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I'm looking forward to an interview with developer Roy Carroll later this week.

We'll discuss his concerns about a design guide for downtown, his support for new school headquarters on South Elm and Lee and the progress on his new center-city tower, Center Pointe.

I'll also ask him a question that's gnawed at me for several days now: What in the world happened to the trees on the block occupied by Center Pointe?

There are tree-lined sidewalks along most of Elm Street, but, curiously, not there.

What's up with that?

Mary Easley definitely did not put in long hours while working at N.C. State, concludes a News & Observer analysis of State Highway Patrol security detail logs.

The former first lady "was on campus about 143 workdays last year," the N&O reports.

"About 60 percent of the time -- 85 days -- she was there for less than six hours."

Good work if you can find it, especially at 170 grand a year.

Maybe that's why she's appealing her termination.

This week's column.

There’s no shortage of dirty laundry in Raleigh.

Just don’t go looking for any clotheslines.

Consider the case of Pricey Harrison, who dared to push a perfectly innocent piece of legislation in favor of drying our clothing and linen the old-fashioned way.

Even as she was about to see another of her bills that would regulate coal ash ponds in the state near passage — after being given absolutely no chance to survive — Harrison’s clothesline bill, alas, had no such luck.

You’d have thunk she spit on the flag.

The bill essentially barred local governments from outlawing, “or have the effect of prohibiting, the installation of a clothesline.”

It did not overrule homeowners association covenants, most of which ban clotheslines. And it gave governments the option to regulate how and where clotheslines could be installed.

But it’s not clear that anybody read that far. Lawmakers may have been too busy conjuring clever jokes about their undies and whether clotheslines needed dress codes.

“Yeah, they did behave childishly,” Harrison said days later. “They never did consider the bill on its merits. It was frustrating.”

The Greensboro Democrat’s legislation simply would have given more people the right to choose whether they wanted to use clotheslines instead of energy-gorging dryers.

Some people consider that a more important question than other folks’ obvious discomfort with actual articles of clothing (omigod) drying in the sunlight, as Mother Nature intended.

Colorado approved “right-to-dry” legislation last year and other states are considering it.

In fact, there’s a national movement to return to clotheslines as a smarter, greener alternative to dryers.

After all, appliances account for about 17 percent of the average household’s energy consumption, with refrigerators, clothes washers and dryers leading the way.

Also, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates that 15,500 fires associated with clothes dryers occur annually, causing an average of 10 deaths, 310 injuries and more than $99 million in property damage.

Still, somewhere along the way, we decided that clotheslines are tacky and unsightly.

You have to look a lot harder these days to find them around here.

One place you’ll still find one is at my mother’s house in northeast Greensboro.

For her, it’s simply a matter of quality. As she sees it, using sun and wind to dry laundry makes it fresher and involves less wear and tear on fabrics.

She has never owned a dryer in her life — and I’m betting she never will.

And if it rains, then it rains. She either races to gather the laundry before the storm arrives, or she washes it again after the storm has passed.

Nor do clotheslines have to be eyesores. New, more compact designs can keep them largely hidden from view.

All that said, I should come clean (honestly, no pun intended). I live in a community whose covenants prevent clotheslines. And chain-link fences. And detached out-buildings. And painting your house without permission.

And I never enjoyed having to hang clothes on the line while growing up, especially women’s clothes.

Still, the bill never had a chance, except as an easy punch line for punchy legislators. People ought to have the right to choose.

One national movement, right2dry, believes precisely that and is trying to persuade the Obamas, “during a one-day photo op,” to hang laundry at the White House to encourage other Americans to follow suit.

The right2dry Web site soberly declares, as a banjo plays in the background: “It is the inalienable right of every man, woman and child to line dry.”

Then there’s the Laundry List, a nonprofit that blogs, tweets and publishes a quarterly newsletter about “making air-drying laundry acceptable and desirable as a simple and effective way to save energy.”

Evidently, a lot of us remain unmoved.

Wrote Kernersville reader Judy Barham in response to another reader’s fond memories of clotheslines: “I think back to January 1960 when snow covered the ground and I had a new baby to care for.

“The joy of hanging cloth diapers on the clothesline and having them freeze solid in your hands and your fingers turning blue sounds like something this lady has never experienced.

“I remember the first dryer I owned and the satisfaction I derived from removing the fresh smelling, wrinkle-free clothes from it.

“I speak for myself when I say this, but as long as owning a dryer does not become illegal (and I can afford the electricity) I will never hang anything on a clothesline again.

“By the way, I don’t iron, either.”

Halloween will be extra scary for some area college football fans this season.

N.C. A&T, N.C. Central and Winston-Salem State all have scheduled their homecoming games on the same date, Oct. 31, at nearly the same time.

A&T plays Bethune-Cookman at 1:30 p.m.

NCCU plays Central State of Ohio at 1:30 p.m.

WSSU plays Hampton at 2 p.m

The problem, of course, is that it’s not unusual around here to have friends, family and spouses who are connected to all three schools.
Or who graduated from one and work for another.

In most years, you don’t have to make a choice. You could attend all three homecomings if you wanted.

Not this year.

Why everyone chose Halloween is one mystery.

Why one school didn’t pay attention to what the others were doing is another.

As the smaller school, Winston-Salem State in particular may lose out in attendance.

As for me, I plan to be in Aggieland.

My office window overlooks East Market Street.

So I get to see my share of car crashes.

Sometimes I merely hear them ... screeching tires, then the sickening thud of sheet metal on sheet metal.

Today, as I left the office for my afternoon walk, I heard an even worse sound in the distance on Church Street.

It was as if something weighing several  tons had dropped out of the sky, and hit the pavement so hard that it bounced and hit it again.

What it was was another collision, this time between an SUV and a smaller car.

The car was in the intersection of Church and Friendly, near the library, its passenger side crinkled and bent inward.

A young woman in jeans walked back and forth with her hands on her head.

The SUV was on the sidewalk lodged against a pole, a man still seated on the passenger side.

In this case, the SUV seemed to have gotten the worst of it.

From the buzz of bystanders, I gathered that someone had run a red light.

Since there had been no screeching tires, I'm guessing they hit one another at full speed.

I see people ignore traffic lights all the time, especially in the morning ...  well after the light has changed.

It’s enough to make you long for the good ol' days of redlight cameras.

Some readers took issue with Signe Waller Foxworth's piece last Sunday about a local currency initiative.

One called the notion "socialism."

But however you feel about local currency, it is perfectly legal, and it is being tried in a number of cities.

Two callers said we should have identified the writer's connection with the Nov. 3, 1979, Klan/Nazi shootout.

That is not our policy.

We do that if it is germane to the topic the writer is addressing ... or if the disclosure reveals some involvement or affiliation that speaks to the writer's expertise or vested interest in the subject.

So, we'd tell you if the author addressing health care reform is in the insurance industry or is a doctor.

Similarly, we'd tell you if someone writing about the challenges at, say, Oak Ridge Military Academy is an employee there.

Waller survived the bloody Nov. 3 shootout. Her husband at the time, Jim Waller, did not.

But her connection to that incident had absolutely nothing to do with what she was writing about Sunday.

Had her column focused in any way on Nov. 3, we would have mentioned her role as one of the anti-Klan protesters and a member at that time of the Communist Workers Party.

It didn't, so we didn't.

The HBO documentary “Prom Night in Mississippi,” is at once a heartwarming and disquieting look at the state of race relations in “post-racial America.”

The film, which was screened at the Sundance Film Festival and premiered on HBO Monday night, involves an attempt by actor Morgan Freeman (who played God, no less, in the movies) to end the tradition of separate black and white proms at a high school in his hometown of Charleston, Miss.

Freeman seeks to accomplish this by offering to pay for a mixed prom.

On his first attempt, in 1997, he was turned down.
The second time, in 2008, the school board, and most of the senior class at Charleston High, said yes.

The film chronicles what happened next, through interviews with students, administrators and parents, black and white.

The interviewees appear candid and honest, even about the prickliest issues.

One of the most memorable is a white father, a self-described “redneck” who opposes interracial dating but whose daughter dates a black boy and will accompany him to the prom.

While the man grudgingly allows the two to date, he does not like it and makes it clear that he hopes they grow apart when the boyfriend goes away to college.

Another is the lone white player on the basketball team, who intends to go to both proms, and who winds up taking two dates.

Another is a black girl who believes the position of valedictorian was awarded, unfairly, to a white student instead of her.

And still another is the white principal, a former coach who says he couldn’t wait to recover from major heart surgery to be back with his kids at school.

The upshot of Freeman’s gambit, without spoiling it for you, is that there is a mixed prom — but some white parents ban together and hold their own prom anyway, where no black people are allowed.
They refuse to be interviewed on camera, or to allow the documentary crew into the whites-only prom.

And they hire a lawyer to explain why.

If they’re featured in the film, he says, squirming at the irony, people will think the parents are racist.

I won’t say more, except that the film leaves me more hopeful than discouraged.

But we’ve still got a long way to go.

They call it clotheslining in football, when someone uses a rigid, outstretched arm to tackle an opponent by striking him in the neck or chest.

It is dirty and illegal.

And it hurts like hell.

Just ask Pricey Harrison, who received such a blow, figuratively speaking, when attempting to push an innocent piece of legislation in favor of clotheslines..

Far be it from me to tell our neighbors how to dry their tidy whities, but Harrison’s bill should have gotten a more serious hearing.

In short (definitely no pun intended), the Greensboro Democrat’s legislation would have empowered residents to choose whether they want to use clotheslines instead of dryers.

Some people consider that more important a question that some people's obvious discomfort with visions of their BVD's fluttering in the summer breeze.

In fact, there is a national movement to return to clotheslines as a smarter, greener alternative to dryers.

After all, dryers consume huge amounts of power.

Appliances account for about 17 percent of the average household's energy consumption, with refrigerators, clothes washers, and dryers leading the way.

They also are a fire hazard. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates that 15,500 fires associated with clothes dryers occur annually, causing an average of 10 deaths, 310 injuries and more than $99 million in property damage

For my mother, though, it's simply a matter of quality.

As she sees it,  using sun and wind to dry laundry makes it fresher and involves less wear and tear on the fabric.

She has never owned a dryer in her life -- and I'm betting she never will.

And if it rains, then it rains. She either races to gather the laundry before the storm arrives, or she washes it again after the storm has passed.

Nor do clotheslines have to be eyesores. New, more compact designs can keep them largely hidden from view.

All that said, I should come clean (honestly, no pun intended), I live in a community whose covenants prevent clothelines.

And I never enjoyed having to hang clothes on the line while growing up, especially women's clothes.

And on rainy or cold days the laundry just doesn't get done.

Still, the bill never had a chance, except as an easy punch line for punchy legislators.

“Yeah, they did behave childishly,” Harrison said. “They never did consider the bill on its merits. It was frustrating.”

Plus, if many of the lawmakers who poked fun at Harrison’s bill were honest, most remember well a day when clotheslines were more the rule than the exception.

According to the N.C. Center for Public Policy Research, one-third of the state’s lawmakers are 65 or older. Yup. They remember.

But some people much younger than that appreciate the simple wisdom of a string of wire and two poles.

They ought to have the right to choose.

That's the thrust of a movement, right2dry, which is trying to persuade the Obamas, "during a one-day photo op,"  to hang laundry at the White House to encourage other Americans to follow suit..

The right2dry Web site boldy declares, as a banjo plays in the background: "It is the inalienable right of every, man, woman and child to line dry."

It was somehow fitting that Walter Cronkite would breathe his last as America revisited the 1969 moon landing.

For all of Cronkite's gifts and contributions, I remember him most for his coverage of the space program, culminating in those fuzzy, surreal images of man's first steps on the lunar surface.

Cronkite managed to combine his trademark professionalism and knowledge with the same awe most of the rest of us were feeling.

As a boy I watched his coverage into the wee hours of the night, curled up in an overstuffed chair in the family den.

Choosing whom to seek as my eyes and ears for the Apollo mission was unconscious and automatic. Who else would it be?

Cronkite's words, by the way, when man finally had touched down on the moon: "Wow."