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Columnists

BOB BROWN: What is Real?

Often, an old song plays in my mind. I cannot identify the situations that bring lyrics and melodies into my awareness. Somehow, I am reassured and comforted by them. Say...

FRED FIRST: Spiders I Have Worn

I see now how often what I chose to write about in my haphazard weekly...

ROBERT L. MARONIC: Does Putin Consider Ukraine Russian Territory? If So, U.S. Negotiations Are In Trouble

President Putin, aka Vladimir the Terrible, is a second-world money-mongering autocrat, who commands the largest...

ANDY PITZER: Not-So-Trivial Geography

The absence of geography courses in American elementary and secondary school curriculums these days is...

ROBERT L. MARONIC: Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest On July 4th Is An Ode To Gluttony

Joey Chestnut, 41, who is 6’1”, surprisingly only 230 pounds, and a personification of gluttony, won...

LIZA FIELD: The Oldest Valentine

  Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity.         ...

LUCKY GARVIN: Notes On The Civil War

An odd name for a war in that there was precious little civility in it. Watching the Ken Burns’ magnificent historical documentary, The Civil War,...

DENNIS GARVIN: Cock Fighting and Fake News

Cockfighting has a long history.  Humans took a natural tendency of roosters to resist any encroachment upon their perceived domain by another rooster.  Looking...

JEFF ELL: Fare Thee Well Beautiful Deer Filled Mountains

I didn’t kill a single deer this year. The last time that happened was 2002, the year we moved to Roanoke. And so now as...

MIKE KEELER: The Story of Two Motherless Children

Tyrus Wong was born in Guangdong, China in 1910. When he was nine years old, he and his father emigrated to the U.S. to...

HAYDEN HOLLINGSWORTH: Attitude Is a Choice

Mark Twain is purported to have said, “I have lived a life filed with terrible things; some of them actually happened.”  Most of them...