VALDOSTA — Clell Wright makes a living off his voice. “My life and my work has been as a choral director for 30 some odd years. It’s what I do,” Wright said. “And so my entire career, really my life, has been working with groups of people to make music.” Wright joins many whose work lives have halted due to social distancing. But these preventive measures did not stop COVID-19 from infecting Wright who became one of Lowndes County’s earliest coronavirus cases.

VALDOSTA — José Camacho painted a parallelism. He said he’s not very good at painting so he imbued his piece with symbolism inspired by Psalm 137. In it, the Babylonians force their Jewish captives to perform the songs of their Lord for them. And the Jews did so but they hung their harps in sorrow on the withering willows of the Euphrates because they were performing in a foreign land.

TIFTON — Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College paid ex-campus police chief Bryan Golden $100,000 as part of a settlement agreement between ABAC and Golden, according to its fiscal year 2018 state financial report. Golden was terminated from his position on Nov. 13, 2015. He was previously suspended without pay from ABAC on Oct. 26, 2015, after his comments in an interview with The Stallion, ABAC’s student newspaper.

VALDOSTA — “The doorknob is rattling,” a friend told me as she began to open the door to the house. An exhale of sound blew out the door as we stepped into the home. Inside, people of different gender, ethnicity and subcultures head-bang to aggressive metal music. A red glow washes over the set-up — a full metal band, two large Marshall amps, a disco ball and a crowd of about 30 people all in someone's living room.

Musicians often differ on how to define “making it” as an artist. Ylva, a 17-year-old pop singer from Kristiansand, Norway, had her big break when she became runner-up in the Norwegian television singing competition “The Stream.” She has signed with Universal Records, is being filmed for a reality TV show and is also lucky enough to have a loving father deeply involved with the music industry in Norway.

In one forestry course, almost two-thirds of all students who took the class failed the course, regardless of the professor. College Algebra had an average failure rate of 30 percent while all the students that took Social Media Marketing and Issues in Rural Health passed with A’s. What is happening here?

TIFTON — “What is this?” asked a small old woman pointing towards what looks like a prickly, pruning pear. “This is a perennial squash that’s native to the Yucatan Peninsula,” said Bret Wagenhorst. “In Latin America, they call it Chayotes. It’s a backyard heirloom vegetable in New Orleans called Mirlitons, and in the Philippines and Asia they’re often called Cho-Chos.”

TIFTON — Imagine losing your life-partner in a tragic accident only to be diagnosed with triple metastatic breast cancer three weeks later. Barbara Day had just lost her husband. Her two boys had just lost their dad. She had no choice but to fight.

A freshman/resident at ABAC woke up one morning to see herself in the mirror covered with small red rashes. It was only a week past move-in and she was new to South Georgia. She thought to herself, “Maybe it was just allergies or some bug I wasn’t used to.” A couple weeks pass and the rashes persisted. One day, she discovered three little bugs.