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Violent crime that strikes the Roanoke Valley usually occurs in the abstract.

Victims usually are "other people," you know? Rare is the day when it slaps you in the face.

Which is why what happened to Brenda Hale on Sunday sounds shocking when you hear her tell the story.

Hale, 63, is the Roanoke branch NAACP president, and she's no stranger to violence.

At age 7, she witnessed her father fatally shoot her mother in their home in the Hurt Park neighborhood.

Hale came face to face with it as a nurse in the military. And as president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she has endured taunts that she should be lynched from self-styled Nazis.

Despite all that, she was still unnerved late Monday afternoon.

She hadn't slept a wink, Hale said, since she found herself involved in a wild car-to-car shooting that ended with one of those cars smashing into hers.

Read the rest of the column here.

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I am asking for your help, regulars and newbies, in writing my Thanksgiving Day column.  It will be your answers to the following broad question:

What are you thankful for?

Please write something from your heart, rather than from those liberal/conservative/atheist/fundamentalist/cynic/sexist/hunter/animal-rights activist/sarcastic, etc parts of your head.

Please DON'T tell us why you are happy that a Democrat is at long last in the White House, or why you're thankful that the GOP has reasserted itself in Virginia elections, or because abortion is legal or that you're thankful for Virginia's upcoming concealed weapons in bars legislation or any of those other like things.

A couple of notes:

1) Keep your entries to 50 words, give or take a few, and post them as comments to this blog, or in private emails to me at this link. Or, at dan(dot)casey(at)roanoke(dot)com with the subject line Thankful.

2) At the end of your 50 words include your first and last name and locality and state, like this: Dan Casey, Roanoke, Va. (I will not publish stuff in the column without a full name & locality.)

I will sort through these beginning Friday Nov. 20 and cull a wide-ranging bunch of heartfelt stuff for the column that appears on Thanksgiving.

I'll tell you one thing I'm thankful for: That I have a bunch of earnest and passionate readers of this blog who will help me write that day's column.

Cheers, and let's see the thanks pour in!

--dan

We get lots of feedback here at column central. It comes as phone calls, voice mails, e-mails and, yes, in comments to the blog.

Certainly it's one of the most fun parts of this job. Today, we'll review some excerpts.

Many readers commented on my recent musings about upcoming renovations to the Roanoke City Market Building.

One of those bemoaned the onslaught of money-excreting tourists who followed "improvements" to the City Dock area of Annapolis, Md., my hometown.

That brought back both good and bad memories for Richard Anderson, an ex-Annapolitan who for the past 25 years has called Rockbridge County home.

"The resulting congestion [in Annapolis] of people and traffic, especially in the summer time, encouraged us, reluctantly, to relocate from Annapolis to the Shenandoah Valley," Anderson wrote. "And now, whenever we have an occasion to revisit Annapolis, we know we made the correct decision."

Read the rest of the column here.

Market Building, Roanoke, Va. /Flickr

Let's take a little restaurant survey today.

Which national fast food chains would you like to see in a gleaming, refurbished City Market Building downtown?

Domino's Pizza. Hardees' Thickburgers. Arby's roast beef. Wendy's fries. McDonald's McNuggets. Long John Silver's hush puppies.

The gut-busting, diabetes-inducing possibilities seem endless.

Do you believe it's ridiculous? That it could never happen? You're probably correct.

But an interview last week with Assistant City Manager Brian Townshend left the door open for such a scenario. Just barely open, mind you. But open nonetheless.

Read the rest of the column here.

The city intends to close the Market Building on June 30 and embark on at least a year's worth of renovations, much of which will be financed by historic-renovation tax credits.

Burger in the Square,  Zorba's, New York Subs, Big Lick Pizza and the other food-stall vendors will be forced out. Some will move elsewhere. Others may close for good.

Read the rest of the column here.

The longest running card game in Roanoke started sometime in May 2009, over at William Fleming High School.

Let’s call it SOL poker.

That is S-O-L as in state-mandated Standards of Learning tests, not the more common street acronym that stands for “you-know-what out of luck.”

The game has gone on for months. And the biggest hand so far was played Tuesday night at the Roanoke City School Board meeting.

The two remaining card players are Susan Willis, the school’s suspended-with-pay principal, and the school board, which sent the message that she has to go.

Tuesday night, Willis treated the board’s decision to fire her as a bluff, and she raised the ante. She threatened to sue and drag out this proceeding, potentially for many more months and who knows how many more thousands of taxpayer dollars.

But the hand didn’t end there.

The school board raised the ante too, by hinting it might sue Willis to recover all the money it’s paid her since her suspension, as well as taxpayer dollars it’s spent trying to assess and undo this scandal.

Lost in the drama of all that bluffing and raising are the hundreds of students – according to the school system – who were negatively affected by this mess.

You could call them Students Out of Luck.

Read the rest of the column here.

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This is a big week for the Virginia Tech chapter of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus.

It’s Defense Education Week, and the SCCC, which has 100 to 200 members, has organized a week’s worth of seminars and gatherings in support of concealed carry on Virginia college campuses.

Last night’s featured speaker was Philip Van Cleave, president of the pro-gun Virginia Citizens Defense League.

Monday I spoke to Ken Stanton, 32, a serious-sounding engineering grad student and the vice president of the Virginia Tech SCCC chapter.

Here’s his argument in favor of guns on campus:

“We’ve had a couple years since [the April 16, 2007 massacre]  to discuss this issue, to do research, to discuss this with legislators,” Stanton told me. “We have not found a single argument that says we should not allow it.”

Stanton’s chief contention is a familiar one: law-abiding handgun permit holders should have the right to defend themselves from gun-toting bad guys.

Right now at Virginia Tech, where guns are banned, “We have no chance. We literally are sitting ducks. We’re seeing way too much evidence of that,” Stanton said.

Though his argument sounds simple, it has some interesting implications.

Read the rest of the column here.

If you've watched the gradual evolution of Roanoke's downtown market area over the past 30 years, you're aware of a dramatic change for the better.

The market was once a best-avoided and gritty part of town infested with drunks and prostitutes drawn there by beer joints, greasy spoons and at least one adult bookstore.

Today, it teems with customers and vendors who sell inexpensive meals, fresh food, flowers and handmade soap, jewelry and other arts and crafts. There's also a grand hotel, a striking Taubman Museum of Art, the O. Winston Link Museum and some "nice" restaurants, too.

National magazines tout the market as a historic jewel. That publicity, no doubt, draws out-of-town visitors.

But they're not the only ones crowding its sidewalks on weekdays and Saturdays.

Valley residents flock there, too. Many of them are apartment dwellers who are part of Roanoke's continuing renaissance in downtown living. The market's rebirth was a prime driver of that.

In short, the 30-year evolution has created a place that's worthwhile for both visitors and Roanoke Valley residents.

But big changes are coming, and they can have far-reaching consequences for the short- and long-term future of downtown.

Read the rest of the column here.

If you organized a conference on marital fidelity and made Elliot Spitzer the keynote speaker, that would raise some eyebrows.

The same goes if Wall Street swindler Bernard Madoff gave a lecture about investment fraud at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Thus, plenty of eyebrows were raised last week after Washington and Lee University announced the keynote speaker for its upcoming seminar on journalism ethics would be Jayson Blair.

Blair, in case you have forgotten, is the disgraced ex-New York Times reporter who lied and plagiarized his way into journalism infamy.

His open-to-the-public speech is Friday evening in Lexington, and the university is paying him $3,000, a sum in line with past keynote speakers.

Read the rest of the column here.

It's possible, though difficult, to cast a write-in ballot on these voting machines, similar to the ones Roanoke uses. / Wikimedia Commons

This was going to be a serious discourse about democracy and the importance of voting, and all that civics-lesson stuff.

But you hear that high-minded slop before every election, don’t you?

So instead, we’ll recount the experience of A.S. Cooper, who found himself in a polling booth a couple of years back during a local election.

We shall consider this Roanoke native the Everyman disenchanted-voter.

Cooper is 55, lives in Southeast Roanoke, and remodels homes for a living. Most of those are over in the Raleigh Court area.

He drives a minivan, has a golden retriever named Mack and a mutt named Skeeter. His girlfriend is an office worker and his regular brew is Old Milwaukee. More often than not he votes for Democrats.

This is the same A.S. Cooper, by the way, who complained about denominational prayers before Roanoke City Council last year. City Council stopped those, and Cooper was reviled in our letters to the editor.

You could say he’s a regular-Joe guy who stirs the pot a little and who likes a good laugh now and then, too.

But that Election Day, standing before the flimsy electronic gizmo that now passes for a voting booth, Cooper was not laughing.

Truth was, he had a hard time finding a candidate on the ballot worth voting for.

Read the rest of the column here.

Ralph Owen, (right in foreground) delivers donations of food from Colonial Presbyterian Church to Melrose Towers for the Soup for Seniors drive on Tuesday. Joyce Wooden (left) Sam Butler, and James Britt, help unload. By STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS | The Roanoke Times

The soup's on at Melrose Towers, the subsidized senior citizens apartment building in Northwest Roanoke.

It's on tables in the large conference room that serves as makeshift headquarters for the annual Soup for Seniors project.

It's on chairs and desks and stacked on the floor, too. And in scores of brown paper grocery sacks volunteers are packing up for needy senior citizens.

It's also in cars and minivans and SUVs, whose kindhearted drivers have slowly paraded into the Melrose Towers parking lot this week to drop off donations.

Thank you, generous readers responding to Sunday's column. Though the LOA Area Agency on Aging remains behind its annual Soup for Seniors goal, it is much closer to that mark because of you.

Hundreds of additional needy senior citizens faced with a choice between buying food or medicine will get a bag of donated groceries because of you.

Read the rest of the column here.

Read Sunday's column here.