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Thed 21-team National Indoor Football League has announced that Greensboro is one of seven cities that will field new teams this year.

However, no one is saying yet who the owners of the new franchise are.
A new franchise in the NIFL costs $250,000.

This is good news for the Greensboro Coliseum, which needs the revenue home-team sports tenants can generate.

More good news: A new minor-league hockey team also might return to the coliseum.

Problem is, will enough people care?

I don't mean to be a killjoy, but Greensboro has, in general (no pun intended), been a lousy town for minor-league sports in recent years (the Grasshoppers are a notable exception, thanks, in large measure, to a new ballpark).

The most recent attempts at hockey and arena football both failed here, primarily because fans stayed away in droves.

Mayor Keith Holliday would no doubt complain that I don't have a PGA (Positive Greensboro Attitude). I do. But I'm also a realist. Here's hoping I'm dead wrong.

Our ongoing call for community columnists has stirred considerable interest among writers willing to audition for occasional space on our op-ed pages.

It also has raised some concerns from long-time readers that we're jettisoning syndicated columnists to make room for local folk.

This email came this week:

Well, here I am back again about the op-ed page--used to be asking for improvement, now just to defend the status quo, since I see the proposal is for a "significant shake-up". I realize that you are aiming at the newer generations and those of us who grew up on newspapers and can defend them as well as you can, will just have to adapt--altho we are sort of past the easy adaptation age. But really, I dont desire to read a bunch of locals--they may be very well informed people, but scarcely any have the background, the resources and the time to put out weekly or twice weekly columns of national and international content. I havent got time to fool with them and the various touchy=feelly features. Your editorials take care of opinion on the local level. I read them also.

We appreciate this regular reader's loyalty and we understand her concerns. And believe me, we don't want to lose what has earned us her loyalty over the years. But we also see an opportunity to make our pages livelier and more interesting.

We don't see these as conflicting goals. We believe we can have both. And we fully intend to.

An interesting story on journalists' role not only in covering Katrina but in helping the helpless, from Richard Prince of the Maynard Institute.

The latest flare-up in the cultural wars may involve an NBC-TV show, "The Book of Daniel," an apparently quirky depiction of the misadventures of an Episcopal minister.

Among the series potentially controversial elements:
1. The minister has ongoing conversations with Jesus (portrayed by anactor in the flesh, but who no one else can see).
2. His son is gay.
3. His daughter has been busted for selling pot.
4. Well, do you really need a fourth one?

Judging from NBC's promotional spots on the show, which debuts tonight on WXII (Channel 12), the network isn't running from controversy; it's probably courting it. The drugs, Jesus and homosexual angles are emphasized.

After all, the only thing worse than a big fuss is small ratings.

Channel 12 hosted a roundtable of Triad clergy who voiced mixed reactions to a preview screening.

But it may all amount to another new show that comes and then goes in the blink of an eye.

Some reviewers give it points for skirting convention but more than one has said it tries too hard.

Others have not been that kind.

Notes the headline of a Reuters preview of the first episode: "Even Jesus might not forgive 'Book of Daniel.' "

Somebody once defined a consultant as someone from somewhere else who we pay to tell us things we already know.

Consider the case of Greensboro Police Detective Ernest Cuthbertson, a nationally recognized expert on gangs whose deep knowledge and understanding of street culture appears to be valued and respected anywhere but here, in his hometown.

Maybe they'd listen if he were from Chicago or Detroit. Then again, maybe they wouldn't listen to anyone.

Cuthbertson, 36, is a former Marine who grew up in the Morningside Homes and Ray Warren Homes public housing communities. If fate hadn't been kind, he might well have become a gang-banger himself. Instead he chose to use his early exposure to gang culture to fight it.
As a Greensboro police officer since 1993, Cuthbertson has interviewed hundreds of gang suspects and has built an impressive archive of information on gang culture, some of it gleaned from the gangs' own detailed "handbooks." He has been interviewed by MSNBC and USA Today. He has conducted workshops for educators, social workers and other police officers.

In fact, on Feb. 24, he will be a plenary speaker at a conference of Canadian police officers, probation and parole officers, school officials and youth organizations in Niagara Falls.
But his toughest audience remains the Guilford County school board, some of whose members expressed skepticism at his presentation last October about a growing pattern of gang signs, graffiti and dress in local schools.

"We just don't see it, this Crips and Bloods stuff," school board member Amos Quick, who grew up with Cuthbertson, said last fall at a forum on school discipline.

Some principals bristled that he'd dare suggest a gang presence in their schools. Board member Deena Hayes said that the presentation unfairly stigmatized minority youth. A teacher disputed his contention that gang graffiti had been spotted at her elementary school. Never mind that he had photos.

"If we're going to arrest the problem, then we have to have accurate data," Hayes said in recent interview.

Yet, after the tempest of indignation and denial that followed, the school board did nothing. Although he seemed obviously frustrated that some school board members disputed his facts, Cuthbertson said this isn't about him. And he acknowledged that there isn't a serious gang problem here. Yet.

That's the whole theme of his message: Heed the early warnings. Deal with the problems now while they're still small. "At some point, we'll all have to bear the cost of what's going on with our young people," he said. "Either upstream or downstream."

Someone else who ought to know says Cuthbertson's absolutely right. "I agree 100 percent with Ernest that it is a small problem," said Cpl. Lindsay Welch of the Guilford County Sheriff's Department, who has been a school resource officer at Southern Guilford High School for 12 years. "But if the parents don't open their eyes, if the administrators don't open their eyes and see that we've got a small problem, then someday we're going to be like Los Angeles County and Aurora, Colorado."

Welch also agrees with Cuthbertson's call for preventive steps. Right now. "Don't wait for it to happen," Welch said.

In separate interviews, both Cuth­bertson and Welch lamented the lack of parental involvement and even worse, parental awareness of their children's activities. In February of 2005, Cuthbertson even tried to do something about it, proposing a "School Watch" program that would have partnered the police with schools and communities.
The program's goal: To build awareness about the threat of gangs and crime among teachers, parents and students. And to help youth realize that police are there to help, not harm students.

Some school board members charged that the initiative was designed to recruit student "snitches." "It's asking students to be lookouts," Quick said, suggesting that the program should focus strictly on training teachers, parents and volunteers.

Instead, nearly a year later, the school board simply has done nothing. When asked whether School Watch is dead, Cuthbertson shrugged. "I honestly don't know," he said.

What he does know is that as a young man he had many choices, most of them bad. He chose to be a cop, he said, because a pair of Greensboro police officers, Ed McDonald and Berkley Blanks, took an interest in him as a youth. "They gave me a different outlook on life," Cuthbertson said.

Now he'd like to give others that same chance. If only we'd let him.

When your boss changes the locks on your doors, it's hard not to get the hint: Resign or be fired.

For whatever reasons -- and there seem to be more than one -- David Wray no longer is Greensboro's police chief.

Wray's fall from grace seems rooted in his management style; he apparently alienated enough people in the department to undermine his officers' morale and City Manager Mitch Johnson's confidence.

There is enough irony in this story to last into next year.

Wray was chosen in a painstaking process that included a panel of community representatives.

He rose through the ranks.

He comes from a family of local cops.

He said the right things at the right times.

He was a spit-and-polish stickler for details and regulations and by-the-book neatness and order.

Among his first directives as the new chief was the modify the design of police cars. Never mind that a committee of officers had conceived the paint scheme; it was too busy.

Then there was the directive that cops would wear hats.

The tiff over rotating schedules. The furor over a so-called "secret police" unit.

There's nothing in and of itself that was wrong with Wray's firece desire for neatness and order and crisp creases.

He never ironed out the wrinkles and repaired the frayed threads of too many tatteresd relationships.

What a sad ending.

The latest email hoax to find its way to the News & Record: "Bonsai kittens," whose young bodies allegedly are placed in molds to customize their size and shape.

There even is a Web site. And it's a cruel hoax.

But some letter writers have been duped. A writer from Stoneville implores the public to do something about this "sick" practice.

Not to worry. The only problem is that someone took the time and energy to propagate this twisted fairy tale.

Meanwhile, the latest form letter -- or astroturf -- campaign involves opponents of the new TV series "The Book of Daniel."

We have received several letters saying the same thing about the NBC show, which premiered last week.

Not to worry about it either. Its own clumsy scripts and contrived plots should guarantee its demise soon enough.

David Wharton hangs it up.

Hardy Floyd drops out of sight.

Michael's Corner closes shop.

All had interesting, thoughtful and frequently entertaining things to say. They'll be missed.

Perhaps it'sa case of burnout, as Ed Cone guesses.

Or maybe it's because blogging isn't as easy as it looks, especially if you're attempting to have some semblance of a life and career at the same time.

Whatever the reasons, these muted voices leave a void in this neck of the blogosphere.

Y'all come back, hear?

One of my editorial writing students at A&T is an Army Reservist who recently returned from a year's deployment in Iraq.

When she shared that fact with us during introductions last night, I surmised that such an experience must really change your perspective.

"I guess going to class and having to do assignments must seems like a piece of cake now?" I asked.

"Nah," she said. "I don't know too many things worse than a night class at 6:30 on a Thursday."

We finally saw "Brokeback Mountain" Saturday night in a packed auditorium at the only place the so-called "gay cowboy movie" is playing in town, the Carousel.

Directed by Ang Lee and scripted by Larry McMurtry of "Lonesome Dove" and "Last Picture Show" fame, "Brokeback Mountain" is a well-crafted character study about friemdship, pain and frustration -- and the emotional and physical casualties left in their wake.

It is leisurely in its pace, making no rush to apprecciate the beauty or rolling mountains and the double-edged romanee and boredom of a modern cowboy's life.

My significant other says she was most angered by the exploitation of women in the movie. She's right. They were often treated callously and thoughtlessly by the smitten cowboys, who made spread their snese of hopelessness to spouses and family.

Nearly one week after Greensboro Police Chief David Wray resigned under mounting pressure, the Rev. Albert Som-Pimpong still has trouble squaring what he reads in the newspaper with what he has seen for himself, up close.

Som-Pimpong roomed for two weeks with Wray during an 11-day trip by 44 local residents last fall to Israel through a program called the Interfaith Mission Tour. "We slept in the same room," said Som-Pimpong, an immigrant from Ghana, West Africa. "We prayed together."
Som-Pimpong can't say whether charges that the chief used his Special Intelligence unit to target black officers on the force are justified. Nor can he address concerns by City Manager Mitchell Johnson that Wray had lost the trust and confidence of the men and women he commanded. "But for him to become a persona non grata. I have a problem with that."

In an interview last week, even the city manager himself wrestled with who Wray appears to be versus what he appears to have done.
Johnson noted that even citizens who sat on a panel in 2003 to evaluate finalists for the chief's job were stunned.
"One of them called me and asked if she'd done something wrong," Johnson said of one panel member who had enthusiastically endorsed Wray for the job.

David Wharton, who is active in the Neighborhood Congress, praised Wray's ability to hold dialogues with neighborhoods.

"Chief Wray had an extraordinary gift for communicating with ordinary people," Wharton wrote last week in a blog comment, "and I believe he really understood what kind of policing the city of Greensboro needs. It's a shame that the management problems so entangled him."

That's part of what makes this all so hard to swallow. Wray's demise has been utterly rhymeless, cloaked in a fog of episodes and behaviors that seem to have no logical pattern.

Wray seemed the consummate professional. He seemed to understand how police work and the social fabric of the community were so tightly interwoven. He also seemed acutely aware of the political and social consequences that could follow if a sensitive issue were handled insensitively.

Consider his response to a widely publicized 2004 case in which a 68-year-old Egyptian woman who spoke little English scuffled with Greensboro police officers at the Battleground Avenue Wal-Mart and later was hospitalized.

Alleging that someone had taken money from her purse, Afaf Saudi became agitated with store clerks and refused, when asked, to leave the store. Still refusing to leave even after police arrived, Saudi had been handcuffed and arrested.

Wray helped keep the incident's aftermath from turning ugly by meeting with representatives of the Muslim community and holding a news conference to clarify the circumstances of the incident.
Some fumed in a poisonous post-9/11 funk about "ragheads." Others railed about police brutality.

Facing that potentially explosive backdrop, Wray reacted coolly and gracefully. The police met with Muslim leaders days after the incident. Wray stressed his intentions to find out what happened and to respond appropriately, heading off a planned mass prayer at the Guilford County Courthouse that could have sparked more friction and possibly even violence.

"We felt the right thing to do was to give the police a chance," Wajeh Muhammad, treasurer of the Islamic Center of the Triad, said later.

After an internal investigation, based on store camera footage and eyewitness accounts, cleared the officers, Muslim leader Badi Ali appeared with Wray when the chief announced the findings at a news conference.

"You can make out of a bad incident a good thing," Ali said.
How could that Wray be the same man whose "secret police" tore a rift through the police department and who seemed to effectively alienate himself from so many of his officers?

How could he be the same man who seemed to hide and mislead and to stir fears of conspiracy among some in the black community?

Who is David Wray? And where did black books and "secret police" come in?

Were we simply fooled, charmed and taken in by Wray's ability to say what we wanted to hear, when we needed to hear it?

"If what he was doing was pretending," Albert Som-Pimpong said, "he couldn't pretend for 11 days. The guy we went to Israel with is not the guy we're describing today."

Which is to say, the only thing more unsettling than what we know about Wray's fall from grace is what we still don't know.

Doug Clark skewers New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin for some poorly chosen words. I agree 100 percent.

Vernon Robinson, the indefatigable black Republican who believes he is a soldier in a "culture war," has said he will run for Democrat Mel Watt's seat in the 12th congressional district.

Robinson, who lost his Winston-Salem City Council seat last fall, said in an interview with me in November that running for office again was not on his wife's "honey do list."

But I suspect Robinson, who may fall to the right of Jesse Helms in his views, couldn't resist.

Yes, his chances for an upset are beyond remote in the predominantly black, predominantly Democratic district.

But I don't know that winning is the point. Robinson loves politics that much. He's like someone who enjoys window shopping. The process is more than half the fun.

We can only hope the mounting sentiment in public forums to turn our backs on socially and racially diverse schools does not represent a majority opinion.

The concept of "neighborhood schools" sounds warm and fuzzy but it represents the same type of veiled rhetoric we heard in the late 1960s and the early '70s.

And stripped of the visions it conjures of picket fences and friendly schoolhouses down the street, it means an unhealthy return to segregation.

As history has proven, segregation does not work. It didn't then and it won't now.

Consider these words from Chief Justice Earl Warren, in the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka:

"Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other 'tangible' factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities?

"We believe that it does."

Greensboro has a problem.

That became crystal clear once the words "secret police" and "black book" slipped so seamlessly into common usage that nearly anyone around here instantly knew what they meant.

However you look at it, the current mess involving former Police Chief David Wray is confusing and unsettling. Who did what to whom and why?

Was Lt. James Hinson the object of a racially motivated witch hunt by the chief, and have other African American officers been targeted for similar treatment? Or is it Wray who has been unfairly persecuted for asking questions about the department that needed asking, and because he wouldn't stop asking them until he received satisfactory answers?
It depends on whom you believe.

And it seems to ebb and flow with each excruciating new sliver of information.

For his part, local Muslim leader Badi Ali, like a number of others, rallied to Wray's defense. Ali wrote in a letter to the editor that, "In my experience, the outgoing chief of police has been a fair and unbiased man."

But Ali also remained uncomfortable about what he doesn't know. "God help us," he said last week over the telephone about this latest community quandary.

I still can't shake the video surveillance footage of smiling Florida youths beating a homeless man with baseball bats and golf clubs.

What a queasy vision. This is somebody's idea of a good time?

The Miami Herald reports that the crimes are as hard to explain as they are to accept.

"It doesn't add up," a Herald story reports. "Overall, violent crime by U.S. young people is down -- dramatically.

"But violent attacks on the homeless are up, across the country, in 39 states.

"And 75 percent of those arrested in such attacks are youths."

"But hardest to understand is the randomness, the lack of even irrational motive. In cases across the country it's usually not robbery, hardly ever revenge, seldom even anger, experts say. Even when youths try to explain why they did it, the best they can come up with is it was for kicks, because they were bored."

The newspaper's e-mail server got seriously ill the other and, e-gads, we had to find the courage to live without e-messages for a whole day, maybe e-ven longer.

This also meant we had to catch up on all the notes we missed once the problem had been e-radicated.

Between you and me, the break may have done me some good. There's something to be said for actually talking to people.

And for being spared, at least for a while, cyber-overtures for body part enlargement, hot dates and can't miss money schemes from correspondents in West Africa.

E-nough already.

I have little sympathy for author James Frey, who Oprah hung out to dry on her show Thursday.

After all, Frey had been trying to defend the indefensible -- fabrications in his best-selling memoir about addiciton and redemption, "A Million Little Pieces." And subsequent lies about them.

Fiction is fiction and nonfiction is nonfiction, plain and simple.

Yet, Oprah's sudden about-face on this issue also deserves criticism.
She had staunchly defended Frey's book, which had been featured as a selection of her newly revived -- and highy influential -- book club.

Last week she told Larry King the fuss about Frey's veracity (or lack thereof) was "much ado about nothing." Thursday she said, "I feel duped."

Fact or fiction, Oprah? Was there an epiphany somewhere along the way or was Oprah merely out to save Oprah?

Greensboro is not the only city in the state with pressing concerns about pedestrian safety.

That probably comes as no surprise.

What may surprise you is that one of those other places is Chapel Hill.

The News & Observer of Raleigh reports that the state's most famous college town saw three fatalities this week involving people being hit by vehicles.

Chapel Hill hadn't had pedestrian killed by vehicle since since 2002.

Incidentally, one of the accidents involved the Boston College team bus, which struck and killed a bicyclist on the way to Thursday night's game against Carolina at the Smith Center.

A cyclist hadn't been killed in Chapel Hill since before 1997, the News & Observer reports.

A reader wondered the other day why the News & Record's letters column had become so "overrun" with pronouncements (and/or denouncements) of religious faith?

Why not publish all that stuff on the religion pages?

He's hardly been the only one to complain.

If I said Pat Robertson makes us do it, I'd only be half-kidding.
The fact is, the line between politics, public policy and religion has become increasingly blurred.

Consider some of the recent issues — some legitimate, some ginned up as political diversions, some the products of vacationing good judgment — that have fanned the flames of editorial opinion:

• Gay marriage, often decried — and sometimes even affirmed — with lengthy quotes from the Bible.
• Prayer in public schools.
• The controversial placement of a Ten Commandments monument in the rotunda of Alabama's state judicial building. Or, closer to home, by a congressional candidate, Vernon Robinson, who plopped his own granite monument at the doorstep of Winston-Salem's City Hall. Of course, the national media descended on cue.

"American Idol's" ratings are up a whopping 10 percent, reports that august chronicler of the perils of Paula, Simon, Kelly, Fantasia, et al, The New York Times.

Clay Aiken is a hit. That poor kid mangling the Rick Martin tune was a hit. The telecast of tryouts in Greensboro were a hit. Everything associated with the mutant offspring of "Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour," "Fame" and "Star Search" is a hit.

I don't get it.

I have tried watching this show and, frankly, the most fun I tend to have involves the wannabes who can't sing a lick.

Obviously, some of these people are intentionally trying to be awful (anything for a split second of fame). But part of the fun is trying to figure out which ones those are -- and which ones actually believe they have talent.

As for the others, the arrangements and choreography typically are hokey and uninspired, and will age -- when this show inevitably airs in reruns some day on TV Land -- as as well as "Donny and Marie."

She bangs, she bangs indeed.

A&E's gripping presentation of "Flight 93" Monday night was one of the best TV movies I have seen in recent memory.

The real-life retelling of the Sept. 11 commercial plane whose flight crew and passengers (including Greensboro's Sandy Bradshaw) rebelled against their terrorist highjackers could easily have been maudlin and preachy.

Instead, it hangs its narrative on authentic recreations of the cell phone conversations of passengers with their loved ones.

And its writers and director clearly realize that this story requires little amplification. All the drama it needed happened for real. So they wisely stay out of its way.

My only complaint is the commercials. Although the broadcast was presented with "limited commercial interruption," the transition from the harrowing takeover of the plane to the Burger King dashing for a touchdown was jarring, to say the least.