Secret Vistas – By Glynn Wilson – SHENANDOAH NATIONAL PARK, Va. — When Americans and people from all over the world think of visiting a national park, or camping in the great outdoors in the United States, they often think of the big, famous parks out West like Yosemite in California, the Grand Canyon in…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. – An amazing thing happened at the time of our return to the nation’s capitol region in May. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a surprising announcement on Thursday, catching many people by surprise, including those who work in the White House. “If…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — The rain has stopped and the sun is coming out from behind the clouds as we set up in the nation’s capital for the first time since November, when it was a celebration by the campfire as Joe Biden was declared the winner in…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – It would be hard to imagine making it through the hellscape year of 2020 and the COVID winter and spring of 2021 without the internet — or the art of movies. As frustrating as new computer technology can be sometimes, how could we have possibly made it…
Sunday Reader – By Glynn Wilson – Now that Trump is gone, the CIA can tell the truth. Well, sort of anyway. They could have just quoted the Book of Revelations and been done with it. It’s an old, familiar story. The first trumpet sounds: Hail, fire, and blood rain down on earth, burning up…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Remove the profit motive and the need for a happy ending. What stories are left? In this time of epic hardship, is it more important to talk about the world as it is, show it in all its gore and reality in a mirror,…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – All of a sudden I’m feeling an unquenched desire to start practicing Yoga. Why? Maybe because I just heard that the conservative, Christian Republicans in the Alabama legislature are dead set on keeping it banned from public schools. If they don’t like it, it must be good.…
“It’s very difficult, in geography as in morality, to understand the world without leaving your own house.” – Voltaire Sunday Reader – A Think Piece – By Glynn Wilson – KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Do you ever just take some time off to simply think? To dream? Experts in psychology say this is critical not only to…
The Big Picture -Â By Glynn Wilson -Â As the capitalist Easter Bunny works overtime to deliver massive amounts of sugary chocolate to stores across America in time for the weekend to celebrate the fertility of spring and the alleged death and resurrection of a prophet named Jesus, pollsters and pundits are wringing their hands…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – Cue up the spinning wheel of bad news. Simply turn on the TV or crank up the internet. Just as we thought the hellscape of 2020 was behind us, a mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado replaces a mass shooting in Atlanta, Georgia, which supplants a border crisis…
An Update on the Legal Jeopardy of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump – Sunday Reader – By Glynn Wilson – Now that the nation is finally beginning to turn the corner on the coronavirus pandemic and on this first day of spring begin to reemerge from the economic downturn caused by it, there is a…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Spring forward and sleep late. I know I did. The iPhone clock said 10:30. The devil who shall not be named is no longer tweet storming an insurrection against American democracy from the White House. A new sheriff is in town. People are already…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – It was 56 years ago today (Sunday) that John Lewis led civil rights marchers north across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to face Alabama State Troopers and Dallas County sheriffs deputies on the other side with billy clubs, cattle prods and tear gas. By putting their…
Sunday Reader – By Glynn Wilson – KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — The east-facing window in this humble abode was enshrouded in fog the first thing Sunday morning, not the famous smoke you sometimes see in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina. Since it’s National Public Sleeping Day and the weather was not conducive to…
The Big Picture -Â By Glynn Wilson -Â GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK, Tenn. — Are you suffering from cabin fever from the COVID winter? Take a drive in nature in a park near you. When the forecast showed sunny weather and a high of 54 for Sunday, Feb. 21, I just had to get…
Hold Fast Reader Dear How to hold you reader dear: Regale you with comforting stories of barefoot summer mud puddles past? Excite you with salacious tales of sex scandals and conspiracies holding you aghast? Bore you with straight prose and fifth grade level blurbs of fair and balanced contrast? Or write the flame out of…
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms; And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel And shining…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – Well, the Year of the Rat is over, and the Year of the Ox is here, as of Feb. 12, 2021, the Chinese lunar New Year’s Day. In America, the Rat King Donald Trump has been dethroned, but not banned from running for public office again, and…
Shelby Could Do the Right Thing and Swing the Impeachment Vote Against Trump – But He Won’t – Editor’s Note: In our continuing series showing how the press should be operating in America, as opposed to how it operates now and how it has failed in the 21st century, here is our take on the…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – So I’m sipping the second cup of coffee Tuesday morning, watching the sun come up over the Smokies, scouring the web looking for an expert to quote, when it finally dawns on me like an epiphany: I must be the nation’s top expert on the press and…
