Monday Me: “No per diem? No budget?” My editor: “I’ll give you an extra 50 dollars.” Me: “Man, I can go that in an hour.” Editor: “You wanna do it?” Me: “OK,” I sigh. “I’ll do it.” Twenty bars in five days. The whole concept makes my head hurt. 8 p.m. We want to go […]
peter eichenberger
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Booze, drugs, guns and football
Inside Wake County Courtroom 3C last week, the mood matched the weather–a sullen, omnipresent haze floated over the proceeding. Outside, the pavement was reduced to the consistency of taffy, orange traffic cones softened to the point that they were falling over like melted candles. In a land that has turned murder into a spectator sport, […]
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Schools rock, Raleigh tows
“I am ashamed to be part of this city. I have worked here, schooled here, run a business here for the last 20 years. I have had such hopes for this city. I knew that Raleigh had a long way to go to even begin to measure up to its culturally-diverse, intelligent and progressive neighbors […]
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When the messenger warns about the message
PETER POWER: At half past 9 this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right […]
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The Klan: Terrorism in the name of God
I saw Virgil Griffin the other day. I really, really hope I never see him again. Griffin is the Imperial Wizard of the Cleveland Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, one of an alphabet soup of Klan organizations, a secret terror state inaugurated almost as a joke by six bored Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tenn., […]
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An Expedition going nowhere fast
“I’m gonna kick your ass,” the guy yells out the window. “Go ahead. Kick my ass.” “I’m calling the police.” “Great. I’ve already called them, that should speed things along even more.” In the defender’s corner, perched in a black Ford Excursion as big as a tank car, weighing in at 7,725 pounds, is this […]
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Mutilating Raleigh’s character, brick by brick
The subject is a woman, married, who we’ll call “X.” She is 41 and what could be called “upper middle class.” She went to St. Mary’s and her husband is an attorney. They live off of White Oak Road. He drives the Tahoe, she the Suburban. X has a feeling of never having been realized; […]
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Ryan’s return
I was at The Berkeley Cafe for the Wednesday Jam when I get a tap on the shoulder. “Go to Slim’s, right now.” I grabbed my friend. “We have to go. Now.” Slim’s was packed with patrons, a band in the back. I listened and realized it was Raleigh expatriate/bad-boy Ryan Adams and components of […]
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Pot ruling highlights hypocrisy
Medical marijuana ruined Eddie and Dianna Davis’ lives. Several years ago, a spat with an ex led Oconee County authorities to get a warrant to search their Walhalla, S.C., home. The next thing they knew, the South Carolina Department of Social Services had sundered the family, taking their four children into custody. Diana and Eddie’s […]
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Six more weeks of weirdness?
Helicopters are buzzards for trouble. I have a sick thing about ’em anyway, so last Tuesday morning, I’m at the D.H. Hill Library at N.C. State and start smelling smoke and I hear that distinctive clatter. I jump on the Sears three-speed and ride right into trouble. Kling, Kling, gotchu lomein. OUDTAWAY. “You ride that […]