Jack Cox and Kayden Zollinger (soon to be Cox, pending paperwork) are proud — and relieved — to announce the marriage of their parents, Chris Cox and Tammy Jo Schroth. The two were married without apparent warning in an impossibly small, curiously intimate, and strangely romantic setting — the magistrate’s office in the Haywood County Detention Center, adjacent to the lesser of our three Ingles — on Jan. 26 at approximately 4:38 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

By David Redman • Guest Columnist

There is absolutely no doubt about the economic impact the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and its Harrah’s Cherokee Casino and Hotel operation have in Western North Carolina.Over the past 10 years the facility has furnished our previously economically depressed area with not just hundreds, but thousands of quality jobs. And guess what? All without incentives from the State of North Carolina.

Downtown Sylva is a special place. The events of the last couple of months only reinforce that fact, and so the momentum to create a better, closer and more unified business community should continue.

By Carl Iobst

Gee, what’ll they think of next. In Olympia, the capital of Washington state, there’s a state representative that’s proposing that dogs be allowed to drink in bars. Well not exactly drink, although I’m sure that some dog owners might pour a cool one in one of those collapsible doggy bowls for their thirsty purebreds now and then.

By Doug Wingier • Guest Columnist

We American consumers are richer than most in the world, and as voters more powerful. Yet as one wave of technological change after another washes over us, we tend to accept each as inevitable and out of control, and feel helpless to prevent the coming catastrophe presaged by Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Gambling at the Harrah’s casino in Cherokee is wildly successful. That success — and the state’s own actions — makes Gov. Mike Easley’s resistance to the use of live dealers slightly ridiculous and enormously hypocritical.

It’s an old story, the only one worth telling, really, especially here on Valentine’s Day. It’s a love story, the lengths that we will go to, etcetera.

Jackson County took the first step this week to ban new subdivisions until it can write an ordinance to control the proliferation of new developments within its borders. By doing so, its county commissioners proved they have a mettle that is too often lost on elected officials who worry too much about re-election and too little about their constituents.

Few rivers have been the focus of as much controversy over the last century as the Pigeon, a fact that makes it worthwhile to also celebrate the victories as the controversy fades away and a whole new era emerges. A major milestone in those efforts — the lifting of the last advisory against eating fish caught downstream of the paper mill in Canton — occurred earlier this month, one that is among the best pieces of news in the river’s recent history.

“Who is the girl wearing nothing but a smile

And a towel in the picture on the billboard in the field near the big old highway