Question of the Day: What Scares You?

BOO. Are you scared yet? Nah, I didn’t think so. But this is the time of year that our thoughts turn to the dark side of things, and I’ve been wondering about just what scares me, and “us,” by extension. And the answers I’ve come up with – both the “what” and the “why” surprised me.

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Wow! A Ghost Story. Just Like I Pictured It. With Guns. And Everything.

You are looking at a picture of my old alma mater, C.E. Byrd High School, in Shreveport, Louisiana. (To be perfectly accurate, I only went there my senior year, but I DID graduate from there, so it will serve the purpose as an alma mater, I suppose.) The entire time I was there, I never heard about the ghosts. (You’d think, something like that would be all over the school every year, like an idea virus.) Still the truth behind the ghost story is kind of interesting…

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Robert Baillio “Gun Harassment”: a Black and White Issue?

When you’re a reporter, you dream of a day when a story – a really juicy story – falls right into your lap, all tied up neatly in a bow. So it was with visions of the blogger’s equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize (there IS a blogger’s equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize . . . isn’t there?) that an email came across my desk in my lonely writer’s garret, that made me sit up and take notice. The email recounted a story about a man who was pulled over for a traffic stop. He had pro-gun bumper stickers affixed to the rear window of his pickup truck. It was late at night. When he was pulled over, he immediately got out of his truck and walked to the rear of the vehicle. The officer asked him “do you have any guns in the vehicle.” He said, yes I do.” The officer asked him to stay in the back of his truck, walked to the truck and removed the firearm from the vehicle.

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