By Dick and Sandy Michener

Are you a serious competitor or a weekend athlete? Are you an accomplished artist or a hobbyist? Regardless of your abilities and goals, you have a place in the 2007 Haywood County Senior Games (and the Senior Games in all the counties in Western North Carolina for that matter).

By Bruce Hare • Guest Columnist

I would like to respond to Mr. James Costa’s letter (March 14, The Smoky Mountain News) expressing his concern about kayaking and canoeing on the headwaters of the Wild and Scenic Chattooga River.

Being environmentally conscious has become mainstream, but we still have a long way to go before mankind figures out how to live and prosper without negatively impacting the very earth that sustains us. A relatively new front raising awareness in this arena is coming from organized Christian religions, and an upcoming conference at Lake Junaluska is a great example of a progressive movement whose time has come.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the attack on the student in the cafeteria of Tuscola High School a few weeks ago where one student beat up another and inflicted some relatively serious injuries. Apparently it wasn’t the guilty party’s first incident. I never have understood those for whom fighting is just something that happens on a semi-regular basis, but then again, there are a lot of personality traits I see in others that I can’t comprehend.

By Stephanie Wampler

It was one of those days .... One of those days when an unnecessarily shrill alarm clock tears you from deep slumber, when you swing out of bed and land your foot on a particularly sharp Lego, and while you are hopping and cursing, you crash into the corner of the door.

Back in the early 1950s when Western Carolina University was still Western Carolina Teachers College, I got a crush on a feisty little co-ed named Hedy West during my sophomore year. Hedy played a banjo and sang exhilarating songs about dying miners and terrible injustices visited on people who worked in cotton mills.

“What we’re trying to do here is reduce the impact of development. That’s really what conservation is, the wise use of resources.”

— Blair Bishop, Haywood Community College

How come this isn’t done all the time?

“The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one’s own home.”

“What has become alien to men is the human component of culture — which upholds them against the world.”

— Theodor Adorno, social critic and philosopher

I don’t wear a watch. Why should I? Everywhere I look, I see the time of day. In fact, no matter where I go or how hard I try, I can’t seem to escape the passage of time. It’s on my cell phone. It’s on the oven AND the microwave in our kitchen. It’s on my computer screen, lurking down in the right hand corner.

By James Costa • Guest Columnist

There has been much discussion in recent weeks regarding the notion of opening the upper Chattooga River to boating. As a biologist and as a longtime resident of the Southern Appalachian region, I have studied the issue for the past several months in order to take an informed position on the potential impact that boating might have on the river and surrounding national forest.