Here are recent posts from our OrangeChat blog. You can read and comment on more local news at blogs.newsobserver.com/orangechat/home.

Al Denelsbeck's dog pictures

Submitted by Mark Schultz at 3:57 p.m. Nov. 12

It was a white pit bull.

He just beamed confidence. Not what you expected to see in the adopt-a-pet column in the local paper.

So I called the Orange County Animal Shelter in Chapel Hill and asked who had taken the photograph.

They said Al Denelsbeck.

Al's photos were hands down the best dog pictures I've ever seen.

Each dog talked to you.

A few years ago, Al left the shelter for Durham's Piedmont Wildlife Center, where he's the administrative assistant or "paper grunt."

He also took his photography in a new direction.

Al still shoots (in a good way) the injured and orphaned animals that come into the office. Only now instead of pit bulls he's shooting possums, box turtles and baby flying squirrels. He's also shooting animals in nature, which you can see on his Web site, wading-in.net.

Next weekend you can also bid on some of Al's photos at the Piedmont Wildlife Center,s benefit auction, Saturday, Nov. 22, at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh.

Whatever he's shooting Al says he tries to connect.

"I'm just interested in what's happening, how animals behave in their environment," he says. "Seeing how it all works together."

"If I can convey the fascination I have [enough] to make somebody go out and look for it, that's perfect."

Orange commissioner gets teeth fixed in Tijuana

Submitted by Mark Schultz at 11:49 a.m. Nov. 11

Orange County Commissioner Mike Nelson writes about getting his teeth fixed in Tijuana on his blog, Leading from the Left.

Nelson says two of his teeth with old fillings broke unexpectedly before Christmas and he didn't have the $5,000 to pay for two crowns. He began researching foreign health care and ended up in Mexico.

"So, how much did I save? Well, dental care in Mexico generally costs 1/3 as much as care here in the US. Remember the original estimate I received of roughly $5,000? Well, including airfare and some hotel nights, I spent $2600 out of pocket. Yup, half what I would have spent here! Plus, my dental insurance company reimbursed part of the treatment. So, when all was said and done I only spent about $1800."

Read Nelson's entire post at http://electmikenelson.blogspot.com/

Many thanks to Mike

Comment submitted by Anita Badrock at 1:07 p.m. Nov. 11

Many thanks to Mike for sharing this experience. This has apparently been the Bush administration's solution to the broken health care system we have here -- order your drugs from Canada, get your teeth fixed in Mexico, and get a heart operation in Singapore (a story which the N&O covered earlier).

When a person can travel multiple times by air and pay for all associated expenses for half what the service would cost in the U.S., one has to wonder why.

Jeffery Beam, son of the South

Submitted by Mark Schultz at 12:39 p.m. Nov. 5

LOVE COMES

not silent,

but noisy and indiscreet,

rowdy and persistent.

He comes in leaf fall.

musty earth in his palms.

Held out to me

I can do nothing but take it,

and take it gladly,

earth being the one coolness

other than water

to be enjoyed.

Jeffery Beam never wanted to be "a gay poet."

He didn't want to be an unpublished poet either.

But good poetry by a gay man could be a hard sell in the '80s and '90s if you weren't part of the in crowd -- as in "in" New York and other cities where many of Beam's contemporaries were finding success.

Now Beam has taken many of his "fugitive" poems, many published in gay journals but not previously in book form, and published them in "The Beautiful Tendons: Uncollected Queer Poems 1969-2007." He gave a reading last week at The Internationalist book store.

Beam didn't want to leave his native South to make it as a poet. More to the point, he saw value in living as a gay man where that might not be easy.

"I saw it as a political act," he said.

"I thought some of us needed to stay here."

Now, 38 years after he wrote the oldest poem in "Tendons," Beam sees a benefit to being excluded from the anthologies. By not fitting in with the urban gay poets who were defining a certain type of gay culture, he says he avoided confining his themes to coming out and political messages that today seem dated.

His work was always more about the spiritual, rather than political journey.

Even if that journey only took him from Kannapolis to Chapel Hill ... and now to Hillsborough, where he lives with his partner of 28 years, Stanley.

"I grew up redneck," Beam told D.G. Martin on WCHL a few weeks ago. "That didn't mean I could stay in Kannapolis. But I still wanted to stay in the South to demonstrate what it was like to be in front of you, to demonstrate a life."

"I want to live my life in the same wonderful kind of community I grew up in. I find people in the South are such a delight to be with. And I'm one of them."

An admirable stand

Comment submitted by Mark Marcoplos at 8:20 a.m. Nov. 6

It shows a lot of respect for his roots and personal courage that he would endure prejudice to help change the flawed culture he was born into. A true local hero.