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.
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.
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.
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.
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.â€
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.â€
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
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.”
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.
The Guardian has news of the discovery of a very large, bipedal crocodile which once inhabited the Carolinas.
Scientists have unearthed fossils in the United States of a big land-dwelling crocodile that lived about 231 million years ago, walked on its hind legs and was a top land predator right before the first dinosaurs appeared.
Transported back to the Triassic Period, what would a person experience upon encountering this agile, roughly 9-foot-long (about 3 meter-long), 5-foot-tall (about 1.5 meter-tall) beast with a long skull and blade-like teeth?
“Abject terror,†said North Carolina State University paleontologist Lindsay Zanno, who led the research published in the journal Scientific Reports.
“Climb up the nearest tree,†advised North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences paleontologist Vince Schneider.
The creature is named Carnufex carolinensis, meaning “Carolina butcher,†for its menacing features. It was a very early member of the crocodile lineage and was unlike today’s beasts. It was not aquatic and not a quadruped, instead prowling on two legs in the warm equatorial region that North Carolina was at the time.
Watching the video, it seems clear that the photographer could have stood up and, at least briefly thereby, frightened off the elk, and he would very probably then have had time to scurry off and take shelter in one of the nearby cars. It also seemed clear to me that the young elk was frequently very close to starting a really thorough hoof-stomping, antler-poking display of power.
The Knoxville television station reported yesterday that Park authorities sent that elk off to live on a farm, having apparently witnessed more than one incident of “human contact.”
Apparently, park visitors had been feeding him, and antler rubbing and close encounters of the cervine kind may have been his way of saying: “Feed me, Seymour!”
I saw a very unusual sight in Cataloochee Sunday morning. There were about twenty people lined up along the road watching and photographing a bull elk and his harem of about ten cows and three calves. Everyone was being very quiet and truly enjoying the sights and sounds of a beautiful Fall day in the Smokies.
Movement caught my attention to my right and there sitting on the pavement about seventy-five yards up the road from me was a spike elk sparring with a photographer. The spike had apparently come out of the woods behind the man and wanted to do a little sparring. I turned my camera and began recording the session.
The man lowered his head to avoid eye contact and covered his face with his arms while the spike placed the crown of his head between his antlers against the man’s head and began turning back and forth. The man protected himself as best he could with his arms while clutching his camera and this went on for several minutes.
Each time the spike stopped and backed up a few steps the man would look up and the spike would begin again. The man did not appear to be suffering injuries but the spike would not stop. Finally, a white car approached and turned toward the spike who backed up just long enough for the man to rise to his feet. When the man got up the spike moved toward him and lowered his head like he would charge. The driver of the car approached the spike closer and the man was able to get in the car.
Montana Outdoor Radio asked: “Have you ever seen anything like this in areas out west where the elk are used to people?”
Yes. Some years ago, Karen and I saw California idiots trying to pet a female Roosevelt elk from the Elk Meadows herd near Orick, California. As the human family advanced, the elk looked more and more alarmed, and it was easy to see that if that elk ever decided she was cornered, she was going to stomp or kick some of the offending humans good and proper. Fortunately for them, the elk found herself an exit from the crowd closing in on her, and trotted away. But there was certainly a real possibility for someone to have seriously hurt.
