Opinions

t was a dark and snowy night...always wanted to write those words...and, indeed, it was dark, and it was snowing when the photograph was taken Wednesday night, January 29, while yours truly was motoring home after another day of toiling at The Paragraph Factory.
As sometimes happens in this space, we’re going to have a little bit of this...and a little bit of that...depending on where our simple little mind takes us... ...along with an even more shameless than usual plug for an upcoming event in our little corner of the world... ...here we go... ...if a...
A fellow traveler on The Journey Through Life shared this image of a bobcat which was captured on one of those nifty field camera thingies.
Sunshine was making a rather rare appearance last Sunday afternoon, so yours truly decided to go for a nice, long walk. It was either go for a walk in the sunshine or spend some more time on homework. Yes, kids, homework. Think that you won’t have any more homework after you finish school? Wrong....
A group of vultures, also known as a committee, or maybe a kettle, or, a wake, if they happen to be feasting on some sumptuous delicacy along the road.
This all started with what seemed like a pretty simple, maybe even silly, idea, and then quickly ended up going down a rabbit hole. By the way, do you know the name for a group of rabbits? One day last week, your writer, who also takes an occasional photograph or two or three, was looking at an...
A marker along Illinois Route 146 between Jonesboro and Ware (or Ware and Jonesboro, if you happen to be heading the other way) recalls several important stories in the history of Union County.
Bear with me, folks, as I attempt to wrap up one more loose end left over from the dearly departed year 2019...and share a little bit of a history lesson, too.  Last fall, in November, to be more specific, I motored to Carbondale to hear a presentation about a tragic chapter in the history of our...
Swans? We think so. They were seen in a silhouette on December 31.
The holiday season “officially” came to an end last Sunday evening...with a bit of a sputter. “Officially,” with quotes, looks, well, much more official than just plain old officially, standing there all by its lonesome self. “Officially” is written with confidence. Because Sunday evening was when...
June 30. Egret. In floodwaters near Ware.
‘Tis the season for tradition...fa la la la la la la... By the way, did you know that “‘Tis” is an “old,” as in “very old contraction of ‘it is’”?  Dictionary.com was kind enough to inform me that “the apostrophe replaces the ‘i’ in the word ‘it’ to create ‘tis.” It seems that ‘tis was a “fan...
They’re everywhere...they’re everywhere...just like the legendary “Chicken Man.” I hadn’t noticed such a thing before. However, since vultures were on my mind, I happened to catch a glimpse of the feathered carrion crunchers taking a break on top of a water tower near Anna-Jonesboro Community High School last week.
The holiday season has arrived. Christmas is less than two weeks away. Which does not seem possible.  With the holidays in full swing, our thoughts turn, of course, to vultures. Truthfully, it’s hard not to think about vultures these days. Some of the radio stations in our little corner of the...
Look...up on the fence...it’s a bird...nope...it’s a plane...probably not...you know what it is...don’t you?
Maybe we should all be used to such things by now. For some reason, the weather prognosticators were suggesting on Sunday evening that there was a “chance” for snow flurries.  So it was a bit of a surprise when I looked out the window Monday morning and saw that “flurries” had accumulated on the...
A white-tailed deer was  grazing along the shoreline at Cedar Lake near Pomona. A moment after the photograph was taken, the deer realized that it was being watched.
Truthfully, it might have been hard to determine who was more surprised by a rather brief encounter which occurred during the second afternoon of November at a popular Southern Illinois lake. The encounter involved a creature of the four-legged variety and another critter with a mere two legs. The...
Lurking in a tree top: a squirrel, with malicious intent likely on its mind, appeared to have some sort of projectile in its paws...just waiting for the right moment to drop it on an unsuspecting passerby...
Before we get started on the good stuff, let me just say that I looked at the calendar on Monday, just to make sure it was still November...and not December or January. At the time this was being crafted on Monday morning, the sky was gray...the wind was blowing...light, drizzly precipitation had...

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The Gazette-Democrat

112 Lafayette St.
Anna, Illinois 62906
Office Number: (618) 833-2158
Email: news@annanews.com

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