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ASHEVILLE – And you thought 15 major Republican candidates for president was a lot.
Four last-day filings Friday brought the number of candidates for City Council this year to a whopping 16.
Filing Friday were Richard Liston, a former university professor; John Miall, a former city employee who ran unsuccessfully for mayor two years ago; Planning and Zoning Commission member Holly Shriner and Dee Williams, a businesswoman who lost previous bids for council. None had announced their plans this year before Friday, the last day to get in the race.
Not filing was Jonathan Wainscott, an unsuccessful candidate in 2013 who had announced plans earlier this year to seek a seat. He has been arrested four times over a roughly two-month span.
The large number of candidates for three seats on council is a big jump from 2013, when only eight people sought four seats up for grabs that year, but city voters have faced long ballots before. There were 14 candidates on the 2007 ballot, for instance.
Candidates who filed before Friday are Corey Atkins, Joe Grady, Brian Haynes, Marc Hunt, Rich Lee, Julie Mayfield, Ken Michalove, Grant Millin, Carl Mumpower, Lavonda Nicole Payne, Lindsey Simerly and Keith Young.
Hunt is the only incumbent in the field, although Mumpower served on council previously. Councilmen Jan Davis and Chris Pelly both decided not to seek another term on council.
An Oct. 6 primary will narrow the field to six candidates. The general election will be Nov. 3.
Until then, candidates will have to work hard to connect with enough voters to get themselves over the first threshold, said Bill Sabo, a retired UNC Asheville political science professor who still lives in the city.
Especially for those with little name recognition, “The real challenge is going to be … to do something that will stand out,” he said.
A large candidate field sometimes indicates general dissatisfaction with a city government, Sabo said, but he said that doesn’t seem to be the case this year, although some candidates do say they want to see a change in direction.
“There seems to be no common thread in their concerns. Everybody has a personal interest in a particular issue or issues,” he said.
Liston has been a professional trombonist and taught computer science. He’s now trying to start an alternative college in the city.
He said he’s running partly because of concerns about the balance between tourism and other parts of the local economy and with growth in traffic.
Miall is a consultant after a lengthy career with the city. His last city job was as risk manager.
He said city government spending is “not sustainable” and he’s running because “my passion for government has not changed (since 2013). The things I wanted changed have not happened.”
Shriner could not be reached for comment.
Williams has run unsuccessfully for council before, most recently in 2007.
She said she would use her experience in business and economic development to control city spending and avoid tax and fee increases.
In other Buncombe County municipalities, the close of the filing period ensured that Montreat will have a new mayor, as incumbent Letta Jean Taylor did not seek re-election. Tim Helms is the only candidate for the job.
Biltmore Forest will have a mayoral contest as incumbent George Goosman III will face challenger Jim Taylor. Woodfin won’t: Mayor Jerry VeHaun was the only person to file for the job.
In a county beyond the reach of any four-lane highway, a young couple chuckles and swivels in their chairs as they start telling for posterity the story of how they met.
“You want me to tell the story, or you tell the story?” asks Pete Culicerto, 20, who’s seated next to his girlfriend before a pair of black microphones.
“I’ll tell it, because you’d make it all cheesy,” says 17-year-old Ginger Smyth, each of her syllables snaking through a black cable into a high-end audio recorder ticking the time off on a green digital screen.
“Cheesy’s good,” says West Virginia University linguist Kirk Hazen, encouraging a relaxed conversation that allows the accents and speech patterns of their mountain community to flow unhindered by the self-consciousness that sometimes keeps them in check.
Hazen, who’s spent two decades recording dozens of interviews around West Virginia, is among a new wave of scholars seeking to put to rest “Beverly Hillbillies”-style myths and stigmas about Appalachia.
Three books in the past year and a fourth to be published soon challenge these century-old stereotypes by noting, among other points, that Appalachian residents speak a variety of Englishes — and not a single monolithic dialect — and that scorn for the region’s speech is often based on outdated notions of how they talk.
In southwest Virginia, English professor Amy D. Clark has held summer workshops for 15 years for rural teachers to help them teach students to write effectively without shaming them about their speech. The same message runs through teaching units on dialect for schoolchildren in North Carolina and West Virginia.
Proponents say reducing stigmas about speech has resulted in victories such as last year’s decision by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in East Tennessee to cancel classes aimed at reducing workers’ accents.
“You’re trying to get across the idea that all language varieties are legitimate. There’s not one that’s somehow damaged and then others that are just fine,” Hazen said. “They’re all just fine.”
—
The first step in changing perceptions of mountain speech is documenting how contemporary Appalachian residents talk, which is why Hazen, who started the West Virginia Dialect Project in the late 1990s, has invited Smyth and Culicerto to a borrowed conference room at an ambulance company on Pineville’s main street. The building shares the main drag with a dress store, two pharmacies and an accountant, all down the hill from the county courthouse.
Culicerto laughs as he recalls his first encounter with Smyth in the office of Wyoming East High School: “She smiled at me, then I got shy.”
“He didn’t smile back!” Smyth interjects.
“No, I didn’t smile back. I turned away,” he said. But they began chatting over social media and soon were eating breakfast and lunch together every day in the school cafeteria.
In a loosely organized conversation, Hazen and another researcher ask questions about Culicerto and Smyth’s families and their community, such as whether parents are generally involved in teens’ love lives.
The answers themselves are routine, but it’s the underlying sounds the researchers are most interested in.
When Smyth says, “It depends,” the latter half of the word sounds similar to “pin,” an example of a merger of vowel sounds common in the southern part of the state.
Culicerto remarks that in their relationship, both sets of parents ask the couple out to meals, showing an example of a pleonastic — or redundant — pronoun: “Both sides, they always ask.”
The two examples are among enduring dialect features in West Virginia, which Hazen’s research shows have remained steady in the state.
Hazen has also used his research to illustrate that other stereotypical features of Appalachian speech have become rare — such as the demonstrative them (“them apples are the best”) or a-prefixing (“I’m a-going to the store”). Neither of those fading features was heard during the recent interviews in Pineville.
The recording will later be fed into software that allows researchers to analyze one syllable at a time, then catalog each word for further study.
—
Despite what Hazen’s research shows, many outsiders still have negative impressions of people who speak with a mountain accent, sometimes based on outdated speech features. It can take decades for perceptions about language to change.
The tone in the conference room grows more serious when questions turn to whether outsiders comment on the way Smyth and Culicerto talk.
“I think they look at me and they’re like: ‘Oh my gosh, she lives way back in the holler … and is so redneck!'” she said. “They think lower of me.”
The researcher working with Hazen on the interviews, Pineville native Jordan Lovejoy, said she was made to feel self-conscious about how she talked from a young age and worked until recently to change it.
She recalled going to New York as a teenager and feeling embarrassed when a hotel clerk couldn’t understand her request for a pen. On a student government trip to the northern part of West Virginia, other students made fun of how she stretched out the vowel sound in “bill.”
“It’s upsetting,” she said.
A turning point for the recent West Virginia University graduate was taking a class taught by Hazen about the history of dialect in West Virginia. She learned that a Pineville accent “wasn’t necessarily a bad thing … so I try to be a little more natural now,” said Lovejoy.
—
It’s this kind of breakthrough that educators around the region are hoping for as they experiment with novel ways of teaching grammar.
Among them is contrastive analysis, an approach in which students diagram spoken sentences and compare them to formal written English. Contrastive analysis is among the methods discussed at the Appalachian Writing Project’s summer institute for teachers, led by Clark, the English professor in Virginia. About 130 teachers have completed the training program since it started in 2001.
Traditional “right and wrong” approaches to grammar turn off many kids in the mountains, Clark said.
“Kids don’t understand it. They just think they’re speaking a broken English,” said Clark, one of the editors of the book “Talking Appalachian.”
Lizbeth Phillips, a middle-school teacher in southwest Virginia who’s worked with Clark’s project since 2004, assigns her students to keep journals of how adults in their community switch between formal and casual ways of speaking. Educators say the approach, known as code- or style-switching, allows students to preserve the way they speak at home and improve their writing without feeling ashamed.
Phillips said her approach has helped students’ scores on standardized tests, and she was recently asked to work with another English teacher to expand her approach to all eighth-graders at her school.
“If you’re marching out the red pen … you’re really criticizing their culture and their family heritage and other things. It’s not just about standardizing the language,” she said.
“I tell these children all the time: Do not forsake your culture. Do not forsake your spoken language, your home language. Keep that. It’s special,” she added. “But understand: when you’re sitting for an interview at U.Va. or sitting at a job interview, you might not want to say ‘y’all,’ ‘you’ns’ and ‘a-going.”
For middle school students in West Virginia and North Carolina, Hazen and Walt Wolfram of North Carolina State University have worked with colleagues to develop teaching units that emphasize the history of each state’s dialects.
“It gives them a sense of pride,” said Wolfram, who recently spent a week working with kids in a mountain school system. “They think it’s cool. And it also makes them special. It contributes to the sort of cultural capital of kids who want to be from someplace, who want to have a strong heritage and want to be grounded.”
—
Wolfram believes that Appalachian culture is in the midst of a renaissance in which people are more aware — and more proud — of their heritage.
“There’s a kind of re-appropriation of things ‘hillbilly,’ which were once considered to be a negative stigma, and embracing it and turning that around into something positive. So people will say, ‘Yeah, I’m hillbilly, and proud of it!'” he said.
William Schumann, the director of the Center for Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University, said the trend is demonstrated by larger number of young adults learning how to play traditional mountain instruments.
“What 20 or 30 years ago was uncool, is cool again. It’s sort of hipster to be into the banjo,” said Schumann, one of the editors of “Appalachia Revisited,” due out next year.
Speakers in the region may purposely use vernacular expressions to show they belong to a group of family or friends. In his article about the word “ain’t,” Hazen notes that all West Virginians are conscious of how the word is perceived, and that for the past three decades, its use has been “a choice of social identity.”
Last summer when the Oak Ridge National Laboratory canceled optional accent reduction classes after some employees complained, the headline in the Knoxville News-Sentinel read: “ORNL bows to Southern pride.”
The speech coach slated to teach the class, Lisa Scott, said she’s noticed a “strong divide” between people who are very proud of their accents and those who want to change them.
Scott said most of her accent reduction clients are foreigners who want to speak English with less of an accent, but that she also has many clients from the South, including a woman who recently called her in tears after being mocked at work.
To Smyth, such tensions are frustrating but very real: “I don’t see anything wrong with me having an accent.”
—
In the conference room, the late afternoon sun shines through the windows as the interview stretches to nearly two hours.
When the topic turns to the planned construction of a new highway, the couple differs on whether the growth would be a good thing for the county. But they agree they wouldn’t want to grow up anywhere else.
“I like it being a small town. Everybody knows everybody,” Smyth said.
“I couldn’t ask for any other place,” Culicerto adds. “I couldn’t imagine growing up in New York City, Atlanta or Charlotte.”
Culicerto said he finished high school with a perfect 4.0 grade point average. Now an accounting student at Marshall University, he has plans for a master’s degree.
He knows that the stubborn stereotypes outsiders have of people like him can run both ways.
“The way they look at us, we might look at them the same way, like: ‘Oh they have a city accent.’ But really, we’re all the same.”
American Airlines and US Airways next weekend will start the three-month process of combining their reservations systems, signaling the beginning of the end for the US Airways brand.
When the complex changeover to American’s system is completed on Oct. 17, US Airways’ website will go away and the combined airlines’ flights and airport facilities, if not all planes, will carry a single name — American.
“We’re going to be one airline for our customers,” Maya Liebman, American’s chief information officer said.
The final flight is now expected to be Flight 434, a red-eye scheduled to depart San Francisco around 10 p.m. on Oct. 16 before landing and landing in Philadelphia after 6 a.m. on Oct. 17.
American and Tempe-based US Airways merged in December 2013, retaining the American name and its Texas headquarters, and have been gradually combining their operations. The airlines’ frequent flier programs were merged earlier this year.
The reservations switch is one of the most complicated in an airline merger and has caused major traveler headaches in other mergers as systems went down and other glitches arose. When America West Airlines and US Airways merged their reservation systems in early 2007, major glitches arose that caused flight delays and snaking lines at several major airports.
American said it is taking three months to move US Airways’ flight reservations into American’s system instead of an overnight switch to minimize risk. Beginning on July 18, for example, all flights booked for travel Oct. 17 and beyond will be labeled as American flights in the reservation, even if the flight is booked on usairways.com and is a traditional US Airways route, say Phoenix to Seattle, San Francisco, Charlotte, N.C., or Boston.
Travelers currently holding US Airways reservations for travel Oct. 17 and beyond will receive an e-mail letting them know their flight is now an American flight with a new reservation number. Everything else on the itinerary remains the same, the airlines say.
“There’s nothing for customers to do,” Leibman said. “They don’t need to call reservations to get that new number.”
American executives insist it will be business as usual for American and US Airways passengers over the next three months as the reservations integration is underway. Travelers will still be able to book on tickets on US Airways or American’s website or reservations centers. At the airport, check in for American and US Airways flights will remain separate so travelers will still need to check their itineraries to see whether US Airways or American is operating the flight.
American says it is ready for the most critical part of the changeover, on Oct. 17, when all reservations will be in American’s system. The airline says it has hired 600 new airport agents and 1,300 new reservations agents and is putting existing US Airways agents through extensive training on the new system.
Leibman said American/USAirways has also proactively canceled some flights around Oct. 17 to “ensure that we had a little bit more breathing room when we’re doing the actual systems integration.”
Kerry Philipovitch, senior vice president of customer experience, said the airlines are ready for the biggest merger test to date.
“It’s something that we’ve been working towards and planning for for the past couple of years,” she said.
Airplane seats that face each other?
The seats aren’t likely to find their way onto a major airline anytime soon – if ever.
But that hasn’t stopped the Internet from exploding with stories about an airplane seating plan that would force passengers to face each other in alternating directions.
What’s prompted all that talk? One of the world’s largest airplane seat manufacturers has patented such a plan, which would allow carriers to squeeze more passengers into the economy cabins of their planes.
In its patent, Zodiac Seats France — a division of Zodiac Aerospace —calls the seating arrangement “economy class cabin hexagon.” On planes where coach cabins have middle seats, the layout would turn the middle seat backwards to — in Zodiac’s words — “increase cabin density while also creating seat units that increase the space available at the shoulder and arm area by creating an overlap in the shoulder areas of adjacent seats.”
The seat-maker has issued renderings and diagrams of its proposed seating arrangement. For now, the idea is just an “exploratory concept.” And even with the patent filing, it’s unclear when — if ever — such a configuration might make its way into the cabin of a major passenger airline.
Despite the potentially awkward face-to-face arrangement, Zodiac claims the layout does have some upside for fliers. For example, Zodiac suggests the alternating seat direction would end up giving fliers four extra inches of legroom.
“It’s a different way of traveling, with people facing each other,” Zodiac vice president Pierre-Antony Vastra says to The Australian newspaper. “We can have nice conversations.”
Already dozens of stories on the topic have surfaced on the Internet, appearing in publications across the globe. The reviews are both over-the-top and generally negative.
Among those, Wired magazine called it “the most nightmarish idea for plane seating ever.” The reputable Globe and Mail of Toronto says the seating idea is “horrifying.” Conde Naste Traveler says the seat design “will haunt you forever” while worrying about “unavoidable eye contact, … hand-holding with your neighbors” and general all-around awkwardness.
There’s more. Tech site Gizmodo? It chimed in too, saying the design “almost seems like a sick joke or some misguided reference to the fear of an unknown serial killer.” Vox struck a similar theme, saying the proposed cabin layout “looks like something from a future Mad Max sequel.”
For now, though, fliers should take a deep breath and relax; this “exploratory concept” is unlikely to fly with a major carrier anytime soon, if ever.
Dawn Gilbertson, a travel reporter at The Arizona Republic, contributed to this week’s column. Today in the Sky runs every Saturday in Escape and at DesertSun.com
In response to the June 17 Xpress article “Leveling the Playing Field,” if you had been part of the Short Term Rental Advocacy Asheville group, you would know the rhetoric in the newspapers is a campaign. Since December 2013, local short-term rental advocates and hosts have been working with the city concerning the “sharing economy” and ensuring that all city residents benefit from the economic wealth brought by tourism and travel.
STRAA shared “best practices.” It encouraged people to check local laws, screen guests, set ground rules, rent for the “right” price, promote property properly, have a 24/7 owner/contact in the event of problems, have property insurance and pay their taxes. We hired a land-use attorney to work with city staff, including Judy Daniels (retired), Allen Gines, Shannon Tuch, Cathy Ball and the Asheville City Council.
Last summer, the city hired and paid a consultant to write a report about the impact of short-term rentals in North Carolina. After multiple drafts, the final report was vague and inconclusive. Now there is no mention of this report. We attended Planning and Economic Development and City Council Planning and Zoning Commission [meetings] for two years. In January 2015 the Chamber of Commerce sponsored a meeting at Diana Wortham. Ms. Minges, hotel and restaurant industry representative, talked for 30 minutes, followed by a panel discussion of locals speaking five minutes each (the bed-and-breakfast group, Realtors, the Coalition of Asheville Neighborhoods, local and quasi-government representatives). The public was given three minutes.
The second public forum in March was sponsored by City Council. Many spoke in support of loosening the current restrictions in the city. STRs are allowed in the county and Central Business District. Couldn’t similar smart and transparent regulatory policies that benefit the entire travel ecosystem be developed around the goal of ensuring an adequate supply of housing? In each meeting, there seemed some movement toward consideration of establishing basic components to regulate short-term rentals while protecting the common good.
The information is not consistent coming from the city. Our initial impression was there was room for negotiation. Now there is no acknowledgement that there has been a two-year conversation and interaction with Council, that the city hired a consultant, that staff worked with a land-use attorney representing short-term rental advocates.
This is the situation Asheville finds itself in: The city, state and county are raising all the taxes to have the tourists share tax burdens, most of which is going to go outside the Asheville city limits. Enforcement continues to be neighbors reporting neighbors. The city has created a climate of fear and mistrust among neighbors. The fines of $100 per day have been levied, and people have been put out of business, losing a vital level of income in some cases that allowed them to stay in their houses, improve the housing stock and make ends meet in Asheville. The fines are going to increase to $500 if PZ’s recommendation is heeded by Council. This is overzealous and out of control.
I am wondering what is really going on. The city does not have a clear and transparent agenda. Fear is not a professional or politically adept way of organizing a “sustainable” city for tourists or locals.
— Asheville resident
Editor’s note: Although Mountain Xpress ordinarily does not withhold the names of letter writers, in this case we made an exception because we determined that the writer’s concerns about possible loss of income were valid.
The back of my 1988 Casio keyboard had an empty socket. Simply marked “sustain,” teenage Josh set out to discover its purpose.
I sliced off the end of a pair of headphones, plugged it into the back and taped the bare wires together.
As I played notes with one hand and twisted wires with the other, the tones came out in long, drawn out sounds. Some tape and a bent piece of tin later, I had my first home-built sustain pedal.
I’ve always loved the junction of music and technology. In college, I attempted to force the boxy monochrome computers atop electric pianos to talk to each other by stringing a web of phone cords across the room in a cat’s cradle of OSHA violations. As a reward/punishment, I was permitted to design the school’s first electronic music studio.
As someone who is as passionate about music technology as I am about our economic future, Moogfest’s official departure from Asheville was a double blow.
Moogfest combined thumping electronica I was a little too old for with brainy discussions I was a little too dumb for. It brought to town different classes of people — bermuda-shorts-wearing tourists and bearded beer aficionados walked beside skinny-tied intellectuals and neon-haired electronica fans.
It’s a mix of people we won’t soon see again.
The festival wasn’t a commercial hit for Moog, but it represented one possible future for Asheville. A piece of destiny that heralded a brighter path than the current tourism reputation that we seem to be settling for.
The 2014 festival ended up losing $1.4 million — a hit to Moogfest’s books as they paid the difference — but many area businesses came out on top.
According to a joint study by the Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce and the Economic Development Coalition, sales tax revenues went up by nearly $700,000 during Moogfest’s run. Big technology sponsors lent their names to the event. Overall, the study estimated that the festival had a $14 million impact for the area.
The cost to taxpayers for that impact? The city kicked in $90,000, and the county added another $90,000 — 0.06 and 0.02 percent of their operating budgets, respectively. And, while that’s not an inconsequential number, the city and county deal with with annual budgets of hundreds of millions. In fact, if dollars in their budgets were represented by the number of words this column, the impact of Moogfest on their budget would be roughly the first letter of the first word.
I’ve talked to a lot of people who didn’t like Moogfest. In fact, distaste for Moogfest may be the one issue I’ve seen that unites local conservatives and progressives. So I realize that this column may put me in the minority.
I do believe, though, that if it was given time to pick up steam, the festival would have done its part to help Asheville’s technology sector grow and played at least a partial role as a chord in diversifying our economy.
Its departure feels like an admission in a larger narrative that we’re giving up on trying to be a big player in the tech space. Other festivals will come along, but they’re most likely to celebrate beer or food — topics that ultimately cement our reputation as a place to visit and leave in favor of towns with richer job opportunities.
I understand why Moogfest couldn’t stay. No company can afford to put on a public event and lose money. If they find a bigger audience in Durham, and public and private entities there are more willing to chip in on the cost of bringing an event like that to town, then I hope they find success.
Moogfest’s departure doesn’t condemn us any more than keeping it would have turned us into a high-wage paradise. But, for Asheville, I worry that this is another sign that we’re unsure of our destiny.
We know we want to be more than a tourism town — we aspire to more than serving wealthy outsiders. But if we don’t collectively step forward and decide how we want to get there, others will do it for us.
Email Executive Editor Josh Awtry at JAwtry@CITIZEN-TIMES.COM.
FILE – In this Aug. 23, 2014, file photo, demonstrators march to protest the death of 43-year-old Eric Garner in the Staten Island borough of New York. Nearly a year has passed since Garner had the encounter with New York City police that led to his death. Since then, his family has become national advocates for police reform and the department is changing how it relates to the public it serves. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker shakes hands after announcing that he is running for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination at the Waukesha County Expo Center, Monday, July 13, 2015, in Waukesha, Wis. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
FILE – In this Feb. 20, 2014 file photo, Sam Schneider, left, practices with his U16-9798 Premiere club soccer team at St. Louis Soccer Park in St. Louis, Mo. A study published Monday, July 13, 2015, in the journal JAMA Pediatrics of U.S. high school games found that over 1 in 4 concussions occurred when players used their head to hit the ball. But more than half of these heading-related concussions were caused by collisions with another player rather than with the ball. (Sarah Conrad/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP) EDWARDSVILLE INTELLIGENCER OUT; THE ALTON TELEGRAPH OUT
Posted: Monday, July 13, 2015 8:04 pm
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Updated: 10:30 pm, Mon Jul 13, 2015.
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Your daily look at late-breaking news, upcoming events and the stories that will be talked about Tuesday:
1. GREECE STRIKES FINANCIAL RESCUE DEAL
Now it’s up to Prime Minister Tsipras to sell the bailout plan to skeptical lawmakers and political allies in Athens.
2. PROPOSAL WOULD LET TRANSGENDER PEOPLE SERVE IN US MILITARY
The plan outlined by Defense Secretary Carter would formally end one of the last gender- or sexuality-based barriers to military service.
3. WHAT WORRIES US, EUROPE ABOUT NUCLEAR DEAL
Among their fears, they don’t want to see Iran using billions of dollars in newly unfrozen cash to expand military assistance to forces opposing Western allies such as Saudi Arabia and Israel.
4. NYC, FAMILY OF ERIC GARNER REACH SETTLEMENT
The city will pay $5.9 million in the chokehold death case. Garner, 43, died in police custody almost a year ago.
5. WHO’S LATEST REPUBLICAN TO JOIN PRESIDENTIAL RACE
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker embraces his reputation as a “fighter” as he formally declares his candidacy.
6. IRAQ SAYS CAMPAIGN LAUNCHED AGAINST ISLAMIC STATE GROUP
The aim of the military operation is to dislodge the extremists from western Anbar province.
7. PLANE CRASH SURVIVOR MAKES IT TO SAFETY
The teenage girl is picked up by a motorist after walking for “a couple of days” after the crash in a mountainous area of Washington state.
8. LITTLE PLUTO LITTLE BIGGER THAN SCIENTISTS THOUGHT
On the eve of NASA’s historic flyby of Pluto, scientists announce that the New Horizons spacecraft has nailed the size of the faraway icy world.
9. WHERE COMIC STRIP IS BEING REBORN
“Bloom County,” absent for a quarter-century, is getting new life on Facebook, its creator says.
10. ROUGH PLAY RISKIER THAN HEADING IN YOUTH SOCCER
More concussions are caused by collisions with other players rather than heading the ball, a study determines.
© 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Shareholders approve Samsung deal paving way for succession
4 Marines and gunman die in attack on 2 military sites
4 Marines and gunman die in attack on 2 military sites
4 Marines and gunman die in attack on 2 military sites
4 Marines and gunman die in attack on 2 military sites
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Monday, July 13, 2015 8:04 pm.
Updated: 10:30 pm.
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In a sparsely populated Appalachian county, the young couple is recounting how they met while a language researcher captures their story with a high-end audio recorder.
“She smiled at me, then I got shy,” 20-year-old Pete Culicerto recalls of his first encounter with Ginger Smyth at Wyoming East High School.
The story itself is routine, but it’s the underlying sounds that researchers are most interested in.
West Virginia University linguist Kirk Hazen is among a wave of scholars seeking to put to rest “Beverly Hillbillies”-style myths and stigmas about Appalachia.
Three books in the past year and a fourth to be published soon challenge these century-old stereotypes by noting, among other points, that Appalachian residents speak a variety of Englishes — and not a single monolithic dialect — and that scorn for the region’s speech is often based on outdated notions of how they talk.
In southwest Virginia, English professor Amy D. Clark has held summer workshops for 15 years to help rural teachers teach students to write effectively without shaming them about their speech. The same message runs through teaching units on dialect for schoolchildren in North Carolina and West Virginia.
“You’re trying to get across the idea that all language varieties are legitimate. There’s not one that’s somehow damaged and then others that are just fine,” Hazen said. “They’re all just fine.”
The first step in changing perceptions of mountain speech is documenting how contemporary Appalachian residents talk, which is why Hazen is interviewing Culicerto and Smyth. Discussion topics include friends, community, and how involved Wyoming County parents are in teens’ love lives.
When Smyth says, “It depends,” the latter half of the word sounds similar to “pin,” an example of a merger of vowel sounds common in the southern part of the state.
Culicerto remarks that in their relationship, both sets of parents ask the couple out to meals, showing an example of a redundant pronoun: “Both sides, they always ask.”
The two examples are among enduring dialect features, which Hazen’s research shows have remained steady in West Virginia.
Hazen, who’s spent two decades conducting interviews around the state, has used his research to illustrate that other stereotypical features of Appalachian speech have become rare — such as the demonstrative them (“them apples are the best”) or a-prefixing (“I’m a-going to the store”). Neither was heard during the Pineville interviews.
Despite Hazen’s research, many outsiders still have negative impressions about mountain accents, sometimes based on outdated speech features. It can take decades for perceptions to change.
The interview questions turn to how outsiders react to Smyth and Culicerto’s accents.
“I think they look at me and they’re like: ‘Oh my gosh, she lives way back in the holler … and is so redneck!'” said Smyth, who’s 17.
Increasingly, educators are seeking improve students’ confidence and test scores with novel ways of teaching grammar.
Among them is contrastive analysis, an approach in which students diagram spoken sentences and compare them to formal written English. Contrastive and other methods are discussed at the Appalachian Writing Project’s summer institute for teachers, led by Clark, the professor in Virginia.
Lizbeth Phillips, a middle-school teacher in southwest Virginia who’s worked with Clark since 2004, assigns her students to keep journals of how adults in their community switch between formal and casual ways of speaking. Educators say the approach known as code- or style-switching allows students to preserve the way they speak at home and improve their writing without feeling ashamed.
“If you’re marching out the red pen … you’re really criticizing their culture and their family heritage and other things. It’s not just about standardizing the language,” she said.
Some lovers of mountain culture see confidence starting to take root.
“There’s a kind of re-appropriation of things ‘hillbilly,’ which were once considered to be a negative stigma, and embracing it and turning that around into something positive. So people will say, ‘Yeah, I’m hillbilly, and proud of it!'” said Walt Wolfram, a linguist at North Carolina State University.
Last summer when the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in East Tennessee canceled optional accent reduction classes after some employees complained, a newspaper headline hailed it as: “ORNL bows to Southern pride.”
Culicerto, who made straight A’s in high school and attends Marshall University, said stereotypes can run both ways — people where he’s from sometimes look down at residents of big cities — but they’re usually misguided.
“The way they look at us, we might look at them the same way, like: ‘Oh they have a city accent,'” he said. “But really, we’re all the same.”
The Ridgeline Trolley has arrived in Burke County and is available for private charter.
The Ridgeline Trolley arrived on the campus of Grace Ridge Friday to take several lucky residents on the trolley’s maiden voyage.
Trolley driver, Joe Johnson, welcomes riders to the trolley.
Grace Ridge residents embark on the maiden voyage of the Ridgeline Trolley No. 1780. Both the name and number are specific to Burke County.
Ed Phillips, executive director with Burke County Tourism Development Authority, welcomes Grace Ridge residents to the trolley. Driver Joe Johnson looks on.
Evelyn Beaver, director of life enrichment at Grace Ridge, followed the Ridgeline Trolley on Friday in her red convertible.
Evelyn Beaver, director of life enrichment at Grace Ridge, talks with the residents prior to a trip by trolley to points of interest in Burke County.
Grace Ridge residents embark on the maiden voyage of the Ridgeline Trolley No. 1780. Both the name and number are specific to Burke County.
Posted: Thursday, July 16, 2015 12:02 pm
|
Updated: 12:35 pm, Thu Jul 16, 2015.
The News Herald
Burke County residents can expect to see a new mode of transportation cruising around the streets.
Providing a unique local travel opportunity, the Ridgeline Trolley and Tours will transport riders to points of interest in the county and meet a need.
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CAMBRIA hotels suites NEW logo
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Local artists recreate floral decor during the grand opening of the Cambria hotel suites New York-Chelsea
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Mark Laport, CEO of Concord Hospitality, Mike Murphy, SVP of Upscale Brands at Choice Hotels, Philip and Robert Chun, We Care Trading LLC, and Steve Joyce, President and CEO of Choice Hotels at the grand opening of the Cambria hotel suites New …
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Mark Laport, CEO of Concord Hospitality, Mike Murphy, SVP of Upscale Brands at Choice Hotels, Philip and Robert Chun, We Care Trading LLC, and Steve Joyce, President and CEO of Choice Hotels at the grand opening of the Cambria hotel suites New York-Chelsea
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ROCKVILLE, Md., July 15, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — Choice Hotels International, Inc. (NYSE: CHH), one of the world’s largest hotel companies, celebrated the grand opening of the new Cambria hotel suites in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood. Owned by We Care Trading Co. Ltd and operated by Concord Hospitality, Cambria hotel suites New York – Chelsea is located at 123 West 28th Street and sits in the middle of the eclectic Flower District, which is brought to life in the hotel’s design and decor.
The neighborhood inspiration was highlighted in last night’s garden party-themed grand opening celebration. Guests were treated to flower-inspired signature cocktails and fresh local fare, took exclusive tours of the property, and mingled with key leaders in the hospitality industry, including Steve Joyce, President and CEO of Choice Hotels, Michael Murphy, SVP of Upscale Brands at Choice Hotels, Mark Laport, CEO of Concord Hospitality, and property owner, Rob Chun. The event was also attended by Andrea Fasano, Choice Hotel’s Ultimate People Person, who is currently out on the road representing Choice and creating meaningful, in-person connections all over the United States this summer.
“New York City is one of the liveliest, most beautiful, bustling cities in the world and we’re thrilled to introduce the Cambria brand to business and leisure travelers visiting the Big Apple,” says Steve Joyce, President and CEO, Choice Hotels International. “With companies like Google, Goldman Sachs, Spotify and American Express nearby, we are able to give travelers something that is often hard to find in New York – stylish, affordable lodging with upscale service.”
Within walking distance of Penn Station, Madison Square Garden, Macy’s Herald Square, the Empire State Building and Times Square, the 135 room hotel offers sleek, modern rooms in one of the city’s hippest neighborhoods. Guests can also enjoy the property’s Social Circle™ Bistro Restaurant, open morning and night serving a locally inspired menu and craft beer, or they can enjoy a drink on the rooftop lounge which showcases amazing downtown views all the way to the World Trade Center. In addition, business travelers can utilize the property’s business center and meeting rooms, which are perfect for accommodating conferences and banquets.
“We’re excited to operate this hotel for We Care Ltd. and Choice Hotels, and to make our mark on the unique Chelsea market,” said Mark Laport, CEO of Concord Hospitality. “At Concord, we’re constantly looking for opportunities to grow in top-tier, urban markets. Given the success in opening our Cambria hotel suites Washington, D.C. last year, we’re thrilled to be involved in this hotel as a second New York City Cambria is coming this fall in Times Square.”
The Cambria hotel suites New York – Chelsea is accepting reservations now. Visit www.cambriahotelsandsuites.com to book your next stay and connect with Choice Hotels on Facebook.
About Cambria Hotels Suites
Cambria hotels suites makes business travel easier—and more fun—than ever before. Offering modern decor, rooms that feel like an upgrade, and fresh, local cuisine at our Social Circle™ restaurant, Cambria makes every guest feel like a VIP. As of February 15, 2015, there are 24 properties open across the country and 25 under development in the U.S. and Canada. To learn more, visit www.cambriahotelsandsuites.com.
About Choice Hotels
Choice Hotels International, Inc.® (NYSE: CHH) is one of the world’s largest lodging companies. With more than 6,300 hotels franchised in 35 countries and territories, we represent more than 500,000 rooms around the globe. As of March 31, 2015, 615 hotels were in our development pipeline. Our company’s Ascend Hotel Collection®, Cambria® hotels suites, Comfort Inn®, Comfort Suites®, Sleep Inn®, Quality®, Clarion®, MainStay Suites®, Suburban Extended Stay Hotel®, Econo Lodge® and Rodeway Inn® brands provide a spectrum of lodging choices to meet guests’ needs. With more than 23 million members and counting, check out our Choice Privileges® rewards program to see how you can reap the benefits of being a member of the Choice Hotels® family. Visit us at www.choicehotels.com for more information.
Additional corporate information can be found on the Choice Hotels International, Inc. web site, which may be accessed at www.choicehotels.com.
About Concord Hospitality
Concord Hospitality Enterprises Company, an award-winning hotel management and development company based in Raleigh, N.C., manages over 90 hotels offering more than 11,500 guest rooms in 22 states and two Canadian provinces. The company operates hotels and resorts under such well-known industry elite brands as Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, Starwood, and Choice Hotels, as well as select independent boutique hotels. Formed in 1985, Concord recently was listed as one of the nation’s top management companies in the nation by independent sources, and recently won Marriott’s elite Partnership Circle award for the eighth time. Concord properties are some of the most awarded hotels in the country, having won nearly 100 top honors in the past two years alone. For more information, visit www.concordhotels.com.
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SOURCE Choice Hotels International, Inc.
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