Yes, I live in the south. And this proves it. Don’t miss the special musical close:

Despite what Thomas Wolfe said, I guess you can go home again. Sort of. It’s just that everything looks much different.

I spent tonight in the same building where I spent much of 1982 through 1984, in the student union at UNCG. I was attending an information session for prospective graduate students, since I’m planning to get my MLIS. (And yes, that’s an announcement of sorts.) But there’s no resemblance whatsoever between the Elliott Center of my misspent youth and today’s version.

To start with, the building is about twice as big. It now has a food court and a Barnes & Noble, not to mention an entirely new auditorium. If that weren’t enough, though, they’ve also gutted the old part of the building. Nothing I remember is there anymore. No more radio station hallway where we used to play record frisbee with Survivor albums, no more Student Government office, no more lower level men’s room where I used to, ummm, never mind…

It’s disorienting as hell to be in a building where you’ve spent literally thousands of hours and not to be able to find your way around.

The big controversy in Charlotte this week is about the appropriateness of saying the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish. Of course, you’d think the flag-waving nationalistic types would be ecstatic that people want to recite the stupid pledge at all, but they’re not.

I guess it’s all about empty symbolic gestures, like the insistence that one swear oaths in court (or oaths of office) with a hand on the Christian Bible. Why on earth would anyone want me to swear on a book that means about as much to be as “Aesop’s Fables” or “Tom Sawyer”? Apparently, conservatives reactionaries prefer a memorized, insincere expression of loyalty and truth to an honest and uncoerced one.

My suggestion: all official business in the United States must be conducted using Olde English, since that’s the language God spoke when he and King James first wrote the Bible back in 1611. Thus, it’s God’s “official language” and therefore it should be ours.

This is, after all, an English-speaking, Christian nation, just like it says in the Constitution, right? Oh come on. You know it’s in there somewhere. Maybe toward the back…

Had a visit from Duncan this weekend, which is always a happy thing. We had dinner at the cafeteria, and breakfast at the Cloverdale, and we even managed to do a quickie tour of Greensboro before coming home and paying tribute to Molly Ivins by watching a show she recorded for the late great BayTV in San Francisco several years ago. I miss Molly.

Speaking of the City of Doom, Mark is back there now. I got to experience the coldest low of the year firsthand as I drove him to the airport at 4:30 this morning.

Now I’m very alone and very cold, but at least the satellite and the video camera are both working again. And I’ve got lots of cheap eggs from the brand new Food Lion.

Pretty exciting stuff, huh?