The Emperor With No Clothes is lumbering at his full speed toward the highest office in the free world, pulling behind him to help guard the hens the largest collection of miscreants, misogynists and thieves since Alcatraz closed shop.
She called it her "Sleeping Beauty Castle," and that name is apt. If you saw this storybook chateau in the U.S., you'd figure Disney built it. You'd drive a thousand miles to look at it.
Last week the temperatures dropped, the sedum in the front yard turned blush pink, SEC teams took the field, an owl hooted, and it was safe to go on the porch again. Fall is always worth the wait.
The apex of my 40-year journalism career was a telephone interview, strange to say. I combed my curls and dressed up in my best corduroy skirt and blue sweater for that phone chat, wanting to look pretty because of the person on the other end of the line.
I've been three times to the Ernest Hemingway house in Key West, Florida, hoping with each visit to find some secret to writing short, declarative sentences that resonate with the reading public and sell millions of books.
It was a story in USA Today with a big, inky headline that caught my eye: "OVERSEAS WARNINGS ABOUT TRAVEL TO USA COULD HURT TOURISM."
It's almost like one of those "Where's Waldo?" books, when you find the man in the funny cap on every page in every location in every situation.
I'm scheduled this month to show up at a writer's fair in Mississippi's Jackson, a town where I've only ever distinguished myself by not being hired by the local newspaper, being evicted from an apartment for parking a rotten sailboat in the side yard and working briefly for United Press International after that news organization stopped issuing regular paychecks.
Most of us, if we are lucky, have one place in our lives we have seen that exceeds all expectations, that we keep in our minds like an escape hatch from the dreary routine of daily existence or failed dreams.
As soon as the heat dropped below 90 degrees one recent late afternoon -- about 7 o'clock, really -- I moved the CD player to the front porch, adjusted the fan just so and put my feet up on a coffee table. I played "Sunday Morning Coming Down" and "The Pilgrim" and "The Captive."
A Wellesley College English professor, Katharine Lee Bates, made a journey by train to Colorado Springs in 1893 and was so inspired by the sights that she wrote a poem.
I wonder if the governors of Mississippi and North Carolina and other states where gay, lesbian and transgender citizens have been targeted, usually in the name of religion, have any idea that the taxpayers they are maligning have been through many other battles. And survived.
President and Mrs. Obama reportedly are about to join a club in which I'm glad to no longer hold membership: They are about to become renters.
I like to go back to Metro Atlanta often enough to remember why I left. Atlanta, of course, is now one hellishly dense suburb that stretches from Chattanooga to Columbus with a tightly stitched tapestry of chain crap and traffic snarls in between. I creep along and remember.
There are still a lot of overgrown Katrina lots on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, green ghosts left from a decade ago when the driveways led to houses and the concrete slabs held homes.
The civil-rights movement wasn't just "Rosa sat down, Martin stood up and the white folks came down to save the day," the photographer Matt Herron quips.
When I was a kid in knee socks held up with rubber bands from the produce aisle, my fourth-grade teacher scribbled a note on my report card. Rheta has a flair for drama.
When I moved to Monroeville, Alabama, in 1975, it was because of Bill Stewart, not Nelle Harper Lee. Stewart was the publisher of The Monroe Journal, an excellent weekly run by Bill Stewart's son, Steve, and his daughter-in-law, Patrice.
The heft of the gold felt good in the palm. A smooth, super-size coin was passed from person to person. It was the Pulitzer Prize. A real one.
It is Twelfth Night. Beneath a balcony in the French Quarter, we listen as dignitaries high above welcome Joan of Arc and the start of Carnival season.
Search articles back to February 2009 with the form above.
1. Business Moves with Mary: The Veranda restaurant closed permanently BUSINESS
2. Southsiders request more from CPD after shootings COLUMBUS & LOWNDES COUNTY
3. Mississippi State falls to LSU in first game of SEC women's basketball tournament COLLEGE SPORTS
4. Columbus ends six-foot social distancing mandate in businesses, keeps masks in place COLUMBUS & LOWNDES COUNTY
5. One killed, another injured in Pilcher Street shooting STARKVILLE & OKTIBBEHA COUNTY