Hello! This week, I’m trying out a slightly new format, so just roll with me.

Old Story That’s Newly Topical

The story’s not really all that old, but it’s time to revisit the conditions that led to this quote uttered by a man 25 years ago on September 11, 2001: “As bad as what happened today in New York, I just don't think it'll have the effect on America that the death of Dale Earnhardt did.” It’s a story about absurdity, yes, but also about coping.

Also, I was unaware until this week that one of the men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks went to college in North Carolina and earned a degree from A&T in 1986. He is one of several others who are still awaiting trial.

Last thing about September 11th. My son learned about the attacks in school, but I haven’t really tried to explain to him how that day led to, well, the background music that defines our current existence (although this 25-year-old Onion article “for kids” was remarkably clear-eyed on the conditions that led to the attacks). Instead, talking about it feels like it’s pointing out a bunch of data points. Some of my New York expat neighbors up the street used to set up a 9/11 display in their front yard, which consisted of a lot of American flags and plywood replicas of the twin towers. My town, Oak Ridge, just got an actual piece of steel from the south tower and put it on display at the park. There have been so many moments of silence and stories of victims and survivors that were retold last week.

I’ve remembered a lot of stuff as small flashbacks from that day. I found out what was going on when I walked into a 9 a.m. film audio course at Ohio University taught by John Butler, who was briefly Mr. Rogers’s sound guy. He had NPR on, and I thought it was a trick—some War of the Worlds-style demonstration of the power of audio—until we all kept listening in silence and gradually realized that it was real. I remember lying in bed that night, thinking how bizarre it was that there were no planes in the sky anywhere in the entire country. I remember one of my friends driving to New York to help, even though he really didn’t know where to go or what he could contribute.

Since I’ve been under the weather for a few days, I spent some time on my couch watching the original NBC Today Show broadcast from the morning of September 11, 2001. I realize that it might be triggering, but it was a jarring and clarifying way to see the first draft of history being written on the fly, especially with the benefit of 25 years of hindsight.

If there’s any point I’m making, it’s probably that there are few pivot points in history that neatly reveal themselves as single events, and this was one. It almost feels cliche to state the startlingly obvious thing: The entire country, maybe for the last time, watched a terrible thing unfold on live television, and everyone, even the kids who weren’t even born, are still dealing with the trauma. It’s not history. It’s still here.

A Recommendation

Maximum Overdrive! I have written about this movie before because it’s completely batshit, but that was from an outsider’s perspective. Cliff Bumgardner talked to people involved in making the actual movie, who described how batshit it was behind the scenes as well:

Anyhow, this was a joint story between WUNC’s The Broadside and The Assembly to celebrate the movie’s 40th (!) anniversary. It’s great. Read it, then watch the movie. It’s all summed up nicely by a grip named Jock Brandis: “Maximum Overdrive may have been the most chaotic movie I ever worked on, and considering I’m a veteran of a movie called Death Bed: The Bed That Eats People…that’s saying something.”

After 40 Years, Maximum Overdrive Is Still Bad Enough to be Good

The auto-horror spectacular 'Maximum Overdrive' began and ended Stephen King's directing career but helped set Wilmington as a film haven.

The Assembly NC • Cliff Bumgardner

Something I Found

The Chuck E. Cheese in Pineville is one of only five left in the country that still has its original, creepy, animatronic band, WBTV reports. It’s so old that it’s hard to find replacement parts for the band members when they break down. Drink in the experience:

Something You Found

According to reader James Gilbert, Charlotte could have had itself its own soulless cookie-cutter multi-use stadium! The Three Rivers of the South! I, for one, would like to point out that this looks exactly like something you’d see on display to this day in Tomorrowland. BEHOLD, THE CHARLOTTE OF THE FUTURE:

@ncrabbithole.com Found this picture in some digital archive that I can't remember. Plans emerged in the 1960s to build a multi-purpose style stadium blocks from what was then known as downtown Charlotte. This site is present day Frazier Park. The tree lined street to the left is Trade St.

— James Gilbert (@jamesleegilbert.bsky.social)
7:31 PM • Aug 31, 2026

Hey, Watch This

This guy named Phil Edwards, who says he’s all about “researching and reporting on rabbit holes” (wait), did a whole video about how teal became the color of the ‘90s. SPOILER ALERT: Alexander Julian’s original Charlotte Hornets jerseys did the trick:

Instagram post

A side note: In 2013 while I was working on a WCNC-TV story about the Charlotte Hornets, I took the file footage of the original uniform unveiling and uploaded it to YouTube, and that clip now shows up in Phil’s post and in other places around the internet. Good people, I’m here to serve.

Something For The Newbies

The cardinal is North Carolina’s state bird. That’s pretty basic. But I did not know that there was such a thing as a Thicc Cardinal, who goes by Gary.

We have this really fat cardinal named Gary that hangs out in our yard and he’s awesome

— Benj Edwards (@benjedwards.com)
12:54 AM • Sep 3, 2026

Point of Personal Privilege!

I was on WCNC’s Charlotte Today with Colleen Odegaard and Eugene Robinson last week to talk about some Panthers-related Rabbit Holes. You can watch the whole clip here. I’ve known Colleen for more than 20 years—my first job in North Carolina was working the overnight shift to produce the morning TV show she anchored—and yes, she’s lovely and terrific.

Pressley Park Restaurant, present day.

Before I went, I stopped in at Pressley Park Restaurant, which sits in an industrial park and was a place where I was a regular during my time in Charlotte. It looks exactly the same inside, from the signs touting the endorsements from Creative Loafing and Jim Celania on walls, to the posters of the 1990 Charlotte Hornets above a booth. The new owner says the old owner still owns the building. The food is still fairly cheap, fairly fast, and hearty.

But! As I was wrapping up, a woman came out and put a whole 24-pack of tiny bottles of flavored alcohol-free Heineken on a table with a handwritten sign that said “Free.” I had to go before I could ask why. I just shoved two into my pockets and left. Sometimes, the universe provides.

Delicious.

A Chinese restaurant next to the Food Lion in the Raleigh Oaks shopping center (Photo by James Willamor)

Here’s a fun game that you can play right now. Go to Google Maps. Look up any Food Lion in North Carolina. Then look and see if there is a Chinese restaurant in the same shopping center. In most cases, it’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of how close. A lot of times, the restaurant is right next to the grocery store.

I’m not claiming to have amazing powers of perception here. The Food Lion-Chinese restaurant thing has been a meme for a long time now, so much so that people just accept it as truth:

Twitter tweet

Seriously. It’s part of the North Carolina culinary cultural canon, like gas station fried chicken and haunted fish camps in the middle of nowhere.

However! Just because something feels true doesn’t make it actually true. And, as far as I know, nobody has ever tried to see exactly how many Chinese restaurants have set up shop next to Food Lions. Until now.

@jeffrey.jiacheng

scientifically proving if every food lion is next to a chinese restaurant #northcarolina #chinesefood #foodlion

This TikTok rocketed to the top of my feeds a few weeks ago. In it, a man basically compares two geographic datasets to find the places where a Chinese restaurant is within a five minute walk of a Food Lion. What he found was that 59% of all Food Lions have a Chinese restaurant nearby. In North Carolina, that number is a whopping 72%. So yes, that thing you’ve been noticing for years (or if not, will now will notice for the rest of your life)? In North Carolina, it’s overwhelmingly true.

Trust, But Verify!

Or, at least I hoped it was. In an age where AI is ascendant, ragebait is a business model, and misinformation is rampant, I was a little worried about this video. When I looked at the account, I found that it had barely any followers, and the Food Lion video was the only video it had ever posted. When I tried to track down the name on it, Jeffrey Jiacheng, nothing came up. So I sent a direct message and, in the meantime, studied the background for something suspicious. I also asked people who do spatial analysis to see if the post’s methodology seemed legit.

Turns out I just needed to be patient. Jeffrey Shen, the guy in the video, replied to me a few days later, and we talked by phone. He’s a software developer who makes interactive online mapping software, and he moved to Charlotte about a year ago (Jiacheng is his Chinese name). He, like you, noticed the Chinese restaurant-Food Lion thing. He’d done data visualization in the past, and after talking to some friends, thought he might be able to figure this thing out.

It took him about a week. “Honestly, the hardest part was find a list of all the Chinese restaurants,” he said. “It’s probably not complete.”

He ran the numbers and double-checked his work. Then, he was talked into making the video. “I was talking to my girl about it,” he says. “She thought a lot of people would be interested in this.”

They were. As of now, the video has 228,000 views.

(For what it’s worth, I did ask someone I’ve collaborated with before on geographic analysis to look at Shen’s work. “Deserving of applause!” analyst Blake Esselstyn told me via email. “It's not often that I see quantitative geographic research on a platform like TikTok, and this one has documentation of sources and methodology, no less. I wouldn't say it's quite ready for publication in a journal, but for this medium, it's way above average.”)

Of course, this was more than just straight data analysis. “I’ve always had a soft spot for Chinese restaurants and owners,” Shen told me. “In the South, immigrants opened shops and restaurants in places under Jim Crow. I’d been thinking about it, and then I came here and saw this phenomenon.”

So yes, it’s a real thing. But there’s a much more complex question afoot. Why?

A Food Lion and a Chinese restaurant in Lumberton (Photo by Kirk Ellis)

There Are More Chinese Restaurants Out There Than You Think

First off, you may be surprised by just how many Chinese restaurants there actually are in North America. A frequently-cited estimate from the Chinese American Restaurant Association states there are more than 45,000 of them across the United States alone, more than all of the McDonald's, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Wendy's locations combined. That’s incredible, considering that people of Chinese descent make up only 1.6% of this country’s population. Culturally, Chinese cuisine is punching far above its weight.

The largest concentration of Chinese folks in America is in California, which isn’t surprising, given the fact that it’s geographically one of the closest states to China, and was the place where the first wave of Chinese immigrants arrived during the 1849 gold rush. In the decades that followed that boom, a wave of anti-Chinese racism led to the the first law restricting immigration into America, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned the entry of Chinese laborers. That law, strangely, gave birth to the Chinese restaurant industry in the United States. While laborers were banned, there were other ways for Chinese people to get visas. “Owners of particular businesses could obtain ‘merchant status,’ which enabled them to enter the United States and sponsor relatives,” writes Heather B. Lee in a history of Chinese restaurants. “After a 1915 court case granted these special immigration privileges to Chinese restaurant owners, entrepreneurial people in the United States and China opened restaurants as a way to bypass restrictions in U.S. immigration law. Flows of newcomers from China were diverted into the restaurant industry.” It still wasn’t easy to get a visa, but new Chinese Americans were able to make connections, enlist white partners for both supplies and testimonials to immigration officials, and rely on family for demanding, low-wage work. Because of that, the number of Chinese restaurants shot up exponentially in the early 20th century.

The food wasn’t always authentically Chinese. Fortune cookies are actually Japanese, but became staples in Chinese restaurants amidst the Japanese internments during World War II. Broccoli wasn’t well known in China—It was an Italian staple. And early in the 20th century, chop suey was a phenomenon in cities where young people were looking for something exotic for a night out. Would people in China have recognized that dish? Nope! “I like to say chop suey is the biggest culinary joke one culture ever played on another,” the writer Jennifer 8. Lee said in a 2008 talk, noting that the words mean “odds and ends” when translated back into English. “So, these people are going around China asking for chop suey, which is sort of like a Japanese guy coming here and saying, ‘I understand you have a very popular dish in your country called ‘leftovers.’”

By the mid-1970s, the draconian laws restricting Chinese immigration had been loosened, and interest in more authentic Chinese food skyrocketed after Richard Nixon was shown eating a meal with chopsticks during his landmark visit to China in 1972. After that, a number of Chinese restaurants became high-end cuisine in big cities, and mom-and-pop Chinese food really started to take off in small towns where there was less competition and the rent tended to be lower.

Richard Nixon using chopsticks during his 1972 visit to China (White House Photo)

This rural phenomenon caught the attention of Jocelyn Fung, a master’s student in Data Analytics and Visualization at Pratt Institute in New York City. “I wanted to validate this observation that I had, that wherever you go in Canada or the U.S., there's a Chinese restaurant in like every single small town,” she told me. First, she dove into the history, and found that a lot of studies and books about Chinese restaurants focus on big cities, not more rural areas. So, as part of a grad school project, Fung took user-generated Foursquare data, and generated a map of every known Chinese restaurant in North America, some 44,000 in all. The data, while imperfect, suggested that there seem to be more Chinese restaurants per capita in small towns than in big cities.

“The main thing that I wanted to validate is this assumption that it doesn't matter where Chinese populations are. There's going to be a Chinese restaurant no matter what. A lot of people think about Chinese food as something really foreign, but it's actually very, very American,” Fung said. “And the other thing I wanted to validate is that the people that these restaurants serve are not Chinese, right? It's white people.” Indeed, Fung said, a Chinese restaurant map is really just a map of where white people live.

But one thing that Fung’s map and data don’t explain, at least not directly, is the Food Lion-Chinese restaurant connection. “I think there are like spatial statistics that will help you assess that out, like whether or not there is like a statistically significant relationship between these,” she said. “It might just be a correlation.”

A Food Lion next to a nail salon and Chinese restaurant in Farmville (Photo by Ally B. Frazier)

Food Lion and Chinese Restaurants Are Looking For The Same Customers

That said, there are a lot of ways in which Chinese restaurants and Food Lions are pulling from the same customer base. A 2018 study cited by Fung called “From Chinatown to Every Town” took a closer look at the phenomenon of small-town Chinese restaurants. It found that Chinese employment agencies and benevolent associations helped form a network that bussed employees into the small towns where they could find restaurant work (which, as shown in a 2014 New Yorker article, can be very stressful, exhausting, and isolating). Restaurant owners tended to look for areas with relatively low unemployment and low crime. The study also found that owners tended to focus on areas with a lot of low- or middle-income people, which seemed to be their best customer base. “Meals in Chinese restaurants are very affordable, especially at Chinese takeout places,” the study’s authors wrote. “As such, potential customers do not need to earn a high income to eat in a Chinese restaurant.”

Now consider Food Lion, which has always prioritized higher volume over higher prices. Ralph Ketner of Salisbury, the store’s founder, wrote a book called “Five Fast Pennies.” The reason for the title? “I learned from my father, ‘Never charge the customer more than necessary. Make a living—not a killing,’” he wrote. “At Food Town/Food Lion, our lower prices led to higher volume. We chose to make 1¢ profit on each of five cans of beans, instead of 5¢ on one can of beans—thus my philosophy of Five fast pennies instead of one slow nickel.”

Wilson Smith (left) and Ralph Ketner, Food Town’s founders, at a supermarket in Salisbury, N.C., in 1971 (Photo via NC DNCR)

Ketner was a hardworking math whiz who loved efficiency in his stores and in his offices, evidenced by the cheap linoleum that once lined the floors in the company’s headquarters in Salisbury. In the late 1960s, he introduced LFPINC (Lowest Food Prices in North Carolina) and, except for meat, lowered prices to numbers that were six-to-ten-percent lower than any other grocery store. That meant some items actually were sold at a loss.

The concept worked, and Food Town (which became Food Lion in 1983) grew from a small-town chain to a Southern grocery store behemoth. Lower prices catered to lower-income people, and Food Lions became the anchor tenants at brand new strip malls being built across North Carolina and other Southern states.

To be fair, Food Lion doesn’t have exclusivity here. Any major supermarket will usually make for a strong anchor store at a suburban shopping center. But Food Lions tend to show up in lower-income areas than many of its peers. “Consider the local demographics of the area when determining the value of a grocery store,” one retail analyst states. “A Food Lion in an area with a high median income will not perform as well as a Whole Foods or Trader Joe's.”

The things that surround supermarkets are often small-scale stores that serve everyday needs. They’re usually privately operated, and tend to cater to the same type of customer as the one that’s coming in for groceries. And, while nobody has done a more serious study of the Food Lion-Chinese restaurant relationship, it does seem that strip mall owners have made the connection. An acquaintance of mine in commercial real estate works with landlords at four Food Lion-anchored shopping centers across North Carolina. He doesn’t know if Chinese restaurant owners are intentionally seeking out Food Lions, but he says he knows of some landlords who deliberately seek out Chinese restaurants instead of national chains. The reasons: Chinese restaurants put their heart-and-soul into their businesses, more than a franchise owner might. They pay on time. They tend to take care of small issues themselves. They’re usually very good tenants.

The China Wok at the Raleigh Oaks shopping center, which sits next to a Food Lion. (Photo by James Willamor)

Of course, Chinese restaurants aren’t the only places that set up in Food Lion strip malls. There are also nail salons, tax preparers, Subways, vape stores, and Mexican restaurants. And they don’t exclusively choose Food Lions either. You might find one in the same shopping center as a Harris Teeter or Lowe’s Foods. Hence, the phenomenon might be more about the rise of strip malls than the rise of Food Lion.

I did attempt, somewhat feebly, to commission my own research into this. Last month, as I picked up an order of General Tso’s Chicken from the Asian Bistro in Winston-Salem, I asked the folks behind the counter about the Food Lion a few storefronts down. Did it factor into the decision to rent here? “I don’t think so,” the woman behind the counter told me. And last week, a manager at the China II restaurant in Denver, North Carolina told Rabbit Hole reader/deputy correspondent Austin Putnam that when they opened up 20 years ago, the Food Lion shopping center was the only strip mall in town. They’ve been there ever since.

In the end, this all may be a numbers game. Fung looked into her data for me, and found that North Carolina ranks fourth when it comes to the total number of small town Chinese restaurants with 269, behind California, Texas, and Ohio (Related: North Carolina is far more rural than you think). Overall, Fung’s data show that as of February, there were 1,462 Chinese restaurants operating in North Carolina (By comparison, data scraping sites note around 470-480 McDonald’s locations in this state). As far as grocery stores go, Food Lion is the biggest supermarket in North Carolina, with more than 500 locations across the state in both big and small towns.

By The Numbers

So. When it comes to groceries and takeout, Food Lion and Chinese restaurants are more prolific than anyone else in their respective categories. They both prioritize low prices. They’re both catering to the same type of customers. And, they’re both staples of strip malls across the South in both big and small towns, especially in North Carolina. And yes, mom-and-pop Chinese restaurants aren’t franchises in the same way that Panda Express or P.F. Chang’s are, but they often rely on support networks for staffing, menus, naming, and more. It’s entirely possible that people in those networks are telling prospective owners to set up next to Food Lions. But it’s also possible that they’re telling them that the best places to open are in spots with criteria that would, just by happenstance, put them right next to a Food Lion. There’s definitely correlation. Causation? Who knows.

That said, Fung’s data and Shen’s analysis both show that North Carolina’s strip malls are places where culture and capitalism collide, ones that allow you to grab Chinese takeout and a gallon of milk during the same trip. “I feel like it's very much a supply and demand thing from all different angles, right?” Fung told me. “People come here looking for a better life and they need work. People here love Chinese food. So It just seems to be a thing that works. For everyone.”

Dolly Parton died on Wednesday at age 80. She was a proud native of Long Carolina Tennessee and a child of the Great Smoky Mountains. The guitar lick on Jolene, which she came up with herself, still gives me chills.

Even though the news of her death left me teary-eyed, I’m not really equipped to write a meaningful remembrance. Many friends and writers I respect have done that here, here, and here. The Assembly already tackled the Could Dolly Parton Happen Here? angle and did it well. I’ve kinda written about Dolly’s late brother Randy, who opened a big theater in (squints) Roanoke Rapids that bled money and closed for 10 years (It’s back open and the property’s being turned into a resort with an indoor water park, none of which bears the Parton name anymore).

Instead, I want to talk about Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. If you don’t know, it’s a program that mails a book a month to kids under five, free of charge, for any parent who signs up. There are a lot of things that Dolly Parton has done to help others. She helped fund COVID vaccine research early on in the pandemic. She provided millions in relief money after wildfires in Tennessee and after the flooding caused by Hurricane Helene. She’s also been behind acts of generosity big and small, some of which are only now coming to light.

But her book-giving gift may be her greatest gift of all. The Imagination Library began in 1995 in Parton’s home county in Tennessee. Since then, it’s given out more than 332 million books across the United States and four other countries. Part of the genius of it is that, in most places, you didn’t have to jump through many hoops to start getting books for your kids. You’d just sign up, and the stories would come. That was it. It didn’t matter how much you made, or where you lived. Any kids could get books. When kids aged out, Parton sent them a graduation letter, which has been making grown parents cry for quite a while now.

RIP Dolly Parton. This is the letter that was sent to every child completing her Imagination Library program. What a superstar!

— Grangemouth high school library (@gmthhs-library.bsky.social)
5:40 AM • Aug 26, 2026

That said, the program does cost money. Several states, like Kentucky, Indiana, Maine, and Washington all cut (or attempted to reduce) funding for the Imagination Library, according to Newsweek. Some reversed course. Others decided to get more private donations to make up for the reduction in state funds. Dave Jorgenson, the former Washington Post TikTok guy, has a good summation here:

Instagram post

The same sort of thing happened in North Carolina too. Last February, Smart Start, which administers the Imagination Library at the state level, said it had run out of state money, and that new children wouldn’t be able to enroll statewide. Some places still could take new kids. Other places couldn’t. That led to some confusion. Some people blamed state lawmakers for cutting funding, and others thought this was the beginning of the end of the Imagination Library in North Carolina. Even as recently as Monday, two days before Parton’s death, some articles seemed to imply that funding for the library was going down. So, what’s going on?

The folks at Smart Start led me through it. First off, the Imagination Library has been in this state for more than two decades, after a school librarian in Mitchell County created the first local partnership in North Carolina in 2006. In 2017, North Carolina became the second state after Tennessee to expand the Imagination Library statewide, thanks to $7 million a year in funding that was put into the budget by state lawmakers.

It’s worth noting here that Parton herself isn’t paying for all of this. Her Dollywood Foundation picks the books, handles the mailing, and covers the costs of administering the program nationwide. But local organizations, both states, non-profits, and a patchwork of private organizations are the ones who actually enroll new kids and pay for the books and postage. Smart Start made a graphic to show how it all works:

In all, the program only costs $2.60 a month per kid, and has put nearly 25 million books in the hands of children in North Carolina since 2017. “We hear that kids are waiting at the mailbox when it’s time for the books to come,” Laura Bilbro-Berry, Smart Start’s literacy manager, told me this week.

Bilbro-Berry says that the Imagination Library’s growth has been steady, but last year, it ran into the realities of the state budget process. In 2023, lawmakers gave the program an extra $1.5 million in one-time funding to help it grow. But then the state just… didn’t pass another budget. Bilbro-Berry says that as the program continued to get bigger, the funding did not, and our enrollments in the program exceeded its available funding. Meaning in February 2025, Smart Start hit the limits of the budget, and ran out of state funding to enroll new kids (the kids who were already in the program would continue receiving books).

It’s possible that you may not have noticed this. There are 75 local partnerships that take part in the Imagination Library. Some 58 of them stepped up, raised money, and used community funds to allow new kids to get books. “We learned a lot,” says Bilbro-Berry. “Some of the fundraising that has happened in that process has allowed us to serve more and more children.”

Even so, others had to put things on pause. Earlier this year, before the budget process really got going, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a bill to get more money to Smart Start for the Imagination Library. It didn’t go anywhere.

All of that changed over the summer. When the budget passed, lawmakers not only gave the Imagination Library an extra million dollars every year, but it also set aside $5 million for the Program, which can be spent between now and 2032. Translation: The pause has been lifted, and the extra money will allow the program to keep enrolling new kids in all 100 counties, even if it takes a while for the next budget to pass. “We don’t want to be in a situation where we have to pause again,” says Bilbro-Berry.

Parton’s family, after her death, told people that instead of sending flowers, they should send donations to the Imagination Library. Smart Start has noticed an uptick. And they’ve always noticed the effects the books can have. According to their own surveys, 43% of parents in the program said that if not for the Imagination Library, they wouldn’t have been able to buy as many books for their kids. That’s also meant more parents have been reading more to their kids. “We’re saddened by the loss of Dolly Parton, but it’s encouraging to see her legacy live on,” Bilbro-Berry tells me. “Instilling that love of reading is hard to measure. It’s hard to put a price on that.”

Even after kids age out, the books remain. The night before Parton’s death, my daughter, who’s about to turn 10, pulled out a book from her shelf at bedtime. She called me in so she could read it to me. So we sat there and she read “Philomena’s New Glasses,” a whimsical and cute story about guinea pigs who wear glasses and dresses. I looked at the jacket, and noticed the Imagination Library logo at the bottom. “Dolly Parton sent you that book,” I told her. She smiled.

UPDATE (9/8/26): This story has been updated to clarify Bilbro-Berry’s comments about Smart Start’s growth and funding.

Before I started writing this, I consulted a longtime acquaintance who’s also an SEO expert. I wasn’t trying to trick people into reading this story. I just didn’t want to give people the wrong idea. Mostly, I was worried about a specific word in the name of a product that I wanted to look into. What would happen if I put that word in a headline? Would I get blocked if I used it over and over in the story?

My guy, David Zimmerman, said not to worry. “As far as SEO goes, I wouldn't be concerned,” he told me. “You'll never rank for [that word] no matter what you do because you're fighting years of spammers.”

So, with that out of the way, I would like to show you a picture that several of you sent me a while ago, you freaks:

Before we go on, let’s establish some ground rules. First, despite the name of the potato chips shown above, this story is going to be non-sexual. It’s somehow safe for work! Sure, we’re going to talk about stuff like slang and the idea of vulgarity and human nature and stuff. But if you got here because you searched for something naughty on the internet, you are going to be very disappointed, much like the folks who Googled some overtly porny terms and ended up at another story I wrote. My apologies.

Also! I do understand that AI could conjure up an image like this in a split second. But I’ve checked, and this is a very real potato chip bag. It’s on the wall in a small town museum and everything. They’re kinda proud of it!

What’s less clear is the story of the man depicted on the bag. If you check on the internet every time this picture pops up, you’ll get a simple story that sounds fairly authoritative, but has been pretty hard to fact check. Plus, if you ask around town (which I did), you’ll get different stories that don’t seem to line up. Big Tit is a bit of an enigma.

But beyond that, I had a more existential question. If someone wanted to bestow the name Big Tit on you in the present day, you may not be happy about it (unless, of course, you were in a specific line of work, in which case, you do you!). But here, we’re talking about a man who lived a century ago. Did he and others know what they were doing?

I originally came across the picture of the potato chip bag more than a year ago. I made calls. I talked to people who gave me conflicting information. I dove into archives. I spoke to linguists. And finally, this week, I connected with the only person left who personally knew the man whose ill-fated venture created an internet meme and a quirky point of pride for a small town.

So now, at long last, here is the true story of Big Tit.

All of the swirling stories and internet posts out there about the potato chips seem to have one thing in common: The guy who made them had the last name Tart, and he lived in Dunn, North Carolina. Here’s the problem, though: There are a lot of Tarts in Dunn. There’s a Tart Road. A Tart Memorial Park. A real estate firm named Tart & Tart. There’s Tart’s Strawberry and Produce Farm. A search through an old Dunn phone book brings up more than 100 people named Tart in a town with a population around 8,000. They’re everywhere.

All Tarts, however, are not created equal. Some of them became very prominent citizens in Dunn. Others did not. “I always tell people: There’s the rich tarts, the medium-rich Tarts, and us, the poor Tarts,” said one Tart I talked to by phone. “I don’t even have a potato chip bag,” he added. “I wish I did.”

That particular Tart had heard that Big Tit had a son named Tittle, who was a Mason, a Shriner, and the last surviving member of the Dunn Clowns, meaning he occasionally wore a fez and drove a tiny car in parades. Tittle was indeed a real person, but he went by a different nickname, Slim, and he was not Big Tit’s son. Also, all of the Tarts in Dunn seem to have nicknames. This, too, complicated things.

Nobody with the name Tit is mentioned in any books about Dunn. I asked the folks who run a local history Facebook page if they’d post a picture and ask people what they knew, but they declined. An administrator said he’s tired of the Beavis and Butthead genre of reactions they get every time the picture shows up.

The dozens of Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit posts about the potato chips all tell the same basic story: That the bag was from the 1930s, and that Big Tit was the nickname of a guy named Titus Tart. When I called up the Dunn Area History Museum, which has an original wax potato chip bag up on the wall, they told me the same thing. Problem is, there doesn’t seem to have been a Titus Tart who ever lived in Dunn. My searches of archives, old newspapers, yearbooks, and census records all came up empty.

The Dunn Area History Museum, with the potato chip bag displayed on the wall (Picture via Dunn Area History Museum)

The folks at the museum gave me a few more Tarts to contact. I called several of them and, after introducing myself as a grown man who writes a newsletter called the North Carolina Rabbit Hole, proceeded to ask them if they knew anything about Big Tit. I felt awkward, but every Tart I talked to did not seem to think that the name was cringeworthy. One of them, Lee Tart, responded to my question with “Hell yeah, Big Tit!” and told me that he had a potato chip bag hanging on the wall of his home.

Lee confirmed that Big Tit was actually Lofton Arthur Tart Jr., who was born in 1910, died in 1967, and has the nickname Tit on his grave marker. Past that, Lee didn’t know much. But he said his father, Clarence Lee Tart Jr. (whose nickname is Bozie), might be the only person still alive who might know more.

All of this, by the way, happened in March of 2025. Back then, Lee told me he’d get in touch with Bozie who was in his 90s, but the connection never happened. Lee stopped replying to my texts, and the trail went cold.

In the meantime, I pursued another burning question: Did this man know what his nickname actually meant?

For that, I consulted linguists. One, a man named Colin Gorrie who writes a newsletter called the Dead Language Society, told me that the word “tit” is an Old English word, and its meaning hasn’t changed all that much. The word “teat” may have come from it. “But your question about how off-colour it would have seemed in the 1940s is an interesting one. From all I can find, ‘tit’ was originally fairly neutral, but became seen as slang in the mid-19th century. So I think it's likely that it would have been cause for raised eyebrows in the 1940s.”

Another linguistic anthropologist with experience researching and analyzing slang said roughly the same thing. “I think vulgarity points to extreme feelings,” Honey Hyman-Dworsky told me in a message. “In the 1940s, tit was vulgar but the degree of obscenity is only to the same degree that breasts are taboo. Like, an excess of awareness about breasts would correlate with how vulgar the word would be. For example, during feminist awareness in the late 20th century around the accessibility of breastfeeding in public, there was a conservative reactivity which made breasts super duper important and also super duper obscene. It’s why many millennials find the word particularly atrocious.”

Hyman-Dworsky said that Big Tits Potato Chips would not have flown as a national brand in the 1930s or 1940s because, well, people would probably have had the same initial reaction that you did when you saw the bag. But in Dunn, the nickname and the brand name both could have worked because, well, everybody knew who the proprietor was. “Names like ‘Tit’ and ‘Dick’ are both around because people can withstand that kind of scrutiny,” Hyman-Dworsky wrote. “If Big Tit was out here with a company named after him, I’d guess that they were either small for their own community, or white where the family can enjoy the benefit of being taken seriously even if someone’s out here named after a boob, lol.”

So, yes, it seems as if this man would certainly have known that his nickname was slang for a part of the female anatomy. It also seems like nobody in town really cared all that much or found it to be vulgar, as evidenced by the fact that they printed his nickname in the local newspaper and were okay with him naming a potato chip venture after it.

But that was all an educated guess. Facts-wise, all I had were some newspaper clippings from what amounts to the 1950s version of a gossip column. I needed first-hand information. So this week, I texted Lee Tart one more time. He got back to me right away. Bozie had been hesitant to talk before, he said, and he’d been working through some deaths in the family. But finally, he was ready to tell me what he knew about Big Tit.

Bozie Tart is 92 years old, and other than a stint in the Army that took him to Panama and some time away at UNC-Chapel Hill, he’s lived in Dunn his entire life. He loved working at the family lumber mill until he sold it in in 1972, and he’s been in real estate ever since. He’s one of the Tarts in Tart & Tart Inc.

Bozie’s grandfather was Lofton A. Tart, a farmer who opened that lumber mill, and later ran a bank and became a county commissioner. He was so prominent that the Raleigh News & Observer named him as a Tar Heel of the Week in 1954.

Tit was Bozie’s uncle. For decades, he ran a fuel oil company on North McKay Street in Dunn, one with a shiny red showroom floor and a prominent aquarium full of fish, plants, and snails. But Tit was different than his father, Lofton. “He was not in the same tradition as my granddaddy, who was a very successful banker and farmer,” Bozie told me. Over the course of our conversation, Bozie said the family loved Tit, but that he marched to a different tune. “He was just different,” he said.

Tart Coal & Oil Co. on North McKay Avenue in 1951 (Picture from the Dunn Daily Record)

Tit never married. “He was kind of a bachelor playboy in a way,” Bozie said. “He was known to have a girlfriend all the time. Story is that he carried a diamond ring around in his automobile and he connected with some girl somewhere and gave her that ring. And he had to take it back.” That story is backed up by a newspaper story that said, in 1957, that he was “considering matrimony” with a girl from Salemburg. “Tit has that romantic look in his eyes,” the story read.

Also, about that automobile. Tit’s Cadillac was the biggest car in town, one that was meant to hold seven people but had room for nine. “His automobiles were limousines. He didn’t buy standard cars,” Bozie said. “He didn’t have a chauffeur. He drove it himself.”

Getting in and out of the car was a whole production. For one thing, Big Tit was, actually, big. A draft card from 1940, when he was 30 years old, lists him as being 6’1” and weighing 240 pounds. An injury later made moving harder for him. Bozie said Tit once fell off a platform at his oil company and broke his neck. “He always had a real stiff neck. From the waist up couldn’t hardly move, but he could walk,” he said. “You’d see him in that limousine. He’d get out of it, and it was all he could do to move around.” The cartoon image from the front of the potato chip bag, depicting a large man with a cane, was accurate.

By most accounts, Tit’s company was successful, and the local paper once called him a “prominent Dunn business mind.” Behind the scenes, though, things were more chaotic. “My dad was Big Tit’s brother. But my dad had to bail him out of two or three ventures. He was pretty fed up with him,” Bozie said. “One time, there was about a $15,000 claim against his oil company because he was a playboy, and he ran through a lot of money and he didn’t pay for the products. They were going to sue him.

“It was hard on my dad. He was successful, but he didn’t have that kind of money. Being his brother, he had to help him out. It was hard to control Tit.”

One of those ventures that didn’t work out? The potato chip company. In the 1930s, chips were a fairly new product. They’d been around since the mid 19th century. The story goes that in 1853, Cornelius Vanderbilt was unhappy with the thickness of some fried potatoes he ordered at a restaurant in Saratoga, New York. He sent them back. The chef made some thinner potato slices, fried them, and sent them back out as a prank. Vanderbilt loved them, and the chips became a hit. They became a marketable product once someone figured out that they’d keep and travel better in a wax paper bag.

Big Tit got in on the action as a side hustle, but it didn’t last. “They didn’t go over real big,” Bozie said of the potato chips. “It was just something he did on the side. I’m kinda in the dark about how successful it was. I don’t think it generated much income.”

Past that, Bozie told me he doesn’t know much more. He doesn’t know how Big Tit got his nickname, only that he usually just called him Tit. I asked him if it was short for Titus, and Bozie said he didn’t think so. Nobody had ever called him by that name. He didn’t know much else about his personal life. While a bunch of other Tarts joined the family businesses—the lumber yard, the bank, the farm, and later, the real estate company—Tit went his own way. He wasn’t ostracized. Nobody held it against him. He didn’t have a bad reputation. “He was just a playboy,” Bozie says. “I think if he hadn’t been a playboy, he would have done alright.”

L.A. “Tit” Tart, Jr., at far left, in 1951. It is unknown if the kettle he’s looking at was used to make potato chips. (Picture from the Dunn Daily Record)

Of course, all of this stuff is now way in the past. Lofton A. Tart Jr. died from a blood clot in 1967. He was 56 years old. His oil company is long gone. His family name carries on, but there are a lot of Tarts. He has no descendants. His brother, Bozie’s father, has a park named in his honor. There isn’t any landmark that honors Big Tit.

And yet, somehow, a failed business venture created a few cherished and sought-after mementos that the internet gets a good chuckle out of from time to time. If you live in Dunn and you’re lucky enough, you might have a bag of Big Tits Potato Chips on your wall. Each wax paper totem that’s left is a small nod to a small-town guy who lived large and whose nickname gave him a long life after death. Past that, there’s not much else to say. After all, says Bozie: “He was just an uncle.”

I’ve prepping a pretty big story for you all (4,000 unedited words can’t be wrong!), and I was hoping to have it done this week, but the editing process and a flat tire set me back. So here are a few things that I found interesting that you may have missed:

The More You Spray, The Less You Slay, Eventual-lay

Look, mosquitoes suck. Nobody likes them. They ruin any perfectly good backyard activity. You can understand why people want them gone.

You how how you can get rid of them? By just getting rid of anything that collects standing water. Old tires. Low spots in the yard. Birdbaths? Maybe? Standing water is a breeding ground for mosquito larvae. Get rid of it, and make it possible to grill outside in peace.

But who has the time to do all that? You can just, you know, pay someone to spray your yard. Better living through science!

Except when you do that, there’s a chance you’re going to create a type of super skeeter. From phys.org:

Two studies from NC State University (brought to my attention by Elizabeth Friend) looked at Wake County. The first showed that around ten years ago, most mosquitoes didn’t have a resistance to pesticides. In 2018, they found a small cluster of resistance. By 2023, they found at least some resistant mosquitoes in 84% of the blocks they sampled.

The second study found that resistance was higher in neighborhoods with higher property values. Researchers didn’t check and see whether those individual houses were using more insecticides, but they said the findings suggest that the more money you have, the more likely you are to hire someone to spray insecticide or just to do it yourself.

As always, the researchers say more research is needed.

Does this mean that spraying is universally bad? Not necessarily? It just can’t be the only thing you do to rid yourself of the scourge of mosquitoes, unless you want them to arrive in greater numbers eventually. Viva la resistance!

The Charlotte Bobcats Were Once So Bad That The Miami Heat Ate Bojangles BEFORE Playing Them

Being a Charlotte Bobcats fan was once an exercise in tradeoffs. If you went to a game, there was a good chance that the opposing team would rest their best players because, well, they didn’t need them to beat the Bobcats. However! You could, if you waited until a minute after tip off, convince the scalpers to sell you tickets for as cheap as $5 a seat.

However, here is proof that the players themselves did not need to be in peak form to win in Charlotte:

Instagram post

“We had some Bojangles before the game because they wasn’t that good,” former Miami Heat legend Dwayne Wade said on the Post Moves Show podcast.

So when did this happen? Almost certainly in 2005, when Stan Van Gundy was still the Heat coach. In February of that year, the Heat beat the Bobcats by ten, but in March, they lost by two. So let that be a lesson to athletes: Always try your best. But when you’re playing the Bobcats, it’s Bo Time.

Here’s An Old-Ass Broken Down Car that Got Repossessed

Part of me admires the initiative it takes to, say, pay down a thousand-dollar debt in pennies, god rest their little copper and zinc souls. Could you write a check? Initiative a bank transfer? Put it on your debit card? Sure! But in order to show just how salty you are, you really have to work to round up 100,000 pennies, and deliver them to the person who’s making you pay up. Let them figure out how to transport more than a quarter-ton of currency.

I don’t know the exact circumstances of a civil case that happened in Catawba County, but as part of it, sheriff’s deputies seized this car, a 1950 Oldsmobile:

If you’d like to buy this thing, it’s being auctioned off next month.

Does it run? No! How’s the chrome looking? Mighty nice. How’s the rest of it? Never mind! How much is it worth? Depends. Project cars go for as little as $10,000, and nice ones can fetch five or six times that amount. Even though this is a 76-year-old non-working car, it’s almost certainly worth more than the other cars the deputies seized: a 2003 Toyota Celica and a 1994 Dodge Ram.

This morning I woke up and remembered that the NFL Hall of Fame Game is tonight.

Then I remembered the Carolina Panthers are playing in it.

THEN I remembered that the Panthers haven’t played in the Hall of Fame Game since their inaugural season in 1995.

AND THEN I remembered that a picture from that game ended up on the front of a video game. In the 31 years since, it’s the only time a Carolina Panther has made the cover of Madden.

So yes, that’s your trivia question. Who’s the only Panther to make the cover of Madden? Not Cam Newton. Not Steve Smith. Not Greg Olsen. Not Jake Delhomme. Nope.

The only Carolina Panther to get a Madden Cover is … a seemingly random guy who got cut before ever playing a regular season game. His identity was a bit hard to find. But years ago, I figured out who it was, and tracked him down.

His name is Cary Brabham.

Next question: Who’s Cary Brabham?

Well, here you go:

I wrote about this years ago, but since this is the first time the Panthers have been back to the Hall of Fame Game in three decades, I figured I’d give Cary a buzz so that a whole new generation of Carolina fans can learn about how a random play led to Madden immortality.

You can watch the video above, or listen to this story on Apple Podcasts.

Thanks as always for your support of the North Carolina Rabbit Hole, and go Panthers.

North Carolina-born Gallagher smashing a cake in 2011. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Apprentice Nicolas C. Lopez)

I have a task for you.

Name a North Carolinian.

Do I care to elaborate? No. I don’t.

Okay, I’ll elaborate a little. This is a very unscientific data-gathering process. In the past, I’ve asked you all to tell me where you’re most likely to get an ass-whuppin, or to merely name a North Carolina town. This helps me both understand something a little more about you, a person of sound mind who freely signed up for a newsletter called the North Carolina Rabbit Hole. But it also helps me understand a little more about this state. After all, if you hadn’t told me that the Huntersville Cook Out was a hangout for wannabe UFC fighters, I would not have discovered a Charlotte Observer story that was once entitled: “NC fighter who pooped in MMA ring gets sponsorship offers.” This state contains multitudes.

You can participate in several ways. You can reply to this post on Bluesky or Facebook. You can call into the Rabbit Hole voicemail/tipline at (980) 477-5465. You could reply to this email. Or you can leave a comment by hitting the button below (I know, you have to log in to do this, hopefully you won’t have any problems but let me know if you do!).

What’s the criteria? Whatever you want it to be! At some point, I’ll compile everything, analyze the data, and let you know the very important results. After all, without your insight, I would have never known that the Midnight Train to Georgia has made a permanent stop in North Carolina.

Honolulu, North Carolina in 2024 (Photo via Google Street View)

I went to Hawaii last week. It was great! I had poi and everything.

But! In the spirit of this newsletter, I decided to see how Hawaii and North Carolina might be connected. Turns out a former Honolulu mayor, Peter Carlisle, is a UNC-Chapel Hill grad. Also! The first written record of surfing in North Carolina actually showed up in a Hawaiian newspaper. In 1910, Burke Bridgers of Wrightsville Beach wrote a letter to a writer in Hawaii, asking how to build a surfboard. He and his friends had tried to ride some waves in North Carolina the summer before but had a hard time, because their boards all sucked. Plus, I saw a guy wearing a UNC Greensboro backpack at the Honolulu airport.

That said, the most obvious connection is probably the most tenuous. There is a place named Honolulu, North Carolina. It has no connection to the one in Hawaii. So how did it get its name? Glad you asked:

Last thing: The population of Honolulu (the Hawaiian one) is about 341,000 as of last year. The population of Greensboro is nearly 309,000. My conclusion: HONOLULU IS THE GREENSBORO OF THE PACIFIC. Although! If we’re comparing places solely on the similarity of their populations, Rabbit Hole reader Jon Kimball has that topped:

Population US Virgin Islands: 87,146

Population of Gastonia, NC: 87,067

— Jon Kimball (@jonkimball.bsky.social)
7:27 PM • Jul 22, 2026

Officer Jeff Postell in his office at Boston College in 2019.

Don’t say it was luck.

When Jeff Postell was 21 years old, he noticed something moving behind a dumpster in the middle of the night. He pulled his police cruiser back around to have a closer look.

“I don’t think an experienced officer would have gone back,” Chris Swecker, the former head of the FBI in North Carolina, told me back in 2019.

But Postell, who was 10 months out of the police academy, was doing what he’d been taught. “Do your job differently every night,” he recalled his training officer telling him. “Don't do the same thing every night. Don't go check the same building at the same time in the same manner every night. Change it up if you want to throw people off, because people watch the movements of the police.”

One of the guys watching those movements? Eric Rudolph. Before Postell was working the overnight shift in Murphy, Rudolph had no problem sneaking in town to get the food and supplies he needed to survive in the western North Carolina mountains. But in the 10 months before his capture—the months when Postell was patrolling during the wee hours in Murphy—Rudolph didn’t quite know when the police would be cruising by. “I had almost caught him once before,” Postell says. That night, Rudolph was packing a gun. The night Postell caught him, he was only wearing a flashlight. And that’s when he got caught.

“[Rudolph] said, ‘I just miscalculated this guy, just I totally underestimated him,’” Swecker said. It wasn’t luck. It was training.

Eric Rudolph was the man who set off a bomb at the Atlanta Olympics on July 27, 1996, killing one person and injuring 111 others. Over the next two years, he set off more bombs at abortion clinics across the south. At one of those bombings, someone saw him getting into a car with North Carolina license plates. Not long afterward, police and federal agents swarmed his home in Cherokee County. Rudolph had been watching TV inside, saw that he was now wanted, and fled. Agents missed him by mere minutes.

What followed was an intense five-year manhunt, which is widely considered to be the longest and most intense in American history. “[It] was more like an occupation of western North Carolina,” Swecker told me. Soldiers and feds looked for Rudolph everywhere, and kept coming up empty. They knew he was somewhere up in the mountains. They just couldn’t find him.

And then, around 3:30 a.m. on May 31, 2003, Jeff Postell caught him rummaging through a dumpster.

What happened to Eric Rudolph has been thoroughly documented. What happened to Jeff Postell has not.

That’s what led me to fly to Boston in 2019 to meet up with Postell, who had moved on to become an officer at Boston College. I was working at Our State magazine at the time, and part of my motivation for the trip was pure curiosity. The other part was a bit of a self-imposed challenge. Our State is a relentlessly positive publication. The manhunt for Eric Rudolph was an especially dark time in western North Carolina. Sometimes, I’d think to myself: How could I sneak a story about a bleak era in this state’s history into a publication that prides itself on joy and celebration? What’s the most positive thing that came out of a very negative period?

Postell’s capture of Rudolph seemed to be it. By 2019, the podcast I’d created, Away Message, had gone from passion project to a legitimate endeavor at Our State. I’d earned enough goodwill to take a two-day trip to Boston to go see Jeff Postell.

Me and Jeff Postell in Boston in 2019.

That’s the backstory. The actual story was the longest episode of Away Message that I ever produced. It’s one of the things I’m most proud of from a nearly quarter-century career in journalism. And, I can honestly say that I knew very little before I flew to Boston. Over two days, I found myself surprised and astonished multiple times.

My friends at WUNC’s wonderful podcast, The Broadside, republished that episode last week. You can listen below on YouTube, or find it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

For your reference, all of the old episodes of Away Message, from 2017 through 2020, are still in my podcast feed. You can find them by mashing one of the buttons below. I think they all still hold up, and if you’re looking to explore this state, you might find some stories in there that’ll put you in the mood for a road trip.

In the six years since this particular episode aired, Postell has taken a new job, and one of the people I interviewed, Bill Hughes, passed away earlier this month. I’m grateful to WUNC for highlighting this story again, 30 years after the bombing. In their words: “Being a footnote to history is sometimes just the beginning of a life well-lived.”

A Plott Hound, the state dog of North Carolina (Photo by dimmerswitch via Flickr)

What’s better: Dogs or cats? Before you decide, know that there is only one right answer here. That answer is dog. I present to you my evidence:

Millie, a dog (not a Muppet)

I mean, LOOKIT THAT PUPPY. This is my dog, Millie, who’s ¾ poodle and follows me everywhere. Conversely, I have never met a cat that didn’t have murder in its eyes. I’m sorry, but I just don’t trust an animal that is constantly thinking about how I might taste.

But! What about the law? Legally, which pet is superior? Consider this: North Carolina has an official state dog (we’ll come back to this), but a bill pushed by fourth graders in Nash County to recognize the bobcat as a state symbol died in committee back in 2015. Hence, we have an official state marsupial, but not an official state cat.

Here’s another metric: If you steal a cat, it’s possible that you’ll only get a misdemeanor. Stealing a dog, though? Automatic felony charge! I only learned about this after reading a Reddit comment from a former North Carolina police officer who said he was taught this fact in the academy. It was also stressed that, as Rabbit Hole readers discovered last year, you can’t get a DWI on a horse (we’ll also come back to this!).

So, um, why? Why does this state think dogs need extra protection, but not cats? Which lawmakers are in the pocket of Big Canine? Are there more dog lobbyists than cat lobbyists? (Note: If you are a cat lobbyist, please email me. Or, if you are pretending to be a cat lobbyist but are just a bunch of cats underneath a fedora and trench coat … also please email me).

Let’s go way back to the beginning. For as long as humans have lived with animals, other humans have tried to take those animals. Thieves were always stealing cows to eat or horses to ride (or, um, to eat). Dogs were also targets, and even kings weren’t immune to having them stolen. In 1660, three years before he signed the charter that created the Province of Carolina, King Charles II reported that one of his greyhound-spaniel mixes was missing. When a reward didn’t work, the king himself had to take out a newspaper ad pleading for its return. The dude loved dogs, so much so that the King Charles Spaniel was later named in his honor. “He took great delight in having a number of little spaniels follow him and lie in his bedchamber,” wrote John Evelyn in 1685, “where he often suffer’d the bitches to puppy and give suck, which render’d it very offensive, and indeed made the whole Court nasty and stinking.” Okay then!

In Victorian London, thieves would steal dogs and hold them for ransom. In the United States, college students dognapped their rivals’ canine mascots (In 1934, editors of the Harvard Lampoon stole Yale’s bulldog, named Handsome Dan II). In 1965, a Sports Illustrated story about a dalmatian that died after it was stolen and sold to researchers led to a sweeping federal law, the Animal Welfare Act.

Historically, though, stealing a horse was the thing that could get you in the most trouble. You could be executed for taking one, especially in the more lawless wild west. Those hangings also, occasionally, happened here. A list of North Carolina executions lists five horse thieves who were hung between 1768 and 1809. Two horse thieves from Tennessee were executed in Asheville in 1835. Another man was hung in Macon County in 1863 for stealing a single horse. After the Civil War, horses and mules were being stolen at such a rate that in 1867, legislators passed a state law that formally instituted the death penalty for thieves. They were goaded on by, among other things, a Salisbury Banner editorial that called them “chicken hearted” and “squeamish,” and sympathized with the farmers and others who depended on horses to plow fields and to get them to town.

A few years later, lawmakers got rid of the death penalty for the crime, but expanded the law to include harsher punishments for people who stole other forms of livestock like cows and pigs. Meaning: Farmers were protected in ways that regular pet owners were not. Animals that aren’t specifically wildlife have always been considered to be property, so stealing a pet might be akin to a misdemeanor. Your dog or cat, in the eyes of the law, was once akin to a lawnmower or a yard gnome.

That was the case up until 1989. Here, we run once again into a recurring Rabbit Hole character: State senator Bob Swain of Asheville. Swain, a lawyer and conservative Democrat, was a particularly powerful orator who, among other things, didn’t like change and thought a lot of punishments were too harsh. His senate Judiciary committee was the one that advanced a law that prevents you—to this day—from getting a DWI on a horse. He also, single-handedly, once stopped an anti-cockfighting bill that was almost certainly going to pass. He was, as my grandfather would probably way, a character.

Robert Swain.

But! Swain was very much a homer for a specific breed of hound, one that had roots just a single county over from his district. Over the years, people had come to him with ideas for an official state dog. Some had suggested the Labrador retriever or the Irish setter, but Swain didn’t like the fact that those dogs had other places in their name. The Plott Hound, however, was a dog that was brought over from Germany to Western North Carolina. For generations, it was bred by the Plott family in the area around Waynesville. Swain liked the fact that this dog, unlike other state symbols, actually did something: Track and fight bears. “They’ll hunt for their master. They’ll protect him. They’ll do all of these things,” Swain said in an interview in 1989. “Why, hell, a state bird won’t do that.”

On April 10, Swain introduced his bill to make the Plott Hound into a state symbol. Just days later, a new state representative saw an opening. Julia Howard, a real estate agent from Mocksville, had just been sworn in for her first term four months before. Two days after Swain introduced his Senate bill to recognize the Plott Hound, Howard introduced a bill in the House that would increase the punishment for people accused of stealing pets.

It’s worth clarifying: $400 was the diving line between larceny that’s a misdemeanor and a felony back in 1989 (it’s currently $1,000). Meaning: If your lawyer can convince a judge or jury that the marmot you stole is worth $999 and not an even grand, then you’re going to face less punishment. Hence, the theft of a purebred Plott Hound, which could sell for $5,000 back in 1989, would have always been considered to be felony. What Howard wanted was to make the theft of any dog or cat into a felony.

So, why did she introduce the bill when she did? Howard, who is now 81 but is still serving in the state House, picked up the phone at her realty office this week. “I do remember this,” she says. “Strange.”

The idea for her bill came from an incident—Howard thinks it might have been at East Carolina University—in which a student’s seeing-eye dog was “borrowed” around Halloween time. A bunch of kids got dressed up and took the dog out with them. “They had a couple of shooters, they let the dog go, and it got killed in the road,” she says. Howard thought something ought to be done about it because of the emotional and financial toll. A replacement service dog would cost $10,000 to $12,000. (For what it’s worth, I tried without success to find this story in the newspapers back then and couldn’t. Howard also says the victim here went on to become a U.S. Attorney.)

The story moved Howard and other lawmakers, and her bill easily passed the House. Swain’s bill sailed through the Senate. And that’s when the games started.

Howard’s pet larceny bill ended up in the Senate Judiciary committee, which Swain chaired. That committee tabled the bill in late June because senators thought that the increased punishment wouldn’t always match the crime. But! The House now had Swain’s Plott Hound bill, and they decided to play a game of their own. They attached an amendment making it a felony to steal any pet dog, one that could be punished with up to 10 years in prison. They dropped the part that made cat theft a felony because, as Howard stated at the time, it might have been ruled out of order in a bill that was about dogs.

Swain wasn’t happy. Publicly, he said he’d pass the new bill, but wasn’t “crazy over the thing.” Privately, he had other reasons. During the debate, Howard said she ran into Swain at one of his constituent events in Raleigh. “I’ll tell you why I’m not going to let the bill go,” she remembers him saying. “You’re a damn Republican, you’re a damn woman, and you’re a damn freshman.” That private comment didn’t stay private. Howard said some of his constituents heard what he said, and the next day, his hometown newspaper quoted him verbatim (Again, can’t find this story! But other stories allude to the fallout).

Howard’s original bill never passed, but her maneuver got the felony upgrade for stealing a dog through the Senate. That meant the combined Plott Hound/dog theft bill had to go before a join conference committee to iron out the differences before becoming law. Just to continue to poke Swain in the eye, the Democratic speaker of the house appointed five freshman Republican representatives to the committee. Four of them were women. “I’d give almost anything if I could I could keep from meeting with them,” Swain said at the time.

They eventually worked it out. When the final bill passed the senate, Howard and the three other Republican women on the committee gave Swain white carnations. “I want to express my appreciation to you for recognizing what a fine man I am,” said the thrice-divorced, Equal Rights Amendment-opposing Swain. “I take back everything I said about Republican women.” The whole episode got a lot of laughter (again, this was 1989), and Howard and Swain became friends before his death from cancer in 1991.

Julia Howard in 2025, serving in her 19th term in the North Carolina House.

In the end, Howard tells me that she achieved her objective, thanks to help from her fellow lawmakers and a craft move that outsmarted a grumpy, powerful lawmaker who stated that he didn’t even like cats because he’d been “scratched and bitten too often.” Protecting people’s pets was always the goal, and while it would have been nice to make the theft of cats a felony too, Howard is good with how things turned out. After all, she says, “I’ve never seen a seeing-eye cat.”

In 1865, during the waning days of the Civil War, a Union Soldier was rummaging around in the upper levels of the state capitol in Raleigh when he came upon an old document sitting unceremoniously in a cabinet. He swiped it.

And thus began one of the strangest stories in North Carolina history. The thing the soldier took was North Carolina’s official copy of the Bill of Rights.

This month, our country is celebrating its 250th birthday, which makes this the perfect time to re-share one of my favorite episodes from Away Message, the podcast I produced during my time at Our State magazine. I talked to archivists, attorneys, a former undercover FBI agent, a CEO, and a former governor. I got into a vault underneath the state archives that few people get to see. The result was a story that spans more than a century, a true-crime caper that involves an FBI sting operation, the Antiques Roadshow, and vanilla milkshakes from Cook Out. It ends with, of all things, a court case that hinged upon a pivotal piece of evidence: a typo.

You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

You can subscribe to the North Carolina Rabbit Hole podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on your favorite podcast app. And, of course, if you like what you’ve been hearing and reading here, you can help keep the North Carolina Rabbit Hole humming along by becoming a paid supporter. You don’t have to! But it really, really helps!

Also! Here are some pictures from both the recovery…

Governor Mike Easley (left) after the return of North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights. (Photo via NC State Archives)

…and from my time in the vault. Did you know that the state also has the original Carolina Charter from 1663? It’s the actual document that formed the first government in the colony of Carolina. Archivists call the Bill of Rights “Bill.” They call the charter “Chuck.”

Two of the people featured in this episode wrote books about the theft and the recovery of North Carolina’s Bill of Rights:

• Lost Rights: The Misadventures of a Stolen American Relic, by David Howard

• Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures, by Robert K. Wittman and John Shiffman

One last note: I did all of the reporting for this story in 2018, and it was also adapted into an oral history-style article about the FBI raid for Our State. Many thanks to everyone who helped me back then, including former Governor Easley, who spent half of our interview talking about woodworking.

The Trust, formerly the Home Federal Building on at South Tryon and Fourth Streets in Uptown Charlotte. (Picture by Mx. Granger - Own work, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Today, LaMelo Ball was traded from Charlotte to Minnesota. Hornets fans may be sad. People driving in Uptown may be relieved. The trade seems to be fantastic for Charlotte, and terrible for the Timberwolves (One league source told The Athletic “I don’t know what they are doing lol”). People remarked that this move will allow LaMelo to, you know, drive snowmobiles and enjoy Minneapolis’s Skyway System, which in a twist of fate, was one of the inspirations for Charlotte’s slowly dying Overstreet Mall. He will no longer be a fixture in the Gateway to Gastonia.

But! Think about the human side of all this. This celebrity was just like us. A real person. A real person who liked to drive a go-kart on the rooftop of his condo.

@espn

LaMelo hanging out on his rooftop 😂 (via jrloading/X) #basketball #gokart #car

Apparently he liked to do this quite a bit! That’s according to literally everybody who worked in an office building nearby, many of whom would post videos of LaMelo living out his MarioKart dreams.

However! You may be wondering: What did the person living right underneath the rooftop think about all of this? Was it loud? Annoying? Has that person ever banged a broom on the ceiling of the penthouse below and yelled at LaMelo to keep it down? I suppose to find out for sure, you’d have to ask the person who owns the penthouse: Michael Jordan.

MJ? LaMelo? In the same place? What is this magical building? Why is there one singular tower in Charlotte that once hosted some of the greatest basketball and football talent that North Carolina has ever seen? Today, through the magic of public records, we unlock the mystery of The Trust, a former bank that got a second life as a bachelor pad for rich, mostly-single dudes with money to spend and a location that was both visible and secure. Well, sort of.

A century ago, 139 S. Tryon Street in Charlotte was home to a hotel that later, like so much Uptown real estate, turned into offices for a bank. Home Federal Savings and Loan was on the rise in the 1950s, and wanted a modern new headquarters. So it tore down the old hotel in the mid 1960s and built a seven-story modernist structure with distinctly Japanese overtones. At the time, most of Charlotte’s new skyscrapers were glass and steel boxes. This one stood out.

By the 1980s, Home Federal was one of the biggest banks in the state, which led to its takeover by First Charter Bank in the 1990s. The headquarters moved down the street, and First Charter put the building up for sale.

The building was given historic status by the city in 2002 (despite the objections of council members who said wasn’t old enough). Even so, it sat mostly vacant for about five years before Jim Donnelley decided to convert it into condos. Donnelley and his wife had moved to Charlotte in 2005, bought a building uptown, converted the upper floor to condos, and opened the Emerson Joseph men’s grooming lounge on the street. They thought they could repeat that formula at 139. S. Tryon, which they renamed The Trust.

It wasn’t going to be, uh, affordable housing. “We won’t have any lower-priced units,” Donnelley told the Charlotte Observer in 2006.

By 2008, right in the midst of the looming financial crisis, seven of the eight condos on the upper floors had been sold, and a Brazilian steakhouse, Chima, opened up at street level. My Charlotte friends and I used to celebrate ChimaFest one a year. We ate a lot. We got the meat sweats. It was there that I learned life’s most important lesson: Pace yourself.

So who moved into The Trust? At first, there were a lot of single dudes with money to spend. Two of the co-founders of Direct Digital, an online nutritional supplement company, bought condos early on. So did some unmarried guys with connections to the financial industry. Even in the middle of a global financial meltdown, the units sold for close to their predicted asking price of $1.5 million.

Then, the athletes showed up. The first was Boris Diaw, a Charlotte Bobcat and Frenchman who seemed to enjoy the finer things in life and, also, sometimes, basketball. He bought a condo on the third floor in 2009.

Twitter tweet

Then, in 2010, about nine months after he bought a controlling interest in the Charlotte Bobcats, Michael Jordan closed on the two units on the top floor and combined then into one 7,000-square-foot penthouse. He also got his own private elevator. That condo features prominently in a 2013 ESPN story about Jordan’s 50th birthday, written by Wright Thompson. The story begins, however, inside the arena uptown:

He did not, in fact, own the building! He did, however, own the penthouse a few block away.

In 2012, the Bobcats waived Diaw, and he sold his condo. By then, Charlotte had become enthralled by another athlete: Cam Newton. A month after Diaw left town, a company formed by Newton’s father Cecil bought a condo two floors above. In 2015, right around the beginning of the Panthers Super Bowl season, Newton bought another condo downstairs on the fourth floor. He decorated it with, among other things, a Pepsi machine adorned with his own image.

Twitter tweet

Then! In 2020, not long after LaMelo Ball showed up in town, Newton rented that fourth floor condo to him. After he left for the New England Patriots, he also rented his fifth floor condo to Jermaine Jackson, who had been Ball’s manager since high school. Remember that guy for a moment.

First, let me take a quick detour to note one other resident you may have heard of. In May 2014, the condo across the hall from Diaw’s old place was bought by Chris Daughtry. If that name rings it’s a bell, it’s probably because you watched American Idol in 2006 (Daughtry got to the final four, but was eliminated). Since then, he formed a band called—wait for it—Daughtry, and in 2014, went in on a condo in The Trust with his wife. That didn’t last long: He sold it a little more than a year later. Before that, he lived in a home he built off of Haw River Road in Oak Ridge (FULL DISCLOSURE: I live in Oak Ridge! A few miles away! My house is much smaller!). In another weird convergence of celebrity, Daughtry lived just down the road from NASCAR legend Kevin Harvick. Both sold their property more than a decade ago, but a new celebrity has emerged in another house ON THE SAME ROAD. That’s right: Twister Sister singer Dee Snider. I swear I am not making any of this up.

Back to the sports stuff. In 2024, Newton sold Ball the fourth floor condo that he’d been renting and Ball, as we said much earlier, celebrated by driving a go kart around on the roof. Things did not go as smoothly for his manager, though. In May, a judge evicted Jackson from Newton’s condo (which is still owned by his father, Cecil), saying he owed more than $150,000 for 11 months worth of rent. Jackson counted by saying the place needed repairs, had mold and mildew, and that the aquarium was leaking.

Also, you’d figure a building that housed millionaires and top-tier athletes (and has a bank vault converted to a private wine cellar) would have top-tier security. Not necessarily! Apparently it used to be extremely easy to get into the parking garage (People would yell and startle MJ, and at least one person broke in to sit inside LaMelo’s Ferrari). Two years ago, a guy who worked for an owner got his ass kicked by a random dude in the elevator. The HOA for the building told WCNC-TV that they were gonna fix the problems.

All that said, the entire building is still extremely pricey. The condo across from the one LaMelo’s manager was renting sold in 2019 for $3.9 million, making it the priciest residential sale ever in Uptown Charlotte. Another condo on the sixth floor, owned by the husband and wife behind Little Hardware, is currently up for sale. Others, like Cam Newton, have quietly held on to their property. Jordan still owns the penthouse (technically, it’s listed in the name of a company run by his longtime business manager, Curtis Polk).

There’s no word on what LaMelo will do just yet. After all, he just found out today that he’s moving! Even so, his legend lives on. Real estate listings for other units show his camouflaged Hummer parked in the garage (before he wrecked it on Trade Street). And one real estate agency bragged about it this way: “One detail most people don't know: The Trust has a private rooftop terrace exclusive to residents — the same rooftop where LaMelo Ball famously rode a go-kart.” Sure, LaMelo may no longer be a Hornet, but he’ll always be turning laps on the terrace of our hearts.

Struttin’ Stormy on the Carolina Hurricanes road jersey (Picture via @canes)

Let's do that hockey.

Last weekend, the Carolina Hurricanes hoisted the Stanley Cup for the first time in 20 years. That is a big deal all on its own, and plenty of people spent the week afterward reminiscing about the team, the fans, and their fantastic playoff run.

But I thought to myself: what is the most Rabbit Hole angle here? What’s inconsequential, but may also contain multitudes? I found the answer on the shoulder of the road jerseys for the Carolina Hurricanes. There, you can find a patch depicting a cartoon pig in mid-stride. He’s wearing a sweater with a Carolina Hurricanes “C” on it. He's kind of smirking. He’s wearing a sailor hat that says “Canes.” This logo is called Struttin’ Stormy, and it is unlike anything else in the NHL today. So how did did this pig end up on a jersey that’s now going to be immortal?

This story took me to a places I did not expect, from grumpy executives in the NHL league offices to a small town in South Dakota. This week, I spoke to the three people who brought the logo to life, and put Struttin’ Stormy just inches away from the Stanley Cup itself.

These conversations have been edited for brevity and clarity. You can also listen to this story as a podcast episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Some Pig: The Story of Struttin' Stormy and the Stanley Cup

Podcast Episode · North Carolina Rabbit Hole · June 20 · 25m

Apple Podcasts

North Carolina Rabbit Hole: We’ll get to the logo, but first, what is the greatest Canes tweet of all time?

Dan LaTorraca, former Canes VP of Marketing and Brand Strategy: Man, I wasn't ready for that question. There's a couple that I'm very partial to that still will make me giggle. When we unveiled our previous road uniform with the diagonal word mark on it several years ago, the Rangers commented on it, implying that we were not being creative by having a diagonal word mark across the front of the jersey. And I remember sitting in my office thinking: What's the best reply to that? And what I came up with was: It's a huge honor for the inventor of diagonal to tweet at us.

And then it became a meme a little bit after that. I always liked that one.

And I was really passionate about the the Cameo video we did against the Devils.

Rabbit Hole: Is this your personality? Are you like, I am going to troll you in a way that makes you think: I don't know if I’m mad. I'm kind of impressed.

LaTorraca: I mean, you've known me a long time, Jeremy. I don't make fun of my friends. I really try not to, but when you represent a team, especially in a market like the Carolinas, where it's the first generation of fans, and there's always a much-needed chip on the shoulder because it's a smaller market and hasn't been around as long. It's the New Jersey in me to stick up for people. But that's probably not my personal style of humor. It's just marketing.

Rabbit Hole: You were the voice behind the Canes when it came to Twitter, but what else did you do when you were working with them?

LaTorraca: Before I left, I was overseeing a couple departments: Our overall marketing, which contained digital and traditional branding and advertising, as well as our creative services team, which was anything design- and production-related. That could be anything from flyers and signage to uniforms.

I oversaw photography, video production, and in-game content production. Retail was the other piece there, like the great merch that we sell, from Bunch of Jerks to all the other fun things as well.

Rabbit Hole: One of the things that I thought was interesting was this little cartoony logo that showed up on the shoulder of the away uniforms this season. It's a pig because the mascot, Stormy, is a pig. But he is dressed in a particular way. How did he get from somebody's brain to now, where it's gonna be in every 2026 Stanley Cup image?

LaTorraca: I've been giggling and texting a few people about that for the past week now because it's wild. But to give you the full timeline of it: I'm a creative at heart for sure. I also grew up in the northeast. And when I first moved down to the Carolinas to work for the Panthers, one of the first questions people would ask me was: Where did you go to school? I am a proud University of Scranton and Canisius University alum.

Look, college athletics are not a huge deal in the Northeast. I grew up a pro sports fan. but I never realized how big it is in the Southeast and in the Carolinas. It blew me away. I always was drawn to those vintage strutting logos. I loved that design and was always a little envious too. I often would look at sports design forums and things like that. And I always had the idea of doing something like this. But then it really clicked when I saw this one artist on the sportslogos.net message board who specialized in this. His name is Ross Hettinger, he lives out in South Dakota, and I really loved his work. So I was like: Hey, you know what? I'm gonna reach out to this person and see if they'd be interested in working with us on this.

Ross Hettinger, artist: I'm primarily an art teacher at a middle school in Aberdeen, South Dakota. But I also do mascot logo design. I've been drawing since I was very little. I actually went to school for graphic design, but then kinda shifted towards regular visual arts, and did painting and sculpture and that kind of stuff. I ended up changing again to art education because I had a lot of teachers in my family. I got in with the school district here pretty much right after I graduated, so I've actually been at the same school for fifteen years now.

Rabbit Hole: How did you get into designing these retro mascots?

Hettinger: Other than drawing as I was growing up, I was also in in sports. I was a ranch kid. If I didn't have a sport to do after school, then I went home and had to pitch hay and do chores and stuff. So I was very into sports. I'm into basketball and football. My bridge between art and sports were the sports logos.

I ended up finding Chris Creamer's sports logo boards online, and so I would put concepts on there and stuff. I shifted towards the more vintage style ones, especially the college ones because they they have such a nostalgic feel.

I started finding any images that I could and made myself a database of different college mascots. I made a jackrabbit for my alma mater, SDSU. And I did it in a vintage style. It kind of jumped off and I thought, well, there's probably other schools out there that don't have a vintage logo with a sailor hat. And so I did a deer and a bison and a pronghorn, because those are the animals around here that I've drawn realistically many times.

Rabbit Hole: You went to school for this, but in this particular discipline, you might be a little more self-taught.

Hettinger: I would say so.

Rabbit Hole: Were you getting attention for this?

Hettinger: Yeah, with the fan bases and stuff. I would post some things as T-shirt designs. People liked those. On the sports logo boards, people really liked them more than I actually knew. I always had to make a logo and put it out there and move on to the next thing. But it's just kind of a compulsion almost to create them.

Rabbit Hole: How did Struttin’ Stormy come about?

Hettinger: Dan LaTorraca contacted me at the end of 2021 and said: Hey, I saw your stuff on the sports logo boards and wanted to see if you'd be interested in doing this. I said: Absolutely.

LaTorraca: He was fantastic to work with. My intention was that it'll be a fun retail play. You know, something we can throw on a t-shirt, a car decal, hat, sweatshirt, just something fun because it fits with the Canes unique brand. You know, we're in a college sports mecca in the Triangle. The Canes and the NC Courage are the pro teams here in the Triangle that unify the different college fan bases, which obviously have a bitter rivalry.

It's unique to the brand in the way that tailgating is, because of the college culture that exists in the region. it just was a natural, fun nod to the colleges, to create something that's uniquely ours in the NHL, and to sell some fun, cool merch. And that's what it's all about within sports is, you know, doing things that fans will like and enjoy. And sometimes you can do stuff that you enjoy too.

Hettinger: I think it was in February of 2022 that I sent my first pass of Stormy. And so I just sent him a picture of the the sketch that I did. And after we got the look figured out in pencil, I scanned it in, got my line work done, and started sending them some different color samples on how the colors could be arranged. He took those to his team and they figured out how they wanted that to look. It was a pretty smooth process, actually.

One of Ross Hettinger’s early sketches of Struttin’ Stormy.

Rabbit Hole: What is it like to get a call from a pro sports team? It sounds like maybe your mindset was more like: I do this 'cause I think it's kinda fun and cool and it's something I feel like I need to do. And then an actual team says: Can you do that for us?

Hettinger: Disbelief essentially. My first thought: Dan's not really with the Canes. I'd been burned before, not by people claiming to be from a sports team, just projects where they say, Hey, can you do this? And then I never hear from them again. That kind of thing. And so I looked him up and I was like: He worked worked with the Panthers and now he’s with the Carolina Hurricanes. So yeah, it was pretty surreal.

Rabbit Hole: Did you ever think: How did they find me, an art teacher in South Dakota?

Hettinger: I don't get a lot of commissions all over the place. Like I've done high schools and I did work for the University of Tennessee just in the last couple of years. But at the time that this was happening, it was kind of a cold call in a way. Like they cold called me. And I'd been putting out cold calls to teams for a long time, and I'd either get the direct no or just never hear from them.

In a way, it wasn't even work on my part. I was putting out a lot of stuff on boards and I kind of had a portfolio page. And so every once in a while I would just do a random Google of a vintage sports logo, and quite a few of mine would pop up in search results.

Rabbit Hole: I don't know if compulsion or obsession with these logos is the right word, but that ends up turning out to be a pretty good SEO strategy, right?

Hettinger: I mean, that was never a a true strategy on my part, but it just kinda ended up working out that way.

And, you know, where Stormy is now is not what I expected either.

LaTorraca: A lot of fans saw this vintage Stormy thing in the store, and they were like, this has to be for the Stadium Series game. It wasn't, which led to some fun, organic posting and word of mouth of this thing getting out there. And we didn't confirm or deny. It just ended up being something that took on a life of its own. Fans loved it and embraced it. It wasn't wasn't something we used a ton in our media or our content. It was just a fun retail play.

And when Doug Warf became team president a couple of years back, and he really liked the design.

Doug Warf, former Hurricanes team president: I am now a senior advisor to Governor Stein, but I did two different stints with the Canes. I did a 17-year stint that ended in 2017 where I left as VP of marketing, and then I came back as president.

I'll take a little bit of a step back. Struttin’ Stormy is Dan LaTorraca’s brainchild. He, Mike Forman, and the marketing team had the idea for it. They had Ross Hettinger design it while I was kind of in my time in between working for the Canes. So I was a fan when the mark came out.

On the marketing side of my brain, when I saw it, I was like, man, I love that. I was kind of envious that I didn't think of it.

I always loved the mark. When I came back, they wanted to change the road jersey. The owner and our team really loved the 2023 Stadium Series jersey. The idea was kind of creating the inverse for that for a road jersey.

The key things that weren't done yet were the shoulder patches. One was kind of easy. The fans have always loved the state flag. We put that on a third jersey years ago and has kind of always been a fan favorite.

The other shoulder was the one that was a little bit more challenging. And I brought up Struttin’ Stormy. Dan loved it. I think in the past, I didn't know this immediately, but I think there had been one or two folks at the NHL who didn't always love the logo. So I think that was where they needed me to do a little fighting for Struttin’ Stormy.

Rabbit Hole: What what does that look like?

Warf: You gotta be a good salesperson, Jeremy. (laughing) You know, I think it helped that our team was really bought in on it. Our owner liked it. Tom Dundon always likes to push the envelope a little bit. And I do think the mark is, I don't want to call it irreverent, but it's just different. And there are folks in the league sometimes who slightly averse to change. So it was just letting them know: Hey, we're all behind this. We all want to do it. Our fans are behind it. We were able to talk about how well some of the merch had sold. I think that helped convince, them but it was also one of those things that I didn't really want to back down from.

I knew it wasn't something that they could withhold from the jersey because it didn't violate any of their rules. And even if you throw it back, I mean, Pucky the Whale was on Whalers’ jersey shoulders at some time. So it's it's not like it's this ridiculous idea that had never been done.

Pucky the Whale on vintage Hartford Whalers jerseys. The Whalers moved to North Carolina in the 1990s to become the Hurricanes.

LaTorraca: It ultimately took some internal pushing and it ended up on a uniform. And once something is on a uniform, then it's officially part of your brand. It's part of NHL history, which is what we're seeing now. This uniform that came together really quickly that had a fun cartoon pig on it is now immortalized forever with the Stanley Cup win of the Carolina Hurricanes. To me, that's awesome. We've seen people get tattoos of it now. And it was all just a little fun idea. That's the beauty of sports marketing is that some little spark like that can turn into something really, really special and sometimes immortal.

Twitter tweet

Rabbit Hole: What is It like to see that team win the Stanley Cup?

Warf: Well, winning the Stanley Cup is one thing. The community support the team has right now? I think that’s what those of us who worked there in the early days take so much pride in. There were a lot of foundational bricks that were laid—In the ‘02 run, the ‘06 run, ‘09, the 2011 All-Star Game—that were hard, right? That was back when we were scrounging around for fans and going to events where three or four people would show.

You know, in 2006 my own family, who are spread around the Carolinas—I had a family member call me and say, Hey, it's great that you guys have a female that plays on the team. And I was like: I’m not against that, but we don't. What makes you think that we do? And she's like, well, they keep saying Brenda Moore is playing really well. That's where we were in 2006. That was my own family.

And now to see Stanley Cup road games where the Lenovo Center is sold out for a watch party, there's probably another 15,000 people outside, there's 7,000 people at Red Hat to watch, there's watch parties at every bar. I mean, I you know, there are tears of happiness from that, whether we won the Cup or not.

Rabbit Hole: Do you think it's kinda cool that an idea that you brought into reality with a lot of help, is now part of like every image of the Canes raising the Cup?

Warf: I hope it is the symbolism of us against the world for our fans. And I think that's what we thought of when we were putting it on. We knew that almost all of our fans would love this.

They would get the homage to whatever college they're aligned with in North Carolina. And so I think that there's this little bit of Bunch of Jerks that comes through with that logo being on the shoulder that we all playfully love.

Rabbit Hole: You know, Ross, it was on T-shirts. Now you can buy a jersey with your logo on it.

Hettinger: I mean the only word that comes to mind is surreal. I still have a hard time coming to terms with it.

I was watching the Stanley Cup finals every chance I could get the TV from my kids. And I'd point out: Hey look, see that on on the shoulder? That's the thing that's on that shirt that dad has. My kids are just like, that's cool. Can we turn our shows back on now? (laughing)

I don't wanna feel like a salesman all the time. I don't boast about that kind of stuff, or I try not to, but I'd love to be able to just tell everybody, hey, you see that? That's me. You know that meme of Leonardo DiCaprio from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood where he's snapping his fingers and pointing at the TV? I feel like that all the time.

What Ross Hettinger feels like when he sees his logo on the Canes road jersey.

Rabbit Hole: Do your art students know about this?

Hettinger: Yeah. I have some hockey players in my classes and they think it's pretty cool. But you know, they're middle schoolers, so they don't wanna let the teacher know that they think what the teacher does is too cool.

Rabbit Hole: So as the guy who designed it and put this thing into the world, what does this all mean to you?

Hettinger: Looking at all those vintage logos, they were all designed by Arthur Evans from the Angelus Pacific company way back when. He designed about 90 percent of all college mascots. And nobody really knows him. You know, you can search it up and figure it out.

I feel like that’s where I’m gonna end up falling with Stormy, you know. I'll always know that it was mine, that I created that. I feel like a lot of people won't. And it'll be one of those things where I say: By the way, I did this. Really? That crazy, you know?

A brick of Neese’s sausage (Photo via Flickr/mswine)

On Thursday, I noticed something odd. Every so often, I would go digging for clues about Neese’s Country Sausage, which had mysteriously vanished from store shelves without any official explanation. There were a lot of suspects, though. A listeria outbreak at its plant in Greensboro shut down production last year. The longtime CEO and family patriarch, Thomas Neese Jr., died in April. The website went down, only to come back a few weeks later. There were shortages of Neese’s sausage and livermush at grocery stores across North Carolina. Then it seemed to be completely out of stock. People—jokingly—began to jack up the prices of the remaining bricks they had at home.

For months, the company said nothing. At all. Hence, to fill the vacuum, plenty of people wrote their own obituaries for Neese’s. They reminisced about their favorite recipes, many of which called for Neese’s sausage by name. They started to look for something else that would at least come close. People had started to move on.

The only news lately was that a packaging company had sued Neese’s over unpaid bills. So, I went to see what else Neese’s might be late on. Turns out, they were running a little behind on paying property taxes for their facilities in Charlotte and Burlington but eventually settled up in April. Others noticed that the facility in Charlotte was up for sale. So I looked to see if there were any changes at the most basic level. For that, I did a search for Neese’s Country Sausage on the North Carolina Secretary of State’s business lookup. On the annual report, I expected to see, maybe, a change in the company officers. Or, perhaps, that the company had officially filed to dissolve. Or, most likely, no change at all.

Instead, the search came up empty. This was highly unusual. Even dead companies still show up in the archives. Neese’s was gone.

Turns out, that was sign of things to come. On Wednesday, the head of the company, Tommy Neese III, filed to change its official business name for the first time since it officially incorporated in 1947. After 79 years, Neese’s Country Sausage became NCS Enterprises, Inc.

So on Thursday, I started asking around, trying to figure out exactly what that meant. On Friday, the company itself answered that question in the form of a press release:

Yes, this is the same Jones who provided the namesake for Jones Sausage Road, which you’ve probably seen if you’ve drive past Raleigh toward the coast on I-40. The company started in Danville, Virginia and might be best known for the red hot dogs they sell at the Martinsville Speedway. The brand hasn’t been owned by the Jones family for a long time, though. General Mills bought the company in the 1960s, and ConAgra took it over after that. For a time, the old Jones factory in Garner made all sorts of meat products for ConAgra, including Slim Jims. It closed in 2009, after an explosion killed two people. Today, it’s the site of a giant Amazon warehouse.

Jesse Jones’s current owners, the White Packing Company, took over and split off Jesse Jones in 1997, long before the explosion. The White family has deep Virginia ties. Its headquarters have been based in a small office in Raleigh since 2022, but its president, Karl White, is based in Fredericksburg, Virginia according to company filings, and the company had a longtime processing facility 20 miles east in King George.

So, what about Neese’s? The press release, published Friday afternoon by WFMY-TV, goes on:

Remember: Neese’s production plant had been closed for months because of a listeria outbreak. Since then, it hadn’t invited USDA inspectors to come back to check things out, which meant the production line couldn’t reopen. So, will it ever? A Jones company rep wouldn’t comment to WFMY, so the fate of Neese’s main facility outside of Greensboro and its slaughterhouse in Burlington remain unclear. That said, it seems like Jones won’t tinker with what’s inside the sausage (which, notably, is free of fillers and additives), but it might change how it looks on the outside. “We are committed to reintroducing Neese’s products in a way that remains true to the original recipes, while positioning the brand for long-term success,” White said in a story from WGHP-TV.

Hence, Neese’s will once again be Neese’s, mostly? Kinda? But it won’t be exactly the same. The company built its plant behind the original family farmhouse southeast of Greensboro. Its sausage, liver pudding, and other products notably looked and tasted the same for generations. And yes, in the business world, 109 years is an extremely long time for one family to be in charge of one thing. “Running a small business, a family business, there’s plenty to keep you awake,” CEO Thomas Neese Jr. told Our State in 2013. Back then, he was worried about corporate competitors and a shift in the marketplace, but planned to keep the company in the family. “After so many generations, you don’t want to be the one that gets it wrong,” he said. At the time, his son Tommy III and daughter Andrea Neese Pegram ran the company with him as co-presidents, although Pegram left that position in January 2016 after 29 years, according to her LinkedIn and corporate filings.

Still, change almost always comes, even for the stuff that your grandparents used to love. Duke’s Mayo was bought by a private equity fund in 2019. Krispy Kreme was subsumed by a German conglomerate in 2016 before (once again) going public in 2021. Bojangles keeps yo-yoing between private equity firms. Sure, Cheerwine (which was also first sold in 1917, the same year as Neese’s) is still family-owned. So is Cook Out. But when something become beloved, it also becomes a brand, which becomes valuable, which means it gets surrounded by the storm clouds of investment. One family’s business can quickly became part of another corporation’s portfolio.

So when will Neese’s come back? Who’s in charge? Where will it be made? Will the wax paper wrapper be replaced by something else? All unclear for now. “We believe the White family is the right fit to carry our family sausage business forward and build upon its legacy for generations to come,” said Tommy Neese III, who now, seemingly, becomes the last Neese to independently run Neese’s Sausage. Whether that matters is up to you.

The Wall Street Journal recently wrote the Shibumi Shade story that everybody writes every summer: “The $255 Beach Shade Dividing America’s Coastal Towns.” It plays the hits:

• Many people like them because they work better than any other beach shade.

• Some people think they are very loud, although new ones aren’t as loud as the old ones.

• They’re really popular on the east coast! Not on the west coast.

• The company has a patent (which I wrote about) and spends a lot of time trying to stop imitators.

• Some towns hate them and have banned them. Lookin’ at you, Myrtle Beach!

Every year, some national publication “discovers” the Shibumi Shade. How? Maybe the same way that most people who spend time at the beach discover them: By looking around and seeing them everywhere.

However! If you read things closely, there’s a tiny bit of actual Shibumi news in there:

• The three friends who created the shade and the company, Dane Barnes, Scott Barnes and Alex Slater, are no longer the majority owners. Stories in the past have noted that Stripes, a private equity firm, made a significant investment in 2021. The Journal now says that Stripes is the majority owner, although the founders “remain board members, brand ambassadors and strategic advisers.”

• They’re still selling a lot of them. In 2024, the company told The Assembly that it sold 300,000 in the first eight years. The Journal now says, as of 2026, the number is 500,000. That’s 200,000 in two years! Boy that’s a lot of Shibumis, which are now sold in many different colors. The company stuck with the original blue version for a long time because it initially helped with marketing and identification.

• Shibumis were originally made in North Carolina (originals state it on a fabric tag), but production moved out of the United States to Asia in 2024. (The Assembly story back then noted that some production had moved overseas).

Also, given that Shibumi is constantly trying to tamp down copycats, it’s probably not surprising that the woman who’s been its CEO for the last three years once worked for Tory Burch as its “Director of Intellectual Property and Global Brand Enforcement.” In an interview last year, she said that the company’s goal is to expand to the West Coast (where, the Journal article noted, nobody seems to know what they are). And while this seems to be the season of the IPO (SpaceX! Anthropic!), Shibumi will not be following suit to celebrate its tenth birthday. “At this time, Shibumi is not seeking additional investors as we focus on expanding and scaling with the current support,” Tiffany Walden said last year. Sorry to dash your Shibumi memestock dreams!

So maybe the Shibumi Shade is less North Carolina-y than it used to be. Which, you know, is just business. However! It’s interesting to compare that company to another one founded by UNC grads. In 2014, David Baron, Ryan Cocca, and Hannah Fussell started making play couches inspired partly by their hatred for dorm room futons. Hence, The Nugget was born, which is basically two triangles and two rectangles covered in microsuede. It’s catnip for kids (I know this—we own one), and demand exploded during the pandemic. At one point, more than 200,000 people were on a waitlist. Years later, the company still makes each and every one in Butner, North Carolina, and the internal foam comes from a plant in Mt. Airy. "It was really important early on (for Nugget Comfort) to be in North Carolina," Baron, the CEO, told WTVD last year. "It was important to me to stay connected to the state because we had gone to and benefited from a public university."

Look, I’m not telling you how to live. But if you drag your Nugget down to the beach and set it up underneath your Shibumi Shade this summer? Respect.

I’d like to say that, as a journalist, I have an uncanny ability to find and root out the best stories. But in this case, I was on Facebook Marketplace looking for something else and saw something I’d never seen before. The algorithm knows me, I guess.

I immediately called the guy who was selling this amazing thing and asked him all sorts of questions. What follows has been edited for brevity and clarity. (I’ve also annotated our conversation with the help of Dana Hanson, the extension meat specialist at NC State University and the person who puts on State’s annual Barbecue Camp.) You can also listen to this story on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

North Carolina Rabbit Hole:
Can you tell me about yourself?

Tyius McKinney:
I’m Tyius McKinney, born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, went to Southern Guilford High School. I have a family. I live a little bit south now in a town called Randleman. I’m in IT. I was a Navy veteran, got out like four years ago at this point.

Rabbit Hole:
Tell me about your Facebook marketplace listing that went up a couple of days ago.

McKinney:
Yeah, sure. It's just a vertical file cabinet that I turned into a smoker.

Originally, I was looking at some of the vertical smokers that they have for sale. One: they cost a lot more. Two: A lot of them were not in stock. So I was like, hey, I want a vertical smoker. Let me see what else I can find. And getting on YouTube, going through some forums, reading and stuff, I saw that people had turned file cabinets into smokers.

And I'm like, that seems incredibly easy. I feel like I can get that done, no problem. And that's what it turned into. A file cabinet smoker.

NOTE: At this point, you might be wondering the same thing I was: Is this something that’s new to me, or new to everybody? It turns out that file cabinet smokers have been around for a while, and they’re not necessarily a Southern thing. “if you call yourself a Buffalo Bills fan, it’s maybe a rite of passage to have a file cabinet smoker in the parking lot,” Dana Hanson tells me.

Googling “file cabinet smoker” will give you plenty of how-tos and breathless demonstrations, along with plenty of humblebrags. At least one student has built a file cabinet smoker as a class project. Google Trends shows that something happened in June of 2015 that shot their awareness into the stratosphere, although the reaction to them online seems to show that most people have never seen or encountered them. Hanson hasn’t seen many himself, but he remembers the first time he gazed upon a file cabinet smoker. “My initial response was: That's pretty cool,” he says.

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Rabbit Hole:
I have many questions because I have not delved into the file cabinet smoker section of Reddit. What sorts of things would this sort of a thing be good for? Like, what were you cooking in it?

McKinney:
Vertical smokers are able to hold more food, because normally the firebox will be off to the side or the firebox is at the bottom, and that's how you can control how much smoke and heat is gonna go up on it. And then you just have multiple layers that are closer or farther from the heat. You can hold a lot more food. That one, I was able to cook like six pork butts on it, no problem. I had I still had space left.

I just don't cook for that many people that often. I'm not like a professional cooker or anything. I cook in my backyard. But I wanted to see like what the vertical smoker was like. It was super easy to maintain the heat, super easy to maintain the fire in it.

So the first thing I did was find a fireproof file cabinet on Facebook Marketplace. I think I got it for like $30 from somebody. Went and met them in a McDonald's parking lot. Then after that, I went to Harbor Freight and I got some wheels to go on the bottom. I spaced them out so that it wouldn't tip over or anything and I could move it around a pretty bit easy. Put those in there. Then I went to Lowe's and I got some grates that they had. I'm pretty sure they're like stainless steel grates. I'm trying to think what I used to cut it out the bottom. Did I use a reciprocating saw? I might have. So I cut out the bottom, replaced it with the grill grates, and then I just tack welded them on the sides. And then I realized, well, you know, maybe I want to make them removable, so I cut those welds off.

And so now that they're removable and you just put the food on them, they don't move around at all, but you can take them out and clean them if you need to. Then I put a chimney on the side of it so the smoke had a way to go through all the food. And I put some temperature gauges on the top two drawers.

Rabbit Hole:
What are you, an engineer? Do you do this stuff in your day job?

McKinney:
No sir. I just like to mess with stuff. I work on cars, but that's really the only engineering I do. I'm more of a mechanic than an engineer, honestly.

Rabbit Hole:
So you're not like somebody who would know exactly how to engineer something like this, but you can put something together.

McKinney:
In a nutshell, that's exactly it. I saw a problem. I'm like, hey, I feel like I could do this and then I watched a couple of videos on YouTube, looked at some people on smoking meat Reddit. I'm like: That might work. That seems pretty easy. And then once I tried it, I'm like: This was insanely easy. It took me maybe a couple of hours to put it all together. Like, five hours.

And so when I first got it, I set a big fire in it. I wanted to make sure all the paint on the inside was gone. You don't want those toxins in your food.

NOTE: Obviously, file cabinets were not engineered to be smokers, which means they might contain some stuff that you don’t want in your food. “The biggest thing I would be concerned with are the materials,” says Hanson. “I would venture a guess that some of those cabinets are made with galvanized steel, which is a concern. High temperature, galvanized steel, and food do not mix. At high enough temperatures, there could can be some toxicity issues with that galvanized being volatilized.

“Same thing with the paint. Certainly paint is not considered safe in any fashion. So I would use caution. Again you're dealing with something that wasn't designed to be food safe. The standard materials in in barbecue grills are non-galvanized steel and, in some cases, cast iron and ceramic. Stainless steel is probably the material of choice because it’s able to be cleaned.”

Shorter version: We’re not endorsing the safety of any food that comes from a file cabinet smoker! But we’re also not saying that a lot of people don’t think they’re cool.

Rabbit Hole:
When you used it to cook for people, what was their reaction when you wheeled that thing out?

McKinney:
If you're ever gonna be smoking anything, it takes a while. So the people didn't know that's what I was gonna be cooking on. And so then they got there, they're like, what's in your driveway? And I'm like: That's a smoker I'm using. And they're like: That's a file cabinet. And I'm like: No, it's a smoker I made out of a file cabinet. And I showed them and they're like: No way. And then they ate it and it tastes like normal barbecue and they're like: That's actually insane.

Rabbit Hole:
Is there anything else like this in your personal collection? Or is everything else like very normal?

McKinney:
I mean, I make a tool every now and then, like you gotta grind off a wrench so that you can get into a hard part or something like that. But other than that, no.

It really and truly came down to money. I looked at the smokers. Unless you go the Oklahoma Joe route, if you go like a professional vertical smoker route, they're talking about like three or four thousand dollars. I'm like, yeah, I'm not spending that on some metal. We can figure this out another way. And that's where it came from. It was just pure ingenuity because I refused to pay the prices that they wanted for a professional vertical smoker.

I've had it for about a year and a half. I just don't really need it anymore. I found out I don't need a vertical smoker. It can hold a lot of food, honestly, and I just don't use it as much. I use my offset smoker more.

NOTE: Is an expensive smoker any better than, say, a file cabinet? It depends on how much you want to cook, and what kind of a show you want to put on, says Hanson. “You can go to any Home Depot or Lowe’s—not to plug either one of them, but those types of home stores have them at a very reasonable price. Or you can spend In excess of $10,000 for a pit smoker.” Some pellet grills don’t require much oversight at all. Others require constant attention. “At the top end is an offset, reverse-flow, stick-burning tank smoker. You're managing the firebox for that 10- to 12-hour cook. You're stoking the fire. You're adding wood every 20 to 30 minutes. You’re Invested for the whole time.” Which one’s the best? It depends on your need. “They all produce barbecue at the end of the day,” Hanson says. Even the smokers that you make yourself.

Rabbit Hole:
You're selling it for like a hundred dollars.

McKinney:
It cost a hundred fifty dollars to make it.

Rabbit Hole:
But you also say you would trade it for a broken chainsaw.

McKinney:
Yeah. Chainsaws are expensive number one. But if you can get like a old school steel Husqvarna chainsaw, a beefy chainsaw for like two hundred dollars that's broken? You get it fixed, you got like a six hundred dollar chainsaw that'll last you the rest of your life.

Rabbit Hole:
You're willing to barter.

McKinney:
A hundred percent. I'm definitely a barterer. I'd rather barter than money, to be honest with you. I just think it's fun. I enjoy seeing what people got and I like seeing other people's junk that maybe I can make something useful to me.

Rabbit Hole:
How much how much interest have you gotten in this so far?

McKinney:
It's really been a lot of people like: Hey, that looks amazing. Can you tell me more about it? I'm not really trying to buy it, but that's just amazing. I've never seen anything like that. I've had a couple of people message me like: Hey, I'm trying to buy it. When can I meet up? And then you message them back and they don't say anything. So I mean, that's what goes with Facebook Marketplace. Well, it's only been five days, so we'll see.

NOTE: A day after our conversation, the listing came down. Tyius texted me to say that one of his friends saw he was selling it and asked if he could have it instead.

Rabbit Hole:
It seems like a unique item, although it sounds like there are other people out there that have done it.

McKinney:
Yeah, I don't think a lot of people have seen it. A lot of people don’t even know about it to be honest. I think smoking meat is a niche community. Once you get into it, like you really get into it. I am learning because I am new to it, and I very much enjoy it. I say if you have never smoked meat or barbecued, get into it. It's a great hobby, great way to meet people, great way to talk to people.

I am sort of mechanically inclined, but you can do it too. I promise you, if you know some wrenches, or have used the reciprocating saw before, you can do this too.

Me and Roy Cooper watching a Carolina Hurricanes game in 2023 (Photo by Tyler Reinhold)

Politicians, by their very nature, are supposed to take the positions of their constituencies. Sure, it’s great if they believe in something! But if an idea is polling well, and if a certain stance on that idea can get them elected or re-elected, or if it’s something that they know is a bit unpopular now but will pay off for them in the future, then yeah, they will like The Thing That They’re Not Personally Crazy About. Again, we’ve seen what happens when someone running for office in North Carolina says, from their heart, that they don’t like barbecue, only to renounce that position when everybody complains about it.

It’s much easier for politicians, then, to be for innocuous things. Ma’am, I see here you’re running for office. Do you like Cheerwine? Absolutely, it’s all I drink. Who do you think is gonna win at North Wilkesboro next month? Tyler Reddick’s running well these days, but my dark horse pick is [hopeless driver with local ties]. Have you been to [longtime locally beloved restaurant where the food is so-so]? Not yet, but I hear it’s great and I’ll go there the next time I’m in town.

Roy Cooper, the former governor of North Carolina who’s now running for U.S. Senate, is not immune to this. Hence, look at his first campaign ad, which dropped this morning:

Sure, he says insurance companies suck (easy target) and that he wants an economy that values working people (yup!). He also says he sent to church on Sundays growing up (checks out). He then says Fridays were for football (true).

Of course, this is the Roy Cooper of the past. The true Roy Cooper of today would recognize that today is the first day of the Stanley Cup Final, and use that 30 seconds to break down the Carolina Hurricanes power play and to talk about whether they can neutralize Jack Eichel.

Many people know Cooper is a Canes fan. A few years ago, I wanted to understand the depth of his fandom. So, after more than a year of asking, his aides allowed me to tag along with the then-governor for a game. I wanted to know if it was an act. It’s not an act.

What it's like to watch a Carolina Hurricanes game with Roy Cooper

Cooper has been this state's chief executive for six years. He's been a Caniac for much longer. I watched a game with him to find out what he and his fandom are all about.

North Carolina Rabbit Hole • Jeremy Markovich

(In the interest of fairness, I’ll say here that Cooper’s opponent, Michael Whatley, went to the Coca-Cola 600 in Charlotte over Memorial Day Weekend. The only Carolina hurricane he’s talked about online over the last few years seems to be Hurricane Helene. Whatley was the “recovery czar,” after the storm. He says he did a great job! Others say he did not!)

One of the weird job requirements of a North Carolina governor: Being a ball knower. Cooper knows ball (and can talk about the North Carolina-Duke game, the ups and downs of NC State, and so on). But no governor is required to know puck. Basketball and football fans almost certainly outnumber hockey fans in this state, but the game is growing here. It’s hard to say if Cooper’s fandom is a sign of hockey’s move away from its northern roots (Hence, a Carolina-Vegas matchup in the Stanley Cup Final). Or, if it’s evidence that people like what they like.

Either way, Cooper has not stopped doing Canes stuff. He tailgated during the Eastern Conference Final. He’s been an analyst on post-game shows. And last fall, he called his shot at the beginning of the season, breaking down film, and fully expecting to drink Sun Drop out of the Stanley Cup. We’ll know in a few weeks whether he’ll finally get the chance.

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Can You Take The Bus to the Stanley Cup Final?

If you can actually afford a ticket to the game (which are going for upwards of $1,000 at the moment), I’m guessing you can also afford to pony the $95 it’ll cost you to park at the Lenovo Center tonight (It’s $65 if you pre-pay). Which led me to this question:

can you take a bus to the canes game

— Jeremy Markovich (@ncrabbithole.com)
11:30 AM • May 13, 2026

The online transportation guides for the Lenovo Center list taxis and rideshares as options, but public transportation is nowhere to be found. If you don’t already know, the arena is a ways out from downtown Raleigh, shares a parking lot with Carter-Finley Stadium, and sits near the state fairgrounds.

But yes, it’s POSSIBLE to get there via public transit. A bus stops at the Carter-Finley Park & Ride on the far side of the stadium from the arena. Or! You could get dropped off at the corner of Blue Ridge Rd and Westchase Boulevard and then walk the last mile to the Lenovo Center. All of which is to say that it’s possible but probably not easy. If you’re interested in pulling this off, then please 1.) check out this guys’s Reddit post and 2.) tell me how it went.

Go Canes.

Photo Illustration by North Carolina Rabbit Hole (Original image by Jackson A. Lanier/Wikimedia Commons)

Here’s something Thom Tillis said:

Instagram post

This was flagged for me by former Greensboro News & Record editor John Robinson, who says he’s lived in the South for his entire life and never heard anyone say the words “stupid on stilts” before. I will say that Tillis, a two-term U.S. Senator who’s not running again, is firmly in his “Fuck it, we ball” phase, wearing bolo ties (usually to shoutout the Lumbee, who finally got federal recognition) and saying stuff like … this. He followed this up a day later with this statement about Ken Paxton, now the Republican nominee for a U.S. Senate seat in Texas: “To call Paxton ethically challenged is to call Jeffrey Dahmer suffering from an eating disorder.”

However! “Stupid on stilts” seems to be the phrase that’s been capturing people’s attention over the last week. Tillis first used it to insult President Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund for January 6ers during an interview on Spectrum News, also calling it “payout pot for punks.” But “stupid on stilts” resonated so much in the online newsosphere that he used it again during an interview on CNN. It was used in a ton of headlines. It was clever (and alliterative) enough to stick in people’s brains. Even people who don’t like Tillis grudgingly admitted that they might start using it.

"Stupid on Stilts" is my new favorite band name.
newrepublic.com/post/210785/...

— Dwight Silverman (@dwightsilverman.com)
1:13 PM • May 22, 2026

Is it a Southern phrase? A folksy, edgier, blunter version of “bless your heart”? Let’s start by considering the messenger here. Thom Tillis was born in Jacksonville, Florida, lived in more than a dozen places growing up including New Orleans and Nashville, went to college in Chattanooga, and worked in Atlanta before settling in Cornelius, north of Charlotte. Fun fact: He and his brothers are all named Thomas.

So did he pick this expression up from longtime Southerners? The kind of people who drink sweet tea on rocking chairs and reminisce about picking tobacco? Unlikely. Again, consider our starting point: A newspaper editor who’s lived in the South for his whole life had never heard of it. Neither had almost all of the people I polled informally on BlueSky.

That’s probably because it’s not really a Southern thing—It’s an English thing. Blame Jeremy Bentham (who I’ve written about before), a philosopher and the father of Utilitarianism. Basically, in the famous Trolley problem, he’s the guy advocating for you to flip a switch to have a trolley change tracks and run over one person to save the lives of five people. Why? Because five is more than one, which means that’s the measurable way to do the most good. It would suck to be that one person! Bentham would not care!

(Also, Bentham decided to have his body preserved after he died so it could be, um, wheeled out at parties to hang out with his old friends. Today, it sits in the lobby of the student center at University College London. Is that weird? Yes. Weirder than naming all three of your sons Thomas? Well, yes.)

The “auto-icon” of Jeremy Bentham on display at University College London in 2003. Don’t worry, that’s a wax head and hands. But yes, his skeleton is inside, although his severed head only goes on display for special occasions. Because it’s gross. (Photo by MykReeve/Wikimedia Commons)

One of Bentham’s big ideas was that natural rights did not actually exist. You know life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? The unalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence? Bentham was not a fan. “If the right of pursuit of happiness is a right unalienable, why are thieves restrained from pursuing it by theft, murderers by murder, and rebels by rebellion . . .?” he wrote in his Answer to the Declaration in 1776. Later he went on to expand on this idea during a response to the French Revolution, saying the concept of natural rights was nonsense, and the idea that someone could have rights that were not granted by the government was “nonsense on stilts.”

Bentham and his ideas became very popular, which helped “nonsense on stilts” enter the British lexicon. The phrase has had remarkable staying power. A search of one newspaper archive going back to the mid-19th century turned up more than 1,600 hits. “Nonsense on stilts” is still a favorite expression for extremely British newspaper columnists and the kind of people who write letters to the editor. Its most memorable modern usage may have come in 2001, when a member of Parliament and his wife described rape allegations made against them as “nonsense on stilts.” They were later cleared.

The August 11, 2001 issue of the Telegraph and Argus of Bradford, England.

The expression does show up in the United States. In 1987, George Will wrote that “‘creation science’ Is nonsense on stilts.” In 1994, when Bill Clinton was toying around with the idea of putting a politician on the Supreme Court, columnist Bruce Fein wrote that “The statement that politicians, unlike sitting judges, bring a human element is nothing but nonsense on stilts.” As recently as February, the conservative writer Jonah Goldberg said “I thought — and continue to think — that Trump's tariff policy is economic nonsense on stilts.”

In short, if you’re the kind of person who unironically uses the word “nonsense,” then fella, you’re gonna love “nonsense on stilts.” In which case, I can also point you to a pair of contemporary portraits that have been named for that expression.

Over time, referring to something as “on stilts” just became a way to say that it was extreme—“the norm on steroids,” according to a contributor to the Urban Dictionary in 2006. The example, from back then, was: “Bringing coals to Newcastle is stupid on stilts.” For a select few, “stupid” replaced “nonsense.” An economics professor at George Mason University, Thomas Rustici, was not a fan of Jeremy Bentham’s views on natural rights. But he also loved “nonsense on stilts” so much that he’s adapted it into his own catchphrase: “Stupid on stilts with flashing neon lights.”

Still, “stupid on stilts” didn’t catch on like “nonsense on stilts.” Coincidentally, one of the only other politicians who said it on the record lives just a few miles away from Tillis. In 2006, Democratic State Rep. Drew Saunders of Huntersville weighed in on a spending debate, telling the Charlotte Observer: “To say you’re not going to utilize money that’s being given to you to build school buildings is not only stupid, it’s stupid on stilts.” Saunders, who served six terms in the house, was far more well-known for another thing he said during an ethics debate: “Even the baby Jesus accepted gifts, and I don't think it corrupted him.”

So where, exactly, did Tillis pick up the phrase? Did he hear Saunders say it while they both served together in the General Assembly? Is he a fan of Jeremy Bentham? Utilitarianism? Does he know Thomas Rustici? Who knows. All we do know is that Tillis has tried out the phrase at least once before, and it didn’t catch on the first time. In March 2025, Tillis argued that despite Trump strongly hinting that he wanted to shut down FEMA, the agency wasn’t actually going to go away. “The narrative of it just going away is stupid on stilts, and they know that—and they’re not proposing that,” he told NOTUS back then.

This time, though, Tillis is using the phrase to go after Trump, not to defend him, which is far more interesting. And while you might think this is the greatest thing Tillis has ever said, it’s just the latest example of a long line of Tillisisms that have been calibrated to get the maximum amount of attention using the fewest number of words. I’ve known this for a decade, ever since Tillis went to a forum and declared that handwashing policies were an example of government overreach. “I don’t have any problem with Starbucks if they choose to opt out of this policy, as long as they post a sign that says, ‘We don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restroom,’” Tillis said, to laughs. “The market will take care of that.” It worked on me! I did a whole TV news story on the handwashing thing. I even shot my standup on the toilet.

So yes, Thom Tillis is having a moment. He’s shooting up in my personal North Carolina Politicians Who Say Stuff rankings (Pat McCrory—toe-steppin’, stupid-hat-wearin’ Pat McCrory—is still on top). He’s got less than a year to go before he’s out of office, and instead of fading away during his lame duck period, he’s choosing anger. Sure, Tillis may be an originalist when it comes to the Constitution, but he’s willing to adapt a 230-year-old turn of phrase for a modern world. It’s not just politics. It’s politics on stilts.

It’s Memorial Day! Unfurl North Carolina’s official state beach flower: The Shibumi Shade.

I’ll have a regular edition of the Rabbit Hole later in the week. But for now, here’s some stuff that you may have missed:

Most North Carolina-Coded Thing of the Week: Ten minutes of Dave Doeren Catching Strays after the Canes Lost

Twitter tweet

Dave Doeren has been the football coach at NC State for 14 years. What does that have to do with the Carolina Hurricanes playoff run? Nothing! Except! Last year, when the Canes came up frustratingly short of the Stanley Cup Final (again), people called into the Ovies & Giglio Podcast to complain and, often, invoked the name of Dave Doeren (who, by the way, is one of the blessed few who must always be referred to by his first and last name). Why? If you are not plugged into the Triangle sports scene, just know that NC State has, over the last few decades, also come up frustratingly short in basketball and especially in football. This is, lovingly, referred to as “NC State Shit.” It may or may not have died after the Wolfpack men’s basketball team inexplicably made it to the Final Four two years ago, but combine years of frustration with a very animated fanbase, and they start seeing “NC State Shit” everywhere. That includes Canes playoff games. Hence, people called in to invoke Dave Doeren’s name in 2025 after the Canes lost to Florida in the Eastern Conference Finals. Joe Ovies and Joe Giglio referred to this as “Dave Doeren catching strays.”

On Thursday night, guess who was the official siren sounder for Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Final against Montreal? That’s right. Dave Doeren. He got a lot of cheers in the arena, but outside, it filled certain fans with a sense of dread:

Twitter tweet

The Canes lost 6-2. Afterward, so many people called Ovies and Giglio to complain not about the Canes—but about Dave Doeren—that Joe and Joe literally ran ten straight minutes of Dave Doeren catching strays. I’ve cued up the YouTube video to the relevant portion here. “The Triangle is wired differently,” Joe Ovies said afterward, trying to explain what just happened to the normals out there.

This is, if nothing else, incredible radio (I know, I know, the Joes are now doing a podcast, but roll with it), and it became enough of A Thing that the NHL on TNT pre-game show referenced the anger toward Dave Doeren on the pregame show. Just for reference, someone else sounded the siren for Game 2. The Canes won 3-2 in overtime.

The Most North Carolina-Coded Thing That Isn’t In North Carolina

I know I know, this isn’t in North Carolina geographically, but it’s very much a spiritual part of our state:

Bojangles Installs First EV Charging Station, Redefining the Roadside Stop with a New “Charge-and-Dine” Experience

Bojangles

Bojangles

Spoiler alert: I bought an electric vehicle last month and, as anyone who’s had a conversation with me since then can attest, that’s all I can talk about. Maybe I’ll write about it soon! For now, though: Yes, you can get Bojangles-branded charging for your car if you stop for some dirty rice and pintos in Savannah. I will note: While the pricing seems reasonable, there are plenty of fast chargers closer to the highway, especially next to the Tanger Outlets just of I-95. Do you want Bojangles badly enough to drive about seven miles out of the way to get electrons with your Botato Rounds?

The Most North Carolina Coded Thing, As Experienced By Canadians

Cheerwine? Zut alors!

@clahanna4

Important journalism #cheerwine #raleighnc #food #tastetest #northcarolina

Data Point of the Week: Franklin County’s Bill for a Bill About Water To Ensure The Future of its Water Bills

The folks at Carolina Forward pointed out something interesting earlier this month: You know what town, city, or county spent the most on lobbying in 2024? Could you guess? I mean, I suppose I spoiled it with the headline here, but yep, it was Franklin County, which sits just northeast of Raleigh. The local government spent $212,515 on lobbying in 2024. That’s more than the city of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County spent combined.

Lobbying is something you do when you want something, but the folks who are normally tasked with getting you that something—your representatives in the legislature—aren’t delivering for you. So what did Franklin County want? Water! And this wasn’t just a 2024 thing. In 2022, according to The Franklin Times, the county also spent more on lobbyists than any other county in the state:

Did it work? Kinda? Last month, Republican lawmakers introduced a provision in a bill that would have allowed Franklin County to buy or condemn property in Vance, Halifax and Warren Counties, all of which sit right next door. Were those counties cool with that. NOT AT ALL. The bill set off protests that caused the normally shame-proof GOP to reverse course.

The bill itself didn’t mention water, but Franklin County hasn’t been shy about noting that it needs more water to keep up with massive growth. According to WRAL, Franklin County gets most of its water from the City of Henderson, and it thinks it’s paying too much, and would rather build its own water plant on, say Kerr Lake, which happens to sit in Vance and Warren Counties. For what it’s worth, Halifax County is home to part of Lake Gaston, another big lake into which Franklin County could dip a very big straw.

Is the bill dead? Kinda? House speaker Destin Hall has threatened to bring it back if everyone can’t figure out a way to get along. It’s worth noting that in 2024, Vance, Halifax, and Warren Counties spent a combined $0 on lobbying. They might start spending now! All of this is a helpful reminder that no matter what happens, billable hours remain undefeated.

This Video of a Raft Guide Eating It Has Ten Million Views

Long ago, I worked as a raft guide at the U.S. National Whitewater Center, and occasionally I would make a mistake. Would I admit it! No! I would bump sideways into a rock. Then half of my paddlers would disappear into the water. Then they’d float helplessly downstream. The rest of us would watch from an eddy, swirling in place while my guests were pulled into other guides’ rafts. Here is what I would say to the people left in my boat: “Yay rafting!” Every time. It worked. I got tips and everything.

I have also fallen out of my own boat. So what did I do? I climbed out of the water, ran down the side of the channel, and then jumped back into my raft, flying squirrel-style. Again, my guests would not see this as a skill issue on my part. They would find me at the bar and buy me all of the beer I could drink.

I say all that to say this: The internet is enamored with what this dude did at the Whitewater Center last week:

Instagram post

Buddy, that’s pretty great. Alfonzo’s guests will speak about this for a long time, while his fellow guides will never let him live it down.

Stuff You Sent Me: Some Guy Broke Into a Popeyes and Made Biscuits

Thank you to everyone who sent me this story from the Charlotte Observer:

‘Biscuit Bandit’ breaks into Popeyes at 5 a.m. and starts cooking, NC police say

https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/article315866111.html

To answer your inevitable question: No, this is not the Kinston Little Caesar’s thing. This is a different thing.

I’m pretty sure this story, the Popeyes one, came from this Twitter post from the Greensboro Police:

Twitter tweet

Before you chuckle, just know that while the Greensboro Police Department is getting a lot of mileage out of its snarky observations, your mileage may vary if you decide to make a snarky observation about the Greensboro Police Department.

Another Thing You Sent Me

Here’s a state supreme court justice trying to pull off a “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?” in a legal argument:

This HAS to be a first. Justice Earles with a Bojangles AND Cook Out reference in today's ruling! Sadly, Currituck has neither! Attention
@ncrabbithole.com

— SamWalkerOBXNews 🎙📻📰🥍🦓 (@samwalkerobxnews.com)
9:06 PM • May 22, 2026

A real Outer Banks knower would have referenced Biscuits ‘n’ Porn.

Shameless Self-Promotion

I did two podcasts last week. One’s about a dude from Cornelius who just pleaded guilty to a new type of federal crime:

The other’s about how two beloved biscuit chains have the same daddy:

You should subscribe to the North Carolina Rabbit Hole on YouTube! Or Apple Podcasts! Or Spotify! Let me know if you like this stuff. I’d like to do more of them, but my feeds have been mostly dormant for a while. Tell your friends! Tell the apps to start downloading episodes again! Every little bit helps.

And as always, holler at me if you have a story that I should be aware of. You can reply to this email, or drop me a voicemail at (980) 477-5465‬. If you’re looking for a prompt,

Have a great day everybody.

Let’s say you were a musician with a pile of money. How might you try to break into the music business? Would you pay your dues? Work your way up? Or would you buy your way to the top by, say, creating a bunch of bots to stream your songs thousands or millions of times on Spotify?

Or, maybe you’re thinking bigger. If a million streams is cool, why not a billion streams? Why not turn fake listeners into real money?

That, according to a criminal complaint, was the plan hatched by a guy named Mike Smith, who lives in Cornelius, just north of Charlotte. It went well! At first. Then the streamers caught on. After that, the feds swooped in.

So! How did the guy try to pull it off? For that, I turned to Wired senior writer Kate Knibbs, who wrote the definitive story of a musician from North Carolina who ended up at the center of the first criminal case involving AI music and streaming fraud. You can listen to our conversation in the latest episode of the North Carolina Rabbit Hole Podcast (Listen here on Apple Podcasts or Spotify), which you can also watch on YouTube.

One more note! I also turned last week’s story into a podcast episode. I’m trying to do more of them, and the best way to listen is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever.