FRIDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2014 | WWW.PGCITIZEN.CA A&E 29 Backyard dog breeder a bad neighbour Dear Annie: My next-door neighbours are breeding and selling dogs illegally. Sometimes they have as many as 18 dogs in the house. The problem is having to put up with all that barking, and even worse, the smell permeates our driveway, porch and yard. It is disgusting. We are retired and have a beautiful home. We cannot enjoy our own yard because of these neighbours, and selling is not an option. I have tried everything from attempting to reason with them to reporting them to the city and animal control centers, to no avail. Each agency passes the buck. In addition, I am sure they are not paying taxes on this illegal business venture. What other avenues can I pursue? — Barking Up a Tree Dear Barking: Have you tried the police? If this is an illegal enterprise, the police should arrest them. Have you called the humane society? If the dogs are being mistreated, the humane society should get involved. Also look into local noise ordinances and check out your homeowners or neighbourhood association, if there is one, and find out whether there is any type of intervention or mediation available to you. Dear Annie: You’ve printed several letters about thank-you notes, so I hope you can help with my dilemma. I recently attended a wedding, and I gave the couple a substantial amount of cash that I placed in a card. It has been over a month, and I have not yet received any acknowledgement. My concern is that perhaps the cash was lost. Should I ask whether they got it? — Unsure in New York Dear Unsure: We suspect the couple has not yet gotten around to writing their thank-you notes. We’d be impressed if they had done so within a month. Please give them a little more time. If you don’t hear anything in another two months, it is okay to phone and ask whether the gift reached its destination. It is always safer to have a gift sent to the bride or groom’s home, or hand a card with a cheque to the couple, the parents KATHY MITCHELL & MARCY SUGAR or the best man. Leaving cash on a gift table is risky. Dear Annie: I am tired of hearing women complain about their mothers-in-law. I have raised a son, sacrificed, worried, lost sleep, worked jobs I didn’t want and devoted my entire life to what was best for him - as all mothers do. I dreamed that one day he would marry and have children, enriching our family. Then he meets “the one,” and she is accepted and welcomed. We help them get settled and offer financial assistance and emotional support, because I want my son and his family to be happy. And then one day it starts. You are no longer greeted with open arms. You have to call first before stopping by (even if you are next door). You get lectures about boundaries, and in the worst case, you are exiled. Do you want to know what I think? I think there are rotten little girls who need to control their men and are too insecure to accept their mothers-in-law as mom and instead see you as the other woman. They show no respect. A mother has a relationship with her son that should be cherished, not destroyed. I pity their own daughters if they are raised by such messed-up women and can only hope that karma prevails if they have sons of their own. — Unhappy Mother of a Son Dear Unhappy: While we agree that some daughters-in-law can be insecure and jealous of their mothers-in-law, we completely disagree when it comes to dropping by without calling first. Too many parents trespass all over their children’s boundaries, as if they don’t apply to them. If you want to be treated with respect, you also have to show respect for the married couple. We don’t care whose mother you are. Friday, October 10, 2014 R001158452 GOREN BRIDGE WITH BOB JONES ©2014 Tribune Content Agency, LLC COURAGE! East-West vulnerable. North deals. NORTH A 10 Y? J52 0 643 4*098654 WEST EAST A J 6 4 A 7 2 <7 A K Q 9 6 ?? 8 4 3 0 8 7 0 K 10 5 2 A 7 3 2 AAKJ10 SOUTH A A K Q 9 8 5 3 O 10 7 OAQJ9 AVoid The bidding: NORTH EAST Pass Pass Pass Pass SOUTH 4A WEST Pass Opening lead: Ace of O Today’s deal is from a duplicate game, where every trick is precious. South took a risk when he opened four spades — he might have missed an easy slam. Partner was a passed hand and he wanted to ward off potential competition, so he took the chance. Just as well — partner was broke! Could he even make four? West started with three rounds of hearts, South ruffing the third. Declarer continued with the ace of diamonds followed by the queen of diamonds. This was not the best play, but it presented East with a fascinating bridge problem. East suspected this layout of the cards and could have given partner a diamond ruff to defeat the contract. But what if partner started with queen third of spades? West would be ruffing with a natural trump trick. East decided that they might defeat the contract two tricks if he played a trump instead. West didn’t quite have the trump holding that East was hoping for, and East had to endure a barrage of spades from declarer. The defender had to find four discards, and he backed his card-reading with his courage and discarded the 10, jack, king and ace of clubs to keep his precious 10 of diamonds guarded. He was rewarded when he scored that 10 at the last trick. Whew! South should have run all but one trump right away, without touching diamonds. Only a clairvoyant East would have shed three clubs and kept all his diamonds. (Bob Jones welcomes readers’ responses sent in care of this newspaper or to Tribune Content Agency, LLC., 16650 Westgrove Dr., Suite 175, Addison, TX 75001. E-mail responses may be sent to tcaeditors@tribune.com.) UNIVERSAL Sudoku Puzzle Complete the grid so that every row, column and 3x3 box contains every digit from 1 to 9 inclusively. 2 7 6 3 4 7 1 2 7 8 2 5 4 8 7 9 8 1 4 7 6 5 8 2 4 3 478279 DIFFICULTY RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Sudoku Puzzle Solution in Today’s Prince George Citizen Classified Pages French author wins Nobel Prize for works on Nazi occupation Karl RITTER, Malin RISING The Associated Press Patrick Modiano of France, who has made a lifelong study of the Nazi occupation and its effects on his country, won the 2014 Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for what one academic called “crystal clear and resonant” prose. Modiano, a 69-year-old resident of Paris, is an acclaimed writer in France but not well known in the English-speaking world. The Swedish Academy said it gave him the 8 million-kronor ($1.1 million) prize for evoking “the most ungraspable human destinies” and uncovering the humanity of life under Nazi occupation. Jewishness, the Nazi occupation and loss of identity are recurrent themes in his novels, which include 1968’s La Place de l’Etoile - later hailed in Germany as a key post-Holocaust work. Modiano’s novel Missing Person won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1978 and is among the more than 40 of his works published in French. Some have been translated into English, including Ring of Roads: A Novel, Villa Triste, A Trace of Malice and Honeymoon. Dervila Cooke of Dublin City University, author of a book about Modiano, said his works deal with the traumas of France’s past but have a “darkly humorous touch.” “His prose is crystal clear and resonant,” she said. “A common description of his work is of its ‘petite musique’ - its haunting little music.” Modiano was born in a Paris suburb in July 1945, two months after the Second World War ended in Europe, to a father with Jewish-Italian origins and a Belgian actress mother who met during the 1940-44 occupation of Paris. He has also written children’s books and film scripts, including co-writing the 1974 movie La-combe, Lucien with director Louis Malle and the 2003 movie Bon Voyage with director Jean-Paul Rappeneau. He was a member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000 and won the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 2012. Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said Modiano’s works often explore the themes of time, memory and identity. “He is returning to the same topics again and again simply because these topics, you can’t exhaust them,” Englund told journalists in Stockholm. “You can’t give a definite answer to: Why did I turn into the person I am today? What happened to me? How will I break out of the weight of time? How can I reach back into past times?” Englund, who wasn’t able to reach Modiano before the announcement, said the French writer also liked to play with the French novelist Patrick Modiano smiles during a press conference at his publishing house in Paris on Thursday. Modiano received the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature. 2008, the last time there was a French Nobel winner for literature, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio. But Williams said the betting pattern on Modiano was not suspicious. “We are experts in analyzing betting patterns and we kind of know what a leak looks like. This doesn’t look like a leak. It just looks like his fans got behind him and gave him a bit of momentum,” he told The Associated Press. Englund acknowledged that a leak in 2008 made the odds for Le Clezio plummet but insisted there was no leak this year. “That was a leak, and Ladbrokes saw that too and stopped the betting,” he said. “I believe we have eliminated that leak now.” Englund noted that the writers with the lowest odds in Nobel betting this year - including Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Japan’s Haruki Murakami and Svetlana Alexievich of Belarus - did not win. With the choice of Modiano, the prize returned to Europe after the academy picked Canadian writer Alice Munro in 2013 and Mo Yan of China in 2012. The Swedish Academy often chooses writers whose works are little-known to readers outside their native country, but the sales effect of that varies. Japan’s Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 literature winner, became a far more popular writer because of the Nobel, while Austrian Elfriede Jelinek, who won in 2004, is just slightly better known now than before. All categories of the Nobel Prize will be presented on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896. Associated Press writers Thomas Adamson in Paris and Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report. □ At heart, the principal themes of detective novels are close to the things that obsess me: disappearance, the problems of identity, amnesia, the return to an enigmatic past. — Patrick Modiano detective genre. In Missing Person, he wrote about a private detective launching his last investigation -finding out who he is because he has lost his memory. “I’ve always had the wish, the nostalgia to be able to write detective novels,” Modiano said in a rare interview last week in Telerama magazine. “At heart, the principal themes of detective novels are close to the things that obsess me: disappearance, the problems of identity, amnesia, the return to an enigmatic past.” French President Francois Hol-lande congratulated Modiano, the 15th French citizen to win the Nobel for literature, saying he “takes his readers right to the deep trouble of the occupation’s dark period. And he tries to understand how the events lead individuals to lose as well as find themselves.” Betting on Modiano to win the Nobel surged in the last week, raising questions about a possible leak. David Williams of bookmaker Ladbrokes said Modiano’s odds had shortened from 100-1 a few months ago to 10-1 before the announcement. Something similar occurred in AP PHOTO