Doug Thompson | Photo by Dan

Doug Thompson hit a cow while riding his Harley Super Glide (which he rode a lot) on U.S. 221 in Roanoke County night the night of Nov. 10. He was on his way home from a Floyd County High football game. Details of the accident are here.

On Friday (Nov. 17) he was  in critical serious but stable As of Tuesday afternoon (Nov. 27), Doug was listed in good condition at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital, and he needs all the thoughts and prayers he can get.

Various news accounts have described Thompson, 64, as the blogger behind Blue Ridge Muse and a former reporter for The Roanoke Times. All that’s true but there’s a lot more to him than that.

Doug worked at the paper for awhile back in the late 1960s and/or early 1970s, and then he landed a job as a reporter in Illinois. Eventually he found himself working on Capitol Hill, first as a congressman’s press secretary and later as a  chief of staff. Here’s his bio.

But he ended up as a lobbyist, working for the National Association of Realtors. He also founded Capitol Hill Blue, which bills itself as the oldest political site on the Internet. That went online in 1994, in the infancy of the World Wide Web, and it’s still around. He’s still listed as their editor and publisher. Read more »

Preston Boggess of Check in Floyd County believes he was scammed by a Christiansburg paving company who said they had leftover asphalt from a nearby job and would he like a deal on some paving. He believed he'd have to pay them a few hundred buckx. Instead, it was $11,500 By STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS | The Roanoke Times

There’s an all-too-familiar story making the rounds in Floyd County these days. Check resident Preston Boggess, whose gravel driveway is a quarter-mile long, recounted it last week.

It starts with a knock on his door Oct. 4.

“We’ve just finished a paving job down the street,” a man told Boggess. “We have a little bit of asphalt left over. Do you have any use for it? I’ll give it to you cheap.”

It just so happened that Boggess, a retired pediatrician, had a low spot in his driveway that he wanted raised up. The guy offered to pave the spot for $32 per yard – much less than the $56 per yard his company normally charges, he told Boggess.

“I said ‘sure,’ ” Boggess replied, assuming that would put him on the hook for a few hundred bucks.

Today, he is $11,500 poorer. He’s also on a mission to make sure you don’t get taken like he says he did. Read more »

From WVTF.com

Seth Williamson is a music critic, accomplished writer and the longest-serving full-time employee of WVTF, the region’s public radio station. He’s a pretty good storyteller, too.

One of his latest is about a summer evening many moons ago on Bent Mountain, when police used Williamson and his car as makeshift roadblock while trying to catch a fleeing felon.

From Lew Rockwell.com:

I was driving home from my job as a public radio producer in Roanoke, Virginia. I lived then in the tiny town of Floyd, nearly an hour from the National Public Radio affiliate where I was still relatively new.

As the shadows lengthened on that mellow late summer evening in the Blue Ridge mountains, it was impossible to miss the 15 or 20 state troopers and county mounties stationed along the country road between Roanoke and Floyd. I wondered what was going on. Just outside the town limits, I found out.

Click on the link to read this rest of this tale. It’s a good one!

Christiansburg Town Manager Lance Terpenny | By Matt Gentry | The Roanoke Times

Interesting goings on in Floyd that comes to us via Doug Thompson’s Blue Ridge Muse.

It seems that Lance Terpenny, the jettisoned town manager of Christiansburg (pop. 17,000) who left with a $290,000 severance package to take over the town manager gig in Floyd (pop. 436) for $50,000 a year has decided Floyd doesn’t need a full-time town manager.

So he’s cutting his hours to 32 per week and taking a $10,000 per year pay cut.

The one-stoplight town has only three employees, including Terpenny, who seems to be still making out pretty good.

Heck, on a per capita basis, he’s pulling in a lot more than Darlene Burcham up in Clifton Forge.