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This week's column.

To hear John Thain tell it, his critics have misoverestimated his extravagance.

Sure, he spent a mint on his new office at Merrill Lynch when he became CEO there, Thain explains.

But you should have seen the place.

The office, which had belonged to previous Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O'Neal, "was very different than the general decor of Merrill's offices," Thain explained.

"It really would have been very difficult for me to use it in the form that it was in. ... It needed to be renovated no matter what."

It wasn't, uh, you know, Feng schui enough.

Among the items Thain deemed necessary for his little fixer-upper:

* $35,115 for a now-infamous "commode on legs."

* $1,405 for a parchment waste can.

* $25,000 for a pedestal table.

* $68,000 for a 19th-century credenza.

For what Thain spent redecorating his office, he could have bought a very big house in Greensboro. Or a small neighborhood.

We now know the name of the mother of the California octuplets.

We know she is single.

We know she has had all of her children as a result of in vitro fertilization.

We know, according to her mother, reports the Associated Press, Nadya Suleman has been obsessed with the idea of having children since she was a teenager.

This seems a clear case of someone who was a questionable candidate for fertility treatments and who should have been screened psychologically. At the very least, in the interest of the children.

Jill Nelson on the Huffington Post about the glaring lack of diversity among the journalists who cover the first black president:

It's profoundly dishonest and morally wrong that media coverage of Barack Obama and his presidency is framed by an almost exclusively white press corps.

Are you ready for your close-up?

We are working on a directory of local bloggers for our Web site that will include videos of bloggers and short profiles.

If you'd like to be part of it, please e-mail me at ajohnson@news-record.com and leave a number where you can be reached. We'll be shooting the next round of videos in our studio on Tuesday, Feb. 10, and will contact you to schedule an appointment.

You'll be ask to speak for a minute or so and say whatever you'd like to say about yourself and your blog.

If you'd like to know what it's like, check with Ed Cone or Cara Michelle or Doug or Sue. They've already done their videos.

Leonard Pitts wonders in his column today how 50 people could witness a shooting at a public park and not have seen who fired the gun.

I wonder how 700 people could be present during a shooting in a packed Greensboro movie theater and not have seen who fired the shots.

You do the math.

Doug was kind enough to invite along to the UNCG-Davidson game tonight.

My take:

Excellent crowd (more 11,000) and atmosphere. So many fans kept streaming into the stands they had to draw back part of the upper-deck curtain.

Blah game: Davidson star Stephen Curry played on cruise control, shot miserably (for him) and still scored 29 points. UNCG played hard but was outmanned in a 75-54 loss.

Pumped chancellor: UNCG’s Linda Brady whupped it up in the student section for part of the first half and seemed completely at home. A certifiable fan girl.

The verdict: UNCG’s new era in the coliseum, soon to be its new home court, was a rousing success.

The question is what happens when Samford or Wofford comes to town?

This week's column.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

Bearing that in mind, state lawmakers have decided not to wait for the Greensboro City Council to hem, haw, ruminate, speechify and attach wholly unnecessary asterisks and conditions to the question of protest petitions.

As they say in the over-priced sneaker business, just do it.

So, Guilford County legislators have moved ahead on their own and filed bills in the state House and Senate that would restore to Greensboro residents a right every other city in the state already has.

Good for them. The lawmakers have simplified a process that the council was making unduly convoluted and drawn-out.

Protest petitions give residents added leverage in discussions of contested rezonings. Residents who own 5 percent of the adjoining land to the rezoning object can force a supermajority vote of the council (at least 7-2) to approve a zoning change.

Greensboro lost its right to protest petitions in 1971, when the City Council at the time stealthily asked for — without public discussion or explanation — and was granted, an exemption from the legislature.

The legislators intend to fix that with bills in the state House and Senate, respectively, that are refreshingly direct in their language and their intent.

City Council members will tell you that they, too, wanted to restore protest petitions. And they voted unanimously on Jan. 21 to ask that the law be reinstated in Greensboro.

“We passed it, period,” said Mayor Yvonne Johnson.

But anyone who attended the Jan. 21 meeting could see the council was clearly conflicted over the issue. It still is.

The student body president of N.C. Central University appeared on CNN Monday in the interest of ... more presentable student dress.

NCCU is pressing the case for pants that actually fit and undershirts that are actually worn under shirts. And its top student leader, Kent Williams Jr., heartily agrees.

“We’re not trying to dictate to students how to dress,” Williams told The News & Observer of Raleigh.

“We just want to get them thinking about what they wear.”

Toward that end, NCCU is passing out cards on student dress that provide some guidelines -- although school administrators hasten to add that these are suggestions, not a dress code.

But some students say the baggy pants thing is passe anyway.

They may be right. At A&T I rarely see low-slung trousers, which seem to be clinging on, as a trend, mainly among young pre-college boys.

I do spot pajama bottoms every now and then, but the most egregious fashions I typically see these days in Greensboro are worn on the backs (barely) of teens at malls and shopping centers.

NCCU’s Williams, for the record, favors suits and ties.

All I ask of my students is that they wear clothes that fit and keep their unmentionables unseen.

And that, unless they aspire to go to prison after graduation, don’t dress like it.

As the president so eloquently put it on MTV, “Brothers should pull up their pants.”

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Sustainable Greensboro has a Web site and a blog now. Check them out.

DeWayne Wickham of USA Today, who also is a faculty member at N.C. A&T, has good things to say about the new chairman of the GOP, Michael Steele.

Wickham directs the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies at A&T. He has a blog, too,rright here.

If the better team wins tonight, Carolina ought to beat Duke.

But the better team does not always survive the emotion of this rivalry, especially in that smelly, steamy and claustrophobic cauldron they call Cameron.

Carolina still should take this one, unless Roy's Folks choose, as they do on occasion, not to play defense.

Carolina by 10.

Meanwhile, HBO premieres its Carolina-Duke documentary on Feb. 23.

Based on previous HBO specials -- and the can't-miss material -- it ought to be good.

You may not want to read this until you’ve had lunch, but there’s some interesting, if not appetizing, information from an op-ed by E.J. Levy in today’s New York Times on what’s really in the food we routinely consume.

“You may be grossed out,” Levy writes, “but insects and mold in our food are not new. The F.D.A. actually condones a certain percentage of “natural contaminants in our food supply — meaning, among other things, bugs, mold, rodent hairs and maggots.”

For instance, tomato juice may average 10 or more fly eggs per gram, canned mushrooms more than 20 or more maggots.

At least there’s extra protein to be had.

For more delectable details, click here.

This week's column.

In a stroke of both good fortune and good police work, officers at N.C. A&T arrested a suspect last week in a cold-blooded December robbery that left a Brink’s armored car guard dead from a gunshot wound to the head.

Juan Estaban Salado, 25, was fatally shot Dec. 15 as he left the Old Navy store at Friendly Center.

The gunman knew when Salado would arrive to pick up a cash deposit.

Disguised in a wig and hospital scrubs, he waited, he struck, and he fled.

The man, identified by police as Isaam Mattaay Chaplin, 28, is being held in the Guilford County Jail without bond.

The good fortune comes in the form of Chaplin not only inexplicably hanging around Greensboro after allegedly committing such a brazen crime. But also being dumb enough to get into trouble while he should have been lying low.

A&T police arrested Chaplin, a former Old Navy employee and former Aggie student, following a scuffle on campus. When running a background check they discovered he was being sought by Greensboro police in connection with the Old Navy murder.

A&T police and Greensboro police, in the case, worked together seamlessly for the good of the whole community.

They should try it more often. The recent spate of violent crime citywide demands that they do.
Broach the word “shooting” these days in Greensboro and the response is likely to be, “Which one?”

A new book laments that snarkiness is eroding the quaility of public discussion.

One of the themes of the book, titled "Snark," by David Denby, says snideness as an end unto itself is making debate meaner, cruder and less constructive.

For an NPR report on the book, click here.

For a Los Angeles Times review, click here.

Obviously, Denby hasn't sampled the reasonableness and civility of the blog comments around here.

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The City Council has reaaffirmed its support of protest petitions.

What a bunch of revisionists.

I attended the Jan. 21 meeting in which they expressed all kinds of reservations.

What the council did was try to have it both ways ... not to offend developers or neighborhood groups in an election year. So they kinda sorta endorsed protest petitions while asking builders and representatives of the Greensboro Neighborhood Congress to discuss possible changes that would have watered down the law.

What the council wound up doing in the process was ceding leadership on this issue to local legislators, who said the heck with all this negotiation business; restore the law as it is written.

Good for them.

Same say even a chimp could have figured a New York Post cartoon linking a rampaging chimp and the economic stimulus package was trouble.

Editor & Publisher reports.

Richard Prince adds more.

This week's column.

Way back when, during my junior year in Chapel Hill, the phone rang one night in my dorm room.

It was Dean Smith.

The coach of the Tar Heels had called to answer a few questions for a story I was reporting for a campus magazine.

Frankly, I hadn’t expected the callback. But here he was, much more gracious than you’d expect from a Hall of Fame basketball coach granting time to some faceless English major writing an article.

Why didn’t Carolina schedule historically black Division 1 basketball schools in the state, such as N.C. A&T? I asked. Smith didn’t hesitate.

“The fact is, we don’t schedule any other schools in the state other than ACC schools,” he said. “We’ve got enough rivals as it is.”

He was right; that was the policy at Carolina in the 1970s, although it has long since been dropped. And Carolina does tend to get every opponent’s "A game."

But I wonder if he even suspected then that one of those in-state rivalries would grow to far overshadow all the rest.

That conversation came to mind as I previewed the new HBO sports documentary, “Battle for Tobacco Road: Duke vs. Carolina.” The one-hour film debuts Monday at 9 p.m. and hits nothing but net in its depiction of the hot-blooded enmity between the two neighbors . You name it, they’ve got it:

• Footage from memorable games.
• Interviews with J.J. Redick, Charlie Scott, Grant Hill, Eric Montross, Christian Laettner, Woody Durham, Jay Bilas, Michael Jordan and even the Durham barbers who cut Duke and Carolina players’ hair.
• Spicy recollections of the testy relations between Duke and Carolina coaches, including the time Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski told Smith to Dick Cheney himself.

For any Duke or Carolina fan, this documentary is a mother lode of hoop dreams. But it does make me a little wistful.

I attended Carolina for six years, counting undergraduate and graduate school. And I got to see my share of classic games in old Carmichael Auditorium — Maryland Coach Lefty Driesell hefting his fist at the crowd and vowing revenge after a narrow loss on a controversial noncall.

An N.C. State player with the soulful name of Al Green, hitting free throws after time expired to beat the favored Heels.

But as a student I never saw Duke-Carolina in person, even watching the famous eight-points-in-17-seconds comeback game (March 2, 1974) from my dorm room while folding laundry (major bummer).

I (theoretically) saved the trips to Carmichael for the biggest games. And those usually weren’t Carolina-Duke. At least back then.

We're interviewing Greensboro Coliseum's managing director for a Sunday Ideas front.

There's lots to cover with Matt Brown: the swim center, the ACC women's tournament, the coliseum as UNCG's home court, the state of the concert business, complaints about parking fees, the Canada dry property ... .

If you've got your own questions for Brown, let me know here by 5 p.m. Tuesday and we'll choose some of them for the interview, which will include a video conversation.

Chancellor Stanley Battle's tenure at N.C. A&T is ending barely before it could get started.

Battle will step down on June 30, after only two years on the job for "family and personal reasons."

Almost no one knows what that means and the few people who may know aren't saying anything, including Battle.

A&T officials flatly denied that Battle was resigning Tuesday, over and over, until finally admitting in a news release that he was.

It is hard what to make of this news. Did his boss, UNC President Erskine Bowles, decide that he wasn't working out?

Did Battle decide the job wasn't right for him?

Did he clash with the university's trustees?

Or some of all of the above?

Or is what we're seeing what we got?

Is he truly leaving for truly personal and family reasons (that phrase has become a PR cliche in many circles, much like Hollywood people splitting over "creative diffrerences," so please forgive the skepticism).

One thing is certain: This is not good for A&T. It needs stable, steady leadership. Now it must start over again in the search for its next CEO -- who will be its fourth in four years.

Among many of the reasons my times at Dudley High School were so important to me, were e-mails like this one that came over the weekend:

Hello, Mr Johnson, While searching "Dudley High 1972," I came across your blog and read about the first graduating class with white students in 1973.

Thanks.
Steve Sims