August 29, 2008
When last we left America’s favorite plastic female icon — no, not Paris Hilton — she was in the throes of the great toy scare of Aught Seven, and things were bleak. Barbie’s accessories, furniture, even her pets were being recalled for lead-paint...
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August 27, 2008
We hear a lot about what overweight Americans eat, but a group of physicians has uncovered alarming evidence as to a related question: What have we been drinking? After a look in this space last Wednesday at the War Between the Doughnuts — Krispy Kreme...
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August 24, 2008
Hunched over this single task, Suzzy has been working all afternoon building the sand fortress, blind to the tide coming in behind her sunburned back. So when the inevitable surge flattens every tower and parapet, fills in the moat and leaves the beach a...
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August 20, 2008
Face it. Reporters are only human. And at a historic moment such as this, it's hard not to be swayed. Even the most hard-bitten and objective can stumble, succumbing to a bias that alienates us from the office coffee klatch, the after-church bake sale, ev...
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August 10, 2008
(Program note: The following is a taped broadcast of the Greensboro City Council's Aug. 11 emergency session on sinkholes. It airs again at 2 a.m. Aug. 24, immediately after "Weekend Wastewater Roundup.") MAYOR YVONNE JOHNSON: Let's go ahead and get start...
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August 8, 2008
It’s meant as a catchy statewide campaign to remind drivers of the .08 blood alcohol limit for DWI: Friday-night sobriety checkpoints timed to coincide with today’s date, 8/8/08. But for members of the Hispanic community, already on edge amid claims o...
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August 1, 2008
It’s silly, I know, that three words can mean so much. But when uttered by a loved one or close friend, a neighbor, a co-worker, or, for that matter, the lady who does my dry cleaning, those three words change everything. “I like cucumbers.” Well......
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July 30, 2008
At last, joy in Riverless City this week at what — knock on wood — looks like a turnaround by Arco Realty, for 55 years a key player in Greensboro’s low-rent housing market. With the clock ticking down to a Dec. 31 deadline for all rental units in t...
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July 27, 2008
Under the big oaks at Heritage House Apartments, the aging, run-down complex that has posed an eyesore for decades at the intersection of Summit and East Cone, it's 92 in the shade. Still, hell is freezing over. Irene Agapion-Palamaris, 38, heir apparent...
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July 25, 2008
Somebody, cut him a break. And this time, with a metal utensil. Granted, Sidney Lowe II did get a private room at the county hotel, befitting the son of an N.C. State basketball coach. Still, he was “scared out of his mind,” his lawyers said. So, it......
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July 23, 2008
Tooling along West Wendover the other day, I could have sworn I saw chickens pecking in the grass on the shoulder. "You weren’t dreaming,” Shirley Morehead Simmons assured me. “You saw chickens on Wendover.” It was true. There at the city line, 40...
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July 20, 2008
Retired Greensboro doctor Paul Long was aboard his boat in Virginia last Sunday when he got an e-mail: “They found Mark.” Reading the story of Mark Hoffmann, a longtime homeless, mentally ill man who left Greensboro in May and turned up recently in hi...
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July 18, 2008
(Lorraine Ahearn is attending a conference on media convergence. In her place appears Hack Crawstuck, syndicated critic and author of "The Future Is Gone With the Wind.") Well, summer is here, and I'm all for a little G-rated fare, a fistful of Laffy Taff...
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July 13, 2008
To make a long, stranger-than-fiction story short, he went home. Or at least, Mark Hoffmann got as close as he could get — the front steps of his parents’ church 331 miles from here, in a town near Baltimore. Hoffmann, 51, the shy, enigmatic homeless...
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June 20, 2008
Seeing as this was the 1840s, his status as slaveholder was a given. But the more the UNCG anthropology students dug up his backyard, the more Gov. John Motley Morehead came off as something of a poseur as well. For a field study in connection with the ci...
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June 18, 2008
(Program note: The following edition of "The 30-Second Gourmet" was recorded before a live audience. Any views expressed do not represent The Food Network. Please heed all manufacturers' warnings.) Welcome to The Food Network. I'm Harry Hogwart, blogger a...
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June 16, 2008
To thousands of motorists passing by him daily at Friendly Center, he was a street person on a bench, a man who appeared one day in 2001 and left just as abruptly in mid-May. To Kimberly Bono, however, Mark Hoffmann is more than that. He is her father, an...
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June 13, 2008
I've never actually met Pauline, but we keep in frequent touch. She knows when all my family members' birthdays are - because of all the cards she receives - and I let her know when her tax refund check arrives. My accidental pen pal and I have mistakenly...
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June 11, 2008
(Note: Lorraine Ahearn is recuperating from a freak attack of bottom-dwelling leeches. In her place appears Melody Singer, a Piedmont child behaviorist and the author of "If Your House is Childproof, How Do They Keep Getting Inside?") Well, if you're lik...
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June 6, 2008
The way it was explained to me, once his opponent leveled up to a Garchamp Level X, exploiting his weakness to lightning, Brian Leary's maintenance was fried, and he couldn't get any energies. Thus concluded a tense, hour-long Pokémon trading car...
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May 30, 2008
Mark is gone. After his seven-year solitary vigil on a park bench near Friendly and Wendover avenues, Greensboro's most visible but enigmatic homeless person has left. One Sunday morning in May, according to the owners at the nearby BP, Mark Hoffmann, 51......
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May 23, 2008
When foster kids hit the magic age of 18 and typically leave the government-issue nest of the system to fly solo in an adult world, Guilford County wants to help them. Should the DSS drop its appeal?
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April 25, 2008
I had a jarring sense of deja vu on West Market the other day when I saw a dead ringer for my mother's 1960 baby-blue Chevy Kingswood station wagon driving the opposite way. The reason this was jarring? It wasn't just the miracle by which this ungainly Ei...
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April 16, 2008
April 2, 2008
My mom was under the dryer at Hilda's, her hairdresser's, when a Hispanic couple came in to ask, in fragmented gestures, if the young woman could use the rest room. Hilda, a good southern lady, naturally obliged, but grew concerned when 10 minutes turned...
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