college, journalism, music
Paramedics drove an elderly woman, Evangeline Koutro, to Gaston Memorial Hospital this morning after she inhaled smoke while struggling to exit her burning house.
She was listed in fair condition as of 1 p.m. Friday.
Neighbor Arthur Moore said he told his wife to call 911 when he saw smoke coming out of Koutro’s window shortly after 11 a.m.
“I thought someone was cooking out at first, ‘cause it barely wasn’t burning,” Moore said.
[Read the whole story here at the Gaston Gazette.]
The two cars collided about 9:40 a.m., said Thomas Sellers, 30, who was driving the tractor trailer for Trexler Trucking Inc. The road was wet with rain.
“He come off the ramp, spun in front of me, and I hit him head-on,” Sellers said. “It kind of threw me around on the inside of the truck a little bit.”
[Read the whole story here at the Gaston Gazette.]
Patrick Burris told his fiancée he needed to go find work. Then, the killings started.
The 41-year-old suspected of gunning down five people in Gaffney, S.C., phoned Martha Ugalde regularly after leaving the Vale mobile home he shared with her in mid-June. He met Ugalde two years ago while on work release from prison.
“He still sounded normal every time he spoke to her,” said Ugalde’s son, Jimmy Vargas. “Everything still seemed fine. He told her he was working, and everything was like (they) planned.”
[Co-written with reporter Corey Friedman. Read the whole story here at the Gaston Gazette.]
The new Wilco album has been out for nearly a week. I don’t like it much – I think it might be even less interesting than Sky Blue Sky. But I don’t like Mike Powell’s review of it much either.
I adored Powell when he was a senior member of Stylus Magazine’s staff. But in this review I think he commits a blunder I never noticed him making before: he gets more interested in his own argument about Wilco’s identity than in Wilco or their music. I think somewhere along the line he dismissed the objective of saying something accurate about them and became more interested in writing something well, something about them, incidentally at their expense.
Other major reviews are less compelling but more accurate.
PopMatters says the band has created an impossibly high standard for itself.
Pitchfork says Wilco (The Album) is a coherent statement of the band’s eclectic identity.
Spin says the band stopped obsessing over change and learned to accept what it is.
Joshua Chowdhury spent three hours perfecting an image with Adobe Photoshop while designing the 2009 “Blutopia,” Gaston Day School’s literary publication, his co-editor Tyler Prow said.
Between January and March Prow and Chowdhury spent hundreds of hours in their school’s small, square college placement office, hunched over the single computer they shared, designing and editing the 81 full-color pages of artwork, memoirs, short fiction and poetry.
Prow said he supplied many of the design ideas, but he usually left the execution up to Chowdhury.
“He has more of a surgical hand,” Prow said. “I have no hope of being a doctor.”
[Read the whole story here at the Gaston Gazette.]
Sixteen-year-old Kerra Lynch only had time to put a towel on when the men in masks pushed her from the bathtub to her living room – at gunpoint.
She and her 15-year-old brother, Ontario, were watching their 2- and 4-year-old cousins Thursday night when the four men burst into her Fourth Avenue home around midnight.
“All I know is that I heard a boom, and then like a dude came in, and he was like, ‘Get on the floor! Get on the floor!’” Kerra Lynch told The Gazette’s news partner, WSOC Channel 9 Eyewitness News.
The criminals tied up the children and dug through the family’s possessions, and took a ring and a watch, said mother Tomeka Lynch. Then they shoved Ontario into the kitchen.
They shot him in the face with a handgun – police believe it may be a revolver.
[Read the whole story here at the Gaston Gazette.]
Calvin Owensby’s phone rang off the hook Tuesday night after The Gazette reported that he planned to sell his five-legged Chihuahua, Precious, to a freak show in Coney Island, N.Y.
Most of the callers berated him for his decision, he said, but one caller, Allyson Siegel, 45, of Charlotte, offered to buy Precious.
Wednesday morning they settled on an amount – $4,000 – and Siegel took Precious home with her.
“Poor thing, she was headed for a terrible life,” Siegel said. “As a kid, I’d been to a fair, and I’d been to all these sideshows, and I just didn’t think it was right for her.”
[Read the whole story here at the Gaston Gazette.]
Precious, the five-legged Chihuahua puppy from Gastonia, was 12 weeks away from getting her extra leg amputated, thanks to an anonymous donor, when Calvin Owensby received a call from the owner of a Coney Island freak show Monday afternoon.
Now Precious will keep her fifth leg forever. She’ll join a two-headed cow, a two-headed snake, and 25 other unusual animals in John Strong’s Shows on Coney Island.
Owensby sold her for $3,000.
“I’m sad. I’m really sad. But we’re going through hard times,” Owensby said. “We don’t want to do it but we have to.”
[Read the whole story here at the Gaston Gazette.]
“Before I did the Soup Nazi I was just this beg-borrow-and-steal actor, but after I did it everyone in Hollywood knew who I was,” he said. “The best thing I could say is that it has become my life.”
In the “Seinfeld” episode, Thomas’ character owns a soup restaurant in New York. An immigrant from some unnamed Middle Eastern country, he speaks limited English and enforces strict rules upon his patrons.
[Read the whole story here at the Gaston Gazette.]
