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The Oligarchs Have Decided: It’s Time for Trump to Go!
My latest conspiracy theory, with some wishful thinking thrown in. The fix is in, folks. A cabal of oligarchs, including Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, and Peter Thiel, has decided that Trump, with his diminished physical and mental capacity (plus poll numbers in the toilet), has outlived his usefulness, and the team is organizing a coup…
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Soundtrack of My Life
I’ve had fun putting this playlist together—43 songs starting with my childhood favorite—Roy Rogers’ “Happy Trails” and concluding with David LaMotte’s wonderful rendition of “We Are Each Other’s Angels.” While I consider many of these songs to be favorites, the intent was choosing music that expressed what was happening in my life at that time—from…
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FIRST ACID TRIP . . . COURTESY OF THE U.S. ARMY
My brother Butch and our pal Rusty were roommates and students at MTSU in Murfreesboro, Tennessee in the fall of 1968, working part-time at the local Samsonite manufacturing plant. I was living nearby, and another of our crew, Nubbin, was visiting from Sewanee when a small package arrived at Butch and Rusty’s apartment with no…
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Five Octogenarians Carry on the Handball Tradition at the Downtown Asheville YMCA
While games in which the player strikes the ball with the hand have been around for thousands of years, the modern game of handball took root in this region at the Asheville YMCA in the late 1960’s. Dozens of handball players at the Asheville Y have come and gone over the decades, but the numbers…
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What, 82 years old! How the hell did that happen!
Yep, today is my 82nd birthday, and this morning I was thinking about what I had written on my birthday a few years ago. It described a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: A group of grubby-looking guys are pulling a cart full of corpses through a plague-ridden medieval village while one of…
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This is what courage looks like!
A little over a week ago, I got an intimate view of tenacity and courage from seven bold women, including my wife Shonnie Lavender and our friend Elizabeth Likis. On March 13, Republican Rep. Chuck Edwards was in Asheville for a town hall at A-B Tech. Since the college auditorium where the town hall took…
