COLUMNS

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Rob Hardy: Darwin and earthworms

Charles Darwin’s name is so firmly linked with evolution that it is often forgotten that he was interested in specifics of biology. For instance, while he was fretting for 17 years over whether to publish about evolution, he was busy investigating barnacles. He was to publish an authoritative work on them. He also wrote about the geology he had seen on his travels in the “Beagle,” and did experiments on whether eggs or seeds could travel the oceans to get to new lands. He was constantly busy on other projects, constantly enquiring and doing his own research simply because he had an exemplary curiosity.

Betty Stone: Veterans’ Day

When I moved to Columbus from Washington, D.C., I was in Miss Emily Potts’s fifth-grade class at Franklin Academy. In Washington people had teased me about my “southern drawl.” In Mississippi they called me a “d---- yankee.” My defense was to try to talk like whoever was talking to me. (I have even caught myself lisping back at someone who lisped!)

Adele Elliott: Fear of flying swine

Once upon a time, when the world was a simpler place, there were only four seasons. In those days, it was easy to understand spring and summer, winter and autumn. The seasons were sort of color-coded and clearly-themed. Back-to-school ads and photographic calendars were always embellished with falling leaves in tones of gold and rust and fiery reds. No matter where you lived, winter meant Currier and Ives-inspired snow scenes.

Starkville’s Festival of Trees opens with gala Thursday

The second annual Festival of Trees, benefiting United Way of North Central Mississippi, opens Thursday with a Holiday Party and Auction in the Palmeiro Center on Mississippi State University’s campus. Last year, more than $20,000 was raised during this multi-event festival. For 2009, a new venue, more events, and increased participation promise an even better year.

Anne Freeze: Friends, food and music

As I emptied my satchel Monday, I wondered how many of my friends attend symposiums (such an educated word) and return with: homemade peppered jerky, individually-packaged cookies from famed Momofuku Restaurant in New York City, a blueberry muffin-shaped kitchen timer, Martha White blueberry muffin mix, harmonicas from the National Peanut Board and the remains of a dark chocolate, grilled jalapeno and salty peanut candy bar? (I could eat another one right now if I had one).

Adele Elliott: Death by poverty

These days it seems that our world is filled with pain. Psychic pain is intangible and private. Who can really understand the agonizing loss of someone dearly loved? American sons and daughters are suffering, bloodily, in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, we do not need to look across the globe to find hearts shattered in ways that will never heal. (Where is Kaila Morris?)

Roger Truesdale: A festival kind of guy

This past weekend made six for six Great Delta Bear Affairs in Rolling Fork, a festival held to commemorate President Teddy Roosevelt’s bear hunting trip to the south Delta.

Adele Elliott: Finally, autumn

It seemed that the season would never change. The city tried to hurry summer along by decorating downtown with our traditional fall display of scarecrows resting on bales of hay. I’m sure those straw men were grateful for the floppy fedoras protecting them from the brutal sun.

Betty Stone: A memory from MSCW

The recent tribute to Disney artist Josh Meador reminds me of an occasion which I probably ought to recount for posterity, assuming posterity is remotely interested. Change is in the air with the possibility of a new name for Mississippi University for Women, so maybe it is time to tell this bit of history — or her story, as some would say. I am not totally proud of it, however.

Rob Hardy: Pat Tillman’s true story told

Everyone who has followed current events even slightly over the past five years knows that football hero and soldier Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan, and that the military had trouble telling the truth about his death from rifle fire by his own platoon. Tillman had a remarkable life for one who died at age 27, and in “Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman” (Doubleday), Jon Krakauer has provided the biography that Tillman deserves, vivid and compelling.

Rob Hardy: Inside the mind of a dog

Scientifically, we might know a lot more about rats than we do about dogs. There are some experimental labs that have dogs as subjects, but lab rats get a lot of scientific attention. Dogs get a lot of domestic attention, but scientific study of dogs, and the ways they get along with humans and with other dogs, has not been a high concern.

Anne Freeze: Seafood is simple

We love seafood and could eat it every day if we had access. Access is the obstacle in a land-locked town, especially a small town. Even a moderate-sized town such as Athens, Ga., with 150,000, doesn’t have a seafood shop. There, we depended on our local organic grocery store, Earthfare, which at least had several deliveries a week of some of the basic fish, like wild-caught salmon or tuna. Plus, they also sold only dry-pack shrimp and scallops.

Roger Truesdale: For Cousin Tuffy and his sidekick, Victor

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine gave me a signed copy of Memphis historian Ron Hall’s latest book, “Sputnik, Masked Men, and Midgets: The Early Days of Memphis Wrestling.”

Roger Truesdale: For Cousin Tuffy and his sidekick, Victor

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine gave me a signed copy of Memphis historian Ron Hall’s latest book, “Sputnik, Masked Men, and Midgets: The Early Days of Memphis Wrestling.”

Adele Elliott: Ode

“Mississippi is like this, a scorched dark country where silence solidifies like clay in a kiln.” Kendall Dunkelberg These days, poems swirl around me. They are caught up in the wind, whipping around my ears and ankles. I hear them whispering in the walls and scampering, like squirrels, across the roof. Recording them, however, is as difficult as capturing clouds.

Betty Stone: From Columbus to Disney’s studios

I don’t remember when I first heard his name. I moved to Columbus when I was 9 years old, so it was well after that. I had practically cut my teeth on the films “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Pinocchio” and “Bambi,” but I had really given no thought to the people who animated them — literally gave them life. For me they were just characters, but as real as I was, created, I guess, by God.

Adele Elliott: Invisible in daylight

Elizabeth Smart is back in the news. You will remember her as the fragile blonde teen, stolen from her bed in 2002 and held captive for nine months. Today she is a composed and articulate 21-year-old testifying against her kidnapper.

Anne Freeze: Becoming a saucier at home

Terry and I had a sort of date night at home recently. It had been a busy week, and we got to spend all of a Saturday together, beginning at the Hitching Lot and ending with steaks grilling on the hibachi outside. I made some wonderful, crispy oven potatoes from “Cooks Illustrated” and broccoli with hollandaise sauce.

Rob Hardy: Comics and mathematics

Stand back, Spiderman. Back off, Batman. Comic books have a new hero with unexpected powers, and he isn’t even imaginary. He’s Bertrand Arthur William, the Third Earl Russell. To most Americans, Bertrand Russell is notorious for being an outspoken atheist long before the current crop of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and others.

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