Tag Archive for: Winter 2013

What do you get when you combine a hot Southern summer’s day, a furry, miserably hot dog and two Clemson graduates? No, not a strange meal at a tailgate.
You get an ingenious way to keep a pet cool.
Marketing major Ken Leahy and design major Mark Raeside, both of Atlanta, are the inventors and co-founders of ChillSpot™ — a cooling dog bed. From the prototype made with sawed-off coolers and the use of thermodynamics, they were able to perfect a design that uses ChillPods placed in the super insulated base and transfers the “chill” to an aluminum top.
ChillSpot™ has become the cool place to be, not just for the family dog, but for famed animals such as the University of Georgia’s bulldog mascot, Uga, the pandas and tigers at Zoo Atlanta, and President Barker’s dog, Mookie.
For more information about ChillSpot™, go to www.chillspot.biz/index.html.

English graduate Michel Smoak Stone’s debut novel, The Iguana Tree, which Library Journal says “recalls the work of John Steinbeck,” received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and an award for one of the top novels published in 2012 by an independent publisher.
Raised on Johns Island, Stone encountered illegal Mexican immigrants who “were forthright in telling me their story.” The inspiration for her book came from a couple who were smuggled into the U.S. with their young child. Stone wanted to explore why people would take such a risk, would put themselves into the hands of people they couldn’t trust — people who might, in fact, just as soon kill them as look at them — without even knowing whether the risks ultimately would be worthwhile.
Stone lives in Spartanburg and is working on her second novel.