The Southern edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains is a land where time passes slowly. A place where one can sense the  weight of its melancholic history that hovers over the time-worn peaks and settles the verdant valleys below.

This is God's country. A country where the values of the past still govern the countenance of its inhabitants and social change is slow to take root.
 
So I was surprised to learn that over 60 years ago, deep in the “blue hills”, a single piece of progressive literature emerged challenging the social establishment of mid-20th century America.

Through a 1944 novel entitled  “Strange Fruit”, Lillian Eugenia Smith fanned the flames of controversy through a bi-racial love story that served as a subtle, yet powerful indictment of the day's social order, an order rooted in racial inequality and injustice.

Read more: A Forgotten Voice

It seems to be every second day that we hear a negative story about children and video games and often parents are blamed for allowing their kids access to violent games without any idea what they contain. It is fabulous then when we hear a story about parents who show that they are both imaginative and switched on to the content their child might encounter in a game they want to play.

When Evan Spencer, a then twelve year old, asked his father if he could play the popular war game Call Of Duty 4, he expected a straight out yes or no but he got much more than he bargained for. His father, Hugh, examined the game and came up with a unique parenting tactic. His child would be allowed to play the game with his friends if he both learned the Geneva convention rules and applied them while he was playing.

Read more: Kid Can Play War Games - If He Learns The Geneva Convention

In a surreal world, Greg Craola Simkins offers a message from our sponsor.

Growing up, Greg Craola Simkins always had a pencil in his hand, and his parents constantly encouraged him to express himself artistically. He also had lots of rabbits hanging around his childhood home. Since then, he has since discovered a way to use his background to his advantage. Instead of letting his parents’ prodding go to waste, Simkins worked his way into an art career, with rabbits frequently popping up as if to usher an unseen Alice back to Wonderland.
 
As he developed, Simkins advanced steadily from drawing in sketchbooks and on tabletops of butcher paper to spray painting blank walls and train cars to creating illustrations for clothing and video games to painting with acrylic paint. Each step along the way, Simkins has soaked up his medium, learning and developing his craft into something that cannot be ignored. Today, his hard work has paid off in dollars and cents, as his talents have been called upon by Disney, Mattel, Vans shoe company, and bands like the Gym Class Heroes.

What do his pieces say? How do they have such appeal? Good questions.

Read more: There Is Something Bigger

For most people social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are a harmless way of keeping in contact with friends and family. The problem is sometimes people forget that they are not like a good old-fashioned letter that is sealed and delivered to the person it is intended for. Sometimes a conversation you intended to be private becomes very public and that can cause you a world of trouble.

A large supermarket chain in the UK recently faced embarrassment after a group of its employees were found to be making derogatory remarks about customers on their Facebook pages. Among the comments were insults about customers being smelly, stupid and irritating. One girl wrote about people who continually asked her if she worked there, she said she has always wanted to reply:

Read more: Facebook Can Get You Sacked