Railroad Park and Mayor Bell notwithstanding, Birmingham is always going to be one unusual place to be. Not bat-guano crazy like Mobile, nor obsessive-compulsive like Huntsville, our town will forever present us with some unmistakable municipal neuroses, most of which (e.

(Well, maybe Jim Preuitt will. The indictment alleges that he not only took cash for his vote, but that the gaming moguls agreed to buy some trucks from his Talladega car dealership. That could give cash-for-clunkers a bad name.).

Autumn used to be an easy season. Weather was always the tipoff that the season of dying and remembrance was at hand; at the first bite of a frosty breeze, the vegetation in the neighborhood surrendered and dropped to the ground faster than Italian infantrymen.

That light at the end of the tunnel clearly emanates from those bright individuals on the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee.

About the only time libraries seem to make the front pages are when they undergo personnel problems or some kerfluffle is raised about whether homeless people are browsing or bunking there. Heed is rarely paid when a library succeeds in its daily mission to provide the citizenry access to knowledge and thus to power.

The rest of us know that at stake this Saturday in Tuscaloosa is nothing less than bragging rights to the entire universe as we know it. It is a rivalry having little to do with stats and charts and more to do with primordial ooze and the eternal disposition of the souls of men.

Last year, I jested about the fact that people going to Tannehill State Park for the annual Labor Day fest would be more likely to see a Moon Pie than a union parade, and I received quite the tart rejoinder from gentlemen of the brotherhood,...

Ordinarily, history pushes us along in a steady current toward the future, but once in a while it creates a vicious undertow that threatens to pull us under and away.

Monday, professional gloomy-gus Nouriel Roubini, who lectures on economics at NYU, tweeted the chance of another recession at 40%. That was actually a little more optimistic than fellow number crunchers David Rosenberg and Robert Shiller, who last week charted the double-dip chances at fifty-fifty.

Photographs are much on my mind of late. It started while I was researching a birthday commemoration for a local radio personality of considerable repute; delving that pulled me, as though in an undertow, back into the golden age of rock and roll hereabouts.