You may love them, you may hate them. You may be among the seemingly handful of people who are fairly neutral about them.

An unintentional consequence of comments made at the May 30 Orange County Commissioners’ public hearing on the budget put as much emphasis on “raising taxes” as on not cutting the county and city schools’ proposed budgets.

Last week I watched a short video designed by social scientists and brought to life by professional actors.  Scene one was a guy in his 20s trying to cut a lock off a bicycle in a public park.  Dozens of people passed by, but few paid him any attention.  A couple asked “Is that your bike?” and each time he said, “No.”  They kept going,

Today I walked over to look at “Silent Sam,” the statue of a Confederate soldier that stands at the north end of McCorkle Place on the UNC campus.

Today is my daughter’s birthday, and I just hung up from getting her a gift certificate for a hair styling at her local spa, which reminded me how nothing any spa could ever dream up could help my hair in this lifetime. I can take them all the pictures I want to of Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman,” and it is - and will forever be - futile. (You men won’t understand this column, so I’d move on to the Sports section.)

I gained an interesting perspective when I listened to two books by Chris Bohjalian back to back. I’ve been a fan since his 1998 “Midwives,” but for some reason his 2008 “Skeletons at the Feast” (Random House, 10 CDs, 12 hours) kept sliding to the bottom of my pile. Why? I suspected it might be a tough listen given Bohjalian’s emotive writing. Whatever subject he tackles, he develops characters you care about quickly. And when you’ve just begun to know their inner and outer terrains, he places them in difficult situations. The fact that “Skeletons” was about WWII insured intensity.