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John C. Campbell Folk School
Stealing Fire
My friend told me before I left home that “Just because it isn’t glowin’ doesn’t mean it’s not hot.”
So the next day I set out from the mountains of northeastern West Virginia along the Shenandoah Valley to the John C. Campbell Folk School (Folkschool.org) in the hills of far western North Carolina to take a week-long class on the basics of blacksmithing.
Southern Health
A Tale of Two Counties
Frank Adams begins each day with a bowl of cereal. He used to eat a larger breakfast, complete with a serving of bacon or sausage – which he now calls “dead animals” – but he changed his ways years ago when his wife’s morning sickness kept her from cooking for him.
Now 74, Adams has continued to eat light, stay out of the doctor’s office and avoid prescription drugs. As founder of Keep Chatsworth-Murray Beautiful, his job allows him walks around the mountainous county he calls home. On those walks, he’s seen that his lifestyle is anything but normal for Murray County.
A Kit of Soaring Pigeons
An idyll of Butler’s Swap
Butler’s Swamp has gone. Confined, sanitized and renamed Lake Claremont, it has been incorporated into a ritzy housing subdivision with its own golf course.
I once covered every square foot of that old swamp in a tin canoe, exploring its reed beds and mud-bars, looking for water rats and reed-warblers’ nests and hoping against hope to encounter a norn – a black tiger snake – lying in wait for some unsuspecting frog. At dusk, squadron upon squadron of little black and little pied cormorants flew in from the Swan River to roost in the paperbarks and drowned gums.
"Anti-" Sentiments
Bill Downs on the Recent Elections in Europe
They Don't Believe in Science
The Wrong Horse
Billion Dollar Questions
A Draperesque Vision of America
Courthouses of Georgia
The Seat Of Power
Love Means
Forty Miles Of Bad Road
People Are Corporations
How Willard Creates Jobs
Southern Politics
New job might have saved McConnell’s life
Facing South
What happened in NC? Lessons from the amendment battle
Vending Machine Legislation
Republican Corruption, Taxes, and Our Children
Guilty or Innocent?
Does CSI undermine common sense in the jury box?
Art in the South
Crystal Bridges Museum’s art and design are magnificent
The Good, Bad, & Ugly
Southern Road Names
Make Life So Beautiful
Paul Simon’s Memphis Blues
The Common Good
How Liberals Think
Take & Take
The Conservative Dilemma
Keepin' Us Safe For Ads
Self-appointed saviors
Literally
Huey P. Long is Re-Assassinated!
Or What?
Do South Carolinians Hate Government?
Hardly Neutral
The Nurturing of Fundamentalist Ideology
Simpler Good Times
A1A, The Road To Burma-Shave
Route 66
Dream Ride
Celebrating Goodbye
Le Pot de Départ
Rights & Not Rights
Irony and Interposition, With A Bourbon Chaser If You Please!
Know Before You Owe
Obamas at Ft. Stewart, Georgia
Southern Inferno
Lost Wax
Prosecute the Malefactors
Running Out of Time
Evil Reporter Chick
Tallahassee
GA Sales Tax Vote
T-SPLOST vote on July 31 is ill-conceived way to help
Cheating Our Schools
Howard Rich – Carpetbaggers, Scalawags and Laboratory Mice
Cheating the Students
On Hold
The Meat Man
Front Yard Barbecue in the Mississippi Delta
Wrought Thoughts
The Poetry That Is Ironwork
Our Wall
What's on your mind?
Recent Comments
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The governor of Florida has rejected Tampa’s attempt to ban the carrying of concealed weapons downtown during the Republican convention. I guess this is one way to ratchet up excitement, but I’d prefer Donald Trump nominated for vice president.
The truly gifted Gail Collins, writing in her column: It’s Their Party - NYTimes.com (via bohemiansouth)Their Bias Is Clear and Shameful - NYTimes.com
The New York Times writes in an editorial:
The Virginia Legislature disgraced itself last week, rejecting the nomination of Tracy Thorne-Begland, a widely respected prosecutor, to be the first openly gay judge on the Commonwealth bench. Mr. Thorne-Begland was the only one of 37 nominees denied appointment to district courts in the final minutes of the session. House Republicans shamefully pandered to election-year politics dictated by the Family Foundation, an anti-gay pressure group.
Bohemian South adds: Great photo. Great thought.
And a footnote: Both the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu have served as visiting professors at Emory University in Atlanta. They are smart, kind, decent, genuine and level-headed people.
Mike Luckovich/Atlanta Journal-Constitution (05/19/2012)
Goodbye, old friend. You’re over a hundred years old, so you’re probably ready to go, but you’ve provided me with years shade in the summer and the enjoyment of watching squirrels chase each other around your great trunk while I drank coffee on the front porch. It’s been tough knowing you were dead but still wanting to believe you were alive because LOOK AT ALL OF YOUR LEAVES! But when you had termites and roaches living in your trunk and bare branches falling on a regular basis, and some really gross fluid oozing from your bark, leaves were apparently not Proof of Life. You threatened our home, and we just couldn’t risk keeping you around much longer.
I’m listening to them grind your limbs now, and I think I’m going to go for a walk. A long walk. When I come back, you won’t be much more than a stump. Hopefully even less than that, because this is really hard to watch.
I know it’s silly to get so emotional over an oak tree that was on its way out long before we moved into our house, but watching them take you down is like watching the snuff version of Gulliver’s Travels. I just can’t believe something that’s been on this earth for over a century would be taken from it on my watch. You’ll be sorely missed.
As a tree lover, I can really relate to this. I’m keeping a close eye on a massive white oak these days.
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Lee Leslie: CCGA Event Series: The Georgia Transparency Project
How Transparent is our state legislature? Join us at the People TV studios for an in-depth discussion of the Georgia Transparency Project – which increases transparency above and beyond what legislators self-report.
Date/Time: Monday, May 14th - 6:15 PM – reception (beer, wine & light hors d'oeuvres provided)
7:00 PM to 8:00 PM – Taping of Program before a live studio audience
RSVP: Click link below for registration -or- call 404-524-4598
http://commoncausega.org/events/ccga-event-series-the-georgia-transparency-project/
Monica Smith: Not to be missed--"Mitt Romney, American Parasite" His years at Bain represent everything you hate about capitalism
James Sanderson had encountered a rare moment of industrial harmony.
It was the early 1990s, and the 750 men and women at Georgetown Steel were pumping out wire rods at peak performance. They had an abiding trust in management's ability to run a smart company. That allegiance was rewarded with fat profit-sharing checks. In the basement-wage economy of Georgetown, South Carolina, Sanderson and his co-workers were blue-collar aristocracy. "We were doing very good," says Sanderson, president of Steelworkers Local 7898. "The plant was making money, and we had good profit-sharing checks, and everything was going well."
What he didn't know was that it was about to end. Hundreds of miles to the north, in Boston, a future presidential candidate was sizing up Georgetown's books.
http://www.villagevoice.com/2012-04-18/news/Mitt-Romney-american-parasite/
David Evans: "If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing." --Kingsley Amis, born in London, 16 April, 1922.
Lee Leslie: The House passed Paul Ryan's budget today (228-191). From Daily Kos: Just a few reminders about the Ryan budget, and what the House Republicans put down as their political marker for 2012, their vision for a Republican-ruled America: It would give the wealthy a humongous tax break, the lowest tax rate since the Hoover administration; it would gut nutritional assistance, cutting it by 17 percent over the next decade; it would cut Medicare benefits and begin the process of killing the program; it would kill millions of jobs; it turns Medicaid into a block grant and deeply cuts federal spending for it, and for SCHIP, the children's health program; and it breaks the already agreed upon Budget Control Act of 2011, threatening, once again, a government shutdown. This is also the budget endorsed by Mitt Romney.
Lee Leslie: Check out the new website dedicated to SC judge who helped end legal Southern segregation: http://WatiesWaring.org/