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Tomorrow is Flag Day, and the anniversary of a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that has its roots in West Virginia. The court’s June 14, 1943, ruling in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette can be seen as something of a pleasing paradox: by giving schoolchildren freedom from the requirement that they salute [...]
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For a few years now, a phenomenon has been quietly spreading: the six-word memoir, credited to Smith Magazine founder Larry Smith. He saw the explosion of online self-expression via Twitter, Facebook, and blog sites, and decided to celebrate it by inviting readers of his online magazine to tell their life stories in six words. The [...]
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The Old Hippie Bus Driver (aka, my wife, Stephanie) reports…that during the time that she drove the Back Creek, Capon Springs route in Hampshire County, she could almost see the field that was once the famous Rudolph strawberry patch. Back in the 1980s, we would go there with little children in tow for seasonal pick [...]
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It’s still not clear just how far state and county officials might be willing to go in terms of tax breaks to help Century Aluminum agree to reopen a plant that has been closed since February 2009. But a critical 3-2 decision by the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals last week that denied an [...]
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The Maryland state trooper parked and hidden in the grassy median must have seen me before I saw him, for within a moment he was riding alongside me in the next lane flagging me to pull over, post-haste. My violation: an absolute failure to be barricaded into my moving vehicle via a lap and shoulder [...]
Continue reading …Have you ever looked into a blue jay’s nest? Me neither. Maybe it’s for the best that we haven’t. Lithuanians, especially those of us with some West Virginia heritage thrown in, are known to do some pretty silly things, especially in a rural setting. Our two most prominent traits, curiosity and hard-headedness, often combine to [...]
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The Home Depot was humming on a recent Sunday afternoon as people filled their carts with all manner of flora and bags of compost and mulch with a few garden hoses and flowerpots thrown in for good measure. There were even people clustered around the revolving seed rack, confident in putting a dried, dead-looking speck [...]
Continue reading …There were no surprising outcomes in last week’s primary election in West Virginia. The biggest disappointment was that only one of every four registered voters bothered to show up at the polls — the lowest turnout for a primary election for this state in 60 years. The previous worst turnout in more than half a [...]
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In our last column, we introduced the First Pillar of Business Success and posed the question, if most customers have a variety of options to fill their need for your product or service, why should they choose your business over every other alternative? The answer was when there are many options available to customers, your [...]
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CHARLES TOWN – Say the word “triathlon,” and many people think of the suffer fest called Ironman –a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike race and a full, 26.2-mile marathon, a trio done back-to-back-to-back, with no break. But there are ways to put the triathlon with reach. A mini-triathlon means a shorter pool swim, a bike [...]
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