“Don’t feel bad, Gastonia. Every town has a little sister to pick on.
“In Raleigh they poke fun at….”
— From “Does Gaston County have an image problem?” by Adam Orr in the Gaston Gazette, Jan. 24 (h/t, John L. Robinson)
Tag: garner nc
Link dump: Apocalypse not now — it’s ‘Idol’ time!
— Jack Betts, the Great State’s foreign correspondent in Raleigh for the past two decades, debarks more suddenly than but just as gracefully as his positively-addicted readers would expect. Jack will dispute this — of course! — but it was his unrelenting editorials and columns that took the lead in sparing Eastern North Carolina the Navy’s ill-sited landing field. In his un-bow-tied hours, he has been an unrivaled fool for tools, managing to wring romance out of an aluminum pot that “perked coffee in five states, on four boats and in at least three houses,” a C-ration can opener brought home from the Army and on his last day a humble tin cheese grater. Happy retirement, Jack.
— Yet another remarkable entry in the New York Times’ Disunion blog, this one about North Carolina’s wrenching decision to secede. Overall, it’s been exciting to see historians and journalists in 2011 probing the way to war so much more ambitiously than in 1961.
— Surely someone saved Garner’s historic last Slim Jim for the North Carolina Collection Gallery.
A link dump even more instructive than usual
— How Charlotte got to be CHARLOTTE (while somehow retaining an amazing microhabitat or two).
— How Asheville came to host its first flash mob pillow fight (while still honoring its more traditional pastimes).
— How a covered wagon from Rowan County ended up on the second floor of a restaurant in New Washington, Indiana.
— How Benny from Lexington became “the old man” on “Pawn Stars.”
— How North Carolina lost — to Ohio! — its official unofficial state “ready-to-eat spiced sausage treat.”