On Tuesday afternoon, the News & Observer blogs will be moving to a new system and a new server. This change will make getting to our blogs quicker and easier. Most of the blogs will change their appearance, while blogs like Taking Stock and Under the Dome will remain the same.

This change requires nothing from the reader. There will be a link to the older posts, and you won't need to change your bookmarks. If you have trouble finding your favorite blog or you have a comment, please email feedback@newsobserver.com.

— Rachel Carter

In my Sunday Q piece, Why Do We Wait for Disaster To Strike?, I included a short paragraph about lost opportunities that helped lead to the current gas crunch:

During the next quarter-century [1983-2008] we could have taken the hard path -- mandating higher fuel standards for cars, even though gas was relatively cheap; investing heavily in the development of solar, wind and other alternative energies even though they were not cost-efficient.

A reader emailed me with this response.

Your article mentions 'could have taken the hard path' by doing so and so, but no mention of drilling or nuclear power or clean coal. Why is that? The whole reason for our crisis is wacko environmentalists who have blocked progress for decades. Yes we need next generation energy and I support research.…

Political characterizations aside, the reader is right. Our unwillingness to drill in certain areas — in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and off the coast of California and other states — has, by definition, reduced the supply of energy.

I failed to take this into account because of my belief that we can't drill our way out of our problems, that new and better technologies for producing clean energy are the only real answer. That, however, should not have blinded me to acknowledging the role environmental concerns have played in giving us higher energy prices.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how cheap video cameras offer almost all of us the prospect of immortality — centuries hence our descendants will be able to see and hear what we looked like.

Writing that piece, I realized a major problem: I'm always the one shooting the movies in my family. My directorial style will be there for all to see, but not my mug.

I guess it no coincidence then — though I didn't think about it until just now — that a week or two later I began doing video commentaries for the News & Observer under the direction of Mike Williams

Click here to see my take on Obama's fist bump; here for my piece on airline luggage fees and here for my take on men and the "Sex and the City" movie.

While researching my recent column on the late great Jonathan Williams, I learned that among so many other things, this North Carolina man of letters collected quotations. In 1989 he published a book of these, which I just ordered, called “Quote, Unquote.”

I also gather quotes. One of my favorites if from Williams, who gave this fine advice to aspiring poets:

=> Read more!

My daughters and I love the movie version of “Can-Can,” especially when Maurice Chevalier and Louis Jourdan sing “Live and Let Live.”

Talk and let talk, quip and let quip
Dress and let dress, strip and let strip
Live and let live, and remember this line
Your business is your business
And my business is mine

Cole Porter’s lyric may be delightful and de-lovely, but it's also de-dated. Nowadays, privacy is becoming just a memory as your business becomes mine — and everybody else’s.

The latest example: the value of your home.

Sure this information has long been a matter of public record. But it used to take a spot of work and know-how to track it down. Not anymore thanks to a website I recently came across, zillow.com.

Type in a friend or enemy’s street address and quicker than you can say shazam!, a satellite image of their neighborhood appears with price tags attached to most every home.

I hate this intrusion with every fiber of my being.

I’ve also spent hours playing with it.

One question: What’s your address?

Flying this summer?
Fear not. My new video commentary offers some helpful – and tasty — tips on how to make the best of airline cutbacks and get around the latest luggage surcharge. Click here.

Of course the national media are liberal.
The only ones who still dispute this notion any more are people so far to the left that they think everyone else is conservative and, of course, the national press corps who truly believe — really! – that they play it straight.

The latest evidence of the obvious — the far more positive coverage given to Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton than to John McCain.

=> Read more!

George Garrett, a leading light of American letters and a founder of The Fellowship of Southern of Writers, died of cancer Sunday in his Charlottesville, Va. home. He was 78.

His best selling novel,"Death of the Fox" (1971) chronicled the fall of the Oak City's namesake, Sir Walter Raleigh. The first book in a trilogy set in Elizabethan England, it was followed by The Succession: A Novel of Elizabeth and James (1983) and Poison Pen (1986).

His many accomplishments, the National Books Critics Circle, notes, included: "author of nearly 40 books of novels, short stories, memoir, criticism, comment about the publishing world, poetry, and plays and editor of many anthologies, recipient of many prizes and grants, including the Academy award, Guggenheim and NEA, T.S. Eliot Award, PEN/Malamud, Aitken-Taylor Award, the Cleanth Brooks Award, etc. etc., and, says author Kelly Cherry, who was his student, "the best friend every writer who ever knew him had."

Read the Washington Post's obituary here.

Listen to a 2002 interview with Garrett here.

Read Madison Smartt Bell's 2001 interview with Garrett here.

Reporters love to moan about editors about as much as editors love complaining about reporters. For 10 years I wore both hats — talk about self-loathing!

So only half of me could fully appreciate this brilliant send-up by a reporter friend, who insisted on anonymity because he’s afraid of … his editor.

=> Read more!

Last Sunday’s article on Timothy B. Tyson’s efforts to promote racial reconciliation through Southern history, elicited a few emails from readers who thought the piece should have addressed Tyson’s comments here and here on the Duke lacrosse case. We asked Tyson about this via email.

=> Read more!

North Carolina lost one of its great men of letters in March, when Jonathan Williams died of pneumonia at age 79. In preparing a June 1 column on Williams, who lived in Highlands in the western part of the state, I came across this wonderful little poem, whose title has as many words as the poem itself.

Aunt Dory Ellis, of Penland, Remembers When She Fell in Her Garden at the Home Place and Broke Her Hip in 19 and 56

the sky was high,/
white clouds passing/
by, I lay/
a hour in that petunia patch/
hollered,/
and I knew I was out of whack

Know a desrving individual or instituion that has made a significant contribution to Raleigh's art scene? Would you like to see the name of that special someone (or something) up in lights - or at least on a plaque?

You've got until May 29 to get your nominationin for this year's Raleigh Medal of Arts.

Past winners of this prestigious honor "have included individual artists such as harpist Anita Burroughs-Price, choreographer Robert Weiss, painter Bob Rankin, and poet Sally Buckner, and organizations including Raleigh Little Theatre, Visual Art Exchange, North Carolina Symphony, and Progress Energy."

For more information and nomination forms, click here.

CNN reports:

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that the U.S. Treasury Department is violating the law by failing to design and issue currency that is readily distinguishable to blind and visually impaired people.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a 2006 district court ruling that could force the United States to redesign its money so blind people can distinguish between values.

Suggested solutions include making bills different sizes, including raised markings or using foil printing which is a method of hot stamping that is tactically discernable.

My knee jerk reaction is that this is political correctness run amok. Why redesign all of America's paper currency to accommodate a relatively small number of people who have managed to get by so far?

On second thought, that response is thoughtless and unfeeling. It punishes the handicapped for being handicapped. Thank goodness I can see. If redesigning our money will help those who can't, it sounds like the least we can do.

I've never thought about this issue before now. Not being a lawyer, it may involve legal issues I'm not aware of. As a matter of human decency, I can't believe the U.S. Treasury fought this case in court. It's position is not helped by the fact that, it seems, most other nations have designed their currency with the blind in mind.

Let's face, a pickle by any other name might taste just as sour, but it wouldn't be a pickle.

A pickle, is a pickle, is a pickle.

The sounds of some words are in such perfect alignment with the thing they represent – pickle, gloomy, portly, curmudgeon – that thing could have no other name.

They sound exactly like they are supposed to — skirt, scalp, drab, buckle, sneaker, twist, jumble.

They fit so fine – Platonic harmony realized! – that it can be hard to stop saying them: jab, fluffy, sneer, click, clack and lullaby.

Joseph Bottum takes these other perfect words out for a sin in this clever column.

What are your candidates?

In 1998 Francine Prose wrote a terrific piece in Harpers - "Scent of a Woman's Ink" – about the fact that male writers win an inordinate number of literary prizes.

Her basic point was that history has led us to consider men’s experiences — whether at work or war – and their peculiarities of mind – their interest in things and ideas over people and relationships – more important than those of women.

She was spot on. By and large – we are generalizing here – women were much more conditioned to see male culture as just plain culture while expressly female things were … female. (Similarly, white culture has largely defined America’s “normal “mainstream” culture that took no explaining.)

The story of the last decade in American culture – and I mean it, THE story — is the increasing influence of women. The male mind still reigns, but it is slipping — fast. And guys, we better get used to it.

I was thinking about this while reading John Kass’ funny column in the Chicago Tribune on the forthcoming movie “Sex and the City.” Of the film’s London debut, he writes:

I can still hear the terrified cries of men from across the sea, from England, men scared stiff by the new "Sex and the City" movie premiere, and such cries are cries of warning to men in America, where this evil film will debut in a few weeks.

John, I have three words for you: Get over it.

Consider this payback time for all the Arnold Schwarzenegger movies we’ve made the ladies sit through, all the testosterone-fueled heavy metal guitar solos we’ve made them listen to, all the football games we’ve made them watch. Yes, I know, some women like that stuff, but you get my point.

They’ve done it for us. Now we have to do it for them. And brace yourself. It’s only going to get worse. Hear that roar – get used to it.