Month: January 2007

What’s the name of the city between Greensboro and Winston Salem that no one cares about?

Give up?
The correct answer is High Point, NC. If you didn’t know that, then perhaps you should check out Part 1 of my quasi-regular column entitled “Know Your NC Cities”. This week, we’ll see how High Point can change from a city I don’t care about to a city I hate.

Let’s get our learn on.

Here are some quick fun facts about High Point, NC:

High Point has a population of 92,000 people. Not too shabby. Even more impressive, the population spikes to 205,000 when Whitesnake performs at the nearby Greensboro Coliseum.

High Point sits at an elevation of 926 meters above sea level. Interestingly enough, that’s exactly how high you can stack shit.

High Point is the only city in NC that is spread among 4 counties; Davidson, Guilford, Forsyth, and Randolph. The city’s boundaries were drawn this way because the city’s high welfare burden was too much to place on 3 counties.

High Point leads the nation in moustaches per square foot.

The average temperature during a High Point summer is 82 degrees, which attributes to High Point’s ranking as the number one purchaser of above ground swimming pools and styrofoam coolers.

High Point has a booming furniture industry. Long ago the people of the region were too poor to purchase couches to sit their fat asses on, so they built them by hand.

High Point is the home of High Point University. There, dozens of students spend their formative years studying subjects ranging from cigarette smoking to do-it-yourself window tinting.

Hope you enjoyed this installment of “Know Your NC Cities”.  I hope you learned as much as I did.  If there’s a city you’d like to know more about, let me know and we’ll get educated together.  Until next time…

 “Little Chris thought he’d never play at Littlejohn. To see him is to know why. Chris Poole, a former guard at Raleigh’s Broughton High, weighs 160 pounds and stands what he calls ‘a generous 5-9.'”

Now he’s a senior walk-on at Clemson, living his dream.  But what Poole does more than anything is stand as proof that State does not, indeed, have the market on short, slow white boys with no talent.

“Poole played point guard for the university’s intramural champion. His team went on win the South Carolina intramural title and reached the national final. Poole made the all-tournament team.

This summer, he worked out at Broughton’s gym with other Broughton graduates who knew ACC basketball. His mentor was Will Roach, a former N.C. State walk-on who earned a scholarship…[and] Braxton Albritton, a [current] State walk-on. Occasionally, Poole worked with [longtime Duke underachiever] Shavlik Randolph, his former Broughton teammate who’s now with the Philadelphia 76ers.”

What a remarkable story.  And to think, he could be playing significant minutes for the Pack this season.  How did we let this kid get out of Raleigh? 

All the flights are booked.

106 days and counting…

From Yahoo!

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Philip Rivers would love to be just like Tom Brady.

Seriously, who wouldn’t want to win a Super Bowl in his first season as a starting quarterback, then add on a couple more? That’s what Brady did in compiling his gaudy 11-1 postseason record.

For Rivers to follow that path, he and his San Diego Chargers will have to beat the playoff-seasoned New England Patriots on Sunday in a divisional-round game at Qualcomm Stadium.

“Obviously I understand it, as all quarterbacks do, that you have a won-loss record attached to your name,” Rivers said Wednesday. “I don’t want to do it for me. I want to do it for us.”

From ESPN:

The Denver Nuggets need some breathing space from luxury-tax territory. The Milwaukee Bucks need backcourt scoring to counter their injury crisis.

That’s why the teams, according to NBA front-office sources, are combining on a trade featuring Earl Boykins that will be announced later Thursday.

Now 10 games into the Allen Iverson Era, Denver has agreed to send Boykins and little-used guard Julius Hodge to the Bucks for guard Steve Blake.

From ESPN’s recap of the game against Clemson: [K.C.] Rivers put the Tigers ahead to stay when his 3-pointer about 5 minutes in made it 14-13.

Yup. Pretty much sums it up.

Effective January 1st, our new company health insurance policy through Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee went into effect.  Incidentally, the premiums went up.  The only real effect this had on me is that my paycheck is now a few dollars smaller than it was previously. 

Insurance is a racket, and consequently it is one of the many reasons why I’m not a democrat.  Let me ellaborate for those of you that could care less.

The basic socioeconomic principles of the democratic party are based entirely on socialism; there’s no dispute about that, right?  We all agree that democrats fundamentally believe that society as a whole has a duty to share the burden of individuals. 

Here’s why I have a problem with that.

Insurance has premiums and it has co-pays.  For a higher premium you can get a lower co-pay.  Group insurance policies all have standard co-pays and fairly standard tiered rates. 

My premium went up, although I haven’t been to a doctor in 10 years.  I don’t even have a doctor.  My co-pay remained the same.

Why do I have a problem with this?  Because I’m paying more for insurance that I do not use while taking some of the burden off of those people that visit their doctor every time they sneeze.  The co-pay doesn’t affect people like me, but the premium does.

Rising healthcare costs lead directly to rising insurance costs while premiums and co-pays offset these costs for insurers.  As a republican, I believe that instead of raising the premiums, the insurance companies should raise the co-pay.  In effect, this would ensure that the ones using the insurance handled the majority of the burden for their insurance costs rather than myself, a healthy young individual that hasn’t had any use for insurance since high school.   

I blame John Edwards and Jacob Crawford.