The Wine Guys, Joe and Matt, spent August 18-20 at the Shelton-Badgett Center for Viticulture and Enology at Surry Community Center, judging the 2017 N.C. State Fair Competition with the media, bloggers, and editors. The Yadkin Valley is beautiful any time of year... from a cold winter morning to a hot summer afternoon. No matter the time of year, beauty [...]
By Amanda Lugenbell Located on the Blue Ridge Parkway, snug against Pisgah National Forest, Blowing Rock is a Norman Rockwell-esque town with untouched nature in its backyard. Long cherished as a summer escape from the heat of the lowlands, the town has been welcoming visitors since its incorporation and growing to feature distinctive shops, galleries, restaurants, and inns. Now, year-round [...]
On August 26, the Gregg Museum of Art & Design opened its doors at 1903 Hillsborough Street in Raleigh in sight of NC State’s revered Memorial Belltower. Too long a “hidden jewel” on the Raleigh campus, the Gregg is now open and accessible to everyone on campus and beyond, serving as a hub of art, discovery and learning...with free parking! [...]
Bob Timberlake is a Renaissance man, versatile like a modern day Leonardo de Vinci, performing brilliantly in several fields. He has been honored twice at the White House as Official Artist and official spokesman for Keep America Beautiful. Other awards range from the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism to the state’s highest civilian honor, the Order of the Long Leaf [...]
Al Perry, a former journalist, is the founder and past president of Winston-Salem Writers, a nonprofit group. Al leads writing workshops in the Triad and in the adult outreach program of Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina. He also is active in Second Spring Arts, a Winston-Salem organization celebrating the creative work of people age 60 and above. A graduate [...]
Joseph Polcaro keeps his giant-slalom skiing silver medal in his pocket while walking his dog or interacting with residents at the SearStone retirement community in Cary. It’s not out of boastfulness but more out of pride. At 81 years of age, Polcaro has the energy of a much younger man. This past March he won the medal in the Bronze [...]
Imagine holding a show ticket, not quite sure what to expect. You walk into a once-familiar room that now looks nothing like the theater, town hall, cafeteria, or auditorium you’re used to. Music plays in the background; a mixture of classics you recognize and a few you’d love to know. As you settle in and other audience members grab their [...]
More than a million visitors descend on Asheville annually, most of them with a single destination: the Biltmore Estate, a Châteauesque-style mansion in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was built more than a century ago by George Washington Vanderbilt III. He had traveled the world but had a special fondness for the North Carolina mountains, his "little [...]
The tantalizing idea of extracting DNA from an Egyptian mummy has been a little like trying to suck dinosaur DNA out of an insect in amber; however, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has found analyzing mummy DNA is actually scientifically possible in a new field known as archaeogenics. In the process, Johannes Krause discovered a [...]
The Salem Band, whose roots date back to the mid-eighteenth century, is probably the oldest wind band, in the United States. At least, the late Harry H. Hall, music educator and historian, believed so. As he wrote in his 1967 dissertation, “There has emerged from this modest eighteenth-century beginning an unbroken lineage which seemingly establishes the Salem Band of today [...]
