Fairies in the News!
My Favorite Web sites
My Fairy Home Page
Elve Funstuff!
About Me
Make your own website for FREE!
Ok so this is a new page. I found some fairy articles in the newpaper and wanted to include them somewhere. Here's the first one:
From the Ashville Cutzen-Times Oct.4, 2002:
Fairies, Fog and a senator
Like brightly colored leaves floating down from the autumn trees, your burning questions keep landing all around me. I carefully gather them up and gently place them here, as if making a scrapbook.
A really pathetic, smart-aleck scrapbook, but a scrapbook nonetheless. Let's begin.
Question: Is it true that Sen. John Edwards recently purchased a $4 million mansion in Georgetown in Washington, D.C.?
My answer: What?!? Politicians buying multi-million-dollar houses? I'm shocked! I thought they lived like you and me!
Real answer: "I don't know if they've closed yet, but they have made an offer on a house in Georgetown," said the senator's spokesman, Mike Briggs, referring to the Edwards family. They're currently renting a house in D.C. and still own a home in Raleigh.
The asking price for the Georgetown house has been reported at more than $3 million, Briggs said. According to Roll Call, a congressional newspaper, Edwards' net worth is about $13.6 million, making him the 23rd-wealthiest member of Congress. A potential presidential candidate in 2004, Edwards touts how he grew up with humble roots and was the first in his family to go to college. He became a highly successful trial lawyer.
"His parents gave him an upbringing to make him want to go out and succeed," Briggs said.
Question: Who puts those little reflective circles on newspaper delivery boxes, and what are they for?
My answer: The "little reflective circle fairy" does this, and it means your paper box is magical - every day it will produce a brand- new paper.
Real answer: "It lets the carrier know what subscription type the subscriber has - how many days a week they get the newspaper," said Bob Terzotis, the circulation director here at the paper.
Question: Do the fog detection and warning signs on I-40 in Haywood County actually work?
My answer: Only in clear conditions.
Real answer: The million-dollar signs are working just fine, thank you. It may appear they don't work, but they're only supposed to come on with a message when conditions are foggy or otherwise unsafe. After a string of accidents near Canton, including a 46-car pileup in 1996, the DOT in the late '90s installed three visibility sensors in areas prone to severe fog, and two message boards that warn drivers to slow down. They were plagued with problems but work fine now.
"If somebody goes through there and there's nothing on the message board, it's clear sailing," said Ron Watson, the division engineer for the DOT's Division 14, which includes Haywood. "Periodically, we do have problems with them, and we have technicians go out there and fix them."
John Boyle's column appears on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Contact him at 232-5847 or JBoyle@CITIZEN- TIMES.com.
From the Lexington Herald-Leader. Posted Tues. Oct 15, 2002:
Fairies didn't do it
BALD KNOB - It was a couple of Fridays ago that Leo Slattery went to the mailbox and saw something otherworldly in the steep pasture near the driveway.
"He came back in and said it looked like aliens had landed," said his wife, Ramona.
What was going on at the Slattery's rocky Franklin County farm wasn't a close encounter, or even a crop circle.
It was a mushroom fairy ring, a big one -- about 16 feet in diameter, made up of mushrooms up to 10 or 11 inches across.
Such circles of mushrooms are called fairy rings because people once thought the rings marked the spot where fairies had danced the night away.
There apparently is a bumper crop of rings in Kentucky this fall because the weather has been just right: a hot, dry spell followed by a cool, wet spell.
John MacGregor, a biologist who knows a lot about mushrooms, visited the ring yesterday and told the Slatterys that the fungus that produced it has been in the pasture for a long time.
Judging from the size of the ring, he said, it could have been growing for 45 or 50 years. This year might have been the first time it fruited, or produced mushrooms.
He said he had only seen one other fairy ring that size in Kentucky. It was in McCreary County.
Some mushroom rings are thought to be hundreds of years old, or older. MacGregor said it is possible that the oldest living thing in this hemisphere is a fungus.
Here's how mushrooms form a ring:
Much of the mushroom plant is in the soil, in unseen microscopic "roots" called mycelium.
The mycelium lives off decaying matter, so it must spread outward a few inches each year to find more food.
The mycelium also acts as a fertilizer, so the grass on the outside of the ring is greener and higher than the other grass in the pasture.
Often, fairy rings have no mushrooms at all, they are just a ring of greener grass in a pasture or lawn.
The expansion of the ring also has been described as moving like fire in dry leaves, growing radially to reach new fuel.
The Slatterys (he is 80, she's 73) have lived on the farm on U.S. 421 since 1959. They say they have never seen the ring before it appeared on Oct. 4.
The mushrooms were glistening white then. By yesterday, they had yellowed and resembled the limestone rocks that litter the field. MacGregor identified the mushrooms in Franklin County as Chlorophyllum mol-yb--dites, or green-gilled lepiota.
They would made a person or animal sick if eaten, he said, adding that wild-growing mushrooms should never be eaten by someone who has not thoroughly studied them.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reach Andy Mead at (859) 231-3319, at 1-800-950-6397, Ext. 3319, or amead@herald-leader.com.
I'll find more articles soon. Don't people have a strange view of fairies in our world?
