To understand where this nascent blog is (or will be) coming from, particularly if you're a furriner or a damyankee, you probably need to know where I'm coming from. This book explains it all.
Want to know why the POTUS can get away with such utter blithering degenerate idiocy and not alienate his "base?" Want to understand the roots of Jim Crow and Southern bigotry? Want to know why poor white people consistently and reliably vote for politicians who reward them by cutting their legs off at the knees? Want to figure out why most Southern Caucasians can't trace their family trees farther back than some swamp in North Carolina? Ever wonder why those family trees don't branch a whole lot? Read this book.
Please.
While you're pondering whether to buy it in hardback or Kindle format, or whether to hitch a ride to the public library instead, enjoy some Southern Culture on the Skids. Be sure to wear a "gimme" baseball cap and dance as clumsily as you can!
Shawi is the Choctaw name for the raccoon ( Procyon lotor ), a ring-tailed species of mammalian bandit. Raccoon in its family tree. I've known a bunch of them well. And I owe the trash pandas a blog post. The Trash Panda Family Tree (Mandatory Mammal Speciation Lecture) Without belaboring the biology more than it's worth (which for me is a lot), raccoons are classified by taxonomists in the family Procyonidae , which they share with coatis, ringtails, kinkajous, and eleven other species. Giant pandas, on the other hand, are in the same taxonomic family with as bears, black bears, brown bears, polar bears, big bears, little bears, and the bear that watched the still while Lord Buckley went into town to vote Raccoons were in fact long thought to be related to bears. (The German name for raccoon means "washing bear.") But truth is, raccoons are more closely related genetically to weasels, skunks, badgers, and otters than they are to bears. Collectively, they...
"The only thing that I did wrong was stay in Mississippi a day too long" - Bob Dylan Harley-Davidson Knucklehead I live in the Great Sovereign State of Mississippi. This is an admission that not only am I descended from knuckleheads and live surrounded by knuckleheads but that, at the end of the day, I am a knucklehead myself. This does not mean I am a Harley-Davidson, although a lot of knuckleheads ride knuckleheads. Now, I'll be the first to admit that Mississippi has much bigger fish to fry than what design is used for a piece of cloth, fish like our stubborn refusal to implement Medicaid, our abysmal educational levels, our lack of decent-paying jobs, and ignorant politicians campaigning on such burning issues as the need to keep "In God We Trust" on the automobile license plate, but hey, I enjoy a good fish fry! I also enjoy history. So here I go down the slippery slope! Current Mississippi State Flag The current state flag design, incorpor...
Once it had mandated the removal of the 1894 "Confederate" state flag, the Mississippi Legislature realized it had bigger fish to fry. First up, repealing Prohibition . That's right, Prohibition. You know, the manufacture, sale, and distribution of alcoholic beverages. The same Prohibition that ended in the United States of America in 1933. Okay, it's not quite as weird as it sounds for Mississippi to be repealing Prohibition almost 90 years after the fact. It's weirder. It's instructive to begin with the beginning. Mississippi enacted statewide prohibition of alcohol in 1907 . And it was the first state to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment twelve years later. But in truth, the Great Sovereign State of Mississippi has a much longer history with restricting the sale of booze. Around 1839, there was a (short-lived) state law that banned the sale of alcohol in amounts less than one gallon. Naturally, this didn't sit well with tavern keepers, and the law was r...