Rhino Times

The Rhino Times is a free weekly conservative news and opinion newspaper published in Greensboro, North Carolina, originally founded in 1991 as the Rhinoceros Times. A Charlotte, North Carolina print edition was founded in 2002 and discontinued in 2008. Its circulation in 2010 was 30,000.

The Rhinoceros Times' last publication was the April 25, 2013 edition. John Hammer cited financial reasons for closing the doors after 21 years. A web presence was said to be continued as long as possible. It was acquired by local developer Roy Carroll and reopened in October 2013.

Leadership

Publisher: Roy Carroll

Editor: John Hammer

General Manager: Gregory Rice

Managing Editor: Elaine Hammer

Creative Director: Anthony Council

County Editor: Scott D. Yost

Circulation: Geof Brooks

Advertising Consultants: Darden Kelly Christine Chapman Donna Willen

Features

Local features

The newspaper features editorial columns by noted science fiction and fantasy author Orson Scott Card and local investigative reporting by New York Times best-selling author Jerry Bledsoe.

Rhinoceros (play)

Rhinoceros (French original title Rhinocéros) is a play by Eugène Ionesco, written in 1959. The play was included in Martin Esslin's study of post-war avant garde drama, "The Theatre of the Absurd", although scholars have also rejected this label as too interpretatively narrow. Over the course of three acts, the inhabitants of a small, provincial French town turn into rhinoceroses; ultimately the only human who does not succumb to this mass metamorphosis is the central character, Bérenger, a flustered everyman figure who is initially criticized in the play for his drinking, tardiness, and slovenly lifestyle and then, later, for his increasing paranoia and obsession with the rhinoceroses. The play is often read as a response and criticism to the sudden upsurge of Communism, Fascism, and Nazism during the events preceding World War II, and explores the themes of conformity, culture, mass movements, mob mentality, philosophy and morality.

Plot

Act I

The play starts in the town square of a small provincial French village. Two friends – the eloquent, intellectual but incredibly prideful Jean, and the simplistic, shy, kind-hearted drunkard Berenger – meet up in a coffee house to talk about an unspecified urgent matter. Instead of talking about what they were supposed to, Jean becomes furious at Berenger's tardiness and drunken state and berates him until a rhinoceros rampages across the square, considerably startling the people there. The people there begin to discuss what has happened when another rhinoceros appears and crushes a woman's cat. This generates incredible outrage and people begin to band together to argue that the presence of these rhinos should not be allowed. The beginning of a mass movement is seen onstage.