Careful with your lawnmower

A newly released report by the Journal of Safety Research says that over the five year period studied 66,000 Americans ended up in emergency rooms with injuries caused by lawnmowers. Nearly 100 people were run over by lawnmowers during that time, including children who had been riding on the laps of the mowers. An unfortunate six folks met their demise by lawnmower in the five years studied.

Be careful with the lawnmower, America. Read the whole story here in the BBC. (Over in England they have got a special Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents or RoSPA. Here in America, we have lawyers to sue the lawnmower company ex post facto.)

2016 West Club Boulevard

From the Watts-Hillandale house tour



The house was originally built in 1920 and 1921. It was once owned by the Dean of Duke's Law School Charles Lowndes. Lowndes time at Duke overlapped with that of famous Duke law school graduate, Richard Nixon. The neighborhood legend has it that Nixon once slept at #2016 W. Club. The house is still being remodeled.

2310 West Club Boulevard

From the Watts-Hillandale house tour



This house was built in 1915. It is a classic one and a-half story, side gabled bungalow. The original owner was a local doctor, Dr. Baird Brooks. He was one of many doctors who originally settled in this neighborhood near Watts hospital (now the North Carolina School of Science and Math). Although he only lived there until 1921, he had the noted Durham architect, George Watts Carr, built him another recognizable Durham building, his medical offices. The apartments still at the corner of West Chapel Hill Street and Gregson Avenue were constructed for Dr. Brooks.

2215 West Club Boulevard

From the Watts-Hillandale house tour



The house was built in 1923 by the prolific Durham builder, John T. Sally. It is a Craftsman style brick bungalow. Sally built another Craftsman style house across the street at 2212, as well as simpler houses at numbers 2405, 2407, 2409, 2411, 2413 and 2415 Club. The original homeowners, the Tottens, lived in the house during the height of the Depression with nine other people, including five nurses from nearby Watts-Hospital. The house towers above the street and is a spacious 3000 square feet.

2422 West Club Boulevard

From the Watts-Hillandale house tour



The house was built in 1914. It is the oldest house on the street. It was originally built by a Southern lawyer, Sumpter Brawley and his wife, the civic activist, Margaret Brawley. He served in the North Carolina House of Representatives and the State Senate. She is credited with staging a sit-in outside the Durham City Manager's office until he agreed to plant hundreds of trees along Durham's streets. Between 1970 and 1998 the house was divided into in a multi-unit set-up, with many tenants and even a day-care. It has since been converted back. It features a huge backyard and five bedrooms.

2301 West Club Boulevard

From the Watts-Hillandale house tour



The house was built in 1924. It is a classical revival cottage. The first homeowner, Dillard C. Mitchell, Jr., was the bookkeeper for the Durham Lumber Company which was owned by his father. The master bath features an original commode with 1924 stamped into the lid. The garage, never used for automobiles, was moved to the property from another location in 1967. Side note, Club Boulevard used to be called E Street in this part of town.

1111 Iredell Street

From the Watts-Hillandale house tour



This house was built in 1922, in the Craftsman style. Iredell was known as 8th street until 1960. The original owner Andrew Dennis was also the owner of Dennis Grocery, which was started by his father. It was once located at 1110 Broad St. The house cost less than $2,000 to originally build. It has a beautiful back garden.

Mish Mash

One of the Clarion Content's favorite things about chili is its flexibility. Surely we have recipes we follow and adore, but some nights when we want chili it is simply a matter of grabbing some ground beef on the way home from the office, seasoning it to taste, and finding the right mish mash of ingredients in the pantry.

This experiment in pantry chili went over fairly well at a Monday Night Football gathering.

2 lbs ground beef, cook in a skillet with 1/4 stick of butter until meat is full browned. Season to taste throughout with salt, pepper, garlic, and chili powder. Our recommendation be liberal with all the seasonings but the salt. (This is the base for most of the Clarion Content's chili recipes)

Drain most of the grease from the frying pan and combine cooked ground beef in a large soup pot with two cans of drained black beans, one can of refried beans, and one can of tomato paste. Keep over low heat for at least thirty minutes, stirring occasionally. Continue to season with black pepper and chili powder. For extra kick, we added a couple of healthy dashes of habanero sauce.

Don't eat the meat in the tube

A dear friend of the Clarion Content's editorial board works as a butcher in our local Durham, North Carolina area. The butcher says, "Don't eat the meat in the tube." If you are buying ground beef, get the stuff that is saran wrapped on the white tray. The difference? It is packed locally, whereas, the meat in the tube is mass wrapped in distant locales, hopefully kept cold, and shipped to your local grocery store. (In Durham, that would be a Harris Teeter, Kroger and Food Lion or retail giants Wal-Mart and Target.)

Africa splitting

And no, we don't mean that figuratively, Africa is literally splitting in two according to geologists from the University of Rochester. A thirty-five mile long gash opened up in Ethiopia as recently as 2007, it is twenty feet wide in places. Scientists say the process mimics rifts that open on the bottom of the ocean floor. Fox News reported, "the rift tore open along its entire 35-mile length in just days. Dabbahu, a volcano at the northern end of the rift, erupted first, then magma pushed up through the middle of the rift area and began 'unzipping' the rift in both directions.

The African and Arabian tectonic plates meet in the remote Afar desert of Northern Ethiopia. They have been spreading apart in a process that moves at a speed of less than 1 inch per year, over the past 30 million years. This rifting process formed the 186-mile Afar depression and the Red Sea.

Read more here.