The year was 1999, a week before Passover, and I was pushing my cart through the aisles of Bruno’s in Bessemer, Alabama. At the time, Bruno’s was THE grocery store chain in the state. It was, in fact, a highly innovative company for its time, the first to offer gourmet prepared foods like chicken breasts encrusted with toasted pine nuts or fresh tabouli. You sure didn’t see that fare in the Piggly Wigglies around the South. So, naturally, I assumed that Bruno’s would sell matzoh for the Passover table.
But I was wrong, as the assistant manager – a man in ...
The salesman behind the counter glowered. It was a gale-force scowl that started at his hairline and rolled downward till it ran out of face.
“Are you back, AGAIN?”
It was a Saturday morning at the seed and feed store. The hometown seed store is the last honest bulwark against the encroachment of big-box mega-stores. It is a bastion of individuality where a gardener can find eccentric products of yesteryear alongside new horticultural advances, a place where salespeople know your dog’s name or ask things like, “So how’d that collard seed do, the organic we special-ordered for ya last fall?”
However, unlike the ...
Alabama Gov. Robert Riley wants to shut down electronic gaming in the state. At his orders, state troopers have been making secret midnight and 2 a.m. raids on the large lucrative casino at VictoryLand Greyhound Park, in Shorter, and at Country Crossing casino and country music park, in Dothan.
Bold move, probably appreciated by the anti-gambling faction. Go Bob.
There’s just one picky problem: Electronic bingo is legal. Mere semantics, Riley says. Calling the machines "bingo" is skirting the issue, which is that they are slot machines, he says.
So, back to the raids. Picture a stream of squad cars, lights flashing, sirens ...
The other day, South Carolina Lite Gov. Andre Bauer (a Republican candidate for governor) compared people who take public assistance to stray animals.
"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals," Bauer told a Greenville-area crowd. "You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is, you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't ...
President Obama has started to appoint new judges to the federal courts, especially the appellate courts which decide more than 30,000 cases a year. What kind of jurists will the president pick? In particular, how will he fill openings on the appellate courts in Atlanta and Richmond? His remarks, so far, have been opaque.
Over eight years, the Bush/Cheney legal viewpoint left a heavy footprint on the hundreds of district and appeals courts. Bush's appointments cemented a philosophy of exclusion and a system in which justice served a narrower band of society than ever before. Thus, progressives are hoping Obama’s appointments will ...
It is the subject du jour in some Montgomery circles: What is the definition of “good hair” if you are an African American? A new movie by comedian/writer Chris Rock has reopened this particular debate among Black women and, to a lesser extent, Black men. In my opinion, it would be wise for Whites not to dismiss this as a non-starter, and not just because the issue permeates hiring in the television industry and in journalism, in general.
To begin: Born with curly, wild hair, I’ve been curious about other people’s straight tresses as long as I can remember. My efforts ...
Stand down, Jennie Craig, Weight Watchers and Dr. Atkins. There’s a new kid in town, The Dixie Diet, and we are proud to say it peels off pounds.
Here's how we do it. First, we put you in prison. Then we spend between $1.13 and $1.75 per day to feed you. Then a couple of years later, you are a nice emaciated specimen with gum disease and bone loss. Strangely, not all prisoners appreciate this chance to lose weight.
Last week in Tennessee, a federal judge ordered a Robertson County Jail inmate moved to another detention facility after he and other inmates ...
If someone said, come try this sport with me, would you say yes to the following? You will be exhausted, sleep-deprived, cold, bug-bitten, in need of a wicked pee and hungry every morning for the next two months. You’ll get up long before sunrise, drive an hour in the dark, walk through the damp and chilly woods, make idiot noises for a while and risk exposure to snakes, ticks and poison ivy. Would you leap joyfully into that fray?
No, I thought not.
Good. We don’t want any more novices bungling around in the woods. The rest of the world should stay home ...
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