This is a Monday edition of the North Carolina Rabbit Hole, which means it’s for paying subscribers only. If you’re a free subscriber and would like to upgrade, you can do so by mashing the button below. You can find out more about what you’ll get and why I’m doing this here.

A few housekeeping notes: First, I’m collecting bizarro trivia about all 100 counties, and we’re still a few counties shy. I was out of town this weekend (more on that in a bit), so I haven’t gone through and seen all of the counties that I’m missing, but my guess is that I’m short by about 20 or 25. You can share your stories here! Once we get to 100, I’ll throw a short party, then start compiling them into the world’s most useless North Carolina travel guide.

Also, since I wrote last Monday’s newsletter about a license plate that says FART, the woman who has it has submitted her appeal to keep it to NCDOT, and her plight has been featured on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

And now, on with the show.

Take a guess: What do you think was the most listened-to radio station in the Charlotte area in January? Whatever you guessed, it was wrong, because the classical station in Davidson took down all comers. As the Charlotte Ledger first reported, WDAV was number one in the ratings for the first time in its history. But! It’s also the first time a classical station has ever been number one in a market in modern radio history. Yes, kids, WDAV is bringing sexy Bach.

Now, if I may…

(puts on cartoonishly large “Radio Expert” hat)

…there is not too much that you can get, music-wise, from modern radio that you’re not already going to get from, say, Apple Music or Spotify. People either like whatever sort of music they like and can get it on demand, or they don’t need a radio station to help them discover new music. Terrestrial broadcasting, in general, has tended to become more homogeneous.

However! I’m also convinced that, smaller, plucky outliers are maybe primed to do better here. Other than NPR, there have been two stations in North Carolina that I’ve listened to regularly. One is WNCW, the fantastic, eclectic station in Spindale that actually does play fantastic stuff that you really won’t hear anywhere else. Credit folks like Joe Kendrick and Armando Bellmas. (Armando has a daily newsletter called Ecléctico that really does function as a great music discovery engine on its own.)

The other station I used to listen to regularly was WDAV, especially on Sundays, when my family just needed something refreshing and decidedly not poppy on the way to and from church. It felt a little niche to me (I went back to podcasts for the rest of the week). But now, maybe the niches are finding a slowly-growing but ravenously loyal radio audience. Here’s WDAV’s Frank Dominguez talking about that exact thing:

Anyhow, let’s hear it for WDAV. Haters be Haydn.

I’m going to mix sports here, but stay with me: Back in 2015, do you remember a fairly minor officiating controversy involving Cam Newton and Ed Hochuli? If not, it went like this: Newton was at the receiving end of what he felt was a late hit, but Hochuli, the referee, didn’t make the call. According to Newton, when he protested, Hochuli told him that “he wasn’t old enough to get that call.”

Anyway, I don’t know how old you need to be to get calls, but apparently in Charlotte, you can’t be too old if you want to make them:

LaMelo Ball isn’t a rookie anymore, but quite often the ref in Hornets games actually is. Only Orlando has had more games worked by first-year referees this season. (Credit to Konata Edwards for putting this into my feed.)

One of Winston-Salem’s skyscrapers is famous for being, essentially, the big brother of the Empire State Building. The other one is, well, you know, compensating for something.

Well now, if you have the time, you can construct said building in Minecraft:

Up next, someone should really build the Gaffney Peachoid. No reason.

This story had me intrigued, just because I really enjoyed this line: “I can tell you right now there is no hotter topic in North Carolina fishing circles than the proposed flounder regulations for 2022 from the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries.” I’m here for flounder angst!

Devil’s Logic Brewing in Charlotte held a drone race inside recently. If that seems like a potentially fraught idea, it was! One of the machines did the drone equivalent of blowing a tire and crashed into a woman’s head. For some reason, they proudly posted this video to Instagram along with a Craigslist-style ad to try and smooth things over (You have to click on the link and scroll to the second picture to see it).

First in flight, worst way to get a beer flight, amirite?

If you’ve ever been on the USS North Carolina in Wilmington, you probably experienced something that I noticed this weekend. My son and I went on a cub scout trip to Norfolk, Virginia, and spent the night on the USS Wisconsin, the largest American battleship ever built. The second we walked on board, I was hit with a very distinct smell. I don’t really have a way of describing it, other than I’ve been on other old Navy ships before (like submarines and aircraft carriers), and they smelled the same way.

I got used to it fairly quickly, and the intricacies of wrangling 7-year-olds late at night took over, so I forgot to ask about it. But it turns out that someone at the Wisconsin’s sister ship, the USS New Jersey, tackled this question last year:

In short, it’s a combination of stuff like fuel, bilge water, paint, and sailors doing things like smoking, doing laundry, and farting. The ships were fairly contained spaces, and the smell never went away. Some folks in this Reddit thread also suggest things like old cleaning agents and grease, and note that almost all military equipment has a similar smell. Either way, it wasn’t offensive to me, and the cub scouts quickly replaced it with smells of their own.

Have a great week everyone!