Wake Forest is in the College World Series for the first time since 1955. To give you an idea how long ago that was: The university was still known as Wake Forest College and was still located in the actual town of Wake Forest (it moved to Winston-Salem, its current home, in 1956). If you’re wondering: Yes, the original campus is still there. It’s been home to the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary ever since the move.

The current iteration of the Wake Forest baseball team keeps winning. They beat LSU last night in a nailbiter, despite the fact that Tigers fans tried to instill good mojo in their team by downing a frightening amount of Jell-o shots at a nearby bar.

Before that, the Demon Deacons beat Stanford 3-2 on Saturday. Wake has the number one overall seed in the college baseball playoffs, and they haven’t lost a game this postseason. Even on Sundays.

About that.

Both the Winston-Salem Journal and the Washington Post have run stories recently about a bit of scheduling turmoil that came up 68 years ago, during Wake’s last visit to the College World Series. Back then, the school was officially still run by the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, which took the Sabbath very seriously. As in: No baseball games on Sunday. But in 1955, when a long round of bad weather pushed Wake Forest’s game with Colorado State to Sunday night, it became A Thing.

A Baptist preacher in Durham found out about it, devoted his sermon to it, and sent a telegram to Wake Forest president Harold Tribble that read, in part: “Forfeit of the game is preferable to forfeit of the principles of Christianity.”

Tribble was out of town, didn’t get the telegram, and said he would have stopped the game had he known about it. He, um, said he didn’t know about it.

Also, there wasn’t exactly a rush to tell him, or others. “We were going to play, and nobody was going to tell us anything different,” a pitcher on that team, Jack McGinley, told the Journal last month. The athletics director kept quiet about it too, the Deacs won the game and the whole College World Series, giving the newly-formed ACC its first national championship.

This wouldn’t be the first or last time that the college and the Baptists would be at odds. In 1986, the Baptists voted to formally sever their support for the university. But the whole No Sports On Sunday thing wasn’t unique to Wake Forest. In 1956, a Presbyterian minister in Hillsborough started an effort to stop Sunday racing at Occoneechee Speedway. We have not done right by our children,” the preacher said back then. “The least concern of which is the disruption of our Sundays and the worst a stimulation of our young people to excessive and daring driving and the exposing of them to public drinking and gambling.” It worked, for a while. The state banned Sunday racing in 1957, but it was back by 1961.

Lastly, this wasn’t the only sports trickery perpetuated at Wake Forest. Back in the 1940s, a football coach named Peahead Walker tricked a blue-chip recruit into playing for him after showing him around Wake Forest’s beautiful “campus.” The campus Peahead showed him was actually Duke’s.

I had a lot of great feedback on a story I wrote earlier this month about the financial decisions that made Asheville… Asheville. If you missed it, here it is:

A few of you pointed out that despite the fact that Asheville was often short on money, it still found enough cash to commit to several urban renewal programs that targeted and displaced a ton of its Black residents. Others noted that the financial collapse in Asheville was one of the things that led to the state’s Local Government Commission. Last thing: Many of you helpfully pointed out that Asheville nearly demolished 11 blocks of its historic downtown in the 1980s to build a mall. I know! That part was in the story! But it was a really long story, and the part about the mall was near the end, so I’m assuming many of you didn’t quite get there. So, here’s a much shorter version of the entire story for you, the paid Rabbit Hole supporter:

That 4,600-word story could have been a tweet!

Anyhow, here’s one last extra that I didn’t include. It’s a 1927 political ad for Gallatin Roberts that ran in The Asheville Times:

There’s a lot there, but here’s the line that got me: “Gallatin Roberts will go into office without promises or obligations.” Now, look. I know that Roberts was billing himself as the responsible candidate who was running against a mayor, John Cathey, who ran up a ton of debt to build stuff that would get Asheville ready for a future population of a half-million people (SPOILER ALERT: That didn’t happen!). And yes, I know that Roberts is basically just listing his rather long and respectable resume to tell you that he will go on to become a measured, scandal-free leader (SPOILER ALERT: Oh buddy, that also did not happen!). However, I’ve never seen a direct sales pitch from a politician that basically amounts to: “Hey, don’t worry about it, I got it.”

The only thing that comes close is an example that I covered during my time as a journalist in West Virginia (Also, happy West Virginia Day to all who celebrate). In 2004, Governor Bob Wise decided not to run for re-election because of an affair with an employee. (Because this was West Virginia, the jilted husband of that employee ran for governor with this campaign slogan: “Philip ‘Icky’ Frye: He’ll do his job, not his staff.”) With the race wide open, a guy you may have heard of named Joe Manchin threw his name into the race. He won the Democratic nomination and faced off against a Republican named Monty Warner. Warner tried really really hard to make the case that he had actual ideas and that he was better than Manchin, who was just relying on his party affiliation and familiar family name. Manchin’s response? Basically: Hey, I’m a Democrat. You know my name. Don’t worry about it. This, again, was 2004 West Virginia, when Democrats had complete control. Manchin won easily. Wonder whatever happened to that guy.

My wife and I celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary at The Angus Barn in Raleigh on Friday night. After our meal, my wife snapped this picture of me, after I’d just taken a direct hit from the Meat Tornado:

That is the look of a man who’s about to run a digestive marathon. I had: Cheese and crackers, a large salad, a roll, a delicious hunk of lean chateaubriand, a baked potato, mushrooms, a glass of wine, a cocktail, a cup of coffee, and a slice of pound cake. All in one sitting! BEHOLD, I AM ALL THAT IS MAN.

Also, before you ask: Yes, we got the chocolate chess pie. To go. What do you think I am, a glutton?

I’m not going to write any beautiful ode to The Angus Barn today, because it’s a Raleigh institution and food writers and Raleigh folks know its importance and its workings better than I ever will. But! A couple of things for the uninitiated:

However, here is a very short story about The Angus Barn’s attention to detail. In all, my wife and I went out to eat for three meals last weekend, and all three restaurants made some sort of mistake. So, she did the thing that we normally do when there’s a small error but not a dealbreaker: Said “it’s fine,” and just moved on. But not at The Angus Barn. Our waitress brought out my wife’s espresso-rubbed filet mignon, but then looked at it a little funny. “Cut into it,” she told my wife. The inside of the steak didn’t have any pink, even though my wife had asked for it to be medium.

Before we could say anything, the waitress whisked the plate away, saying that she would fix this egregious error. Later, she returned with the manager, and both of them bore witness to my wife’s ceremonial second cutting of the steak. This one was perfect. They both apologized and left. In the interim, though, the waitress brought my wife a small plate of ribs. On the house.

Replacing expensive meat with expensive meat, and then giving you bonus meat while you wait? That’s somethin’ special.