What’s Up? with Merlene

This is American Diabetes Month, designated to heighten our awareness of a disease that is occurring more and more often, especially with Kentuckians.
Some 400,000 of us either have been diagnosed with Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes or we have indicators that say we are well on our way to having it. We know so [...]

I’m not a fan of the images rap and hip-hop music embrace, specifically those of sagging pants, violence, misogyny and greed.
Those images, however, have sometimes come to define black manhood.
Byron Hurt, a New York filmmaker, writer and activist, has explored those images in hip-hop culture and in society, and the definitions of masculinity those images [...]

Jonathan and Cynthia Austin got what they had hoped for. And much more.
The couple made plans to take their four children to the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, to show their children how blessed their lives are in Lexington and how great the need is for children in other parts of the world.
“We told them, ‘This [...]

Last week, my 19-year-old son had an ingrown toenail removed, but not before an infection had set in.
The podiatrist gave him an antibiotic, and I, his loving mother, made sure he took it.
On Thursday, the podiatrist called him and said she was changing the ­antibiotic because his infection was resistant to the first drug prescribed.
My [...]

While growing up in Lexington, James P. Owen said, he always loved watching Westerns every Saturday at the Ashland Theater that once stood on Euclid Avenue.
He said there would always be a Gene Autry feature and one starring Will Rogers, and he couldn’t get enough of cowboys.
“They stood for something,” Owen told members of the [...]

We often hear of organizations holding this event or that one, trying to raise awareness for a particular cause. Most of the time, many of us ignore the pleas.
In 2005, Yolonda Kelsor Clay had planned to do the same thing: ignore the efforts of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Lexington, to make Central Kentuckians [...]

We’ve had a spat of adults acting badly lately and it is time it stopped.
The most recent incident involved high school teachers in the Bluegrass whose disagreement landed one of them in jail and both of them out of the classroom.
We’ve had a rapper yanking glory from a true winner, a U.S. Congressman yelling out [...]

John and Vivian Nash, owners of The Nash ­Academy of Animal Arts, a dog-grooming school in Lexington, have a home in Brighton, Jamaica, and have visited the small village in St. Elizabeth parish for 25 years.
They grew to love the Jamaican people and to hate the poverty that ensnared one generation after another.
So, John Nash [...]

Simply by looking at complete strangers yesterday — the first day of school in Fayette County — I could just about tell the age of their children or what grade those children were entering, or whether they, like me, were well past first-day-of-school trauma.
The first-timers were the most obvious.
Parents who were sending their children off [...]

The subject line of the e-mail simply said “Mayor of Lynch.”
Since it was in my personal account, I assumed, correctly, that it was for my husband, a Lynch native. Like any dutiful wife, I read it.
I was amazed.
My husband has always told me Lynch is no ordinary town and the residents aren’t ordinary folk. The [...]