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One last post 4 May 2012 8:44 AM (13 years ago)

This is the 300th, and final, post on this blog. I've had a ball doing it.

If you missed the announcement the first time around, I'm leaving the Observer, and today is my last day. I'll have one last column in the paper on Sunday -- it might pop up earlier online -- but this is it for the blog.

The great thing about writing online is that you get to try more things -- stuff that's really short, or really long, or dependent on links, works better on a blog than it does on paper. So we could debate the worst movies ever, or discuss our scars, or just talk about the passion of R.E.M., and it all sort of fit.

After today, you can find me on Twitter or Facebook. In a week or two, I'll also restart the personal blog I created a few years ago.

I'm not good at goodbyes. I always thought the last scene of M*A*S*H did it about as well as it could be done. But the more I think about it, especially now, the more I appreciate the last Calvin and Hobbes. (You can click to enlarge.)



See you on the next adventure.

Well... I have an announcement 23 Apr 2012 11:24 AM (13 years ago)

I've written somewhere around 1,700 columns for the
Charlotte Observer. This is the hardest one.

I'm leaving the paper and taking a new job.

I'll be writing about sports for a new website. It's part of a
joint venture between The USA Today Sports Media Group and
Major League Baseball Advanced Media. I'll be writing about
all sports -- in particular, I think, college football. More details
are coming next month, and the site should launch sometime
this summer.

I'll be here at the Observer two more weeks.

Let me stop for a second and try to breathe.

This is hard. I still love the Observer, and always will. My wife, Alix Felsing, will still be working
for the paper. We’re staying in Charlotte. I'm not running away from the Observer. I'm running  toward this new thing, with the hope that one day it'll make me as proud as I've been to work 23 years for this great newspaper.

Y’all – meaning everyone who has taken the time to read
something of mine over the years – have been such a
pleasure to write for, and talk to, and figure out the world
with. We've shared some of our most profound thoughts,
and some of the deepest places in our hearts. As long as I’m
alive, you’ll be a part of me.

All of you know that things have been tough for newspapers
the past few years. Some days haven’t been much fun. But
most days still are, because we still have the biggest and
best news operation in the Carolinas, and we still have gifted
journalists who work their tails off to get you the news every
day.

I'll miss a lot of things, but maybe what I'll miss the most is those days when a big story happens and all the brainpower and hustle in this newsroom focuses on doing the story right. Nobody can beat us on those days. Nobody.

The Observer will be here long after all of us are gone. And it's still the best deal in town.

So the fair question is, why am I leaving all this?

Part of it is that lately I've felt a pull toward writing sports. I've dabbled in it for the paper, but I've wondered what it would be like to write sports full-time. There's a built-in joy to sports -- at the end of every game at least half the fans are happy, and that's more than you can say about a lot of things in life. More than that, sports gives a writer access to all the big issues -- love, loss, the desire to connect with other people, the longing for something larger than yourself.

My bosses at the Observer, as we were talking all this out, offered me a chance to write a lot about sports. But there was something more in my head.

Let me try to describe it.

Sometimes, when you’re going down the highway, you can
look over and see another road running beside the one
you’re on. I’ve spent a lot of time on the highway, and I've often wondered
about those people on the other road, how the world might
look from over there, how our journeys might be
different even though the direction is the same.

The thing is, you can’t know unless you take the other road.

This road I’ve been on with the Observer, and with you, has
been the trip of a lifetime.

This paper gave me a chance at the greatest job I've ever had. And it only worked out because so many of you gave me a chance and let me into your lives, a few hundred words at a time.

I'll have some more to say over these next couple of weeks. For now, let me say thank you. And let me also say that thank you isn't nearly enough.

Virginia Tech, five years later 16 Apr 2012 8:08 AM (13 years ago)

Today is the fifth anniversary of the shootings at Virginia Tech. I was at lunch uptown that day when my editor called. He said I probably needed to get up to Blacksburg. Why? I asked. All I'd heard at that point was that there'd been a shooting on campus, and one person had died.

There's more, he said. A lot more.

J. Freedom du Lac of the Washington Post has a great piece on the survivors (one in particular) and other people who lived that day up close. Make sure to look at the photos and video, too.

I wrote two columns from Blacksburg. Here are those pieces.

SHATTERED BY A KILLING BLOW
4/17/07

The cold wind blew in overnight, it brought snow to the Virginia Tech campus Monday morning, around the time the early risers heard the first shots.

The wind blew harder at midmorning, when the people on the upper floors of Norris Hall heard the guns firing again and again from down below.

It blew in the news that was impossible. Thirty-three dead. Another score wounded. A campus with its heart cut out.

Two students waited to get a table for supper at Shakey's, right across from campus, and pieced together the day.

"My dad called, " said senior Joe Lemanski, 24. "It woke me up. He said something was going on."

"I heard at work, " said senior Brian Snyder, 22. "The first report said there was one dead. We couldn't believe it. Then the next report, there were 20."

By the time the full reckoning was complete, it had become the worst mass shooting in American history. You could not imagine it anywhere. But especially not here, among these gorgeous stone buildings, across the flat green lawn of the Drillfield in the middle of campus.

You do notice one thing. No buds on the trees. Spring never got here.

Two died early from the shots fired at Ambler Johnston Hall, a dorm on the south side of campus. Then 31 more two hours later at Norris Hall, a classroom building on the northside.

So many questions and so few answers.

Some news report said the gunman was a nonstudent, possibly with a girlfriend on campus. Police did not name him but said he used his last bullet on himself.

No one released the names of those who died.

The morning was chaos. Cell phones couldn't get through because so many people were trying to call. Police locked down the campus. Students watched from buildings across the way as people inside Norris jumped from second-story windows to escape.

By evening, as the wind blew even harder, the campus felt empty. A few students ventured from their dorms, walking in silence. Up at the War Memorial Chapel, a solitary student waited with a camera until the sun sank to the top edge of Norris Hall. He stood up, took one picture, and left.

We will sit down and have a discussion soon about guns, about campus security, about what happened in those hours between the first group of shots and the second.

Not now.

For now, think about what it's like to be in college, walking the bridge between child and grown-up, wearing old sweatshirts and drinking cheap beer, and dreaming up schemes that would let you always live this way.

Just after the sun set, a student named Shannon Turner set out candles on the lawn next to Henderson Hall.

She picked that spot because that's where people gather on sunny days to walk their dogs and throw Frisbees and work their bare feet into the grass.

She puts the candles in a Mason jar, a jelly jar, a flower vase. Pretty soon, some friends stopped by. She pinched off the blooms from a store-bought bouquet and handed them out.

Somebody asked her what kind of place Blacksburg is.

"It's not the kind of place where something like this can happen, " she said.

But, of course, it did.

And so the kids hugged each other close and lit candles against the bitter wind.

That's the first column. You can find the second one over here at my website.

I still think about those two days a lot.

My NCAA picks, and a few thoughts about brackets 14 Mar 2012 9:14 AM (13 years ago)

My friend Michael Kruse, a Davidson grad who wrote a great book on the Wildcats' 2008 run to the Final Eight, isn't fond of March Madness brackets. "The thing is the thing. Your brackets are not," he says, meaning we should watch the games and enjoy them for what they are, not for whether some last-second shot means you rise or fall in the office pool.

Michael is almost always right, and he's right about this, too.

Mostly.

I'd just make two small observations:

1) For a lot of people, the brackets are the ONLY reason they watch. The St. Mary's-Purdue game is not naturally gripping to them because sports aren't naturally gripping to them. The brackets give them a reason to care. And maybe, along the way, the grip takes hold.

2) For a lot of other people, the brackets are a way to catch up on a regular season they've missed. I keep up with the major conferences, but don't watch nearly much college hoops as I used to. Is Wichita State really that good? Can Harvard make a run? The brackets start to organize the stories in our heads.

As I've said many times, the first two days of the tournament are my favorite days of the sports year, and maybe 10 percent of that is because of the brackets. I don't know many true fans who care more about their brackets than the games. I'll take a great finish over my pick anytime.

Having said that, I'd be fine with going 63-0.

I think you can find my full bracket under my name over at the Observer's contest, but I'll put the picks here, too. Upsets are marked with an exclamation point.

SOUTH
First round: Kentucky over W. Kentucky, UConn over Iowa State (!), Wichita State over VCU, Indiana over New Mexico State, UNLV over Colorado, Baylor over South Dakota St., Xavier over Notre Dame (!), Duke over Lehigh.

Second round: Kentucky over UConn, Wichita State over Indiana (!), Baylor over UNLV, Duke over Xavier.

Sweet 16: Kentucky over Wichita State, Baylor over Duke (!).

Elite 8: Baylor over Kentucky (!). Kentucky is the big favorite to win the whole thing, but Baylor is just as athletic and a little deeper. Baylor is one of those teams that could, on a given night, either beat an NBA team or lose in the first round. I've got a weak spot for those kinds of teams. Which means my bracket could be blown to bits by the weekend.

WEST
First round: Michigan St. over LIU-Brooklyn, St. Louis over Memphis (!), Long Beach State over New Mexico (!), Louisville over Davidson (I thought hard about this one, but couldn't pull the trigger...), Murray St. over Colorado St., Marquette over BYU, Florida over Virginia, Missouri over Norfolk State.

Second round: Michigan St. over St. Louis, Long Beach over Louisville (!), Marquette over Murray St., Missouri over Florida.

Sweet 16: Michigan St. over Long Beach, Missouri over Marquette.

Regional final: Missouri over Michigan St. (!)


EAST
First round: Syracuse over UNC-Asheville, Southern Miss over Kansas St. (!), Vandy over Harvard, Montana over Wisconsin (!), Cincinnati over Texas, FSU over St. Bonaventure, West Virginia over Gonzaga (!), Ohio State over Loyola (Md.).

Second round: Syracuse over Southern Miss, Vandy over Montana, FSU over Cincy, Ohio State over West Virginia.

Sweet 16: Vandy over Syracuse (!), Ohio State over FSU.

Regional final: Ohio State over Vandy.

MIDWEST
First round: UNC over Lamar/Vermont winner, Alabama over Creighton (!), Cal/South Florida winner (I'm thinking Cal) over Temple (!), Ohio over Michigan (!), San Diego State over NC State, Georgetown over Belmont, Purdue over St. Mary's (!), Kansas over Detroit. Lots of upsets here.

Second round: UNC over Alabama, Ohio over Cal/South Florida winner (!), G'town over San Diego St., Kansas over Purdue. Ohio is my other big sleeper. I just want ONE team named the Bobcats to win a couple of games.

Sweet 16: UNC over Ohio, Kansas over G'town.

Regional final: UNC over Kansas in the Roy Williams Invitational.


FINAL FOUR

Missouri over Baylor
Ohio State over UNC

TITLE GAME

Missouri 73, Ohio State 62


Let the mocking begin!

The Bookshelf Project: Drew Magary's "The Postmortal" 8 Mar 2012 5:43 AM (13 years ago)

So I started this Bookshelf Project thing this year to force me to read some of the good books I bought and then set aside over the past year or two. I picked out 25 books, which comes out to a little more than two a month. It's March, and I've finished two and have started a third. So, yeah, I'm already behind. Which I expected.

The first book I've finished is Drew Magary's "The Postmortal" -- which, as you can see above, has a fantastic cover.

The book lives up to it.

If you like sports you've probably seen Magary's stuff over at Deadspin, where he writes (profanely -- you've been warned) about everything from hating LeBron James to the agonies of being a dad to his desire for cheap horrendous beer. HE ALSO LIKES GOING ALL CAPS.

But there's an interesting mind underneath all the poop stories. And in "The Postmortal" his mind goes here: What if you could take a drug that would cure aging? You could live forever -- as long as you didn't get hit by a truck or something -- and your body would always be the age it is right now.

It sounds like paradise. But as "The Postmortal" reveals, it's not. God, no, it's not.

Magary tells the story through the eyes of John Farrell, a New Yorker who gets the cure in 2019 at age 29. He takes his roommate, Katy, to the rogue doctor who gave him the cure. Farrell spots a beautiful blonde he had seen the first time he was there. He leaves Katy at the office to track the mystery woman.

And from that point, on page 43, terrible things start to happen.

As you read you'll start to think about all the terrible things that COULD happen if people could stop aging. Would the population explode? Yep. Would some people refuse the cure because it's not part of the natural order of things? Yep. Would they wreak havoc on the people who DID get the cure? Oh, yeah.

And what about a sweet little baby? Would a doting but insane mother...?

The deeper I got into "The Postmortal," the more of these nightmare scenarios I started thinking of -- and I swear, every time I thought of one, there it'd be in the book 10 pages later.

Farrell ends up becoming an "end specialist" -- someone who euthanizes people who've decided they don't want to live forever after all -- and that brings its own set of problems. There's a lot of violence and anger and heartbreak -- and some humor, although not as much as you might expect from Magary's blogwork.

By the end, Magary drags you toward some hard questions: How will we treat one another when things go really bad? What's worth living for? And if you think of life as a story, what's the point of a story without an ending?

I zipped through this book -- it's a fast read, even at 365 pages -- but I'll be thinking about it a long time. And if the cure ever comes, I hope I'll have the guts to pass.

Next on the list: "Pulphead," by John Jeremiah Sullivan.

(Of course, one reason I'm doing this is to hear about what y'all are reading. So the lines are open in the comment section.)

President Obama in Mount Holly (or, The Fainting Economy) 7 Mar 2012 2:35 PM (13 years ago)

MOUNT HOLLY -- The woman had waited for President Obama too long.

The workers invited to see the president here at the Daimler truck plant got herded in early because of security. They’d been standing around a couple of hours. It was warm inside the plant. And so, partway through the president’s speech, she fell out.

“It looks like somebody might have fainted up here,” Obama said, calling for the EMTs. He rescued it with a laugh line: “Folks do this all the time in my meetings.”

The woman was fine. It was just hard to wait so long like that.

Hold that thought.

The president came to Mount Holly to tout clean energy. The Freightliner trucks made at the plant made a nice backdrop, seeing as how some of them are built to burn cleaner and cheaper natural gas.

But this is an election year, so it was also a campaign stop, and Obama had fun with it. He teased the Freightliner employee who introduced him for sounding like a preacher. He joked about his tie having Carolina blue and the Duke shade, too. He said he loves North Carolina: “Even the folks who don’t vote for me, they’re nice to me. They usually wave five fingers.”

He acted loose and confident. With good reason.

Over on the Republican side, primary voters keep trying to run the whole campaign off a cliff like in one of those Indiana Jones chase scenes. Mitt Romney won Super Tuesday, sort of, but he still can’t shed Rick Santorum, who is running one of the finest political campaigns of the 1950s. And Newt Gingrich won Georgia, even though in a general election he couldn’t beat Gen. Sherman.

All those polls you see about Obama being unpopular? They’re true – until you put him next to one of the Republicans. Then he looks like Reagan vs. Mondale.

But there’s a real weak spot – Obama knows it, his opponents know it, and voters know it. It’s the same weak spot you see in the story of this sparkling plant building these massive trucks.

Underneath, the economy is unstable.

One of the reasons Obama came to Mount Holly was so he could mention that the Freightliner plant added more than 1,000 workers last year. Daimler also announced in January that it’s hiring 1,100 people at its plant in Cleveland in Rowan County. That’s all great news.

But back in 2009, the company laid off more than 2,600 workers at those two plants and one in Gastonia. Many of the new hires are workers who got laid off three years ago and are now coming back.

Alan Herrin’s story is a little different. Herrin, who’s 50, was one of the workers who got an invitation to hear Obama speak. He’s been with Freightliner for eight months. He used to work for a company that helped make the doors for Freightliner trucks. What happened to that job?

“Mexico,” he says.

At Freightliner, Herrin inspects trucks as they come down the line to make sure they’re put together correctly. He’s on his feet or under a truck eight hours a day. When I ask him what he uses for a crawler, he smiles and says “these,” pointing to his knees.

But he’s glad to have the job. Freightliner feels like a family to him.

“I hope I’m here ‘til I’m 75,” he says. “But who knows these days?”

Who Knows These Days? could be the theme of this campaign. The unemployment rate is dropping, but millions of people are still without work. The housing market is rebounding a little, but neighborhoods are still dotted with foreclosures.

President Obama can make a case that the economy is growing again after a deep recession. He can also tick off a list of other accomplishments – he saved the car companies, passed a health-care plan, got rid of Osama. But when you’ve been laid off or furloughed or had your pay cut or lost your benefits, none of that other stuff matters so much.

To extend that image from way up at the beginning, people can only wait so long for things to get stable. Then they start dropping out.

It’s March; lots of weird stuff can happen between now and November. (This time four years ago, candidate Obama had just been trounced in Ohio by Hillary Clinton.) But right now, no GOP candidate looks to be much of a match for the president.

Unless the economy dives downward again. There’s no telling what people will do when they start to feel faint.

Two appearances at the library 5 Mar 2012 7:45 AM (13 years ago)

I've got a couple of events coming up at Charlotte-Mecklenburg libraries, if you're interested:

-- This Saturday (March 10), my pal John Grooms and I are co-hosting a showing of "Page One," a really good documentary about The New York Times and the future of journalism. That's at the Morrison Regional branch starting at 1:30 p.m.

Here's the trailer for "Page One":



-- On April 10, I'll be at the Matthews Branch at 6:30 p.m. to talk about my job as a writer and to pass along some advice about writing as a career. Here's the event listing.

Both events are free and open to the public. And here's the real bonus: You'll get a trip to the library out of it. Come see me.

The Monkees and Jimi Hendrix in Charlotte 1 Mar 2012 6:04 AM (13 years ago)

The death of Monkees singer Davy Jones on Wednesday reminded me again of one of the bizarre and wonderful moments in Charlotte history.

On July 11, 1967, the Monkees played at the Charlotte Coliseum on Independence Boulevard (now Bojangles Coliseum).

The Jimi Hendrix Experience was the opening act.

Forty-five years later this sounds crazy for at least two reasons: one, that Hendrix was opening for the Monkees instead of the other way around, and two, that they ended up on the same bill in the first place.

The first reason wasn't quite as crazy back then. The Monkees were at their popular peak -- "Last Train to Clarksville," "I'm a Believer" and "Pleasant Valley Sunday" were all huge hits by the summer of '67. Hendrix, meanwhile, had scored hits in England but wasn't well-known over here.

The background on how the two acts got together isn't totally clear, but by all accounts everybody got along on stage and backstage. The problem was the crowds. The teenage girls (and some boys) who showed up to scream for the Monkees had no idea what to do with the wild-haired black guy playing the guitar with his teeth. I'm trying to imagine a double bill today that would be that different. Maybe Mastodon opening for Taylor Swift. (Actually, hell, I'd go to that show.)

Charlotte was the third show on the Monkees/Hendrix double bill. Hendrix lasted just four more shows after that. He got tired of the boos and the girls screaming for Davy and Micky. At a show in Forest Hills, N.Y., he flipped off the crowd, and that was that.

Obviously, he ended up doing just fine for himself.



(That's 11 minutes, but it might be your favorite 11 minutes today.)

Over the years I've heard from lots of people about that Charlotte show. I have a feeling it's like that Wilt Chamberlain 100-point game -- the arena held 10,000 but 100,000 people say they were there. I've never seen one shred of memorabilia from the concert -- not a ticket stub or poster or photo or anything. If you're out there, and you've got something -- even just your story -- share it with us.

In the meantime, we played some Hendrix, so it's only fair to play some Monkees. "Clarksville," "I'm a Believer," "I'm Not Your Stepping Stone"... those are some fun songs. Not Jimi, but not bad.

Take us home, Davy.

The Bookshelf Project 16 Feb 2012 6:19 AM (13 years ago)

I bring home books like a cat lady brings home strays. Most, I read. Some, I give up on after a chapter or two. (I used to suffer through books I hated, but the great Nick Hornby wrote an essay convincing me that life's too short to read stuff you don't enjoy).

Then there's the third category -- books I really want to read but haven't gotten around to yet.

So I cleared off one of the shelves in the bookcase in our living room. Then I went around the house collecting the books at the top of my to-read list.

I ended up with 25 on the shelf. That's roughly one every two weeks for the year. I'm already behind -- I have to read a lot for work, I love newspapers and magazines, and there's always some shiny bauble on the Internet. But I'm going to try not to bring home any new books until I get all these read.*

*Yeah, that's not going to happen.

As I finish each one, I'll post a review here. In general, I'll talk a lot more about the books I like than the ones I don't. If you never see a review of one of these, you can assume I put it down quietly and we won't speak of it again.

Here's what landed on the shelf (all links are to Amazon):

"Pulphead," by John Jeremiah Sullivan -- Collection of journalism by a Wilmington writer I just discovered. I have no idea how I missed out on this guy. "Upon This Rock," his piece (included in the book) on a Christian-rock festival for GQ, went in about nine different directions, none of which I expected.

"The Postmortal," by Drew Magary -- You might know Magary as the fearless and pottymouthed (OFTEN IN ALL CAPS) writer for Deadspin. But this novel is something different -- a sci-fi story about what would happen if people discovered a way to stop the aging process. (Never grow older! Sounds great. It's not.)

I just finished this one and I'll have the review up shortly.

"Long, Last, Happy" by Barry Hannah -- I have two huge holes in my swing when it comes to Southern literature. Barry Hannah is one -- I know him as the wild and brilliant Mississippi crazyman who died two years ago, but I've only read dribs and drabs of his stuff. This story collection will help me get caught up.

"Norwood" by Charles Portis -- Here's the other hole -- I've never read anything by Portis, who's most famous for writing "True Grit" (although I've seen both movie versions). "Norwood," Portis' first novel, was a recent gift from a friend. The jacket promises a story involving the second-shortest midget in show business, and a chicken with a college education. I can't wait.

"Rin Tin Tin" by Susan Orlean -- The latest book by one of the starters on my journalistic All-Star team.

"Best American Sports Writing 2011" and "Best American Essays 2011" -- Part of my annual EnvyFest, where I look at all the great journalism of the past year written by someone other than me. (Yeah, probably shouldn't have said that out loud.)

"Out of Orbit" by Chris Jones -- We've become buddies over the last year, so take this plug for what it's worth: Chris' is the current heavyweight champion of the world in magazine writing. (For proof, check out this piece on the Zanesville, Ohio, exotic-animal massacre.) "Out of Orbit" centers on the three astronauts (one Russian, two American) who were stranded at the international space station when the space shuttle Columbia blew up in 2003. This book is about how they got home.

"Lowboy" by John Wray -- I picked this up at an Observer book sale a year or two ago. To be honest, I don't know much about it except that it's supposed to be well-written and disturbing. If you've read it, don't spoil it for me. I'm rolling the dice here.

"The Imperfectionists" by Tom Rachman -- A novel about the tangled private lives of a group of newspaper reporters and editors. In other words, right in my wheelhouse.

"The Unnamed" by Joshua Ferris -- A novel about a man who can't stop walking. Not in my wheelhouse. But I'm intrigued.

"Ten Letters" by Eli Saslow -- This gets the Forehead-Slap Award for the great idea I can't believe no one thought of before now. Saslow looks at letters that ordinary Americans write to the president, then finds the stories behind those letters.

"The Big Short" and "Boomerang" by Michael Lewis -- The guy who wrote "Moneyball" and "The Blind Side" started out in finance. These two books bracket the current financial crisis, first here, then abroad.

"Stiff" by Mary Roach -- Subtitled "The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers." That's all I needed to know.

"The Warmth of Other Suns" by Isabel Wilkerson -- One slice of black life in America: an epic telling of the black Southerners who migrated North over the course of decades, looking for better lives.

"The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot -- Another slice of black life in America: A black woman's cells are taken without her knowledge for medical experiments -- and they become some of the most important cells in scientific history.

"Complications" by Atul Gawande -- This Boston doctor is smart and perceptive as a writer exploring medical issues.

"The Ledge" by Jim Davidson and Kevin Vaughan -- Kevin is Buddy #2 on this list. This story about Davidson's ordeal after a cave-in on Mount Rainier gave me chills just reading the dust jacket.

"House of Stone" by Anthony Shadid -- The brilliant Middle East correspondent writes about that region through the lens of his life and his family's history. I got an advance copy, but it's not due out until March 27, so I'll wait until then to write a review.

"South of Broad" by Pat Conroy -- I have a love-hate thing with the Carolinas' most famous writer. Love his nonfiction, love his storytelling... but I've had a hard time getting past his dialog. No one in real life talks the way they do in Pat Conroy novels. But this book has been lying around the house awhile -- my wife read it for her book club -- so I'm going to give him another shot.

"Mountains Beyond Mountains" by Tracy Kidder -- Another starter on the journalistic All-Star team. This book is about Dr. Paul Farmer, who has spent his life trying to cure infectious diseases around the world.

"Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson -- A friend who knows these things says this book has sold more than 2 million copies in hardcover, not counting e-books and Kindle copies and that sort of thing. That's a blockbuster, y'all.

"Hard Work" by Roy Williams with Tim Crothers -- I bought this a couple years ago when I was working on a story about Dean Smith, and wanted to see what Roy wrote about him. What I read was good, so I figured I'd go ahead and finish it off. (If there's a good Coach K book out there, let me know.)

"The Happiness Project" by Gretchen Rubin -- The author spends a year trying out old-fashioned and modern ideas of what makes people happy.

Which is sort of what I'm doing here, trying to read all these books I've been wanting to read.

"Postmortal" review coming soon. Others throughout the year. Keep reading, y'all.

The Valentine's line of love 14 Feb 2012 12:36 PM (13 years ago)

It's 3 p.m. on Valentine's Day. There are 17 of us in line at the flower stand at Third and Tryon. The wind is freezing. But we are men. Romantic men. We are willing to suffer for love.

Yes, women walk by and snicker. Yes, some dude jogs by and yells out: "Waited a little late, didn't you, boys?" We hate that dude. But the hate subsides. Love endures.

Love, and pain.

"It's painful out here," one man says. "But if you come home empty-handed..."

He does not finish the sentence. He does not need to.

The man at the front of the line takes his bouquet and gets into a cab that has been waiting for him. How long did the meter run? How much did the ride cost? These things do not matter on Valentine's Day. The bouquets cost $20. They could cost $200 and we would pay. It is a testament to the fullness of our love.

The men in line do not want to give their names. It is understandable. Love does not boast. It is not proud.

But we are men of all kinds, young and old, in three-piece suits and washed-out jeans, and we will wait here forever for love, except for the two men who leave and decide to come back at 4.

The line is shorter. This is good.

A man gets to the front of the line and orders four bouquets. This is bad.

Love does not boast, it is not proud, but sometimes, at the back of the line, it grumbles. The man smiles. "We'll make a trade," he says. "You deal with my wife and daughters, and I'll deal with yours."

We meditate on this. Then we leave him to his four bouquets.

It takes about half an hour to get to the front of the line. The flowers are beautiful. There are roses, and daisies, and some smaller yellow flowers, and, you know, some lavender things.

The flower sellers have free Life Savers on the table. Other people might point out that the flowers are the real life savers. But they are not men, romantic men, suffering for love.

My bouquet is wrapped, my $20 gladly paid. There are 14 men behind me in line at 3:30 p.m. on Valentine's Day.

The flowers are almost gone.

Tonight, some men will truly suffer.

Whitney, joy, death, and pleasure 13 Feb 2012 9:27 AM (13 years ago)

New Orleans, 1987. A buddy had lucked into tickets to the Final Four and we spent a long boozy weekend on Bourbon Street. Late one night I went for a walk and came up on a sax player who had drawn a good-sized crowd. He was taking requests. Somebody hollered out, not a song, but a name: Whitney Houston.

The sax man started to play, and we locked arms and swayed, and at 4 in the morning we made the most beautiful alcohol choir, Syracuse basketball fans and Japanese tourists and maybe a hooker or two, singing one of those great pop songs that there's no point in resisting and why would you want to:

But each time I try, I just break down and cry
Cause I'd rather be home feeling blue
So I'm saving all my love for you...

Up until last weekend that was a memory of pleasure. Now I wonder who in that crowd was drunk for the eighth night in a row, who in the crowd had a worried spouse and a crying baby at home, who in the crowd was just starting to feel the addiction lock in like a grappling hook.



Whitney might be the last singer we could all agree on. When her first record came out in 1985, I was mostly listening to rap and indie rock -- I remember a summer of Run-D.M.C. and the Smithereens -- but I had the Whitney cassette, too, because no amount of street cred could deny that voice. It melted you.

For the next few years you could count on a good-to-great Whitney single every few months, "How Will I Know" to "So Emotional" to "All the Man That I Need." (Really, check out that last clip. It's from a concert she did in 1991 for troops coming home from the Gulf War. My favorite shot is at 3:23, where a group of guys in the front row stare up at her in unvarnished awe. As in, yeah, THIS is what we were fighting for.)

"I Will Always Love You" was the biggest hit of all, part of the "Bodyguard" movie with Kevin Costner, and right around here was where I jumped off the bandwagon. Part of it was that the song was everywhere, and even the best ice cream starts to lose something after 27 helpings. But also the song felt like a technical exercise, more a gymnastics routine set to soul than soul itself. It spent 14 weeks at Number One.

She had more hits after that, made a couple of movies, made a ton of money... but by my account we got eight years of great music from Whitney. That's a lot more than most singers give us. But that voice was built for more. That voice was made for comeback hits and sold-out tours and a jazz record in her 60s.

That voice made a hit record out of the national anthem. Twice. Look at her as she belts that last verse -- that power, that control, that confidence. She raises her arms at the end. Champion of the world.



Drugs suck. They suck for every too-young addict who ends up in the obits, everyone shivering in rehab or sitting on another folding chair in another meeting, fingernails dug in, trying to hold on. But imagine having more money than you could ever spend and unlimited free time. It's a junkie's dream.

We don't know yet, of course, if drugs killed Whitney Houston. But there's no doubt that drugs ruined her. The last 15 years added up to ashes: canceled concerts, odd interviews, disheveled tabloid photos, and that heartbreaking show with Bobby Brown where, apparently, they sat around and talked about poop. That's what I heard, anyway. I could never bring myself to watch it.

She fell so far that it soured me on the music. It was hard to listen to the songs I loved; all I could see was her coming out of some club dead-eyed and cackling. But now her death has cleansed her life, and you can choose to remember the parts you want to remember. She can't ruin herself any more.

It's a comforting thought, for about two seconds, until you remember that she died at 48.

You can reduce everything we do as human beings into two or three deep desires -- the need to chase pleasure, the longing to create, the search for something bigger than ourselves. Not many people in this world provided more pleasure than Whitney Houston. She built towers with her voice. That voice, in a lot of ways, was bigger than she was. Now I wonder if that was too hard for her to take.

It's cruel, isn't it, how so many things bring us joy right up to the point where they start killing us.

Teaching a workshop at Queens, jabbering about politics at Wingate 26 Jan 2012 10:13 AM (13 years ago)

A couple of things I'm doing over the next few weeks:

-- I'm teaching my "Writing In 3-D" workshop at Queens University on Feb. 18 and 25. More information and details about signing up are here on Queens' site. This is a good introduction to writing for people just starting out, but it also has some advanced tips for writers looking to get better.

-- On Feb. 9, I'll be part of an election roundtable at Wingate University -- it's free, and it starts at 6:30 p.m. at the McGee Theatre in the Batte Center. I'll be there along with Tony Nownes, a political-science professor at the University of Tennessee, and Scott Huffmon, a poli-sci professor at Winthrop University and director of the Winthrop Poll. So at least two of the people on stage will know what they're talking about.

Newt, Reagan and a Clemson joke: Notes from the campaign trail 19 Jan 2012 7:06 AM (13 years ago)

I'm down in South Carolina this week, talking to voters and following candidates as we head for the Republican primary on Saturday. Some odds and ends from the road:

-- Candidates generally don't announce their vice-presidential picks this early, but Newt Gingrich has already made his selection: Ronald Reagan. With the former president being deceased and all, I'm not sure what federal laws might apply here, but I'm pretty sure Gingrich wants the Gipper on the ticket.

In his commercials you see him sitting next to Reagan, deep in conversation. In his speeches this week he's referred time and again to "the Reagan-Gingrich textbook" for turning around the country. He shared a Reagan bit on Jimmy Carter: If your brother-in-law is unemployed, it's a recession. If you're unemployed, it's a depression. If Jimmy Carter is unemployed, that's a recovery.

When the laughter died down, Gingrich said: "I may change the name but keep the story."

It can't hurt a Republican to align himself with the most popular Republican of our lifetimes. Of course, Reagan also (for Republicans, at least) projected warmth. Gingrich is still working on that warmth part.

-- It's hard to talk about how candidate spouses look and dress without sounding weird. So let me be delicate here. In person, Callista Gingrich doesn't look as... lacquered... as she does on TV. She sounded interested and engaged talking to voters one-on-one. Maybe she should spend a little time at the microphone.

-- It's early, but today is already showing how absurd the primary process is -- and how fast things can change. Mitt Romney became the prohibitive front-runner based on wins in Iowa and New Hampshire. Except it turns out Romney didn't really win Iowa -- Rick Santorum did. And it also turns out that Rick Perry is dropping out of the race and throwing in with Gingrich. Perry didn't have a lot of support in South Carolina, but Gingrich doesn't need all that much to push out in front.

So basically, a few dozen votes in Iowa swung the race in one direction, and a couple thousand in South Carolina could swing it the opposite way.

Good thing that we don't have an ex-wife scandal to throw the whole race into a blender. Wait, what?

-- And in case you've missed it: Stephen Colbert wants to run in South Carolina but it's too late to get on the ballot. Herman Cain dropped out but it's too late to get his name OFF the ballot. So Colbert wants people to vote for Cain as a way to vote for Colbert. And to drive all this home, they're doing a rally together in Charleston on Friday.

Which is a long way of saying, I know where I'm going to be on Friday.

-- As important as this primary is, folks in South Carolina are still talking college football -- especially West Virginia's 70-33 beatdown of Clemson in the Orange Bowl.

Up in Pickens County, where Clemson is located, county GOP chairman Phillip Bowers is a Clemson grad. We were talking at Yank's Place in Liberty when his buddy Dan Crosby came over to chat. Crosby mentioned hearing that a friend was in Columbia the other day and remarked on how nice the weather was. "It's 70 here," Crosby said his friend told him. "But I hear it's 33 in Clemson."

Yeah, that bruise is gonna linger a while.










--

A couple of follow-ups on Foundation for the Carolinas 9 Dec 2011 10:39 AM (13 years ago)

Two quick notes following up on my story last Sunday on the Foundation for the Carolinas' new building:

-- In the story, I quoted from an essay by former Bank of America CEO Hugh McColl. The essay ran in the Observer, and our version noted that it originally ran (in a longer form) on the Charlotte Viewpoint website. I didn't notice that, and didn't give Charlotte Viewpoint proper credit in my story. Here's the original version on their site.

-- My story also mentioned the mystery of the wrought-iron letters "KB" over the entrance to the building, which used to be Montaldo's department store. Charlotte architect David Furman wrote in to say he thinks the "KB" stands for King Bostrom, a clothing store that occupied the building at 220 N. Tryon St. in the late '80s.

If anybody has more details -- or a different story -- holler and I'll update.

From the vault: Daisy and Violet Hilton 1 Dec 2011 11:03 AM (13 years ago)

I spent a little time with a documentary filmmaker Wednesday. Leslie Zemeckis was in town working on her new project, a film about Daisy and Violet Hilton.

If you lived here in the '60s you knew about the Hilton sisters. They were conjoined twins (what used to be called Siamese twins) who were well-known performers for a time -- among other things, they co-starred in the cult classic "Freaks." They spent the last years of their lives in Charlotte. I wrote about them back in 1997. I dug out that story and re-read it so I could at least attempt to make sense on camera with Zemeckis. So while I've got the story in front of me, I thought I'd share.

A story of 2 sisters, together, always
Dec. 7, 1997

Side by side the two sisters walked into the Park-N-Shop on Wilkinson Boulevard on a warm winter day in 1962.

Charles Reid owned the grocery store. He knew what the women wanted. It scared him half to death.

Daisy and Violet Hilton had troweled on the makeup. Red toenails poked out from their sandals. Their hair was dirty and their clothes looked like they had been slept in.

They wanted Charles Reid to give them a job.

They would both work, they said, but Reid would only have to pay for one.

Because of their situation.

They were fused at the hip.

Siamese twins.

They had been in the Park-N-Shop a couple of times that week, buying groceries, and the day before they had called Reid and asked if they could come in and talk to him.

At the time Reid didn't know about the history of Daisy and Violet Hilton.

How they were displayed in freak shows before they were old enough for school.

How they became vaudeville performers who once made thousands of dollars a week - nearly all of it snatched away by their managers.

How their show business career had faded, then crumbled just a few weeks before when their manager stranded them in Monroe, broke and desperate.

Reid didn't know any of that. All he could see was the need in their eyes.

After they called that day, he prayed that night.

Lord, I know you want me to do something with these people. What in the world would I do with them?

What he did was this: He gave them a job. (He paid them both.) He found them a house and showed them a church.

And the Hilton twins quietly spent the rest of their lives in Charlotte, no one but a few friends and co-workers ever knowing that Siamese twins lived in town.

Now, nearly 30 years after their deaths, the Hilton twins are stars again. A new Broadway musical called "Side Show" is based on the Hiltons' show-business careers.

But what the Broadway show doesn't tell is the story of the Hiltons' lives in Charlotte.

The only normal lives they ever had.

*

Stranded in North Carolina

As they faced you, Violet Hilton was on the left, Daisy on the right. Violet's left hip joined Daisy's right at a 45-degree angle; they moved in a permanent V, like a flock of geese.

They didn't share any organs, but their blood flowed through both bodies. Some people say they shared each other's thoughts. At the very least, they shared instincts.

"They never said Let's go over yonder' or anything like that, " says Charles Reid, who is now 76. "They just got up and started walking."

They were barely scraping out a living as 1961 bled into '62. They had given up show business once before, to run a snack bar in Miami, but the snack bar folded and they ended up back on the road.

They were over 50 years old when they swung through North Carolina in January 1962 to promote the horror movie "Freaks." The Hiltons had appeared in "Freaks" 30 years before, and now it was making a run through the drive-ins.

How they ended up in Monroe isn't clear - a lot about the Hiltons' lives isn't clear - but what is clear is that their manager, who had traveled with them, suddenly left them behind.

They stayed in a Monroe hotel for a couple of weeks, trying to find work. The hotel bill mounted. Finally some businesspeople raised enough money to send the Hiltons to Charlotte. Everybody figured they could blend in better in the city.

Daisy and Violet rented a place at Tanzy's Trailer Park on Wilkinson Boulevard. Soon after, they asked Charles Reid for a job.

They offered to scrub floors, but Reid couldn't imagine what his customers would do if they saw that. He had just one job he thought they could easily do together.

The Park-N-Shop had a long produce section at the back of the store. At the end of the section, there were two counters where people lined up to have their produce weighed and priced.

The two counters ran parallel, but it was easy enough to turn them into a V.

Reid had a couple of conditions. They had to get rid of the makeup and the long nails and the whole show-biz look. And their hair had to be the same color - Violet's was her natural brunet, but Daisy had dyed hers red.

Reid's wife, Larue, took the Hiltons to get their hair fixed and buy some new clothes. The twins bought three pair of skirts they could alter at home, ripping the seams apart and sewing two skirts into one.

Reid gave them two red-and-white checked shirts, just like everyone else at Park-N-Shop wore.

The next Monday they came to work. For the next seven years they worked the same shift, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Most of the people who came through the produce lines never knew their apples and potatoes were being weighed by Siamese twins.

*

Making a life in Charlotte

After a few months in Charlotte they asked Reid for another favor - help in finding a house.

Reid knew just the place. His church, Purcell United Methodist over on Weyland Avenue, had bought several pieces of land around the church to turn into parking lots. They didn't need all the land right then, and a couple of the lots still had houses on them. After getting the OK from the church elders, the Hiltons moved into a house kitty-corner from the church.

"It had two bedrooms, " Reid says, "but of course they only needed one."

They also needed furniture. Reid made a call to Archie Moore, who ran Clinton's Furniture Co. on Brevard Street uptown. He got them a couch and a bed and a dinette set.

They got a dog, a mixed breed with lots of Lab in him. Leo Wingate used to buy rubber rats - two dozen at a time - for the dog to chew on.

Wingate was a bread salesman for Merita who made deliveries to the Park-N-Shop and got to be friends with the Hiltons. Sometimes he'd be on his route and see them walking to work and pull over to give them a ride. They were tiny - 4 feet 10, about 90 pounds apiece - and they could slip in and out of a car just as easy as you please.

Wingate also went to Purcell United Methodist, where the twins attended from time to time. The church had a do-good box, where they collected money for charity projects, and the twins always put money in the do-good box on top of their regular tithe.

When they went to Sunday school they attended the men's class. Wingate thinks they were more comfortable around men, that women asked too many questions. The Rev. Ernest Fitzgerald, their pastor from 1962 to 1964, figures it was because the men's class was on ground level and the women's was down in the basement.

Either way, they kept to themselves.

"Daisy's the one that did most of the talking, " Wingate says. "The other one didn't have anything to say, except once in a while Daisy would be talking about somewhere she had been, and Violet would poke her in the ribs and say, I was there too!' "

They would chat with customers at the Park-N-Shop, but they refused to do interviews or have their picture taken for the paper. An Illinois doctor known as an expert on Siamese twins came to Charlotte in 1967 to talk to the Hiltons. They turned him down.

Daisy and Violet hated doctors.

"Every doctor that put their hands on them, the first thing they wanted to do was cut them apart, " Reid says. "They could have been separated, even back then. But they didn't want to.

"They said to me, Mr. Reid, we've been together our whole life. We don't ever want to be apart.' "

*

Taken by the Hong Kong flu

And so they lived, never making a fuss, until 1968 bled into '69. Then Violet caught the Hong Kong flu. And just as Violet got better, Daisy caught it.

They were gone from work for a couple of weeks. The Reids called every day to check on them. If Daisy and Violet didn't want to be bothered, they would take the phone off the hook.

But one day the phone rang and rang and nobody answered.

Reid waited until the next morning - Jan. 4, 1969 - and called every hour. Still no answer. So he and his wife drove to the little house across from the church. They banged on the door and nobody came. They called the police.

An officer came and asked Reid what he wanted to do. Reid asked the policeman to pry open the door.

The rooms in the house on Weyland Avenue were connected by a little hallway in the middle of the house. The house was heated through a grate in the hallway floor.

Daisy and Violet lay dead on the grate.

Reid figures they were trying to stay warm as the Hong Kong flu took them away.

Their death certificates estimated they were 60 years old.

There were 23 flower arrangements at the funeral at Hankins and Whittington funeral home on South Boulevard. The crowd was mostly friends and co-workers; Charles Reid saw only one family he didn't recognize.

They were buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery off Freedom Drive. "It was just like an ordinary funeral, " Leo Wingate says, "except for there being two in one casket and all."

The Hiltons share a tombstone with a Vietnam vet named Troy Thompson, and they have a simple marker in the ground:

Daisy and Violet Hilton

1908-1969

"Beloved Siamese Twins"

It was Charles Reid's job to clean out the house on Weyland Avenue.

The only thing out of the ordinary was a dresser, four or five drawers, and every drawer filled with pocketbooks. And every pocketbook had three or four dollars inside.

"The only thing I can figure, " Charles Reid says, "is that they took lots of taxicabs, and they could just grab a pocketbook on the way out and know there was cab fare in it."

Reid found a bunch of photos and newspaper clippings from the Hiltons' show-biz days. But they were all stowed away. None of their movie posters on the walls. None of their publicity photos on the dressers.

Just a normal little house where two sisters lived out their lives together.

Penn State and the infinite sadness 10 Nov 2011 8:17 AM (13 years ago)

This story from Penn State is a blood diamond. So many facets, so many different angles, all of them uncomfortable to think about.

There's the hold that big-time sports has on our culture. I say this as a fan: The games matter far too much to far too many. Coaches and stars are our secular gods. Nobody in the state of Pennsylvania was as loved or as powerful as Joe Paterno.

There's the idea of sins of omission. Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant coach now charged with molesting boys, is the worst villain here. But several people, including Paterno, could have done more to stop him, and didn't.

There's the part that's personal. Sportswriter Joe Posnanski, one of my best friends, has been at Penn State for the last few months, writing a book on Paterno. Now the work ahead of him is so different than he, or anyone else, could have imagined. (He tweeted this from the scene Wednesday night: "I saw a girl crying tonight. When I asked why she said: 'Because everybody lost.'")

But the longer I roll it around, the more this story keeps circling back to one thing: The impulse to protect institutions, even at the expense of people.

Our nature is to build grand things, and to be drawn to them. Giant banks hold our money, stadiums hold our passion, vast churches hold our mysteries. Part of life is the search for something bigger than ourselves, someplace where we fit. When we find that place -- a job, a team, a school -- we often defend it beyond all reason.

Now imagine if you had built one of those institutions. That's what Joe Paterno did at Penn State. He started as an assistant coach there in 1950 before becoming head coach in 1966. That's 61 years in one place, 45 years as the head man, creating a program known for both high academic standards and wins on the field. For decades, Penn State was the model of what college sports could do for its players and for a campus. Paterno did that.

It's easy to imagine that he would refuse to let anything ruin it.

We might never know what was in Paterno's mind, or the minds of all the other people who had information that Jerry Sandusky had molested a young boy in the locker-room showers. But two facts are daggers to their credibility. Not one of those adults called 911. And not one tried to find out who that boy was, and how to help him.

So often, this is where corruption starts. One mistake. One failure to follow up. One moment of fear that finding the whole truth, and telling it, would destroy this beautiful structure that so many believe in.

Good people do regrettable things all the time. You can rationalize almost anything when you believe there's something more important to protect. This is how police departments rot from the inside, and churches collapse, and banks end up bankrupt.

The thing is, those misguided people trying to save an institution end up being the ones who wreck it.

What if somebody had turned in Jerry Sandusky right away? It would've been a brief, ugly story with a short shelf life. But now Paterno is gone, and the university president has been fired, and people have to wonder what else Penn State might have covered up. Everything that took so long to build is wobbling at the beams.

And none of that is the worst of it.

The worst is this: All the sadness about Paterno, about Penn State, about all the students and alumni and fans who love the school, pales against the sadness of that 10-year-old boy in the shower. Not to mention all the other boys who were victims after the adults at Penn State knew what they knew, and did not do enough.

The story is not over. It will grow and change and we will see angles we hadn't thought of. But it seems to me we can come to one conclusion. No institution is worth what happened to those boys.

The cloth of memories 31 Oct 2011 9:24 AM (13 years ago)

The cotton’s coming in.

I saw it the other day driving up I-85, in the countryside around Kannapolis and Salisbury. We’re a top-10 cotton-producing state – nearly a million bales last year – but most of the farms are way out East. Around here you mostly see little patches off the side of the road, looking like snowfields.

This area has such a tangled history with thread and string and yarn. Our towns and cities grew because of the cotton mills – shoot, Kannapolis was created from scratch as a mill town. Hundreds of thousands of Carolinians made a living in the mills. Then synthetic fibers took out a lot of the farmers. Later on, most of the textile companies went off overseas. We got left with beautiful old brick buildings with broken windows.

To so many families around here, cotton was a personal thing. They got the lint in their hair and the dust in their lungs. They dried themselves with Carolina towels and clothed themselves in Carolina denim. As the mills died out, so did the idea that you could get on with one company and work there the rest of your life. People still love the mills, and hate them, often both at the same time.

Cotton was personal in my family, too.

My mom and dad grew up in Georgia as sharecroppers. Both their families picked cotton in fields other people owned. My mom had to quit school in fourth grade and my dad in sixth. They spent every dry day in the fields. They dragged the heavy sacks of cotton down the rows. They picked until dark.

To this day, when we drive by a cotton field, my mama turns her head away.

But my folks climbed the ladder like so many others. They made it off the cotton field and into factory work. My dad went out on his own as a carpenter. We have always had those possibilities in this country for people who work with their hands. You could make your way through ever-better blue-collar jobs. You could set things up so your children wouldn’t have to work so hard.

That progression is so much different now.

It’s a combination of the economy and evolution. The world is evolving toward more high-tech jobs – jobs that require skill in math, science, computers, electronics. At the same time, our sagging economy is hitting blue-collar workers hardest. Jobs have been washed out from under them like sand around a piling.

A cotton field is a beautiful sight on an October drive. These days, it’s good to see a crop that will help a farmer put food on the table. And cotton belongs here, as part of our history. They even have machines to strip the fields now.

But I still get a little shudder when I look at a cotton field. It’s part of my inheritance.

Cotton is deceptive. It looks like you can just pluck the bolls like flowers. But the plants are low, and cotton hulls are as sharp as thorns. My folks, like so many others who picked cotton by hand, ended up with torn-up hands and bent-over backs.

It was awful work. The only thing worse would have been not having it.

Music Wednesday: The Black Keys 26 Oct 2011 7:44 AM (14 years ago)

Here's a new song by one of my favorite bands, the Black Keys. This dude is not the band's real lead singer. But I think he should be EVERY band's lead singer.




So what are y'all listening to? Send links, reviews, etc.

A candidate for Worst Movie Ever? 24 Oct 2011 7:01 AM (14 years ago)

If you've watched the NFL or the baseball playoffs lately, you've seen the trailer for this new Adam Sandler movie called "Jack and Jill." If you haven't, stop for a second and watch. You really need to see this.



Let's start with the possibility that any movie could be a five-star movie, but various aspects of the movie could cause it to lose stars. So, based on the trailer:

-- It's an Adam Sandler movie. (Minus 1 star.)

-- It's an Adam Sandler movie where he dresses in drag to play his own twin sister. (Minus 3 stars.)

-- It's an Adam Sandler movie where he dresses in drag to play his own twin sister, and Al Pacino (playing himself) has the hots for the twin sister. (Minus 37 stars, and Pacino has to give back his Oscar.)

Somehow poor sweet Katie Holmes ends up in the middle of it all. We can only assume that Tom Cruise was at home jumping around on the couches, and she said yes just to get away for a few weeks.

Now... it's possible that the rest of the movie could be full of uproarious gags and tender reflections on the duality of the human spirit. But you'd think that if they had any of that, they would have put some in the trailer. Maybe in place of the "Twister with your sister" line.

The truth is, this trailer leaves me a little giddy. Because we might have a new candidate for Worst Movie of All Time.

There are lots of bad movies out there, of course. But to make a run at Worst Movie of All Time, you have to be special. B-movies don't count. Some of them are good, some are terrible*, but they're playing under different rules -- you can't count Arena League records in the NFL.

*I worked at a drive-in theater in high school and a couple of summers in college... we specialized in three types of movies: first-run movies after the indoor theaters got tired of them; X-rated movies with all the X-rated parts cut out; and random B-movies. Having seen hundreds of B-movies, I can state without a doubt that the best bad movie of all time is "Gymkata." A spy is sent to a distant country to run through the woods in a game to the death. His special survival skill? Gymnastics. Which comes in handy when he arrives in a village of crazed killers -- and there, in the middle of the town square, is a pommel horse. All I can say about this clip is, well, you're welcome.



So, to have a shot at Worst Movie of All Time, you have to have the money and stars to make a good movie; you have to be trying to make a good movie; and you have to fail totally, utterly, miserably.

About 20 years ago, my friend Matt Brunson had a couple of extra passes for a screening. So I went with Matt and our buddy Joe Posnanski to see a comedy called "Hudson Hawk." It starred Bruce Willis (coming off the first two "Die Hard" movies), Danny Aiello (so good in "Moonstruck" and "Do the Right Thing") and Andie MacDowell (not long after "Sex, Lies & Videotape"). Willis and Aiello were master burglars, MacDowell the love interest... we figured it had a chance to be good.

Instead, for the next two hours, we watched a trainwreck on the screen. What was this movie not? Let me count the ways: Not funny, not smart, not clever, not well-acted, not interesting, not compelling, did I mention not funny? The main thing I remember, 20 years down the road, is that the villainous mobsters were called the Mario Brothers. Like the video games. I had forgotten, until I read the Wikipedia entry, that the other bad guys (there were lots of bad guys) were named for candy bars. Here's part of the plot synopsis:

Kit Kat and Butterfinger take Anna to the castle. Tommy trips Snickers, causing his bomb launcher to shoot a bomb onto his head. Hudson and Tommy escape while Snickers and Almond Joy are killed when the bomb goes off.

Sorry for the spoilers.

Afterward we stood outside in the parking lot, and we could barely talk about it -- it was like trying to review somebody belching the national anthem. To this day no bad movie I've seen has topped it, by which I mean, bottomed it.

But "Jack and Jill" has real potential. There's a moment in the trailer when you see Adam Sandler, in drag, wearing a trenchcoat. I'm guessing, at some point, the trenchcoat comes off. And when it does, Worst Movie of All Time might be in play.

Wednesday tunes -- a little Zeppelin, a little Alabama 19 Oct 2011 10:42 AM (14 years ago)

I'm a little bummed out that the Civil Wars show scheduled for tonight got postponed... so I went looking for some music. Maybe I'll just post a couple of things up here every Wednesday. I'm always running across new stuff.

Neither of these clips are new, exactly -- they're old tunes done in new ways. First up is Michael Winslow, who you might remember as Sound Effects Guy from the "Police Academy" movies and various commercials during the '80s and '90s. I have no idea what he's been up to, but apparently it involves learning the Led Zeppelin catalog. This is pretty amazing.



(Thanks to kottke.org for putting this out there.)

This other YouTube clip isn't much of a video at all -- it was shot from so far away you can barely see the musicians. But the audio is enough. Here's Ryan Adams (formerly of the great N.C. band Whiskeytown) and Jason Isbell (formerly of the Drive-By Truckers) covering Alabama's "Love in the First Degree." If you look closely enough, you can see Adams sporting a Buck Owens guitar.



So what are y'all listening to these days?

A day at the fair 17 Oct 2011 6:17 AM (14 years ago)

We went to the N.C. State Fair on Saturday, along with (and this is an unofficial crowd estimate) 42 million other people. The state fair is one of the great sensory feasts in all of America -- so much to see, hear, smell, taste and touch. Here are a few of the sights -- and a couple of little stories I imagined along the way.

It's a blast to just check out the artwork on the rides... they pay great attention to detail on the art (I hope they pay as much attention to making sure the rides don't fling people halfway to Durham). If we knew aliens would be this comely, I think we'd all welcome our new alien overlords.

Gilding the Lily Dept.: They had deep-fried Oreos, deep-fried Snickers, deep-fried Twinkies, deep-fried cheesecake, deep-fried butter, deep-fried Kool-Aid... which, it turns out, is just Kool-Aid mixed into funnel-cake batter. We tried the deep-fried Reese's Cups. I'm ashamed to say, they were really good.

We found the Great Pumpkin.


"Do not feed your fingers to the donkeys" is such an odd way to say "Don't stick your fingers through the donkey cage, dunce." Maybe somebody was inspired by the first-ever "Saturday Night Live" sketch.



It goes without saying that "Toggenburg Goats" would be a great name for a rock band.



What a downer -- to get all the way to the state fair and find out you're only the second-best meat goat.



We ended up outside one of the livestock buildings as they brought lambs in and out. I'm not sure how you get a coat that shiny. Fried Kool-Aid, maybe.



The crab shrimp were better than I expected -- even though you had to devein them AND crack the claws.


My wife tried to cleanse her palate with vegetables. Yeah, those were fried too.

"The World's Largest Gummi Bear sat still and silent. Those puny ropes would never hold it. It waited for the right time. And then it would punish all those people who ate all his little chewy friends..."


"Angie knew her child was... different. He insisted on that Batman costume. And he always rode upside-down in the stroller. But he was a happy boy, as long as she caught him enough mosquitoes to eat."

Observer, Sovacool 16 Sep 2011 7:51 AM (14 years ago)

Joe Sovacool looked like Jesus and talked like jazz. I had no idea how old he was. Maybe 42, maybe 62. All I knew was that he was the coolest guy in the room. Our newsroom.

Thousands of you heard his voice over the years. If you called the paper looking for somebody, or just to rant at the state of the world, Joe was more often than not the guy who picked up the phone. Charlotte Observer, Sovacool. Or just Observer, Sovacool. We joked that thousands of years from now, when robots ran the earth, Joe would still be there at his desk, soothing the angry robot callers in his soft and low late-night-DJ voice.

Observer, Sovacool.

Joe went and died on us Thursday. (His sister posted the news on Facebook, and I finally learned -- Joseph William Sovacool was 53.) He had been battling lung cancer for a couple of years and then the tumors spread to his brain. He was a little stick of a guy even before he got sick, and the cancer thinned him even more. He lost his Jesus hair. He had trouble with his balance. But he kept working up until a few weeks ago.

Sometimes the place you work becomes home. I'd see Joe outside the office now and then, usually at Thomas Street Tavern, where he'd drink a beer and read a book at the corner of the bar. I know the paper wasn't where he slept. But in my mind, it was always where he lived.

In every office there are one or two people who keep the whole operation from veering into the ditch. They are never the highest-paid people. For years Joe was in charge of the clerks who answered phones, ordered supplies, took obits from funeral homes, kept the copiers running, doled out the mail, and did a hundred other things to make our office go. If you were a panicked reporter in the field (and I've often been a panicked reporter in the field), when you heard Joe's voice on the phone you knew things would be all right. He'd find the editor who had run off to the john. He'd dig out the fax that was buried in the stack. He'd take care of you.

We bonded over Steely Dan. Joe was one of those fans who had heard the Japanese bootleg and the seventh alternate take of the album track. I covered one of their concerts when I was music writer in the mid-90s, and after that he'd send YouTube videos or blog posts he'd run across on the Web. To this day I can't listen to the Dan without hearing Joe talk about them in his hipster patter, man those cats were so tight that night, they laid it out and brought it all the way back...

We've had a lot of heartbreak in our newsroom these last couple of years. Like most companies in this economy, we've let go a lot of good people, and others have let go of us. Every one of those people was a big part of the paper. But no one else was as much a part of our place as Joe. His desk was right there as you walked in the newsroom, and it was so odd these last few weeks to walk in and not see him there. I don't know what it's going to feel like now. I'd just love to hear that voice one more time.

Observer, Sovacool.

Two words. One and the same.




Guest book:   Post thoughts, condolences

A few extras for Saturday's 9/11 column 10 Sep 2011 5:50 AM (14 years ago)

Here's some links and such related to Flight 93:

Reader Tim Collie points out that Sandy Bradshaw, a flight attendant from Greensboro, died on Flight 93. Here's a little more about her.

Frank and Linda Guerra, the subjects of my column this morning, work with a nonprofit called 93 Cents for Flight 93. It's raising money for the permanent memorial that opens in Shanksville today, and it also brings together young kids and senior citizens to talk about Flight 93 and 9/11.

Finally, a quick travel note.

Because this trip is taking me to several different places -- Washington, Shanksville, New York -- I'm driving instead of flying. Which means that after I left Shanksville on Friday, I needed to drive to my hotel in Lower Manhattan.

I'm sure there are places in Jersey where I could've left my car for three days and taken the train into the city. But I didn't get my act together enough to figure that out... plus I sort of liked the challenge of driving in New York City.

I didn't have a GPS. My cell phone mapped out the route, but it didn't follow along like a GPS does; I had to punch a button to figure out where to turn next. Just as I got into the Holland Tunnel, I got the low-battery warning on my cell. And within two minutes after coming out of the tunnel, I had taken a wrong turn.

Pretty soon I had no idea where I was. The optimist part of me said: It's OK, Manhattan is an island, you can't really get THAT lost. The pessimist said: Dude, you are so screwed.

It turns out that, as far as the biggest city in America goes, traffic on Friday night is not that bad. After 15 minutes of rambling around I found a place to pull over and get my bearings. (For the NYC-savvy among you, I was trying to get to the Battery Park area and ended up going the wrong way on West Boulevard.) The phone battery was way down in the red zone now, but at least I had a new route. I got onto Broadway, curved around toward the street I needed... and didn't see a street sign.

My new rule of New York driving: If you come up on a street, and it doesn't have a sign, that's where you should turn.

Instead I hesitated, then kept going straight. Missing your turn in Lower Manhattan is not just a matter of circling the block. I think I made 11 turns before I finally got back to the street with no sign, turned left... and there was my hotel.

I looked down as I pulled in and my phone had just died.

To answer your questions: I did stop and ask a cop. He said "Hmm, I think your street is over that way," pointing directly behind me.

And I probably don't need to drive in Manhattan again. Although, I have to say, by the time I got there I felt a little like Indiana Jones.

Some extras for today's 9/11 story 9 Sep 2011 5:21 AM (14 years ago)

(Photo: fragments of the wreckage from Flight 93, part of the 9/11 exhibit at the National Museum of American History)

As always, any one piece I write is only a small part of the story, and that's never been more true than this week. My first column on this 9/11 journey came out this morning. Here are a few little extras to fill out the frame.

Here's the 9/11 collection at the National Museum of American History. This includes items that aren't part of the exhibit I saw Thursday. One thing I didn't mention: The artifacts in the exhibit aren't behind glass -- they're simply set down on tables, out in the open. You can't touch them. But somehow the lack of barriers makes the exhibit more intimate.

For another take on objects from 9/11, here's a New York Times slideshow on things people kept from the World Trade Center wreckage.

And here's one more photo I took at the museum. People who went through the exhibit were able to write a note about what they thought and post it on a bulletin board.

Sorry for the blurry photo. Here's what it says above the heart: "I will pray 4 these families even though I am very young I understand what happened. I hope you continue to do this to help people understand what happened now. I'M SO SORRY."

A 9/11 journey 7 Sep 2011 5:47 AM (14 years ago)

I'm heading out on the road this morning to tell some stories on the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11. Maybe you can help.

Our plan is for me to write for Friday's paper from Washington, D.C., where terrorists attacked the Pentagon; for Saturday from Shanksville, Pa., where Flight 93 crashed in a field after passengers fought the hijackers; and for Sunday and Monday from New York, where at the World Trade Center site, they are rebuilding.

If you know of 9/11-related things I should see in those cities, or people I should meet, drop me a line in the comments or email ttomlinson@charlotteobserver.com. (You'll get an automated reply that says I'm out of the office, but I can still read your emails.)

I'm looking for people with connections to both Sept. 11 and North Carolina, especially the Charlotte area.

And if there's anything 9/11-related along the way that I need to see or do, let me know. I hope to post here from time to time in between the bigger stories. Would love to hear any thoughts or ideas... even if it's just what you're thinking about now, 10 years down the road.