BREAKING

The Amish came to Western NC and built 100+ tiny homes to shelter Helene victims from the cold mountain weather.

Local and state authorities kicked the victims out of their houses, saying they didn't pass code. pic.twitter.com/Xs5UPHY0JQ

— National File (@NationalFile) November 23, 2024

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Bayou State of Mind on Facebook yesterday:

North Carolina officials initially estimated the road to Big Chimney would take several months to almost a year to complete. Nevertheless, a team of West Virginia coal miners accomplished the task in remarkably less time – under a week. Their commitment and proficiency deserve significant recognition and thanks. Importantly, they voluntarily undertook this project.

Commenter Reid Morgan adds:

Road is Bat Cave to Chimney Rock, took them 2 days. NC DOT estimated months. Awesome for sure!

-a paved road would be great for sure. What the people need now is ability to get in and out. This is a great accomplishment for the community for sure, but of course heavy rains would be a concern. Speaking with a large quarry operator this week, they’re definitely getting the needed materials out fixing the roads in the mountains as quickly as possible. (Around as much in one month as one year for one smaller quarry in the mountains).

BREAKING: NONCITIZENS ADMIT TO BEING REGISTERED TO VOTE

Footage from @realmuckraker shows non-citizens admitting they are registered to vote

A staggering 10% of the people surveyed admitted to this

If this percentage holds, the 2024 election is in jeopardy pic.twitter.com/j8ux3ydwsH

— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) July 4, 2024

This was a wild 46 seconds pic.twitter.com/jIHQg0G4qU

— Sada (@Evi3Zamora) April 15, 2021

From Jalopnik:

A North Carolina man and woman were attacked by a bobcat in their driveway earlier this week, and things got real crazy, real fast. What starts off as a sleepy suburban morning becomes a chaotic scene, culminating in the man throwing the bobcat and yelling “I’LL SHOOT THE FUCKER!”

The day seems to start off innocuously enough, as the man and woman begin their morning by loading things into a Ford Explorer. To the side is a fabulous Ford Freestyle, a vehicle that never got its proper due despite being a wagon.

The man bids good morning to a runner and turns to the Explorer. He carries a tray of food and what looks like coffee, which he then sets down on the hood right after reminding himself that he needs to wash his car. I mean, coffee on the hood is a risky move already, but it pales in comparison to what’s next.

NY Post:

A 100-pound unexploded bomb from the World War II era has washed up on a North Carolina shore, prompting authorities to establish a safety perimeter ahead of a planned detonation, according to a report.

US Navy officials said the large, rusty bomb was found Thursday morning in Buxton on Cape Hatteras, where members of the Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit confirmed it is a live device, the News & Observer reported.

A half-mile safety perimeter was set up to keep tourists out, including the historic Cape Hatteras Light Station grounds and surrounding beach, the National Park Service said.

The US Navy EOD unit placed the bomb “deep inside the beach” near the lighthouse beach access parking area.

The Park Service on Friday morning said the detonation was postponed until later in the day due to a nearby residential fire.

Damage to nearby structures is unlikely from the expected blast, but “Buxton residents and visitors may hear the detonation,” officials said.

During World War II, military training exercises took place in the waters off the Outer Banks.

“The discovery of old military devices is not uncommon along the Outer Banks,” David Hallac, superintendent of the National Parks of Eastern North Carolina, said in the release.

RTWT

HT: Weasel Zippers via Bird Dog.

After some years of enjoying the festive social life of Virginia Hunt Country, Karen and I are finding the absence of society here at our farm in the Central Pennsylvania boondocks a little dull. Moreover, with old age comes arthritis and one feels the winter cold in the knees.

Despite my Northeastern Pennsylvania Coal Region origins, I have old-fashioned tastes and apparently a natural rapport with Virginia. When I arrived at Yale, a number of my classmates misspelled “David Zincavage” as “Davidson Cavidge,” having leapt to the conclusion based on the formality of my dress and manners that I was of Virginia gentry background.

A return to Old Virginia is tempting, but Occupied Virginia inside, and now sprawling over the beltway, loaded as it is with functionaries and bureaucrats all battening on the Federal purse, combined with the welfare class of the Commonwealth’s handful of large cities, recently successfully outvoted the natives and returned Virginia to a revolutionary Reconstruction regime run by Scallywags, Carpetbaggers, and African-American demagogues and mountebanks. I’m not sure my blood pressure would stand a closer proximity to Virginia politics. So we’ve been looking for an affordable very old, very large house (we have an enormous library) further South, hopefully in proximity to an organized fox hunt.

I came, last night, upon a really beautiful North Carolina house (in Milton) which is unfortunately too small, but which has really beautiful architectural detail apparently by a local free black cabinetmaker-woodworker. I think his newel post is a delightful piece of imaginative design. If you lived there, you’d smile every time you saw it.

Wikipedia:

Thomas Day (1801-1861) was a free black furniture craftsman and cabinetmaker in Milton, Caswell County, North Carolina. Born a free black man in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, Day moved to Milton in 1817 and became a highly successful businessman, boasting the largest and most productive workshop in the state during the 1850s. Day catered to high-class white clientele and was respected among his white peers for his craftsmanship and work ethic. Day came from a free and relatively well-off family and was privately educated. Today, Day’s pieces are highly sought after and sell for high prices; his work has been heavily studied and displayed in museums such as the North Carolina Museum of History. Day is heralded in modern society as an incredibly skilled craftsman and savvy businessman. …

With his furniture designs so popular and highly sought-after, it was no surprise that Day began to provide architectural work to homes in his region as well. In this architectural work, Day employed many of the same design motifs as in his furniture, playing again off his own interpretation of the Grecian/Greek Revival Style. For large plantation homes in the North Carolina and Virginia areas, Day provided mantle pieces, stair brackets and newel posts, and door frames among other architectural work. His work focused on symmetry, and he often incorporated similar or complementary designs in the newel posts and stair brackets to create a balance of design and to emphasize his furniture designs, since many homes he did architectural work for also boasted multiple furniture works by Day. As with his furniture designs, it appears that Day’s initial architectural designs stemmed from popular architectural pattern books; to these, Day would again add his personal design motifs to create unique products.

In his work on door frames, scholars agree that Day created both sidelights and transoms for interior doors in many homes he worked on. These architectural elements are characterized by the repetitive use of rectangular patterns. Day also often created newel posts for staircases, which he commonly designed utilizing s-curves and elongated scroll shapes, which represented Day’s interpretation of the traditional newel post; Day’s posts were both larger and longer than the classic Greek Revival Style posts, and are emphasized by the simplistic stair banisters that accompany them. As with his furniture, Day took the popular design of the newel post and added his own stylistic flair through his scroll curves. In crafting these newel posts, Day employed four different types of newels: s-shaped, traditional, a fusion of the two, or completely unique designs; today, twenty-five s-shaped newel posts have been attributed to Day. Day crafted stair brackets to match and complement these newel posts, again employing curvatures and wave motifs that, combined with the newel posts, suggested a tranquil fluidity.

Marine Corps veteran Charlie Winter currently a fireman and paramedic.

Today:

Charlie Winter is a devoted dad who would do anything for his kids. He’d throw himself in front a train — and even a shark.
That’s exactly what the North Carolina dad did Sunday when his 17-year-old daughter, Paige, was attacked by a shark in Atlantic Beach at Fort Macon State Park. The heroic dad punched the shark five times to save his daughter’s life.

“They were standing in waist-deep water and chatting and then Paige suddenly got pulled under,” close family friend Brandon Bersch told TODAY Parents. As soon as Charlie realized what was happening, he jumped into action and began striking the shark on the nose. “Charlie wouldn’t stop until it released his little girl,” Brandon said. “He lives for his children.”

Charlie, a veteran firefighter and paramedic, immediately knew the extent of Paige’s trauma and began applying pressure on her leg while hurrying back to shoreline. “He remained calm the entire time,” Bersch told TODAY Parents. “Paige is alive today because of her father.”

Paige was airlifted 80 miles to Greenville’s Vidant Medical Center where she underwent emergency surgery including a leg amputation. The high school junior, who also suffered severe trauma to both of her hands, has a long road ahead. (A GoFundMe page has been set up to help cover Paige’s medical expenses.) “Paige has more surgeries upcoming, but she’s really optimistic,” Bersch revealed. “As soon as Paige woke up at the hospital, she made a comment about how she doesn’t have animosity toward sharks and she still loves the sea.” …

Bowling applauds how Charlie handled a terrifying situation. “Hitting a shark in the snout or the gills is the best defense if you are being attacked,” he told TODAY Parents. “He absolutely did the right thing.”

In 2013, Charlie rescued a then 2-year-old boy from a home that was fully engulfed in flames. His act of heroism earned him the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the US National Firefighter Award. As Bersch told TODAY Parents, “Charlie is the bravest man I know

RTWT

Mark Robinson in Greensboro, NC, 3 April 2018.

But they’re OK. They sink into a lower metabolic state when it gets cold and stick their snouts out of icy ponds to continue breathing.

National Post

Expert measuring bear cub.

In Atlas Obscura, we find that Asheville, NC has a lot of very large urban wildlife, and the experts (of course!) are studying the issue of just how many bears can live in the city.

Over the past decade, Asheville has racked up all kinds of accolades: according to one list of fawning headlines, it’s “Fantastically Yoga-Friendly,” “One of America’s 12 Greatest Music Cities,” “The Biggest Little Culinary Capital in America,” “#1 Beer City USA,” and “America’s #1 Quirkiest Town.”

Somewhat more quietly, it’s also one of America’s Best Cities for Bears. They hang out near the local hospital, and at the storied Grove Park Inn. Mailmen regularly run into them on their routes. Last August, a bear broke into an Asheville man’s home and stole a stick of butter out of his kitchen trash. As part of its pre-show, the Fine Arts Movie Theater, in downtown, shows a photo of a curious black bear reading its marquee from across the street. “I never saw a black bear until I moved to the city,” Boll says. “Now, I’ll be driving and I’ll go, ‘There’s a bear in someone’s yard!’ or ‘Look at that bear, knocking over that trash can and taking the bag!'”

When we talk about urban wildlife, we’re usually referring to small, deft creatures—squirrels, pigeons, or other standbys that mind their own business and fade into the background. Your average city-dweller might catch a deer in their headlights every once in a while, or spot a raccoon digging through the trash. A bear is something of a different story. A male can weigh 600 pounds. That’s not the kind of creature you get used to seeing on your commute.

Somewhere around 8,000 black bears range around western North Carolina, and many of those make Asheville itself part of their meandering. According to the Urban-Suburban Bear Study, an ongoing project by the state’s Wildlife Resources Commission and North Carolina State University, these bears are very healthy, often well-fed enough to have twice as many cubs as your average scrappy mountain bear, and confident enough to den right outside of town.

After a couple of years of study, the researchers—along with most of Asheville’s humans—are wondering exactly how many bears the city can hold.

The democrats are probably working on registering the bears to vote.

Rush Limbaugh has the legal argument in hand that should allow North Carolina to defeat the Department of Justice lawsuit overturning that state’s law banning transgendered use of ladies’ public bathrooms.

The solution here might be that the North Carolina governor could say that we don’t identify as North Carolina anymore, and therefore your lawsuit against us is irrelevant. We’re not North Carolina. We don’t identify that way, as long as your lawsuit — I mean, it’s absurd here! What do you mean, the way I want to present one day? So North Carolina, I say just turn it right around, “You know what, we do not identify as North Carolina for the length of your suit.”

Walter Todd Huston:

So many citizens of the Tar Heel state have rushed to order their Confederate flag license plates that the North Carolina DMV has run out of the tags, officials report.

Department of Motor Vehicles spokesman Mike Charbonneau reported that in the last 10 days the department has received a whole nine-months- worth of orders for the tags featuring a Sons of Confederate Veterans Logo.

The N.C. DMV says that it will be at least 30 days before the plates will be back in stock.

The rush of orders came on the heels of N.C. Governor Pat McCrory’s claims that he’d like the legislature to end the issuance of the Confederate flag plates.

At the end of June, the Governor urged the legislature to pass a law to end the official designation of “civic club” for the Sons of Confederate Veterans organization and to stop issuing plates with the C.S. flag emblazoned on them.