GwinnettForum | Number 22.50 | July 11, 2023
THERE’S A NEW wine and cheese boutique with a tasting room in downtown Sugar Hill. It’s called Talk of the Table. Just before cutting the ribbon at the opening are, from left, Councilmember Alvin Hicks; Amy Moreau; Downtown Development Authority Chairman Jack Wolfe; Owner Jacqui Branch; Mayor Brandon Hembree; Councilmembers Taylor Anderson and Marc Cohen; and Mainstreet Manager Chase Rehak. For more details, see Upcoming below.
Editor’s Note: There will be no GwinnettForum on July 14. The next issue of GwinnettForum will be on July 18.—eeb
TODAY’S FOCUS: Consider improving your life by adopting a pet
EEB PERSPECTIVE: Enjoy our favorite Canadian, Oscar Peterson
SPOTLIGHT: Centurion Advisory Group
ANOTHER VIEW: Pharma lobby harming our people and our nation
FEEDBACK: More on Social Security and Medicare “entitlements”
NOTABLE: Sugar Hill gets new wine and cheese boutique
RECOMMENDED: Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
GEORGIA TIDBIT: Foxfire program is dynamic approach to education
MYSTERY PHOTO: Swooping roof line stamps this as unusual Mystery Photo
CALENDAR: Lionheart Theatre debuts House at Pooh Corner on July 13
Consider improving your life by adopting a pet
By Louise Stewart
NORCROSS, Ga. | An estimated 6.5 million dogs and cats enter shelters each year — and Gwinnett has its share. An open-admissions shelter, our Bill Atkinson Animal Welfare Center accepts lost, stray, and owner-surrendered animals. But like most shelters today, overpopulation is a big issue.
Stewart
What causes overcrowding? Ninety-five percent is due to owner surrenders — people who can’t keep their pets for various reasons (i.e., We don’t have time for him, allergies, dog got too big, it’s aggressive, we’re moving, he’s too old.) Then there are backyard breeders wanting to make a buck, and accidental litters from well-intentioned people. Then there are strays that are brought to the shelter daily. Sadly, many pets adopted during Covid have been returned lately.
How can the overall community help? Short answer — be a responsible pet owner. Get your pets spayed or neutered, get their required vaccines and tests. Make sure puppies get Parvo shots. Keep your pets healthy. Don’t let them roam.
Then, before you adopt, learn about the needs of the breed or its mix and make sure that fits your family. If you’re moving and for some reason can’t take along your pet, plan ahead. Include Max and Missy in those plans. Check with everyone you know. Taking it to the shelter should be your last choice.
There’s another way you can help the shelter. Volunteer to be a foster home for the shelter. All it costs is your love until the animal finds its forever home. And you can donate money for food. Be a shelter volunteer. Your time will help animals awaiting their new homes. Contact 770-339-3200 or AWEVolunteers@GwinnettCounty.com.
Besides housing, the shelter has other jobs. There’s a full-time veterinarian in the building six days a week and a vet tech seven days. The staff triages every animal entering the facility and the vet treats the sick or injured. On weekends, animals who need treatment see an off-site emergency vet.
Before going to a new home, every animal is spayed or neutered, given appropriate vaccines and microchipped. Adoption fees are minimal and sometimes during very high occupancy, they’re free.
Most of the residents are dogs and cats but sometimes you’ll see other domesticated animals — a potbellied pig, bird, rabbit, ferret, and even a horse.
Field officers are dispatched to enforce Gwinnett’s excellent animal laws and to pick up stray dogs. Each Animal Control vehicle has a chip scanner and computer. Those can enable a lost dog to be returned home without entering the shelter.
Community cats (free-roaming cats who lack human interaction) get help, too. The shelter spays/neuters them for free, gives rabies shots and inserts a chip. Residents can trap cats, take them to the shelter Monday-Friday for this service and release them back to their communities. The limit per person is two cats a day. For details contact RTCCP@GwinnettCounty.com or 678-226-7730.
Today low-cost spay/neuter is easy to find but it’s often hard to convince people of the need. Sometimes it’s a cultural issue. Others think their pet’s personality will change. The positive side includes decreasing free-roaming pets, protecting pets from health problems, reducing undesirable behaviors and lowering the burden on shelters.
If you’re interested in adopting or fostering a pet, start at the shelter. You can find nearly any breed or breed mix that you want. Not only will you be giving an animal a good life. It will improve your life, too.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
Enjoy our favorite Canadian, Oscar Peterson
Peterson, via Wikipedia.
By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
JULY 11, 2023 | Do you have a favorite Canadian? We do: late piano artist Oscar Peterson. Born in Montreal in 1925, he died in 2007. He is considered to have been the world’s greatest jazz pianist.
Listening to him tinkling the keys was pure joy. He could play amazingly fast, and you wondered how on earth a person could hit all those keys so rapidly, yet make such good music on the piano. He could just as easily caress the piano so gingerly, effortlessly, it seemed, and then break out in an exceedingly fast pace to give you an entirely another dimension in music.
He was an improvisationist from the get-go. Peterson would take a familiar song, provide you a standard playing of it, making you quite content. But he seldom stopped here. Usually he would embark on using that song as the basis for a journey into all sorts of gyrations on that theme, going into another level of action, yet eventually returning to the sedate piece that he started out with. Meanwhile, you thought to yourself of another favorite: “I’ve never heard it played this way.”
Peterson was a large figure, weighing in at 250 pounds on his 6’3” frame, and had enormous hands, someone measuring that his hands spanned 17 or 18 keys. Though large, once his hands started moving, somehow he fit his fingers exactly onto the right keys one after another so very beautifully.
We had the pleasure of seeing Peterson three or four times. The first time was in New Orleans, at a warehouse on Tchoupitoulas Street, about 35 years ago. We were in New Orleans at a newspaper meeting, and happened to hear he would be playing at a club. During his first set that night, playing some familiar tune, this writer, no keen ear himself, thought he heard Peterson hit a sour note. This was during one of Peterson’s innovations of a theme, taking off into an unchartered territory. For about five minutes more he gyrated on the piano…..then came back and hit that sour note again, as if saying, “Yeah, I missed a note earlier, but want you to know that I realized it, and here it is again.” It fit into the musical framework so well. Another jazz pianist, Dave Brubeck, was in the audience that night, and Peterson introduce him before the second set.
We also saw Peterson at least once, if not twice, in Atlanta, still the master musician on stage. And finally, just 10 years ago, we heard him on stage in Chicago.
He wrote both the music and words to one particular piece. Listen in and follow the words to this session, recorded in Oslo in 1964.
When every heart joins every heart and together yearns for liberty,
That’s when we’ll be free.
When every hand joins every hand and together molds our destiny,
That’s when we’ll be free.
Any hour any day, the time soon will come when men will live in dignity,
That’s when we’ll be free, we will be
When every man joins in our song and together singing harmony,
That’s when we’ll be free.
Now enjoy (click here):
Now, perhaps, you can see why he has been our favorite Canadian.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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Pharma lobby harming our people and our nation
(American citizens can’t be) “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use…”- Fifth Amendment to the Constitution (note preface wording added by author)
By Jack Bernard
PEACHTREE CITY, Ga. | It was hard for me to learn about the biggest U.S. pharmaceutical lobbying group suing our government because a law was passed by Congress permitting Department of Health and Human Services to negotiate some (not all) Medicare drug prices for our seniors. That self-interested lobbying group (the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America — PhRMA) is saying, based on a very flimsy legal argument, that law violates the due process clause above.
We can all agree on one thing. The Fifth Amendment, as well as others like the Second Amendment regarding guns, is very poorly worded. That fact enables the introduction of personal bias by unscrupulous judges who twist meanings to suit their own political views. But it should be obvious to anyone, even our radically right-wing, politicized Supreme Court, that this amendment was meant to refer to due process for our citizens, not for the huge self-interested, for-profit drug corporations, which have been exploiting Americans.
And we should also all agree on another fact that has been conclusively proven by study after study: these for-profit multi-national companies are interested in only one thing, their bottom line. As renowned conservative economist Milton Friedman has stated: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business, to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits…”
Thus, because of the lack of market competition and/or regulation, our U.S. citizens pay much more than residents of other nations for drugs. Per one study: “The U.S. spends 7.5 times what England does on outpatient drugs for an older adult hospitalized with heart failure and diabetes. The U.S. spends nearly twice as much as Canada, the next-highest country.”
Other studies have found the same, with annual drug spending by U.S. public and private health insurers running $963 per capita, more than double what other developed nations pay, $(466 per capita).
Our Supreme Court conservative majority says it is “originalist.” That means that in its decision-making it uses the intent of the Founding Fathers, that is, whatever existed in 1776 when the Constitution was written. That was their excuse for overturning well-established legal precedent protecting women’s rights (i.e., the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade).
Let’s see what the Trump appointed judges have to say about this case when it ends up in their laps. Will they mis-interpret the Constitution once again as they did with abortion rights in 2022 and guns in 2008? Will they say that drug corporations are really people, as they did in the disastrous Citizens United decision, permitting dark money contributions by big business to undercut our democracy? I would not put it past them.
Some may think the ultra-conservative Supreme Court is doing good work. If so, they do not realize the long-term harm coming out of this court.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
More on Social Security and Medicare “entitlements”
Editor, the Forum:
Let me completely agree with a recent Dan Bollinger letter and to a lesser extent the analysis of Jack Bernard about referring to Social Security and Medicare as “entitlements.”
Yes, I agree with Jack in that its time to increase the income limit to which the Social Security deduction is applied.
However, to Dan’s point – Medicare And Social Security are not “entitlements” but are investments that we have paid cold hard cash for all of our lives for it to be there for us.
Jack is correct that the cut-off limit no longer keeps pace with costs and incomes, but there are other factors that must be addressed but seem to be insurmountable to both parties:
* The cost of drugs and healthcare and the role of lobbying and
campaign contributions to maintain them,
* The use of SS/Medicare monies to pay for welfare via the Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996.
All three of these (including the deduction cutoff limit) are non-partisan issues. Republicans simply say that democrats will always want to spend the money so its easier to eliminate the program; but the majority of conservative voters want to fix and continue them.
– Joe Briggs, now Senoia, Ga., formerly Suwanee
Send us your thoughts: We encourage you to send us your letters and thoughts on issues raised in GwinnettForum. Please limit comments to 300 words, and include your hometown. The views of letters are the opinion of the contributor. We reserve the right to edit for clarity and length. Send feedback and letters to: elliott@brack.net.
Sugar Hill gets new wine and cheese boutique
City of Sugar Hill representatives joined community members on July 6 to mark the grand opening of Talk of the Table, a wine and cheese boutique with a tasting room in downtown Sugar Hill. Located at 5010 West Broad Street, Talk of the Table offers over 300 types of wines for purchase as well as charcuterie boards and wine tastings. It is owned and operated by Jacqui Branch.
Patrons can shop a variety of wines, red, white, and bubbly, ranging from affordable to the more exquisite, depending on the shelf. In addition to wines, Talk of the Table has a selection of artisanal cheeses including some sourced from a local creamery, meats, and other charcuterie board items like spice rubs, salamis, wine jellies, and infused olive oils. Patrons can enjoy their charcuterie boards throughout their wine tasting experience or purchase to take home.
With wine tastings every day, Talk of the Table is open from noon until 9 p.m. on Monday through Saturday and is closed on Sundays.
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
From Susan McBrayer, Sugar Hill: Quirky, silly and a bit ridiculous are words that come to mind when describing this classic Evelyn Waugh spoof on the world of journalism. Beginning with the mistaken identities of two writers, Waugh continues onward with a farfetched story set in both England and a small fictional African town said to be on the brink of war. A massive number of reporters descend on this backwater area waiting for something to happen. But it looks like a dead end to them. So how far will journalists go to get a scoop? What do they do if there’s no war? This satire really drags in places but there are bits of humor scattered throughout in a style similar to P.G. Wodehouse and Alexander McCall Smith. It’s loosely based on Waugh’s experiences covering an Italian invasion of Ethiopia in the mid 1930s. Quirky, silly, ridiculous. But, for a journalist, it’s probably worth reading.”
- An invitation: what books, restaurants, movies or web sites have you enjoyed recently? Send us your recent selection, along with a short paragraph (150 words) as to why you liked this, plus what you plan to visit or read next. Send to: elliott@brack.net
Foxfire program is dynamic approach to education
In the fall of 1966, teacher Eliot Wigginton and his students at the Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School embarked on a mission to interview older community residents and document the skills, traditions, experiences, and history of the Appalachian culture they all shared. All told, this oral history program, set in the southern Appalachian hills of Georgia, would last for decades and produce books, records, videotapes, a museum, a Web site, a Hollywood movie, and an ongoing magazine. The program is still active under the auspices of the Foxfire Fund Inc. Maintaining the program’s original purpose, Foxfire has continued to empower students by giving them a sense of pride, ownership, and responsibility in both the products of the program and the continuation of the Appalachian way of life.
Foxfire began as an English teacher’s effort to get students involved in both their education and their region’s history and culture. Eliot Wigginton, a West Virginia native, moved with his father to Athens, Georgia, at a young age. He attended college at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., where he received an undergraduate degree and a master’s degree in English. He also received a master’s degree in English from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., in 1969.
Intent on becoming a teacher, he found employment at the Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School, located in Rabun County in the northeast corner of Georgia. Wigginton soon discovered that many of his students were “hostile, bored and rambunctious,” in the words of educational historian John Puckett. In an attempt to spark their interest, Wigginton suggested starting a magazine as a school project, and ideas were pitched—including collecting folklore from local residents. The idea for the project came about in part through discussions Wigginton had with guests at the nearby Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, also in Rabun County.
The students decided to name their magazine Foxfire after the blue-green glow given off by bioluminescent lichens growing on decaying logs. Foxfire was a learning experience for both Wigginton and his students since no one had any experience in oral history collecting, documentary skills, or magazine production. The first issue was published in March 1967 and became an instant success, due in large part to an interview with the local sheriff, who described a 1936 bank robbery and his capture of the bandits. In 1977 Wigginton moved the Foxfire program to the newly constructed Rabun County High School in Clayton.
Within the dynamics of the Foxfire program, a powerful approach to secondary education was developed: give students a collective purpose, along with guidance and assistance, and see what they can do. This philosophy has led to a pedagogical practice defined in the organization’s statement of purpose, the “Foxfire Approach to Teaching and Learning,” which lays out eleven core practices and connections to Foxfire projects to be used both in and out of the classroom. These core practices reflect the Foxfire program model itself, emphasizing the role of the student as an active learner, teacher, and evaluator in his or her own educational activities.
Starting with one teacher in one school in north Georgia, Foxfire spawned a grassroots movement of “cultural journalism” programs linked to curriculum reform throughout the United States and the world. The program’s influence spread via a network of published magazines, books, newsletters, and other media, as well as by direct communication between Foxfire teachers and educators. Puckett estimates that the Foxfire model has influenced classrooms in forty-seven states, as well as in such faraway locations as Japan, Australia, Scotland, Costa Rica, Guam, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Wigginton’s model spawned a movement in social history and education that reflects a growing desire to integrate cultural appreciation and reflection into the sometimes dry and disassociated notions of teaching, thereby creating learning environments that are engaging and integrative.
In 2015 Foxfire received a Governor’s Award for the Arts and Humanities.
- To view the Georgia Encyclopedia article online, go to https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org
Swooping roof line stamps this as unusual Mystery Photo
Check out the distinctive swooping roof in today’s Mystery Photo. Not many buildings are like this one, so where is it?
The last edition’s mystery was recognized by several persons. Sara Rawlins of Lawrenceville wrote: “It’s a non-billboard sign called Non-sign II, located between the U.S. in Washington state border and Canada. It comes from an art collective called Pencil Studio located in Seattle, Wash. It is composed of small metal rods to create a negative space so it frames nature all around it. The sculpture wants to take the attention away from all the billboards on the roadways and put the interest back on nature as you travel down the highway.” The photograph was made by Susan McBrayer of Sugar Hill when on a recent visit to the West Coast.
Others spotting it correctly (and several thought it was something else) included
Jay Altman, Columbia, S.C. who said it was: “A billboard tp increase environmental awareness and acknowledge the benefits of the Clean Air Act; .; George Graf, Palmyra, Va.: Palmyra, Va.; Ruthy Lachman Paul, Norcross; Allan Peel, San Antonio, Tex., who wrote “At 30-foot-tall and 50-foot-wide, the woven metal sculpture looks a lot like a billboard, except where you expect to see an ad, there is literally nothing but sky. The piece of art was commissioned by the federal General Services Administration (GSA) and created by a Seattle-based partnership of Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo, collectively known as Lead Pencil Studio in 2010.”
- SHARE A MYSTERY PHOTO: If you have a photo that you believe will stump readers, send it along (but make sure to tell us what it is because it may stump us too!) Send to: elliott@brack.net and mark it as a photo submission. Thanks.
Lionheart Theatre debuts House at Pooh Corner on July 13
The House at Pooh Corner will be on stage from July 13-16 at the Lionheart Theatre in Norcross. Christopher Robin has decided to run away with his friends Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Tigger and the rest. Probably they’ll go to the North Pole or to the South Pole. For there is a dark, mysterious threat that he’s to be sent away to Education. Nobody knows exactly what or where that is, and if he’s sent to such a distant place, what can his friends possibly do without him? So it’s generally agreed that they’ll run away. As the situation becomes clearer, Christopher Robin isn’t quite so sure that running away is the answer. To purchase tickets, go to lionhearttheatrereservations@yahoo.com.
Meet Children’s Authors Kahran and Regis Bethencourt on Saturday, July 15, at 11 a.m. at the Duluth Branch of the Gwinnett County Public Library. They are the founders of CreativeSoul Photography. They will be talking about their new book Crowned, which encourages the imagination of young children. Books will be available for sale and signing.
Writers’ Workshop with the Atlanta Writers Club will be held Saturday, July 15, at 12:45 p.m. at the Duluth Branch of the Gwinnett County Public Library. Learn more about writing, network with other writers, and listen to accomplished authors. Atlanta Writers Club officers Kim Conrey and Patrick Scullin will present “Marketing for Writers.”
Housing Resource Expo will be July 15 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Central Gwinnett High in Lawrenceville. Over 20 housing agencies will provide information and resources on housing issues, homeownership, home improvement opportunities and rental programs. It is sponsored by Gwinnett Housing Corporation and Lawrenceville Housing Authority.
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