I'm not a sociologist, and my evidence is anecdotal, but I suspect that the rural south is dying.

I've just gotten back from four days wandering around Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky. The kinds of roads I look for on a motorcycle trip dictate that I stay far away from population centers. I spent a whole lot of time in rural, agrarian Appalachia over the last 96 hours and saw a whole lot of people who ... well, let's just say that likely Obama voters were thin on the ground.

I got to thinking about this because the first day I passed an abandoned elementary school on TN 116 near Brushy Mountain State Prison. I was familiar with it because I've stopped to photograph it before; as the trip went on I noticed that a lot of the tiny little towns I passed through have closed, abandoned schools. Closed restaurants and service stations are emblematic of rural areas, but not necessarily the end of a way of life; if the schools are closing it means the people are leaving. If true it's a fascinating development because it's not the usual story of displacement and gentrification; this is true flyover country - areas so remote and rural that if the current occupants die off, it will be a generation or more before urban sprawl begins to fill it in again.

Part of my issue with this is simply nostalgia; for better or worse, this is my culture we're talking about. As infuriating as I find some of the social strictures and anti-intellectualism, I can't deny that my work ethic, sense of personal responsibility and basic no-nonsense values also stem from this culture. Rural America is also a time capsule to comforts we've forgotten; I love staying in neglected roadside motels long past their prime where the water comes out of the shower head at five gallons a minute, so fast that it hurts to stand under, where the towels lack fabric softener and complete the cleaning process by abrading two layers of epidermis. I love it that there are still restaurants in America where you are asked a smoking preference.

Nostalgia only goes so far, though. Nothing reasserts your faith in the modern world faster than blasting down a back country road, speedometer ticking over triple digits, the Manson cut of 'Tainted Love' cranked through your helmet speakers, past a Mennonite farmer harvesting tobacco behind a mule.

tags: cars and driving

My first Yahoo IM conversation of the day yesterday, with a co-worker, went like this:

CW: Hi
Me: Hi
CW: Can you get to the Internet?

Apparently because Ron Glass is sick of being asked and not having any answers, Joss Whedon is releasing an online comic detailing Shepherd Book's back story.

tags: media consumption

Some guy has put together a great timeline of internet memes.

EDIT: Link changed to prevent blogspam.

Christ almighty I am old ... is 'I wanna cast magic missle' really twelve years old?

Apparently this has been out for a while, but I've just discovered a Two Doctors charity special called 'Time Crash.' It features one of my two favorite original series Doctors, Peter Davidson. It's full of meta-references and in-jokes, particularly a riff on the fact that Tennant considers Davidson his favorite Doctor and plays his portrayal very much like Davidson did.

tags: media consumption

Check out codymc's live shot from Hoover Dam:

All three acts of Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog are now posted. I believe they're only free to view through the end of today.

They have a page for everything.

First line of the entry: "For other uses, see Everything (disambiguation)."

I was sitting in my favorite sushi restaurant tonight and realized that this was on the radio. Your ears just hear 'George Michael' for a while and it slowly dawns on you that the lyrics are wrong, wrong, wrong. What amazes me is that the meter works; someone has way too much time on their hands.

In a similar fashion, this one is pretty entertaining as well.

Via achariya:

Rules: Post five things you've done that you believe nobody else on your F-list has done. Indulge in remorse (or communal celebration at finding a kindred soul) if someone calls you out on a listed item.

My checkered history makes this easy, I think. I have...

- driven a taxi
- operated a pole hyster
- operated a backhoe
- operated a yarn extrusion tower
- gotten a pilot's license (unless Brian V still lurks)

When I was a child, one of the cooler things you could have, other than the action figure scale Millennium Falcon, was a carrying case for your Hot Wheels shaped like a tire. If you've never seen one, you were a childhood abuse victim whose unfeeling parents forced you to carry your battered and dinged miniature cars around in an old shoe box. Cool kids had one of these.

I bring this up because I was very briefly elated, while wandering through Target today, to see that Mattel still makes these cases. That was before I discovered that the modern version has ... it pains me to say this ... a functioning spinner rim.

tags: cars and driving, kids these days

George Carlin is dead.

I think I'll have to work motherfucker and cunt into my conversation today, as they're the remaining two of the seven dirty words still standing.

"49% say Democratic Party divided."

tags: politics and opinion

Does it strike anyone else as ironic that the most common souvenir in the National Archives gift shop - bins of them in numerous places all over the store - was a big, squishy eraser? Is this the message they really want to send?

We ate dinner in Alexandria tonight. It's a neat place, very, very old, yet well maintained and lived-in; sort of like New Orleans, but not a shit hole.

Anyway, we wandered into one of the cheap tourist souvenir shops ... we noticed that the presidential candidate crap heavily favored Obama and McCain ... they'd have playing cards, for example, or shot glasses, or pens, or boxes of mints, but very products had a Hillary option. I asked the clerk about it, and she kind of grinned and said "well, we've stopped ordering it. All of our Hillary merchandise is 50% off."

tags: politics and opinion

Finally, it looks like Obama is having a good night; with 75% in, it looks like he's winning NC by a larger margin than Hillary is winning IN. NC is the larger overall state, so despite teh split decision his pledged delegate lead should actually increase marginally tonight. That's not the story she needed.

Not that that will stop her; Keith Olbermann had a hilarious recap of her "strategy" yesterday; the video is worth watching. If you want the much shorter version, this cartoon will take less of your time.

tags: politics and opinion

So, this Saturday, Theresa and I are going to be spending a week in our nation's Capital. What's must-see?

Before this film was released, I said, based solely on the trailer, that it appeared to be nothing more than soft-core gay porn. It arrived on Netflix today, and after having watched about half of it, I've concluded that that evaluation is unfair to gay porn, which I have to assume is at least one order of magnitude less preposterous than this film.

tags: media consumption

I'm torn in about five directions on this polygamist church thing. I'm naturally inclined to resist government intervention in private life decisions, and also very attuned to the amount of damage the government is allowed to wreak in the lives of suspects, without recourse, and on very little evidence. It doesn't help that it looks very much like the government has responded way out of proportion based on the complaint they received.

On the other hand, I have a little experience with insular cultish religious organizations and I have no doubt that these kids are being harmed even if no sexual abuse is occurring, and I frankly find that scenario pretty unlikely as well, given what we know about cultures that promote polygamy.

And on that note, they aren't helping themselves by trotting out these women as ambassadors for their religious and cultural choices. This Larry King interview is a good example of what I'm talking about ... speaking in monotones, eyes downcast, and generally acting lobotomized is no way to win a media cycle. That's some fine PR work, there, Lou.

I don't really have anything to add to this.