I call it the Cool Guy Vest, and I'm wearing it today, made of brushed black suede, sheeny satin and sturdy steel snaps. Totally badass.

Thales took things the ancient Greeks attributed to the actions of the gods - magnetism, math and yes, even life itself - and tried to explain them in terms of the natural world, the reality in which he existed. He really blew everyone away when he accurately predicted a solar eclipse that took place during the Battle of Halys in 585 BC.

I'm trapped. A prisoner. I might as well have one foot nailed to the floor and the other stuck in a bucket. I'm not going anywhere... not for a while, anyway. But the kid seems to be doing fine right now - he's currently rummaging through the kitchen for something inoffensive to eat - so I might as well get some work done.

Lewis Pagano, DDS (retired), shifted somewhat uncomfortably in the ladder-backed chair in his youngest daughter's living room. It was his 90 th birthday party, and Lewis, the last of seven children born to Italian immigrants in Morristown, NJ, must have experienced a form of deja vu.

It's just a K-Mart. Nothing special about that. In fact, one could argue that the merchandise at K-Mart is the opposite of special - mass-produced goods slapped together in some Asian sweatshop... filling row after row, aisle after aisle... nothing here is unique. Nothing is one of a kind.

Downtown Greensboro, nightfall. The Carolina Theatre roils with a fan-based contingent of revelers - here for the show, here for the party, here to place faces on those distinctive voices they hear over the airwaves every morning during drive time.

Whoa. I was in the video store attempting to procure the new Batman game - which, it turns out, is not available for the antique Playstation 2 with which I have cursed my children. But once the call came through my concerns seemed trivial, to say the least.

I've got the novelist Allan Gurganus cornered on the front deck of the house by the bar, complimenting him on the dialect style he used in his novel The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, and also his snappy vest which in my opinion looks very literary. He politely humors me before begging off.

Rain falls on the castle near the foot of Summit Avenue. It rolls off the roof and trickles from the eaves, runs through the gutters and drainpipes. Rain slinks down the castle's hard granite surface, rivulets racing to the mossy ground, where they seep into the soil.

But there exist other, less publicized but almost as prolonged cases of mistaken identity in the place known affectionately as the Cancer City. Two weeks ago, Joseph Abbitt was released from a Forsyth prison after DNA evidence cleared him of a 14-year-old rape conviction.