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puddin:
Raises hand and shouts " Sooner "  :<(

gingerman28:
Nah, that's an Oklahoma football team and they ain't going anyplace fast this year.  But the promos keep featuring the Blacks. I don't rememer when one team was featured so much over the others, not even Romber.

puddin:

 
Tony Lascari, Midland Daily News 09/17/2005
 

    Brock Rodgers expects this season of CBS's "The Amazing Race" to be better than the rest.

    He might have a biased view, though, as the Northwood University freshman competed with his parents and sister in the reality show pitting families against each other in a race around the world.


    "I love the show," he said. "I've watched like every season."


    Rodgers, 19, is returning home to Shreveport, La., to use the first showing Tuesday night as a chance to raise funds for the American Red Cross with his family.


    "We're renting out a big restaurant and we're going to charge $5 and give it to the Red Cross," he said.


    The show will be shown locally at 9 p.m. Tuesday on WNEM-5.


    In past seasons, two teammates traveled together competing for $1 million, but the eighth season of the show has 10 families of four racing for the top prize.


    Rodgers said having more participants adds to the drama.


    "Any time there's more people, there's going to be more conflict too," he said.


    The season was taped during the summer, and Rodgers can't give away much information about the series until it airs because of his contract with CBS.


    "No results, no experiences, nothing that went on, nothing about my competition," he said.


    He did share that fellow contestants, the Schroeder family, stayed at his parents' home for a couple of weeks because their home was under water after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast.


    Rodgers said his sister, Brittney, 23, pitched the idea to the family for going on the show. She had won an episode of another reality show, "Fear Factor," that featured Miss USA contestants.


    Their father, Denny, is president and general manager of a car dealership and their mother, Renee, owns a boutique and is a beauty pageant trainer.



 http://www.ourmidland.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=15229427&BRD=2289&PAG=461&dept_id=472542&rfi=6

puddin:
Moms survive their own 'Amazing Race'
By Rick Holland/ Staff Writer
Friday, September 23, 2005

Call it the ultimate male bonding experience.
 
     That's what a Mansfield man and the husbands of his three daughters will bring to a national television audience on Tuesday night, when the first episode in a new season of the reality show "The Amazing Race" airs on CBS.
 
     Erin Drive resident Tony Aiello will appear as part of a family team that competes against nine others in a 30-day around the world scavenger hunt for a top prize of $1 million.
 
     Joining Aiello are his three sons-in-law, Kevin Kempskie, Matt Hanson, and David Alverson, and while all four men are contractually forbidden to make any comment about their experience, Aiello's wife Barbara described what it was like to have the men in the family gone for an extended period.
 

 
     "It was very different, not having them here," said Barbara. "Something might happen during the day and my thought was to call (Tony) and ask for an opinion...then I'd realize that I couldn't."
 
     Part of the agreement Barbara and her three daughters signed before their husbands started the game, was that they would have no contact with them whatsoever, nor would they be informed of any details regarding their whereabouts. Show producers called them once a week during the taping of the show "to let us know they were alive, that was it," said Lisa Hanson, one of Barbara's daughters.
 
     An exception was made on the morning of July 7, just five days after the family had exchanged tearful farewells at the airport, marking the start of the game. On that date, a series of terrorist bombs exploded in London, killing 52 people.
 
     A representative from CBS called immediate family members, but the details were excruciatingly sparse. For all they knew, Barbara along with Lisa and her sisters Heather Kempskie and Amy Alverson thought their husbands could have been in London on July 7.
 
     "They called and told us only 'they're fine,'" recalled Lisa, though she was still not told where her family's team was located

"That's when it hit me that this is my husband's life, and it was a little weird that I could not be told where he was," said Lisa. "That morning was so scary because we had no idea where they were."
 
     Nor could they reach out to anyone outside the family to help ease the burden of anxiety. That's because everyone was bound by contract with CBS to keep secret the fact that the family had even been selected as contestants for the show.
 
     As a result, invites from friends and neighbors to backyard barbecues became exercises in crafting evasive responses. Barbara and her daughters had to attend such events without their husbands, and then provide vague answers when asked where their spouses were.
 

 
     A sense of reassurance during the game, though, came from something Tony told his daughters before their husbands left.
 
     "Dad said to us, 'I promise I'll bring these guys home,'" said Heather, who added that in addition to a variety of wonderful traits, her father's "number one priority is safety."
 
     The Aiellos' team was picked from a pool of 25,000 entries to appear in the upcoming season of "The Amazing Race." Tony made an impression among show producers, early on in the selection process. When the family had to submit a two-minute video to go along with a written application, Tony played the part of a mafia godfather, quizzing his sons-in-law about their worthiness as husbands and show contestants,
 
     "I think the show producers saw my dad as this short, lovable, Italian guy and they were intrigued by him entering with his three sons-in-law," said Heather.
 
     On the day their husbands returned, there was joy in even the smallest things.
 
     "You have to remember, we hadn't seen or heard from them, we hadn't even heard their voices for a month," said Heather.
 
     "There is something to be said for the idea that absence makes the heart grow fonder," said Lisa.
 
     As much as the men learned about each other during the month-long adventure, their wives also had some time to engage in self discovery.

"I learned that I'm capable of much more than I thought I was," said Lisa, describing what she learned about herself during Matt's absence. As an example, she described finding a tick on her son's head and removing it.
 
     "Taking care of the tick, that would have been a 'dad thing,'" she said.
 
     She saved the insect storing it in a plastic bag as a trophy to her courage for Matt to see when he returned. Among other manly duties, the two sisters also said they took out the trash and contemplated lawn care.
 
     Once back home, however, after what was literally a voyage around the world, the husbands jumped back into their roles as regular dads.
 
     "Within two hours after coming home, Kevin was changing a dirty diaper," Heather said.
 
     As difficult and rewarding as the experience was the entire family, the game also had an effect on the Heather and Lisa's 2-year-old sons. Both Kevin and Matt left video messages for their kids and small surprise presents to be opened when moods turned especially sad.
 
     By way of explanation about Kevin's whereabouts, Heather said she told her son, Kyle, that he had flown away on a plane but would be coming back before too long. After that point, whenever Kyle spotted or heard a plane, he'd point to it and say, "There's daddy!"
 
     "It just broke your heart," said Heather.
 
     For Lisa, she said that Matt hadn't been away from their kids for a single night since they were born, so the prospect of being gone for at 30 nights in a row was daunting.
 
     "We broke out the calendar with the month of July and just filled it up," said Lisa.
 
     By the time the month had passed, a jubilant reunion occurred at the Providence airport. The men came down a long escalator into the waiting arms of wives, kids and extended family.
 
     "In a way, coming down to meet us was symbolic, like they were coming back to earth," said Heather.
 
     The entire family has plans to be on the ground and under the same roof at Tony and Barbara's house to watch the first episode of the show on Tuesday night

"I'm looking forward to it on the one hand, but a little apprehensive, too," said Barbara. "You read about how they edit things, so we've had a few laughs not knowing what to expect."
 
     "The Amazing Race" season premiere will air on Tues., Sept. 27 at 9 p.m. on CBS.

http://www2.townonline.com/norton/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=331679&format=&page=1

puddin:
sort of a repeat of a previous article on the Weavers but here it is anyway..


Local widow, kids to compete on 'Amazing Race'

A Volusia man's death spurs his wife and kids to compete on tv.

Ludmilla Lelis | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted September 23, 2005

DAYTONA BEACH -- The family of a Volusia County man who was killed at Daytona International Speedway last year is competing against nine other families in the upcoming season of the CBS television show The Amazing Race.

Linda Weaver, 46, and her three children, 19-year-old Rebecca, 16-year-old Rachel and 14-year-old Rolly, are vying in the international quest for $1 million and will appear in the reality series when the new season premieres Tuesday.

  The show was filmed in July, but the winner will not be revealed until the end of the 13-episode series.

The father of the family, Roy Weaver III, was struck and killed by a race car at the speedway Feb. 8, 2004, as he was removing debris from the track. The family has a wrongful-death lawsuit pending against the track and the race-car driver involved.

His death put the Ormond Beach family into a "tailspin," Linda Weaver said in a video interview released by CBS that was done at the start of the race.

Family members declined an interview request because their TV contract forbids interviews until the show is over or until the family is eliminated from the contest, said their attorney Bruce Anderson.

The Weavers had a traditional family, with Roy as the authority figure, the breadwinner, a "man's man," Linda Weaver said in the video clip. "Everything got messed up," she said.

For a while, the family struggled to cope. Meanwhile, Linda Weaver, who had been a stay-at-home mom, became a teacher at Calvary Christian Academy in Ormond Beach.

Then came the opportunity to join the TV show, which features teams that must race around the globe and complete tasks at different locations. For example, teams this past season had to rope a pair of llamas in Peru and roll a wooden elephant to a Hindu temple in India.

"One of the reasons why we want to do the race is just to really work together as a team, and accomplish a goal and find out we're still a family -- we're still a victorious family," Linda Weaver said.

"We were a strong, united family before," she said. "Now we're going to be a strong, united family again."

"There's not going to be any outside distractions. It's just going to be us, working together," added the oldest sibling, Rebecca, during the same video clip.

Executive producer and co-creator of the show Bertram van Munster said the Weavers were picked as one of the 10 families because producers thought they could be competitive.

"We thought they were a good, strong team," van Munster said. "It's an exhausting trip, and it's a trip that takes a month to complete."

Roy Weaver's death wasn't a factor when the show decided to cast them, he said.

"It might have been a motivation for them, but it wasn't a motivation for us," he said.

The first seven seasons of the show featured two-member teams, often married or dating couples or best friends, in a race that spans more than 60,000 miles. For the eighth season, the producers decided to make the race for four-member families.

"People always ask us, 'What changes are you making? Are you going to keep it fresh?' " van Munster said. "Luckily, we had some phenomenal families."

He didn't think that the show's loyal fans would be disappointed, though some fan Web sites had worried about the "family-friendly" race format, which covered about half the mileage of prior seasons.

Though TV officials are careful not to give away race details, some fan sites have posted potential sightings of the teams as they make their round-the-world adventure. Nathanael D. Robinson, a graduate student from Brandeis University in Massachusetts, thought he may have spotted Linda Weaver this summer.

Robinson said he encountered a middle-age blond woman in Paris and that the situation seemed to resemble a scene from The Amazing Race.

"Seeing the teams for the eighth season has not put my mind at ease," he said. "In particular, Linda Weaver looks like the woman who approached us." He admits, though, that he's not certain


At least one close friend of the family knows she'll be watching. Ellen Kaslewicz, a friend from Roy Weaver's Alabama high school, thinks that he would have gotten a kick out of seeing his family in the race.

"I know that Roy would have been so proud of his wife and kids to be able to accomplish just the process of being considered for the show," the Deltona woman said. "Roy was a strong Christian, as well as his wife and children, and I believe when the show airs, we will see a little of Roy in his wife and kids in The Amazing Race.

"Go, Weavers!" she cheered.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/volusia/orl-vweaver2305sep23,0,938479.story?coll=orl-news-headlines-volusia

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