If that protuberance in southern Orange County familiarly known as Chapel Hill were in fact a volcano, we'd now be in one of those phases when the seismologists scurry around on Mount St.

If there's such a thing as wanting to win too badly, then maybe that helps explain why running for mayor in Durham and Raleigh without help from one of the national political parties is looking about as up-to-date as a tail-finned DeSoto parked in front of City Hall.

The town of Cary, "town" being a term of no small import under the circumstances, has practically quintupled in population since I moved there in 1981 upon coming to North Carolina.

We're told that Robert Bacon Jr. wept with joy, relief or whatever when he got the news that not only would he be permitted to spend the rest of his life in prison, but -- more to the point -- the state of North Carolina no longer would see to it that his life fizzled on command at 2 a.m. some fateful Friday.

If communications from our readers are a gauge of how they're affected by events -- affected in body, spirit, pocketbook, you name it -- then there's another sign, as if any were needed, that the experience we've all shared in recent days has been so intense as to be practically off the charts.

Moot point though it is -- moot in the sense that nothing that ever happened to Ronnie Frye makes the slightest bit of difference in light of what happened to him shortly after 2 a.m. on Friday -- let me clear up any lingering confusion: I'm not the same Steve Ford who evidently got his jollies by repeatedly lashing Frye, when Frye was a kid, with a bullwhip. Don't go in for that sort of thing myself. Horsewhipping the bullwhipper? Now that I could get into.

Our inimitable senior senator pulled the plug in fine fashion, with an accommodating assist from his old cohorts (or their descendants) over at WRAL. His videotaped ain't-running-again announcement had an appealing blend of formality and one-on-one chattiness, as if he'd called each of us into his office for a personal explanation.

When the state Senate's exalted ruler, President Pro Tem Marc Basnight, the Duke of Dare, declared that a proposal to switch to public financing of state campaigns was "too bold a step," well, you didn't need to make an appointment with your neighborhood reader and adviser to tell what would become of that notion. A doornail should be so dead.

Whether the number of tax protesters who repaired last Tuesday to the state government's Halifax Mall (an architectural underachievement once famously said to resemble a UFO landing zone) was 600, 700, or as a promoter charitably ventured, a full 1,000, what's certain is that nobody was complaining about feeling chilly. With the sun glaring down on the treeless expanse, you had to admire the fortitude of the citizens who tried to help derail what they feared was a tax hike train en route from the Legislative Building across the street.

Sometimes you have to wonder if they even believe it themselves. The smart ones, at least, like Art Pope.