The Southern Highland Reader

From the because-I-just-can’t-help-myself department, here are a few basketball notes:

1. The Augusta Chronicle tells its readers that an entrepreneur’s plans to launch an all-white men’s professional basketball league in the southeast are meeting with an oddly tepid response.

In a statement, the All-American Basketball Alliance announced that “only players that are natural born United States citizens with both parents of Caucasian race are eligible to play … “.

The league is the brainchild of Don “Moose” Lewis, a professional wrestling promoter, who calls himself the league’s Commissioner and says he seeks to start teams in 10 or so southern cities.

“There’s nothing hatred about what we’re doing,” he told the Chronicle. “I don’t hate anyone of color. But people of white, American-born citizens are in the minority now. Here’s a league for white players to play fundamental basketball, which they like.”

The Atlanta Journal suggests that the whole thing might be a publicity stunt.

For the sake of Moose’s wallet, I hope so, because everybody who wants to sit and watch white guys play catch is over at the softball field.

2. The Washington Post’s Tracee Hamilton holds forth today on the NCAA’s notion to expand the NCAA men’s basketball tournament from its current field of 65 teams to 96.

This from the folks who can’t pull together a playoff system at all on the football side of things.

Writes Hamilton:

What is it about corporate greed that, when a company is making a kabillion dollars, it immediately begins wondering, “How can I make a kabillion and one dollars?” Capitalism is great, as long as you don’t screw up the product. The expanded field would definitely screw up the product.

Since the field expanded to 64 teams in 1985, has there ever been a year when you watched the Selection Show and thought, “Man, 31 teams got hosed.” No. There have never been 31 teams who deserved to make the field but didn’t. One or two, maybe. Not 31.

3. Former Western Carolina star Kevin Martin, a Sacramento King, is one of the top scorers in the NBA. But he gets a lot of his points at the foul line, and all that foul-drawing has been tough on his 6-7, 185lb. frame. He’s been injured for great swaths of each of the past three seasons.

He’s back on the court now, trying to form a cohesive backcourt with rookie sensation Tyreke Evans.

Moreover, he’s trying to add to, not disrupt, the chemistry that got the young and dynamic Kings off to a hot start. So far, not so good: the Kings have lost four straight since his return. To be fair, the losses were on a tough eastern road swing, but the team’s chemistry problems are evident.

Once, about ten years ago, I was having lunch at a Sylva restaurant called the Spring Street Cafe.

From my table I caught a quick glimpse down an unlikely sightline — framed just so by some plants and interior drapes, down a hallway, and through a cracked door — of a baker’s table. On the table was a wedding cake, and the cake was being carefully decorated by two hands. The hands were all I could see.

The owner of those baker’s hands would one day become my wife, and we would come to own a house across the street from the cafe, where we live today with our three girls.

Spring Street, which has been closed for nearly a year, will soon open again under the ownership of former employee Emily Elders, a Cullowhee native. One of her ideas for an advertisement is a group shot of kids that have sprung from the many friends that have surrounded the cafe for the past ten years. (It better be a big ad).

All along, Spring Street Cafe has held a particular niche in Sylva’s lively-for-a-small-town restaurant scene.

First, in the nineties, it was City Lights Cafe, a small eatery attached to the bookstore upstairs, and under the proprietorship of Joyce and Allen Moore.

About a decade ago it was expanded into it’s full service self by Faye Holliday, whose culinary flair traces at least a little of its lineage to Asheville’s Hector Diaz, owner of the eclectic and popular eateries Salsa’s, Zambra and others.

Holliday and her unusually loyal (for food service) crew built a strong following through wild explorations of fresh local and world cuisines, and Tuesday night old time jam sessions and Sunday brunches were de rigueur among a certain Sylva social set.

Faye’s slow food influence can now be felt in a number of kitchens in the southern mountains.

Holliday sold the place to Lisa Agee a few years back, and Agee, whose desserts were quite a calling card, closed her business last spring, a victim of the economic malaise.

Enter Ms. Elders. As a single mom, a student and director of the Jackson County Greenways Project, you’d think she might have enough on her plate to worry about what’s on everybody else’s, but she’s game. She and a band of volunteers have been sprucing the place up in preparation for a January 26 opening.

“I’m very much inspired by Faye’s ideals,” Elders says. “We’ll be as local and as organic as we can be. My goal right away is to keep price points down, and bring back a lot of the items people remember and love.”

Elders has assembled a crew of former employees and a front-of-the-house manager that’ll be familiar to Sylva folks: Michael Redmon has been a longtime employee of Annie’s Bakery.

Several of the specifics that fans of the place remember will return, sushi Wednesdays and Sunday brunch among them. In addition, Elders and new City Lights Bookstore owner Chris Wilcox hope to develop a more symbiotic relationship than the two businesses have shared before. The cafe’s hours will be much closer to those of the bookstore, and the bookstore will open on Sunday afternoons.

Spring Street will hit the ground running, events-wise. Elders will host a Chamber of Commerce business after hours on January 28th, and will open for business the next day.

Book-signings and an art opening are already on the schedule for February.

CULLOWHEE–When outfitter Burt Kornegay, owner of Slickrock Expeditions, got an email from a friend inviting him to a save-the-Dillsboro-Dam shindig, he fired off a pithy response. Naturally, it was immediately shared all around the interwebs, where by complete happenstance it filtered all the way down to me.

Here it is, with his permission:

First, the note from his friend:

Yo, read all about it….

Saturday night there is a benefit in support of saving the Dillsboro Dam. So, all you anti-establishment, anti-Duke Power people come on down and catch the 7:30 set of singer-songwriter Barbara Duncan. If you’ve not heard her, you owe it to yourself to check this out and to have a few beers in the process, not to mention to support a good cause. So, let’s make Sat. eve. a party night and fill up Guadalupe (that also serves great food).

Hope to see you there …

Then, Burt’s response:

Hey, Partner, Hold on there!

Why do you say that fighting to keep the Dillsboro dam is “a good cause”?  Because doing so spites bad ole Duke?  Let’s not forget that the dam plugs up and drowns the Tuckaseegee River, halting the travel of river creatures and backing up an unnatural mile-long trough of deadwater behind it. Also, from a human perspective now, the dam stands in the way of creating a real, honest-to-goodness “river park” in Dillsboro.  By honest-to-goodness river park, I mean a park with a river that actually flows, like at East LaPorte (probably the most popular public place in our county).  A real river park would make a pleasurable place for all of us to go, and it would be good for businesses in Dillsboro too.  Hundreds of old concrete plugs like the Dillsboro dam are coming down all across the US,  cheered on by river-loving and civic-minded people just like yourself, and I say, Right On!

As for your rebel claim that it is “anti-establishment” to fight for the dam, because doing so is anti-Duke, I say, wasn’t the dam built by the county’s moneyed “establishment” in the first place, back when other segments of the local “establishment” were as busy as beavers gnawing out railroad lines, felling the virgin forest, and turning the Tuckaseegee into flowing mud?  I mean, what could be more “establishment” than a dam?  (Well, perhaps a skyscraper or aircraft carrier.)  And what could be more “establishment” than to align yourself with the likes of county manager Ken “Dam or Die” Westmoreland, who doesn’t mind taxing us to the tune of more than a quarter-million-$ to pay lawyers, in his attempts to do  .  . . what?  Why, to milk still more $ from Duke! When it comes to the Dillsboro dam, the “anti-” lies in taking it down.

Kornegay’s longtime Jackson County business has been the focus of some media features lately. Here and here from the Smoky Mountain News, for example. The Sylva Herald has also written him up (you can search that story at their paid archives, here).

Recent news from the legal struggle over the dam from the Sylva Herald here (link will expire in one week), and from the Smoky Mountain News here.

Man, they have a guide for everything these days:

MT. HOLLY–It’s been three decades since the place was burnt to make room for a warehouse, but my memories of my grandparents’ farmhouse in the rolling hills near Mt. Holly are all emotion and texture.

The kitchen is at the heart of it, of course, as with all house recollections, so when Tipper at the Blind Pig and the Acorn wrote about cornmeal mush recently I took a second to close my eyes.

The large kitchen had west-facing windows, and coffee in a percolator. There was a breakfast porch for when the weather was right, and giant pin oak trees, a row of stone outbuildings and jumbled blankets of ivy right outside.

Inside there was little breakfast table where my pa-pa rolled his cigarettes. The wall lamp had a rooster shade, and the plate on the light switch said “outen the light”.

My grandmother made cornmeal mush here, although not without complaint. She said it took too much stirring.

CHARLOTTE–As a kid growing up in the steep, deep woods up Cullowhee mountain, I looked forward to family trips to Charlotte as a source of enchantment. The 1970’s Queen City skyline was big city stuff for me, and some of my clearest memories are of a vintage JFG billboard that we passed as we traversed the south side of town.

Charlotte’s allure has gone far away, but I still love that sign.

Well, it’s coming down tomorrow, says the Charlotte Observer, and to add injury to insult, it’ll be replaced by a sports injury doctor’s knockoff reading “ACL”.

Here’s the sign:

The best part of south Charlotte, too

Here’s the brief piece from the Observer.

SYLVA–Once, at one of the little-kid birthday parties we frequent these days, the pinata wouldn’t break. No matter how many anklebiters smacked it with the broomstick, and how hard they hit it, there it swung.

The father of honor, Tobias, was beside himself. “The one thing you buy from Wal-Mart that’s supposed to break …” he fumed.

Well, there will be no such letdown at little Araceli Anahi Oroz’s party on Sunday, we hear. She’ll be celebrating way up at Sol’s Creek Baptist Church, in Little Canada, and her mom says they won’t need any bootleg pinata at their place.

Candy aside, it’s not every day you go to a party nine miles up Canada, even if you live nine miles up Canada, and the invitation brought to mind a list of sayings, compiled by Loyal Jones. A folklorist and humorist, Jones, a North Carolina native, was the longtime director of the Appalachian Center at Berea College in Kentucky, and you see his writing here and there.

Once he collected a few aphorisms about living off the beaten path, and I came across it and tucked away. Here are some favorites:

• We live so far back in the sticks that the sun sets between our house and the road.
• And we use hoot owls for chickens.
• And we go towards town to hunt.
• And we have to grease the bushings three times to get to the store.

It’s hard to dip into Jones without being carried away by the current, though, because here is one of those rare, gentle, funny and altogether thoughtful people from whom its nearly impossible to turn away. His knowledge of southern mountain folkways is eclipsed only by his understanding of how the people of the mountains fit into our great national story.

While I was scratching around for the living-in-the-sticks list, I came across several more items of Jones’s that I’d put away.

One was a transcript of a speech he gave in Prestonburg, KY, a few years back, which was as concise a summary of the appalachian “war on poverty” as you’re likely to find.

Here are a few excerpts from that speech:

Down in Harlan County there was a man named Fiddler John Lewis. He was an old nineteenth century man. And he played the fiddle very well and he spoke in a very ancient English and so, a lot of people had played attention to him. Well, eventually, a professor at Berea who was interested in fiddle music went down there to interview him and he had him play and he played several tunes and he said, “Those are wonderful tunes. You play well, have good technique. Why don’t you play me your favorite tune.”

So he played one. And [the professor] said, “That’s really nice. What do you call it?” He said, “I call that ‘Napoleon crossing the Rockies.’”

Well, this was a professor, you see, who feel that they have to confront falsehood and establish truth whenever the occasion arises. So he said, “Well, you play well and you have good technique, but you know, Napoleon never crossed the Rockies…”

Clever John reflected and said, “Well, historians differ.”

Truer words were never spoken, of course, you know.

Another …

I had a real good friend. He was fighting the war on poverty … He had had a modest Dodge Dart, which, you know, was an appropriate poverty fighting vehicle. But he got hit by a coal truck, and he had, it was totaled, and he was almost totaled. But he got out, and got through, rehabilitated himself.

And he was getting’ ready to buy another car and a friend of mine told him, “You need to get a Buick. A used Buick is better than any Dodge Dart you’ll ever get,” he said. So he bought a Buick Electra – this was probably a 1962 Buick – and it had fins and it had chrome and it had … Electra … So anyway, he went over in eastern Kentucky, got lost going to a meeting in Leslie County and … he saw a fella standin’ on the side of the road and pulled up beside him – he’s over on that side, he reached over here and put down the window on that side – said, “Could you direct me to Lower Grassy?” This fella said, “Yeah, you go down here and turn left, you can’t miss it.”

They always say that, you know.

He said, “Thank you very much.” He put the window up and this fella, he wanted do a little talkin’. He pecked on the window and he put it back down again and he said, “What line of work are you in?” and Larry, not knowing what else to say, said, “I’m with the war on poverty.”

Fella stepped back, looked over that Buick, said, “It looks like you won.”

And one more:

Ron Thomas’ son, who has that wonderful band called The Dry Branch Fire Squad, said that when the war on poverty came his grandmother came down to the courthouse and offered to surrender.

SYLVA–City Lights Bookstore will host two author events, each featuring authors with connections to the local area.

First, on Friday, September 18th at 7:00 p.m. the store will host a reception for the contributors to a new book of essays on Cherokee health and culture, entitled Under the Rattlesnake: Cherokee Health and Resiliency.

The book is edited by Lisa Lefler, an anthropologist at WCU and features essays be several enrolled members. The book includes contributions by Lefler, Susan Leading Fox, Tom Belt, Roseanna Belt, David Cozzo, Jenny James, Russell Townsend, Michelle Hamilton, and Heidi Altman.

The event will be a celebration of the book’s publication and a reception for its contributors. Copies of the book will be available for sale and can be autographed.

On Saturday, September 19th at 7:00 p.m. Maggie Valley author Kathryn Magendie will be at the store to read from her acclaimed novel, Tender Graces.

The book follows young Virginia Kate Carey through complicated family dynamics and a present that is always colored by the past. The death of her troubled mother and memories of her abused grandmother lure the adult Virginia Kate back to the West Virginia hollow where she was born. She is the daughter of a beautiful mountain wild-child and a slick, Shakespeare-quoting salesman.

Reliving her turbulent childhood and the pain of her mother’s betrayals, she struggles to reconcile three generations of her family’s lost innocence.

The book is a Staff Pick at City Lights, and the store is delighted to introduce the author and her book to local readers.

The Telegraph of London offers up some obviousness today, writing about research that shows that men who “spend even a few minutes in the company of an attractive woman perform less well in tests designed to measure brain function than those who chat to someone they do not find attractive.”

Facebook pal Eric Knisley of Raleigh gets a relative tip-o-the-hat for this one, which he sent along after assigning it to his personal “Well, duh” category.

Here’s an excerpt from the Telegraph:

The results showed men were slower and less accurate after trying to impress the women. The more they fancied them, the worse their score.

But when the task was repeated with a group of female volunteers, they did not get the same results. Memory scores stayed the same, whether they had chatted to a man or a woman.

Another:

Psychologist Dr George Fieldman, a member of the British Psychological Society, said the findings reflect the fact that men are programmed to think about ways to pass on their genes.

‘When a man meets a pretty woman, he is what we call ‘reproductively focused’.

‘But a woman also looks for signs of other attributes, such as wealth, youth and kindness. Just the look of the man would be unlikely to have the same effect.’

Bonus:

John Hiatt tune “Little Head”

CULLOWHEE–A Washington Times columnist says Western’s visit to Vanderbilt is this Saturday’s season-opening mismatch 25th-most-likely to produce an upset.

Out of 38 total mismatches.

Sadly, the Cats come in 23 notches below Appalachian, which opens up at ECU. But Patrick Stevens does figure Western is five notches more likely to win in Nashville than the Citadel in Chapel Hill, and a full 13 spots more likely to come away happy than Charleston Southern is from the Swamp.

Other SoCon teams on the list: 8. Samford at Central Florida; 13. Wofford at South Florida.

Read the whole shebang here.

CULLOWHEE–As kids on Cullowhee Mountain, we learned the lattice of logging roads and cul-de-sacs of little mica mines around us as carefully as we studied our own yards. But we sensed the difference of a real trail. These footpaths had their own language — a whisper in most cases — and it was along them that time eddied and flowed. It was along real trails that we’d find things: tree carvings left by long lost sweethearts, sipping springs that had been known for a century or two, Mr. Pressley’s lost hound dogs.

Here Christopher Camuto explains about real trails in his book Another Country:

A trail descended from a logging road makes for suspiciously easy walking. Even after such a road has become overgrown and offers only an inviting footpath, you can tell its origins from the odd consistency in its grade and the way it glides along an unnatural contour. That’s how the machines got in the garden and the logs got out. But the fragment of trail I’m on now jags through the woods as if it had a more intimate relationship with the terrain, unwinding footfall by footfall along a narrow bevel of least resistance through the tangled vegetation and around sudden brows of rock without altering anything in its path. Unless you adjust your pace to match the jagged surface of real ground, this path will turn your ankle and run the toe of a boot into the constant variation underfoot. A trace of ancient trial and error, a true trail makes choices that are sometimes hard to fathom, thoughtfully looping downslope to avoid a windthrow that disappeared a century ago but jamming you against the tree that fell last winter. It’s the narrow, winding path of predator and prey, the way of hunters and warriors, lovers and medicine men. A rare thing now, a true trail, a trail that leads somewhere.

Is it damp where you are? Well, here’s some dry humor to help with that.

The prestigious Edinburg Fringe arts festival has been handing out well-considered awards for decades, some of which are for comedy. Judges sifted through thousands of jokes and came up with a top-ten list, along with a list of “worsts”.

The best joke of the year:

Dan Antopolski - “Hedgehogs – why can’t they just share the hedge?”

A few more:

2) Paddy Lennox – “I was watching the London Marathon and saw one runner dressed as a chicken and another runner dressed as an egg. I thought: ‘This could be interesting’.”

5) Jack Whitehall – “I’m sure wherever my dad is; he’s looking down on us. He’s not dead, just very condescending.”

6) Adam Hills – “Going to Starbucks for coffee is like going to prison for sex. You know you’re going to get it, but it’s going to be rough.”

9) Dan Antopolski – “I’ve been reading the news about there being a civil war in Madagascar. Well, I’ve seen it six times and there isn’t.”

A British comedian in your basement is better than a dehumidifier, but Sears – to my knowledge — doesn’t carry them.

Among the worst, plenty of Michael Jackson jokes:

Carey Marx – “I’m not doing any Michael Jackson jokes, because they always involve puns about his songs. And that’s bad.”

Alex Maple – “Michael Jackson only invented the moonwalk so he could sneak up on children.”

Here’s the story from the BBC.

Iris Dement and Emmylou Harris from 1995. Jerry Douglas on dobro.

NATIONAL–The lead from Jonathan Alter’s current Newsweek column:

The United States has two parties now—the Obama Party and the Fox Party. The Obama Party is larger, but it is unfocused and its troops are whiny. The Fox Party, which shows up en masse to harass politicians, is noisy and practiced in the art of simplistic obstruction. As the health-care debate rages, it’s the Party of Sort-of-Maybe-Yes versus the Party of Hell No! The Yessers are more lackadaisical because they’ve forgotten the stakes—they’ve forgotten that this is the most important civil-rights bill in a generation, though it is rarely framed that way.

There are few civil rights issues, it’s worth adding, that Alter’s “Party of Hell No!”, taken as a mindset, haven’t fallen on the dark side of. From Selma to labor, and from child labor to McCarthy, they are as dependable as can be.

A different matter altogether ...

Here’s some current info on health care in North Carolina:

Families USA and Action for Children North Carolina jointly released a new report today that found that family health care premiums rose an estimated 5.3 times faster than earnings for North Carolina’s workers from 2000 through 2009. In that 10-year period, family health insurance premiums rose by 96.8 percent, while median earnings rose by only 18.4 percent.

The Families USA report for North Carolina is an update of its original ground-breaking 2006 report, which was the first of its kind to document these changes on a state-specific basis. Among the new report’s key findings are:

For family health coverage provided through the workplace in North Carolina, the average annual health insurance premium (employer and worker share of premiums combined) in the 2000-2009 period rose from $6,649 to $13,083-an increase of $6,434, or 96.8 percent.

Between 2000 and 2009, the median earnings of North Carolina’s workers rose from $23,080 to $27,330-an increase of $4,250, or 18.4 percent.

Plus, St. Pete Times’ invaluable Truth-O-Meter, the Health Care page.

REGIONAL--Regional bluegrass band Balsam Range — a favorite in Sylva that has played both Greening Up the Mountains and the Bridge Park Music Festival — recently hit number one on the Bluegrass Unlimited magazine chart.

Here’s a story from Tony Kiss at the Asheville Citizen-Times.

Recording the hit:

Antoine Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), author of the the “Little Prince”, takes occasional criticism for his over-the-top prose.

But the man led an over-the-top life. He worked during the 1920’s as a pilot for Aéropostale, flying mail routes over Europe, Africa and, eventually South America. He flew during a time when pilots flew largely by line-of-sight. When something went wrong with their craft, they landed, pulled out tools, fixed them, and took off again. In 1935, Saint-Exupery and his navigator crashed their Caudron C-630 Simoun in the Libyan Sahara while attempting to set a new Paris-to-Saigon speed record. They’d been in the air for 20 hours. They had no idea where they were, and no rations or water. Yet they survived for four days, before a miraculous rescue by a Bedouin on camelback.

“Part of the fascination is the Frenchman’s Hemingwayesque identity as a man of action”, wrote the Wall Street Journal’s Benjamin Ivry in 2004. “Saint-Exupéry was never a flawless pilot, and he survived a number of serious crashes. Nevertheless, he flew mail planes in South America in the 1920s, including a mountain route from Buenos Aires to Patagonia that inspired his 1931 novel “Night Flight” as well as a 1938 essay collection, “Wind, Sand and Stars.”

My personal attraction to Saint-Exupery has little to do with desktop-calendar-ready “essential wisdom”, of which he produced plenty. In fact, I’ve never even found much magic in the “Little Prince”.

What amazes me is the mystery and adventure that flows around his story to this day, and the ability he had to capture vivid snippets of that life in prose.

Saint-Exupery died in a apparent plane crash over the English Channel during World War II, and nobody really knows whether he crashed or was shot down. But in 1998, a fisherman pulled up the author’s silver bracelet from the ocean floor, and two years later, a diver found the remains of Saint-Exupery’s P-38 Lightning off Marseilles.

Here’s an excerpt from Wind, Sand and Stars, in which the author describes part of the trans-South-Atlantic flight of his colleague Jean Mermoz:

… when Mermoz first crossed the South Atlantic in a hydroplane, as day was dying he ran foul of the Black Hole region, off Africa. Straight ahead of him were the tails of tornadoes rising minute by minute gradually higher, rising as a wall is built; and then the night came down upon these preliminaries and swallowed them up; and when, an hour later, he slipped [back beneath] the clouds, he came out into a fantastic kingdom.

Great black waterspouts had reared themselves seemingly in the immobility of temple pillars. Swollen at their tops, they were supporting the squat and lowering arch of the tempest, but through the rifts in the arch there fell slabs of light and the full moon sent her radiant beams between the pillars down upon the frozen tiles of the sea. Through these uninhabited ruins Mermoz made his way, gliding slantwise from one channel of light to the next, circling around those giant pillars in which there must have rumbled the upsurge of the sea, flying for four hours through these corridors of moonlight …

A promo on the radio this morning:

We’re entering a new and more dangerous era of negotiations with the Russians, because up until a few days ago we could count on Sarah Palin to keep an eye on ‘em from her house, but now we’re losing that advantage.

A few late night lines:

“Friends of Governor Palin are saying that she is resigning because she is tired of attacks from the media. Thank God I didn’t say anything.” –David Letterman

“It’s an emotional day. A lot of us are still mourning the loss of one of America’s most entertaining figures, who left us all too soon. But don’t worry, folks, Sarah Palin will be back. Comedians everywhere are praying.” –Conan O’Brien

“She said that before she decided to quit, she called Dick Cheney. Do you remember Dick ‘Ka-boom’ Cheney? And I thought, well, this is great because when you want some advice on strategic maneuvers, I mean, you go to the architect of the Iraq war. I mean, isn’t that where you go? That’s where you want to be.” –David Letterman

“President Obama right now is in Russia. Obama went there because from Russia you can actually see Sarah Palin cleaning out her office in Alaska.” –Conan O’Brien

SYLVA–Our house is a block off Main Street in this little mountain town, so we live just about as “urban” a life as can be in a berg of 2,000. Until last month, we shared our block with the post office, and some mornings traffic at our stop sign would run two or three cars deep.

Our little girls are pretty much “townies”, then; Ada and Iris are squeamish yet when it comes to bugs and worms, and they don’t get into the woods as often as we’d like.

Bald-faced hornet

On the other hand, they’ve figured out how to work Annie the baker for cookies, Dieter the brewer for root beer, and they learned way early how to stay clear of moving vehicles.

They met their first black (rat) snake not long ago — Ada is seven and Iris, three — on the same day they were cold-busted poaching tadpoles in the memorial garden of the episcopal church next door.

Our friends Joyce and Allen own the bookstore across the street, and they live an opposite life. They have 90-acres in the still-relatively-remote Canada community, with a little farm and some livestock. They’ve been there for four decades. And their recent blacksnake story, while short on episcopalians, had a bunch of extra snakes.

It seems Allen went out to his shed the other Sunday on an errand and he discovered, in a surplus roll of nylon netting they use to keep birds out of the blueberries, a couple of entangled blacksnakes.

As he went to reposition the netting in order to cast out the serpents, Allen disturbed an unknown nest of bald-faced hornets – which aren’t actually hornets but rather wasps of the yellow jacket family – and they lit him up three or four times as he beat his retreat.

When I was a kid we called bald faced hornets “japanese hornets” and once, Kenny Burns, who later played baseball for the Memphis Tigers, chased a screaming line-drive down the hill and into the woods, where he found a perfectly round hole through the middle of a very large nest of the creatures and came screaming back out, himself. It’s a wonder it didn’t put him off baseball.

Anyway, after the stings, Allen regrouped and freed the snakes. Later, though, on a different errand, he found that the first two snakes had been replaced by five more, in the same netting.

Blacksnakes, as we all know, are pretty good to have around. They keep away poisonous snakes, and eat rodents. On the other hand, they get pretty big – some as long as six feet – and so they’re not always the most fun to hold. That’s what Joyce and Allen did that night, Joyce meticulously clipping glossy black netting away from glossy black snake, in the dark, while Allen seized each in turn by the neck, and it wrapped itself around whatever part of him that was available. The work went well into the wee hours, so Joyce was a little groggy in the retelling the next day.

We’re sure they were looking for some good sleep the next night, but it turns out they were awakened by their sheep-guarding donkey, Doyle, well before dawn, telling them in his own way that there was a raccoon in amongst the chickens.

From the sneaking suspicion category:

A news piece carried by the BBC yesterday gave details of a study at Harvard that showed that just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of it content.

An excerpt:

[While Twitter is the fastest-growing social network] the Harvard team found that more than half of all people using Twitter updated their page less than once every 74 days.

And most people only ever “tweet” once during their lifetime, the researchers found.

“Based on the numbers, Twitter is certainly not a service where everyone who has seen it has instantly loved it,” said Bill Heil, a graduate from Harvard Business School who carried out the work.

On a typical online social network, he said, the top 10% of users accounted for 30% of all production.

“This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network,” the team wrote in a blog post.

Read the whole piece here.

SYLVA--A few days back, I was blathering on to some skeptical hipsters about having seen the Beastie Boys booed off the stage in Spartanburg, SC.

Of course that show was in the summer of 1986, and they were warming up the crowd for Run DMC as part of some monsters-of-rap thingamabumper. Months later, the Boys released “Licensed to Ill”, and that, podners, was all she wrote. They were well on their way.

Two decades on, the Beasties were nominated to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and they’re still a red-hot ticket today, as evidenced by sales for their surprise small venue performance at Asheville’s Orange Peel later this week. The show was announced about a week ago, and tickets sold out in a matter of minutes.

Y’all enjoy it. I’ll be putting the kids to bed.

Here’s a tidbit from Wikipedia:

Beastie Boys began as a hardcore punk group in 1979, and appeared on the compilation cassette New York Thrash with Riot Fight and Beastie. They switched to hip-hop with the release of their 12″ single “Cooky Puss”, which was followed by a string of successful 12″ singles and their debut album Licensed to Ill (1986), which enjoyed international critical acclaim and commercial success. The group is well-known for its eclecticism, jocular and flippant attitude toward interviews and interviewers, obscure cultural references and kitschy lyrics, and for performing in outlandish matching suits.

Here are a couple of images, and video (sorry, video has been pulled) from a performance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon a couple of weeks ago, backed up by, mind-twistingly, the Roots.