Franklin, NC
SYLVA–One of the stocking-stuffers that made its way in to our house this Christmas was a novelty paperback that pokes good-natured, free-associative fun at “Obamania”. Called Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle, it’s a spinoff of the single-serving website barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com, which has been a big hit in ‘08.
The subtitle is “366 Ways he Really Cares”.
Some [...]
SYLVA–Part of the loot that Santa stuffed into our little girls’ stockings two nights ago was a large candy, shaped like a gemstone and affixed to a plastic ring. The idea is to wear the ring and give the candy gemstone a lick whenever the urge hits.
I could only figure the old elf was pissed [...]
CULLOWHEE–Western Carolina University lives in a media bubble, an anomaly of place, time and people that frees it from some of the pressures that come with media scrutiny.
In some ways, this serves the school well; lack of accountability equals freedom of movement. Sometimes, though, it seems ill-prepared to deal with big events, or tone-deaf to [...]
CULLOWHEE–John Frady lived a mile or so out Speedwell when Speedwell was still a country road, before any aspect of the college was visible from there, and long before any of the towering, cheap apartment buildings that now surround his old home would’ve been thought reasonable.
His old house still nestles there among all those big, [...]
More coverage of WCU men’s basketball here
SYLVA–The year was, I believe, 1994, and here I was courtside at Cameron Indoor Stadium for your standard early-season mismatch between Western Carolina and Duke.
A friend and I had a couple of press passes, and we were sitting in that tiny corridor at Duke which makes up press row [...]
NATIONAL–A south Texas grand jury has returned multiple-count indictments against vice president Dick Cheney, former attorney General Alberto Gonzales and many others for alleged organized crime involving relations with companies that build federal prisoners and manage them under private contract.
While the District Attorney who brought the charges is a lame duck and (apparently) a bit [...]
We didn’t have as many sources for grimness in the early seventies, so we seized upon relatively few famous stories and woolied them to death. And the Bell Witch story was a good one, because its about poltergeists, and those things will work your scare buttons from several directions at once.
GSMNP–According to Asheville’s WLOS TV, President Bush, lacking anything else to fret about these days, is pushing to change National Park Service rules so that individual park superintendents would be able to choose whether they want to allow mountain bikes.
Local bikers argue that bikes would cause no more damage than horses already do, but since [...]
SYLVA–It was one of those sequences of odd serendipity that comes up now and then, when each event seems tied to the one that came before.
Thursday morning I flipped on the radio in time to hear a “Morning Edition” story about Richard Trumka, a former steelworker and a current labor leader with the AFL-CIO, who’s [...]
REGIONAL-My grandfather tried his level best to convince me that some things are worth doing because it feels so good to stop. It’s kind of a riff on the “hit the wrong note hard” theme, I suppose, so that you’ll know the difference when you hit it right.
Well, that’s how I look at squash, and [...]