Columnists

Some years ago, while I was working for an African-American newspaper in South Carolina called the Charleston Chronicle, a local Black attorney tried to get me to ride down with him to a country community near the Georgia border to talk with some people he was representing. George Payton was a self-promoter who had run for public office several times and would probably be running again, and an incessant talker as well, and the idea of spending a day with him—including four hours alone in a car—just so he could get his name in the paper didn’t appeal to me, so I begged off. -more-

This is a tale about politics, influence, money and murder. It began more than 40 years ago with a bloodletting so massive no one quite knows how many people died. Half a million? A million? Through four decades the story has left a trail of misery and terror. Last month it claimed four peasants, one of them a 27-year old mother. -more-

The Kitchen -more-

Change is inevitable; it’s always reassuring when a change in a good business is in the spirit of the original, an enhancement rather than a trip to the oubliette—for example, when an owner retired and sells the place to people who are familiar with it and like its style already. A breath of fresh air is much better than a tornado where there’s something worth preserving. Oh, Toto! -more-

Ouch! That Quake Hurts! -more-

We’re at war with Germany again, and this time they’re winning. No, it’s not a shooting war but since shooting wars always start with economic pretexts, it’s not a far stretch to talk about shooting wars in conjunction with this war and since it involves energy, it’s easy to point to our differing approaches to the war in Iraq as one example of how they’re winning, both morally and physically. -more-

About the time of year the robins wind down and the naked ladies begin to bloom, we start seeing the garden spiders. They’re orbweavers, probably Araneus diadematus, and at this stage they’re just little orange-and-black specks with legs. Between now and Halloween they’ll get a lot bigger, and plumper. -more-