Chamblee54

The North has Bloomingdale’s , the South has Dollar General .
The North has coffee houses, the South has Waffle Houses .
The North has dating services, the South has family reunions.
The North has switchblade knives; the South has Lee Press-on Nails.
The North has double last names; the South has double first names.
The North has Indy car races; The South has stock car races .
The North has Cream of Wheat , the South has grits.
The North has green salads, the South has collard greens .
The North has lobsters, the South has crawfish .
The North has the rust belt; the South has the Bible Belt .
If you run your car into a ditch, don’t panic. Four men in a four-wheel drive pickup truck with a tow chain will be along shortly.. Don’t try to help them, just stay out of their way. This is what they live for.
Don’t be surprised to find movie rentals and bait in the same store…Do not buy food at this store.
Get used to hearing ‘You ain’t from round here, are ya?’
The first Southern statement to creep into a transplanted Northerner’s vocabulary is the adjective ‘big’ol,’ truck or ‘big’ol’ boy. Most Northerners begin their Southern-influenced dialect this way. All of them are in denial about it.
‘He needed killin.’ is a valid defense here.
If you hear a Southerner exclaim, ‘Hey, y’all watch this,’ you should stay out of the way. These are likely to be the last words he’ll ever say.
If there is the prediction of the slightest chance of even the smallest accumulation of snow, your presence is required at the local grocery store. It doesn’t matter whether you need anything or not. You just have to go there.
Do not be surprised to find that 10-year olds own their own shotguns, they are proficient marksmen, and their mammas taught them how to aim.
If you do settle in the South and bear children, don’t think we will accept them as Southerners . After all, if the cat had kittens in the oven, we ain’t gonna call ’em biscuits.

Two years ago Atlanta almost ran out of water. The fishwrapper printed charts every day showing how many days before we ran dry. Finally, some rain came, and we got a reprieve. It was not because of conservation.
Now, it seems like Mexico City, a much larger and wealthier city, is running out of water. Whether the cause is global warming/dry weather or over development is beside the point. The authorities are running the water out at lower levels three days a month, trying to forestall a more severe problem.
It seems that commercial vendors have access to water the city does not have. When you run out, you call the “pipas” who come out and fill your cistern. And the bottled water that everyone drinks is still available.
HT to Andrew Sullivan.

In the early nineties, PG had too much free time. On March 25 of one year, he looked in the fishwrapper, and found a list of famous people with birthdays.
There was an unlikely trio celebrating that day. This would be (in order of appearance) Anita Bryant (1940), Aretha Franklin (1942), and Elton John (1947). All three have been paid for singing. The three have a total of five husbands, with Miss Bryant and Mr. John currently attached (Not to each other). Miss Franklin has good taste in hats.
Several other people have arrived on planet earth on March 25. They include , in 1911,  Jack Ruby,  the killer of Lee Harvey Oswald (d. 1967) ( They don’t say alleged when it was on live TV). 1918 produced Howard Cosell, American sports reporter (d. 1995) and Flannery O’Connor (d. 1964) arrived in 1925. 1934 gave us Gloria Steinem, American feminist and publisher, and in 1937 Tom Monaghan, founder of Dominos pizza, arrived. To make room for all this talent, Buck Owens died March 25, 2006.
March 25 is after the spring equinox, and has been Easter. A few noteworthy events have gone down on this day. In 1894, Coxey’s Army departed Massillon, Ohio for Washington D.C.
In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 garment workers in New York City. In 1939 Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli becomes Pope Pius XII, to the delight of Adolph Hitler. 1955 saw the United States Customs seizes copies of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” as obscene. And in 1969, during their honeymoon, John Lennon and Yoko Ono hold their first Bed-In for Peace at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel (until March 31).
HT and applause to wikipedia.

There is a site publishing vintage photographs called Shorpy. They recently published a picture of a dog’s funeral. This picture is reproduced with permission.
The Aspin Hill cemetery is the final resting place for thousands of four legged companions. Lyndon Johnson took his beagles “him” and “her” there to be cremated. Mr. Johnson caused a furor when he picked “him” off the ground by his ears.
There is a human cemetery on Pleasant Hill Road, across I85 from the mall. PG went there with his camera one day, looking for the permanent residence of his parents. A few spaces over is Boots.

PG remembers the first time the name Flannery O’Connor sank in. He was visiting some friends, in a little house across from the federal prison.
Rick(?) was the buddy of a character known as Harry Bowers. PG was never sure what Harry’s real name was. One night, Rick was talking about Southern Gothic writers, and he said that Flannery O’Connor was just plain weird ” Who else would have a bible salesman show up at a farm, take the girl up into a hayloft, unscrew her wooden leg and leave her there? Weird”
Flannery O’Connor was recently the subject of a biography written by Brad Gooch. The book is getting a bit of publicity. Apparently, the Milledgeville resident was a piece of work.
PG read some reviews of this biography, and found a collection of short stories at the library. The book included ” Good Country People”, the tale about the bible salesman. Apparently, this story was inspired by a real life incident. ( Miss O’Connor had lupus the last fifteen years of her life. She used crutches.) And yes, it is weird. Not like hollywood , but in the way of rural, post world war two Georgia.
Some of the reviews try to deal with her attitudes about Black people. On a certain level, she is a racist. She uses the n word freely, and her black characters are not inspiring people. The thing is, the white characters are hardly any better, and in some cases much worse.
The stories are well crafted, with vivid descriptions of people and places. The reader floats along with the flow of the story, until he realizes that Grandma has made a mistake on a road trip. The house she got her son to look for is in Tennessee, not Georgia. She makes him drive the family car into a ditch. Some drifting killers come by. Grandma asks one if he prays, while his partner is shooting her grandchildren. Weird.
In another story, a drifter happens upon a pair of women in the country. The daughter is thirty years old, is deaf, and has never spoken a word. The drifter teaches her to say bird and sugarpie. The mother gives him fifteen dollars for a honeymoon, if he will marry her. He takes the fifteen dollars and leaves her asleep in a roadside diner.
PG was looking for yard sales one Saturday afternoon. He came to a house off Lavista Road, between Briarcliff and Cheshire Bridge. The house had apparently not been painted in the last forty years. Thousands and thousands of paperback books were on the shelves. The lady taking the money said that the lady who lived there was the friend, and correspondent of, the “Milledgeville writer” Flannery O’Connor. This is apparently Betty Hester, who is mentioned in many of the biography reviews.
PG told the estate sale lady that she should be careful how she said that. There used to be a large mental hospital in Milledgeville, and the name is synonymous in Georgia with mental illness. The estate sale lady had never heard that.

Operation Iraqi Freedom is six years old. The first shock and awe day (SAD) was roughly on the Spring Equinox, 2003. Twenty four seasons have come and gone.
Some say the tide has turned, and the coalition is winning. There seems to be less random violence than before. A government is in place. On the cost side of the analysis, there is increased Iranian power, hundreds of thousands of refugees, and the American economy in tatters. That does not count the dead and wounded of all colors.
Many of us wish the sorry mess had never happened. The question is where to go from here. Troop withdrawals seem inevitable, as well as keeping an occupation force in country. There is going to be a moment of truth, where the Iraqi government is going to sink or swim on its own.
There are many other questions about the future. Iran is not the only neighbor playing power politics. There is the matter of the “Sons of Iraq”. They are people who were fighting our troops, until we put them on our payroll. Some day, they will be introduced to the American custom of the layoff. What will happen then is anyone’s  guess.
There is also the matter of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the other Stan countries. We invaded Afghanistan looking for revenge after 911.  BHO seems to be as clueless as GWB as to what to accomplish there.
Happy Shock and Awe Day.

The fun never stops under the gold dome. Never mind that Atlanta is one dry summer away from becoming a ghost town. Never mind the sorry state of education and health care. The Lesterslature is debating a resolution about Barack Obama.
The General Assembly passes resolutions on a variety of subjects every year. Some printing office sends a certificate to be framed and displayed, and everyone is happy. Until this year. HR 673 says good things about President Obama. ” Honoring President Barack Obama on becoming the 44th President of the United States and recognizing President Barack Obama as an honorary lifetime member of the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus; and for other purposes.”… “, throughout his political career, President Barack Obama has enjoyed an unimpeachable reputation for integrity, vision, and passion for public service,”.
Unimpeachable? Does that mean he has not been caught with an intern?
Now, BHO was slick enough to get elected. He may perform well as the President. But, to this humble reporter, no Illinois politician has an unimpeachable reputation for integrity.
When you are a Georgia Republican, no chance to be petty is too little. The State House voted down HR673. Now it is the Democrats turn to scream racism, and make the Repubs look reasonable. The fun never stops.

Do not order drinks while ceiling is in motion.
Joey-Jim was tooling along the road one fine day when the local policeman, a friend of his, pulled him over. “What’s wrong, Seamus?” Joey-Jim asked. “Well didn’t ya know, Joey-Jim, that your wife fell out of the car about five miles back?” said Seamus. “Ah, praise the Almighty!” he replied with relief. “I thought I’d gone deaf!”
Why can’t you borrow money from a leprechaun?
Because they’re always a little short
Mick and Paddy were walking home after a night on the beer when a severed head rolled along the ground. Mick picked it up to his face and said to Paddy “Jez, that look like Sean” to which Paddy replied “No Sean was taller than that”
“Well, Mrs. O’Connor, so you want a divorce?” the solicitor questioned his client. “Tell me about it. Do you have a grudge?”
“Oh, no,” replied Mrs. O’Connor. “Shure now, we have a carport.”
The solicitor tried again. “Well, does the man beat you up?”
“No, no,” said Mrs. O’Connor, looking puzzled. “Oi’m always first out of bed.”
Still hopeful, the solicitor tried once again. “What I’m trying to find out are what grounds you have.”
“Bless ye, sor. We live in a flat — not even a window box, let alone grounds.”
“Mrs. O’Connor,” the solicitor said in considerable exasperation, “you need a reason that the court can consider. What is the reason for you seeking this divorce?”
“Ah, well now,” said the lady, “Shure it’s because the man can’t hold an intelligent conversation.”
Thanks to JokesFunny.

PG saw a story about an online poll, “how progressive are you”. After hearing Neal Boortz mock progressive, (it might be the next liberal), this poll looked like it might be fun to check out.
The poll is sponsored by a site called “Americanprogress.org”. PG decided to look around a bit, to see what he was getting into here. There are lots of advocacy groups with misleading names. The slogan of “Center for American Progress”…”Progressive Ideas for a Strong, Just, and Free America” … could go either red or blue. A further bit of reading seems to place this site in with the Mother Jones crowd.
A link on the home page led to a page headlined “It’s Easy Being Green: The Solar Surge in Colorado”. It seems as though Colorado has a law requiring a percentage of the commercially generated power in the state to be generated from renewable sources. People can install solar panels on their homes, and sell the excess energy back to the grid.
Recently in Georgia, there was a debate about allowing Georgia Power to bill customers for a nuclear power plant while it is being built. The implication was that nuclear power…with all of its environmental and big government problems…was the only solution available. People in Colorado have a different attitude.
Maybe if we took the billions of dollars that people are so happy to invest in nukes, and install solar panels with the money, that we could generate just as much power.

There are two features about rape this weekend on the internet. They have different angles.
The first is about “rape trees”. The setting is the US-Mexican border. We have a nation wealthy in money ( so far) next to a nation wealthy in people. The people wealth is trying to export itself to the money wealth, with controversial results.
These people try to cross the desert into the land of plenty. They are frequently treated with cruelty. At some point, women entering the northern country are raped, and their undergarments hung in trees nearby. These are known as rape trees.
The discussion in LastFreeVoice takes a skeptical view of the whole thing. There is a lot of noise about illegal immigration now. Some of what the wingnuts are saying is probably true, but not all of it. Some of the coyotes bringing in illegals probably do abuse their human product. It is a good possibility that some women are raped.
The question here is what to do about it. To make immigration tougher is going to make the players that much meaner. The authoritarian answer is more punishment and enforcement. This reporter cannot see how this is going to help the ladies being raped in the desert.

The other discussion of rape…and what the author calls not rape…is very powerful. It was written by Racialiscious. HT to transgriot for running a repeat of it, which allowed this reporter to read it.
Many women have wretched experiences. As a male, PG cannot imagine what it is like. Rape is much more that the violent act of forced sex. It is a cruel power game, that distorts the lives of millions. The ladies violated in the desert suffer just as much as the ghetto ladies Racialiscious talks about.
In the paragraph above, there is a mention of an authoritarian solution to the illegal alien solution. Is it possible that this same authoritarian power grabbing is behind some of this shabby treatment of women? A key episode in the racialiscious story is when an acquaintance forces his way into her house, and says ” I can do whatever I want to you”. This followed:
“He pinned me in the doorway, forcing me down to the floor barely inside my apartment. Holding my arm behind my back with one hand as I struggled against him, he calmly, deliberately allowed his free hand to explore my body. He squeezed my still budding breasts, then slipped his hands down my pants, taking his time while feeling up my behind. When he was finished, he let me up, saying again, “I can do whatever I want.” After he finished his cold display of power, he walked away.”
What was this young man trying to prove to himself? That he was a man?
Is there a connection between that young man molesting that girl, and the authoritarian types who want to deport twenty million illegal aliens? Or, with the angry shouting of the Jesus Worship church? PG is not smart enough to connect the dots, but suspects there is a connection.
Until the time when people respect each other, we are going to have problems.

PG was walking down Clairmont Road when he looked down on the sidewalk. Under the leaves and pine straw, there was a bumper sticker…9 11 01 we will never forget. It had red white and blue letters, with stars and stripes galore.
The attack on 911 was not a glorious moment in American history. It was an embarrassing lapse in our defense. We still don’t know what our government knew, and when they knew it. The suspicion remains that our leaders saw an opportunity to gain power, and allowed the plot to go forward,
As for never forget….this may be true, because you can’t forget what you didn’t learn. The bumper sticker was printed ( most likely abroad) on a petroleum based film. The economic dependency on oil has not been reduced. Whether or not we drill in our own territory, a percentage of that oil will come from countries that are hostile. Others pretend to be friendly, while supplying the terrorists who fly airliners into our buildings.
PG has heard that at one time, there was respect for the flag in America. Apparently this does not extend to bumper stickers styled after the flag, proclaiming the memory of a disaster.

On this cheerful Friday the thirteenth, the world is going to hell. The economy is beyond horrible. People around the world are unhappy with their neighbors. Many people do not have the correct opinions about Jesus.
Craig, at Puntabulous, has an idea. Take a beverage poll.
1. If you could only have one non-alcoholic beverage and one alcoholic beverage for the rest of your life, which would they be?
2. If you could only have one beverage for the rest of your life non-alcoholic OR alcoholic, which would it be?
Note: Your alcoholic beverage can be any alcoholic beverage, and consist of more than one mixers/alcohols
PG is a retired drunk. On December 31, 1988, he walked to the gas station, got a six pack of Coors in the bottle, and walked home. Shortly after midnight, he finished the last bottle. He has not drank alcohol since.
One day, PG will get all AA in your face. He does feel that life works smoother without beer…in fact, if he had not quit drinking, he may very well be dead. To be fair, that is true either way.
Getting back to the beverage poll, we see that it is reduced to one question. The answer to both questions is unsweetened homemade tea. This makes PG a double heretic. He lives in Georgia, where the tea is sweet and the folks are bitter.
The cheaper the tea bag, the better the taste. Winn Dixie used to have a store brand, Fishers, which had 100 unwrapped bags for 79 cents. The best value today is the Kroger or Aldi cost cutter, and it is two something for 100 bags. When you use three bags to make a half gallon, this is not going to kill you.
Some say you should only leave the bag in the boiled water for a few minutes, or you will get a bitter taste. Many of these people put large amounts of white sugar in the tea, which covers up half the taste. PG likes the bitter taste, and so he leaves the bags in the water until it is time to make another batch, and NEVER USES SUGAR.