Wednesday Open Line


Today is the LAST DAY to file for public office, your application must be in the board of elections hands by today at NOON.  There are 15 seats open, with the majority of those seats currently only have one person running as of Tuesday afternoon.  We have a list of people that have filed so far here.  Notice, only 2 spots have more than one name listed…  That’s 4th ward seat for the city council, and NC House District #32.

I have updated our running list of people linked above to whose running as to if they are incumbent or not.  I’m no expert at all, so please correct me if I’m wrong.  But so far it looks like there’s not a lot of choices to vote for.

If you truly want to change this area do more than just vote, run for office yourself and you’ll actually have the power to make the changes you feel are needed.


Tuesday, February 28th.  The college basketball season is in full swing, and millions of fans are eagerly watching high-scoring games on television.  The first player to score 1,000 points in a season was Johnny O’Brien, who scored 1,051 points in the 1951-52 season, playing for Seattle University.  His twin brother, Eddie, was on the same team, which had a stunning win over the Harlem Globetrotters that same season.  The brothers also played together on the major league baseball Pittsburgh Pirates. Johnny also played with the St. Louis Cardinals and the Milwaukee Braves.  Now, men’s college basketball games are watched by nearly 33 million fans each year.

Profile America for the 28th day of Black History Month.  Sports fans know the tennis greats, sisters Venus and Serena Williams.  But they may not know the path was blazed for them over 50 years ago, when Althea Gibson became the first African-American to compete in the U.S. Nationals.  Her story is one odd drive and talent overcoming poverty to become one of the best tennis players in the world.  In 1956, Gibson was the first black to win the French championship.  The next year she was also the first to Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals, an achievement she repeated the following year.  In the U.S. today, there are 260,000 professional athletes, coaches, and umpires — 35 percent of them female, and just over 7 percent African-American.  This special edition of Profile America is a public service of the U.S. Census Bureau. 


Although most years of the modern calendar have 365 days, a complete revolution around the sun takes approximately 365 days and 6 hours. Every four years, during which an extra 24 hours have accumulated, one extra day is added to keep the count coordinated with the sun’s apparent position.

It is, however, slightly inaccurate to calculate an additional 6 hours each year. A better approximation, derived from the Alfonsine tables, is that the Earth makes a complete revolution around the sun in 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes, and 16 seconds. To compensate for the difference, an end-of-century year is not a leap year unless it is also exactly divisible by 400. This means that the years 1600 and 2000 were leap years, as will be 2400 and 2800, but the years 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not, nor will be 2100, 2200 and 2300.

We find February 29th days to be odd, but did you also know some calendars have a February 30th?


Discuss and more on today’s Open Lines!