the offensive line at USF, and when he finished trying to make an NFL roster in 2005, he weighed 335 pounds. Seeking a new challenge, he took up weight loss, buying into the Atkins Diet and weighing himself twice a day. He lost 110 pounds and now has settled in at a healthy 250.

"I'm a different person," said Sarosi, who works in Tampa in construction for a remodeling company. "I just looked at myself and thought 'There's no reason to be 335 pounds.' I wanted to feel better, and it was addicting. I just thought 'It'd be great to get a shirt off the rack and know it would fit.' "

Not all college linemen are meant to be that big. Nick Capogna struggled for five seasons to add weight — and his family owns an Italian restaurant in Clearwater — topping out at about 275 pounds as a senior center in 2007.

Less than two years later, he's down to 225, having had his uniform with the Clearwater Police Department resized twice in six months on the job.

"My job used to be to push people around, but I knew that now, I need to be able to run people down," said Capogna, who recently updated his Facebook status to say he "is sad to say goodbye to XXL and enter the puny world of XL."

Capogna took up a Brazilian jujitsu class and found the workouts helped him drop weight, but a change in diet is the biggest reason.

"I'm not saying everything I eat is healthy, but I go into the grocery store looking for fruits and vegetables," Capogna said.

Capogna remembers seeing teammate Mike Lube, also trying to gain weight for football, melt a gallon of ice cream and drink it from the box. Lube, whose playing career was cut short by a knee injury, is now a program assistant with USF football and has dropped 50 pounds since his playing days.

Dr. Denise Edwards, an assistant professor at USF who runs the college's Healthy Weight Clinic, said dropping to a more normal weight has health benefits all over the body — less susceptibility to high blood pressure, heart and liver disease, and joint problems such as arthritis.

"It's obvious that it can take away a lot of the risk," Edwards said. "As soon as you can get extra weight off the joints, you'll notice the benefits immediately."

That's true for former Florida State center David Castillo, now a medical student at FSU who has dropped about 35 pounds to his current 285.

"As an offensive lineman, you always get picked on by the backs and receivers: 'Oh, you're the big fat guy,' " said Castillo, 27, who regularly runs in 5k races now. "We get the last laugh, because all the linemen thin out after football and all those little guys get heavy."

USF scientists: Alzheimer's study points to possible benefit of caffeine

From the Times:

By Stephen Nohlgren

TAMPA — Hefty jolts of caffeine have reinvigorated the brains of old, demented mice at the University of South Florida.
Mice aren't humans. And caffeine jitters aren't for the faint of heart. But the caffeine connection raises intriguing possibilities for treating Alzheimer's disease.
USF scientists "were able to look both at the idea of treatment — giving caffeine to animals that have already developed pathology — as well as prevention,'' said Neil Buckholtz, chief of the dementias of aging branch of the National Institute on Aging. "It's really interesting.''
So should you binge on latte or invest in Starbucks?
No way, Buckholtz and others cautioned.
"Lots of things have proven effective in mouse models but very few have been tested in humans,'' he said. "That's the gold standard, to see how this translates to humans.''
The caffeine study, described in today's online version of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, was performed on mice genetically engineered to develop high levels of beta-amyloid, a protein associated with Alzheimer's in human brains.
Such mice typically start showing cognitive decline and elevated beta-amyloid levels by 8 or 9 months of age. As they grow older, they also develop sticky clumps of amyloid plaque in their brains, another sign of human Alzheimer's.
Three years ago, the USF group showed that putting the mice on a high-caffeine diet soon after birth seems to prevent or delay these symptoms.
The latest experiments were aimed at treatment.
The mice received no caffeine until they were 18 to 19 months old, the human equivalent of about 70.
By then, the mice had progressed well into their dementia. Beta-amyloid levels were high, protein clumps had developed in their brains, and they performed poorly on memory tests.
For four or five weeks, some of the mice received pure caffeine in their drinking water, equivalent to 500 milligrams a day in an average human. That's what you would get in about five 8-ounce cups of regular coffee or 14 12-ounce cans of Coke Classic.
Control mice drank straight water.
Then all the mice went swimming.

Many bad turns
In water mazes, mice swim around until they discover a comforting underwater platform that allows them to stand up and rest. Researchers return them to the water and watch how quickly they navigate their way back to the platform.
Normal mice with good memories find the platform without too many bad turns. A demented mouse struggles to learn.
In the USF study, demented mice fed straight water took more than twice as many bad turns as normal mice did.
But the demented mice fed caffeine found the platforms about as well as the normal mice.
Furthermore, their brains contained fewer plaques and lower beta-amyloid levels than the brains of mice that drank straight water.
"There were rather striking benefits'' of caffeine, said Dr. Gary Arendash of USF's Florida Alzheimer's Disease Research Center and lead author on the journal article. "There was reversal of memory impairment in mice, which leads us to believe that caffeine could be a very attractive treatment for the disease.''
Caffeine did not improve the performance of normal mice, ruling out the possibility that extra adrenaline led to better scores.

A complex disease
William Thies, chief medical officer for the Alzheimer's Association, called the study interesting but noted that other substances have reduced beta-amyloid and improved cognition in mice, but have flopped in humans.
Human Alzheimer's is a complex constellation of symptoms and events that destroy brain cells. Scientists are far from understanding how these factors interrelate.
Arendash acknowledges the limitations of mouse studies and wants to move quickly into human clinical trials on caffeine. He notes that a recent Finnish epidemiological study indicated that people with Alzheimer's drank less coffee over the course of their lives than people of similar ages who did not have Alzheimer's.
People with Parkinson's disease and Type II diabetes also reported less coffee consumption than healthy people of similar ages.
Such backward-looking surveys have limited use. People often underestimate or exaggerate their lifestyle choices. And maybe coffee drinkers exercised more, ate their veggies or had other habits that explain any health differences later in life.
"We are not saying this is the silver bullet,'' Arendash said. "But there is something about this compound that has benefits for aging bodies.''
Hurdles remain
The true test would be human clinical trials, but caffeine would face several hurdles.
Even a small, pilot trial can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, Arendash said.
Caffeine can't be patented, so the drug manufacturers that bankroll most Alzheimer's trials are unlikely to show interest.
Caffeine would have one advantage when it comes to human trials, Thies said.
"It has a very long safety history and is broadly distributed in the population,'' he said. "You have a much less chance of hurting anybody.''

Should I drink more coffee?
Not without talking to your doctor. The mice were given doses of caffeine that, if adjusted for the average human, would be equal to 500 milligrams. That could harm people with heart disease or other conditions. Other substances that have tested well in mice have failed to help humans. The caffeine study "really shows genuine value,'' said David Morgan, a USF professor and researcher on Alzheimer's. "But the thought of uncontrolled use of these things sends shudders down my spine, that people will read this and jump to conclusions that may be misplaced.''

How much is 500 mg of caffeine?
It's about five 8-oz cups of home-brewed coffee, but of course caffeine is available in many items:

Espresso, 1 fluid oz: 64 mg
Instant coffee, regular, 8 oz: 62 mg
Brewed coffee, 8 oz: 95 mg
Starbucks Coffee Grande, 16 oz: 330 mg
Black tea, brewed, 8 oz: 47 mg
Snapple Iced Tea, 16 oz: 18 mg
Sobe Green Tea, 8 oz: 14 mg
Coca-Cola Classic, 12 oz: 35 mg
Diet Coke, 12 oz: 47 mg
Mountain Dew, Diet Mountain Dew, 12 oz: 54 mg
Red Bull, 8.3 oz: 76 mg
Excedrin Extra Strength, 2 tablets: 130 mg
NoDoz Maximum Strength, 1 tablet: 200 mg

Spend Sunday at a benefit concert at Skipper's

Orient Road, Morgan & Wildflower, John Hancock, Captain Obvious and the Duh Patrol, Jake Mackey, Mike Tozier and Kettle of Fish play live at 5 p.m. today (July 5) at Skipper’s Smokehouse, 910 Skipper Road. $10 donation. Proceeds go to former Skipper’s bartender Jessica Roberts for medical bills after a recent serious car accident. Must be 21 or accompanied by a parent. Call 1-800-594-8499.

Sean Chambers celebrates new album at Skipper's

To celebrate his new album, Sean Chambers plays with Soul2Earth at 8 tonight (July 3) at Skipper’s Smokehouse, 910 Skipper Road. $8. Must be 21 or accompanied by parent. Call 1-800-594-8499.

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