Like most poets, John Casteen IV loves to quote other poets: William Butler Yeats, for instance.

Heidi James knew that memories are usually fleeting. That was one of the things that haunted her when her 18-year-old son Nelson died in an automobile accident in September 2008.

When you think about it, George Rice recruited his younger brother Ed three times.

If you knew the Ed Dobson who lived in Lynchburg — the Bob Jones University graduate who served on the board of Moral Majority, edited the Fundamentalist Journal and helped ghostwrite the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s book, “The Fundamentalist Phenomenon” — you probably wouldn’t recognize him now.

Lynchburg is a city that loves history — and that apparently extends to music.

Now that George Jameson has retired from the Central Intelligence Agency, is he free to spill the agency’s deepest secrets out on the lecture circuit?

As it turned out, the Berlin Wall didn’t just collapse under the weight of history — it exploded outward, flung to the four winds as if all the collective explosive power of the Soviet empire had been detonated beneath it.

Should local residents like my Election Night correspondent be worried?

The 23rd District House of Delegates race was really two elections in one.

Peter Houck takes the current debate over national health care legislation very seriously. Which only makes sense, because he is both a physician and the pediatric medical director at the Johnson Health Center on Federal Street.

A few final political thoughts for election week …

They say that our favorite season is always the one in which we were born — and since my wife, both children and I all observe our birthdays between September 18 and October 15, it’s inevitable that I favor fall. Here are 10 other reasons why:

The marching orders for Saturday morning’s Memory Walk in Riverside Park were explicit: “Rain or shine.”

We’ve all been told that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. To those, let me offer a third — the certainty that politicians will use taxes as a blunt instrument to wield against their opponents.

You might call what Cheryl Burnette does “nursing nurses.”

There is an art to opening a successful gallery, and Todd Smith obviously did his homework.

An army, they say, travels on its stomach. The same might also be said of a high school football team.

Random thoughts for a Monday …

Sometime around the end of 2006, Colin Beavan heard that the polar bears in Antarctica were starting to eat each other.

Somehow, it seems like Vinny Giles should be at least 100 years old. That’s what happens when you start playing a sport in elementary school and continue it past AARP eligibility.

I was sick in bed on Monday, anxiously awaiting my next visit from Dr. Ibuprofen, when I decided to write a column about my notebook.

I haven’t decided yet who to vote for in this fall’s gubernatorial election, and it may well not be Bob McDonnell. If that’s the case, though, it won’t be because of the now-infamous thesis that McDonnell wrote two decades ago as a graduate student at Pat Robertson’s Regent University.

Here’s a news flash: Politics and governing don’t mix.

Breaking up, Neil Sedaka once told us in song, is hard to do. But not for the Lynchburg-based Blue Newt Band. In their case, breaking up was easier than finding a new lead guitar player.

What Lynchburg resident Malia King was doing in Virginia Beach on Sunday might have been quantified as half duty, half pleasure. Call it “fun-raising.”

Something about all those “health plan” meetings being held across the country is beginning to strike me as chronically unhealthy.

What do President Barack Obama and Nancy Marion have in common? An enthusiasm for change.

The main thing I remember from my Oct. 3, 1983, interview with Ted Kennedy was that he seemed nervous.

As a fierce, afternoon-long rain hammered down Saturday on Miller Park, it was a case of “Tanks, but no tanks” for the local chapter of the Radio Control Armor Club.

In the hierarchy of human needs, the bladder always outranks the stomach. Hunger, after all, can wait patiently for hours — even days — before being satisfied. An urgent need for bathroom facilities is another matter.