First responders can get free tickets to the Wyndham Championship golf tournament at Sedgefield Country Club for themselves and a guest now through Sunday by going to will-call or to the course and showing valid identification that they are a first responder.  The tickets are courtesy of Bee Safe Storage & Wine Cellar, owned Roy Carroll, who is also the publisher of the Rhino Times.

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The dog days of summer Rhino Times Schmoozefest is Thursday, August 25 from 6 to 8 p.m. at elm st. grill at 3606 N. Elm St. just north of Pisgah Church Road. Business professionals who sign in and wear a name tag are invited to enjoy free beer, wine and hors d’oeuvres

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I was surprised that I didn’t see a raft of letters to the editor from the LGBT community about this cutline in the News & Record on Friday: “Simone Biles soared to the all-around gymnastics title on Thursday, becoming the fourth straight American woman to win Olympics gold in the all around competition.”

We congratulate Biles on her achievement but can’t imagine what her sexual preference has to do with her gold medal win.

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I really can’t understand why it is discriminatory to require someone to have an ID to vote. In North Carolina, even if you didn’t have a valid ID you were still allowed to vote, but your identity would be checked out before your sealed ballot was counted.

It seems odd that someone is able to get to the polls to vote but is unable to get to any facility that would provide them with a photo ID. It seems to me that they can manage to do things they want to do, like vote, but can’t manage to do the things they don’t want to do, like get a photo ID.

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Massachusetts is seriously considering doing away with daylight saving time. North Carolina should follow suit.

Daylight saving time, even the name is ridiculous. You can’t save daylight by moving the hands on a clock.

When I was a kid and North Carolina finally went to daylight saving time it didn’t make any sense to me, and as an adult I still can’t find any good reason to move the hands of a clock back an hour or up an hour.

It may have made some sense when so many jobs were in factories, but in today’s world, with people working flexible hours or working from home, what is the benefit in moving the hands of the clock? If people want to enjoy more daylight in the summer they can get up an hour earlier.

The way it is now, twice a year everyone’s schedule is thrown off kilter. To what end?

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Considering the whole HB2 mess made me think about the first trip I made on a bus in Haiti. After a couple of hours on an incredibly crowded bus, the driver pulled off the road beside a deserted field. Everyone trooped off the bus and I followed along. The crowd separated; the men went into the field on one side of the road and the women on the other side of the road.

Since I didn’t speak the language, as I learned by observation that this was a bathroom break. There were no signs, no shouting, no disagreements. It was accepted by everyone that to use the bathroom, men and women should be separate. Small children went with their mothers.

It is incredible to me that we are now arguing about the fact that men and women deserve privacy from each other in the bathroom.

I agree with Gov. Pat McCrory, who said that before the issue came up in Charlotte, he hadn’t even realized that having separate bathroom facilities based on sex was an issue.

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This is an unsolicited endorsement of Deep Woods Off.

The Muse and I went out in the wee hours of the morning on Friday, put a blanket down on the edge of Lake Townsend and watched the meteor shower. We saw some good ones, but in the 90 minutes we spent lying on our backs at the edge of a swampy area, we didn’t get one bug bite. Before we went, we slathered ourselves with Deep Woods Off.

Friday morning I went out in our back yard for 10 minutes and got three mosquito bites.

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The Greensboro Zoning Commission on Monday voted to recommend that 14 acres on Lake Brandt Road and Trosper Road be rezoned for a neighborhood retail center. Plans are to have a drug store, coffee shop, restaurant, fitness center and other similar uses.

Because the land is in the watershed critical area, 70 percent of the property must remain undisturbed. About 50 people showed up to oppose the rezoning request that, because the land has to be annexed, is just a recommendation to the City Council. The rezoning passed 5 to 3.

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We occasionally give our friends at the News & Record a hard time for some of their editorial decisions. But this time we’d like to congratulate them on bringing Jim Schlosser back from retirement to write about the Wyndham Championship. No one knows more about the golf tournament that used to be called the GGO than Schlosser, and I’m looking forward to reading what he finds to write about this year.