With elections just around the corner, I have a few questions I'd like answered before I step into the booth and cast my electronic ballot. While a few of my queries are directed at specific candidates, most are generic in nature, more along the lines of food for thought with a dash of advice thrown in just for good measure...

It's been a good week to be a Democrat. After six years of getting slapped around by the neo-cons, the xenophobes, the war hawks and the Rapture Right, the pendulum has begun to swing back in our favor. Maybe, just maybe, it's our turn. And to think we owe it all to that little rosy-cheeked Republican from Florida. All together now, "Hang down your head, Mark… Foley....

Growing up in Burlington I had one goal in life - to get the hell out of Burlington. Looking around, it occurred to me that there were two routes out of Dodge: learning to play a musical instrument, getting an education, or some combination of the two...

Nobody wants to hear about your problems, goes the old saw, so I'll shy away from what's really on my mind. Oh, I could sit here and tell a tale of despair, of lives once filled with promise and a home filled with joy, that would leave 'em crying in the aisles, but it wouldn't change anything...

To the handful of '60s holdouts still fighting the Revolution, I bring bad news: It's over. Not that it hasn't been over since Nixon resigned, but now it's really over. The last representative of the revolutionary spirit, the icon who warned us that a hard rain's gonna fall, has sold out. Alas, Bob Dylan is appearing in a TV commercial...

One of the things I learned early on in the column-writing game is to pick your battles carefully. Of the luxuries a columnist has, among the most cherished is that you don't have to weigh in on every single issue. You choose the ones about which you have strong opinions, some knowledge and/or a great deal of passion and let 'er rip, leaving the rest of the world's problems for the next guy. In short, you play to your strengths...

The Duh administration reached a new low last week. Even for a bunch of bottom-feeders accustomed to wallowing in slime, this latest ploy wreaks of gutter detritus...

What happened? What in the wide ding-dong world of sports has happened? How could my well-ordered universe collapse like this? Last week at this time I'm celebrating, on the verge of a full-blown gloat; now I'm awaiting hockey season...

Hospitals are nice places to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. For the past week, though, Wesley Long has become my wife Janet's home and my home away from home. What started out as a three-day stay for a routine procedure is now into its second week, with no firm departure date yet on the horizon. So Gilligan's Island-esque has it become that I'm starting to call her "Lovie" and one of the male nurses "Little Buddy...

I am afraid I'm becoming a socialist. It's like becoming a junkie; you don't start out to become one, it just sort of happens. I thought I'd kicked the habit - of socialism, not heroin - years ago, some time after the countercultural revolution of the '60s degenerated into the decadent self-absorption of the '70s...

Turns out I was right all along. Back when I wrote the first of what has turned out to be an unending series of columns urging the Congress to impeach George W. Bush, AKA The Duh, my evidence was, well, a tad flimsy...

Those of you under 35 or so likely don't remember the comic strip Li'l Abner, much less the character with the unpronounceable last name, Joe and a-bunch-of-consonants-with-no-vowels, who always had a dark cloud hanging over his head. Likewise, those of you not blessed to be an Andyphile would not recognize the name Henry Bennett, the poor schlub who, thanks to Barney, got tagged as the Mayberry jinx...

If not now, when? If not this issue, which one? If no outrage over this, what will it take?What will move you, America, to take action to remove this president from office?The past six years have produced an ever-deepening sense of bewilderment, punctuated only by brief bursts of hope that this will be the one that finally sends the American public over the edge...

Remember the '70s movie Love Story? Even if you didn't see it (which I didn't), it was impossible not to hear the phrase Ali McGraw uttered to Ryan O'Neal, or vice versa (Like I say, I never saw it) as she lay dying: “Love means never having to say you're sorry...

The irony is way beyond inescapable, approaching bizarre, bordering on surreal. Never in my most twisted fantasies would I have imagined that I'd be advocating this position and employing this tactic. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and you're looking at one up-against-the-wall redneck muckraker...

Philosophically speaking, no good can come out of the Bush/Cheney war on Iraq. Everything that flows from a flawed premise must necessarily be flawed itself. If the initial justification was corrupt — which it is now generally conceded that it was — then the end result will be corrupt...

The letter mailed June 14 was brief and to the point. Originating from the law offices of Isaacson, Isaacson & Sheridan, and signed by Marc L. “Zoning Stud” Isaacson (OK, I added the “Zoning Stud” part) with instructions to be hand delivered to Honorable Keith Holliday and mailed to several other interested parties, its purpose was to notify the Greensboro City Council and Planning Department of his clients' intention to withdraw the rezoning applications for the properties at the corners of New Garden Road and Garden Lake Drive...

I can't begin to express my disappointment upon opening last Thursday's edition of the Greensboro News & Record. The utter inconsistency of the local gazette was again brought into focus when I turned to the sports section and, below the banner headline and five-column photo trumpeting the Carolina Hurricanes' game-5 loss to the Edmonton Oilers in the Stanley Cup finals, was a byline with a name I actually recognized...

Somewhere there used to be a law on the books in Burlington, North Carolina, that decreed that every able-bodied person shall learn to shag before entering the work force. Likewise, one of the requirements for graduation from dear old Williams High School was shag proficiency...