MORE SENSELESS ACTS OF BLOGGERY

I have returned from the US, and I’ve more or less recovered from the jet lag and the 15-hour flight.

It was mostly the same deal as last year: a road trip from Chicago to Maryville-Alcoa and back, by way of Carbondale, Nashville and Cincinnati (rather than Indianapolis). Overall it went smoothly, apart from the occasional debilitating illness. Also, this time out we were unable to meet a few people we wanted to meet due to schedule conflicts and lost wallets. Anyone we were unable to meet, sorry about that, we'll make it up to you next time. 

Other than that, it was a pretty fun time. Here are the highlights:

1. Cheap books

We joined Books A Million and scoured McKay’s (both the Nashville and Knoxville locations), as well as Hastings and a couple other places. Here’s my take:



Note that I’ve read The Sirens Of Titan before, but for $5.97, I’m keen to re-read it.

Also, I’ve finally decided to take the plunge and try some of the Star Wars expanded universe books. I’ve avoided them in the past mainly because I thought it was just too much to keep up with. I was also worried about the quality of the writing. But with all the excitement about the new movie and all, I just felt inspired to try a couple, though I’m sticking to Original Trilogy period for now. We’ll see how these two go and take it from there.

2. Conservative books for conservatives who read

In Maryville-Alcoa, I also visited a place called Ollie’s, which is sort of like Big Lots. It has a book section. It looks like this.



So I didn’t find much there. But I did notice a pattern in Tennessee bookstores, where (1) you see a lot of books on prominent display from authors like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Brian Kilmeade and various GOP candidates – particularly Donald Trump and Ben Carson. As opposed to, say, books by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Just saying.

I also noticed that a lot of these authors take up prominent space in the American History section. You kind of expect that with Bill O’Reilly, who seems to have a second career writing books about famous political assassinations of famous Americans (Lincoln, Kennedy, Patton, Jesus, etc). Glenn Beck and Brian Kilmeade, not so much.

Res ipsa loqitur.

3. Touch me I’m sick

I came down with stomach flu in Maryville-Alcoa. Laid me out for two straight days. Then my mom got strep throat. Then KT got both. Then the cat started vomiting. It was kind of funny after awhile. Anyway, everyone recovered fairly quickly, so our travel plans didn’t get seriously disrupted as a result. I did end up sleeping through Halloween, though.

I just hope my travel insurance will cover my doctor’s visit. I don’t have a lot of experience with American HMOs, except that even something relatively simple can cost you a fortune in consultation fees. The actual medicine was only $20.00.

4. Burger time

We ate a lot of burgers. This is probably unavoidable, though we did try to avoid the obvious stuff on the road.

The highlight: Five Guys, which is still our Gold Standard for fast food burgers.

The lowlight: Steak’n’Shake, which used to be the Gold Standard back in college, but these days seems to go down in quality every time we visit. The shakes are still good, and the food isn’t terrible, but it’s not something to look forward to anymore.

Best décor: S&B Burger Joint, which has a serious rock theme going on. It’s also the only burger place I’ve been to that requires an orientation session from the server. Good food though. Try the deep fried pickles.





5. Toll roads

Chicago is bristling with them. I discovered this last year, but this year we got caught up a little more than usual in the system, thanks to a few toll plazas where either cash isn’t an option, or we ended up in a situation where it was an unmanned toll booth and we had no change. You do have the option to pay online and you have seven days to do so (though you have to remember which toll booth it was, and what time you went through it). The fine for not paying is substantial, but I do find myself wondering how many people actually bother, or how rigorously it’s enforced.

6. There ain't much to country living

We stopped in Paducah, KY for coffee and gas. Inside was two guys in overalls buying wintergreen chewing tobacco. Outside was a pick-up truck with some bullet holes in the side. Meanwhile, in a rest area by the state line, I got into a conversation with the tour booth woman who told me about her 120-pound mini-pig.

Later, in TN, I found myself behind a pick-up truck with a bumper sticker that said: “Uncle Sam wants you to speak English.”

7. I’m bored of American radio

This year’s rental car didn’t come with a Sirius XM subscription, so I had to make do with standard radio, which is hard to do on a road trip where you can only stick with a station for so long until you drive out of range.

Making matters worse is that American radio is just terrible – it seems to get worse every year I come over. It says a lot when you find yrself settling for whatever classic rock station you can find, knowing that’s probably as good as it gets for decent music.

I did notice one trend I hadn’t picked up on before: talk radio on the FM dial. This may be old news to you, but I wasn’t aware that talk radio was in so much demand that the AM dial no longer had sufficient room for it. Unfortunately, this meant that in Tennessee, around 75% of my programming choices on FM were limited to news/talk, sports/talk and country music. The rest was either Top 40 or a classic rock station that was always just five miles away from bad reception.

8. Cheap gas

I paid $1.77/gal for gas in Maryville.

Thanks, Obama.

Well, that’s enough, isn’t it?

Back to the grind,

This is dF

So Obama said the N-word during a podcast and America is freaking out about that.

Which is bloggable for a few reasons:

1. People who are upset about it have missed the larger point he was trying to make because they can’t get over the fact that OMG OMG Obama said “n****r”.

2. The fact that they're freaking out over it actually proves the point he was trying to make, except they don't realize that either.

3. Fox News ha ha ha.

4. A few friends of mine (who just happen to be white Republicans) who really hate Obama (in a non-racist way, they say) have said he shouldn’t have used the word precisely because it distracted from his overall message. Technically they have a point – it’s become such a nuclear word that it upsets people’s sensibilities to the point of distraction.

On the other hand, it’s hard to take that point seriously when it comes from people who (1) have no interest in Obama's overall message, they just want another excuse to bash Obama some more with the Evil Incompetence stick, (2) have spent every day since 2008 claiming the only race problem in America is black people crying racism all the time (and they have the anecdotes to prove it) and (3) tend to complain about how unfair it is that black people can say it but white people can’t.

Anyway. I think I’m supposed to express my opinion here, so:

For myself, it’s just the latest example in a sadly long list of examples (that’s getting longer every week) that demonstrate that not only does America still has a race problem, but that a large portion of Americans (most of them white) are completely unaware that it does.

I’m exaggerating, of course. But as a white person who grew up in the South, I know a lot of other white persons who really think racism is not a problem anymore precisely because we’re not allowed to call black people the n-word, as if that was the problem all along – that, and lynchings and church bombings and KKK rallies and crap. We fixed all that in the 60s somewhere when we desegregated buses or something, and white people don’t do that anymore, and BTW, if America had a race problem we wouldn’t have elected Obama twice, so problem solved, right?

Well no. And this is exactly the point Obama was trying to make: American racism is the product of 300+ years of history which African Americans have had to endure, from the overt to the covert. You don’t erase that overnight with a court decision and a civil rights bill, and you don’t fix it by banning racist epithets and using coded language. It’s a much bigger problem than that, and it takes time to heal. And it doesn’t help when certain political parties and media figures keep the wounds alive by exploiting latent racism for their own ends.

The point isn’t that all whites are racist and all blacks are victims of white racism – of course it’s not that simple. The point is that it’s hard to have a productive conversation about racism when a significant number of people are unaware the problem exists, then get all defensive when you try to point out that it does.

If you want an idea of how bad the disconnect is, look no further than all those African Americans on the streets and on TV telling you they’re victims of racism, and all the white people on TV saying: “No you’re not, because we’re not racist anymore, so you can’t possibly be victims of racism.” (Which is of course kinda racist.) 

Or you can just watch this Daily Show skit with Jessica Williams.

Anyway, yeah. I don’t have a problem with what Obama said. It needed to be said, even though most people who heard it inevitably heard only what they wanted to hear regardless of what word he did or didn’t use. But that’s not his problem – it’s ours.

Word up,

This is dF

re Cliff Richard’s "Devil Woman" being a great song – 

It is. It’s good enough that it translates well into bluegrass music.

As Hayseed Dixie will now demonstrate.



See?

If you don’t know, Hayseed Dixie has been making a career out of proving that rock music can sound good (or at least amusing) in a bluegrass arrangement. They started mainly doing AC/DC songs (hence the homonymic name), but they’ve broadened their range since then.

Highway to hell,

This is dF

Speaking of Ted Nugent …

Spotted last month at Kam Tin Country Park in Yuen Long up in the New Territories:



They have an archery range there, you see. I don’t know that Nugent has anything directly to do with it. I suspect not.

It does make me wonder if the people who got those stickers know that Ted Nugent the Archer is the same guy as Ted Nugent the Motor City Madman (to say nothing of Ted Nugent the Batshit Commentator who wants Hillary Clinton to have sex with his automatic rifle – metaphorically, of course).

Go wild in the country,

This is dF

How Nashville prays:



DISCLAIMER: Yes, I realize he’s probably making deliberate references to both Talladega Nights and local boy Darrell Waltrip. And the fact that I actually caught the Waltrip reference means I’m in no position to judge. And, all right, if you gotta pray in public, you might as well have a little fun with it.

Still, product placement in prayer is kind of a sadly apt metaphor for the state of the nation right now.

Boogity boogity boogity,

This is dF

I’ve written elsewhere about the film Smokey & The Bandit, and the observation that, while it’s basically an excuse for car stunts, it’s also something of a snapshot of modern Southern culture circa the mid-late 70s (albeit one that Photoshops out all the guns, churches and pro wrestling).

But this BoingBoing article by Maggie Koerth-Baker reminded me that it’s also something else: a commentary on the state of the American beer industry.

Young people watching the film today might not get why Burt Reynolds and Jerry Reed would have to drive all the way to Texas for a beer run. The clue is in the specific beer they were getting: Coors.

I remember people in Nashville making a big deal about this, because at the time, Coors was in fact unavailable east of the Mississippi due to federal liquor laws and state tax regulations. One reason this was a big deal was that Coors had a rep for being a damn good beer because it didn’t use preservatives or stabilizers.

The BoingBoing article digs deeper, looking at the state of the US brewing industry at the time, and how home brewing eventually caught on as a response to the mass-produced swill that passed for beer at the time – the exception being Coors.

Which then, says Koerth-Baker, begs the question:


See? And you thought SATB was just a dumb, funny car-chase movie.

Okay. It was, really. But it IS true that when I moved to Colorado circa 1987, I drank a lot of Coors primarily because of that film.

East bound and down,

This is dF

ITEM: Children in a remote village in Colombia, South America, travel to school by flying fox.



More pics here.

The obvious joke is, “Oh man I wish I had to take a flying fox to school when I was a kid!” Except it wouldn’t apply to me. I was scared of heights as a kid.

Also, what I’m wondering (and what the article doesn’t explain): how do they get back to the village?

On a rope,

This is dF

Part 3 of a three-part photojournalism series of How dEFROG Spent The Chung Yeung Festival.

After lunch, we headed off to the Hong Kong Wetland Park, which has an interesting history in that it was built in part to give a home for a wayward crocodile that some trucker brought back from the mainland with the intention of eating it, only for the croc to escape into the Shan Pui River and grow large. It caused a media sensation here, not least because crocs are not native to HK.

Anyway, they eventually built the Wetland Park as a sort of nature preserve to create an environment where people could see the natural ecosystem of wetlands. Like so:



“Pui Pui’s Home” is where they keep the croc (who was named Pui Pui in a contest). We didn’t see her, though. She was off-duty, I guess.

We also checked out the museum where you can learn all about what lives and grows in the wetlands – with a special emphasis on frogs, which I approve – and walked around the actual wetland area. We saw a lot of mangrove crabs that day, I can tell you.

Anyway, it was interesting, though one can be forgiven for walking around the wetlands and thinking, “Dude, it’s a swamp.” Still, there’s a peaceful beauty to it, and it’s educational. Also, no mosquitoes. (I'm curious as to how they do that – maybe we just got lucky that day, but HK is very big on mosquito control, what with Dengue Fever and Japanese Encephalitis being two popular afflictions round these parts.)

I imagine certain parts of the Everglades offer a similar experience (only with way more crocs and mosquitoes the size of housecats). No wonder Carl Hiassen is so cranky about Florida property development. Speaking of which, we did see some old truck tires washed up in the mud by the bird-watching tower. This IS Hong Kong, after all.

And so much for the Chung Yeung Festival.

INSTRUCTIONS: By the way, you can click on the mosaics at any time to access the full set of pics.

It ain’t legal huntin’ alligator down in the swamp boy,

This is dF

And now, the first in a three-part photojournalism series of How dEFROG Spent The Chung Yeung Festival.

First up: Kam Tin Country Club!



As mentioned previously, it’s not really a country club so much as a rural playground where you can BBQ, or play football, or play on inflatable structures under the watchful eye of some Cthulhu creature, or look at rabbits, pigs and chipmunks in jail, or ride around on battery-powered scooters, or catch goldfish in a wading pool, or have some snacks. (That picture in the center? That’s the siu mai dumplings I had to tide me over til lunch.)

The football and BBQ activities were the product of seven (7) busloads of Koreans, who were having some kind of get-together. It was funny to see all the football players take a smoke break after the game. But they seemed to be having a good time. And the BBQ smelled good.

Anyway, this is what people do to amuse themselves up in the New Territories. There’s a certain low-budget country charm to it all, though there’s a certain tiredness to it as well – not as quietly desperate as, say, similar parks I’ve seen in mainland China, but it’s in the same genre, I suppose. Still, everyone seems to have a good time, so why not?

I also like the stacked-pillbox architecture you tend to see out that way.

Okay, well, so much for Kam Tin. Up next: dried seafood in Lau Fau Shan!

Living for the city,

This is dF

Well, damn, I only just got the news. Jerry Reed is dead.

There’s a ton of songs I could post as tribute, but this is my all-time favorite – and it’s also the second song of his I ever heard.


The first song by Reed I ever heard is unavailable on the Internets, but it’s the B-side of this song: “The Preacher And The Bear”, which my dad (who worked in the Nashville music business and got a lot of free records) played for my sister and I, figuring we would find it funny. We did. And it was awhile before it occurred to me to play the other side.

Awesome.

Additional ramblings here.

When yr hot yr hot,

This is dF