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Atlanta

I decided on Monday that there were several reasons why it was necessary for me to leave town for a few days. The water was going to be off all over my apartment complex, I have a promising interview later this week which might make future trips more difficult, and I just sort of felt like it.

So I went to Atlanta.

I just got home. I’m beat so I’m not going to tell any exiting stories about the trip tonight. OK, there weren’t really any REALLY exciting stories anyway, but still…

Randomly Saturday

Random thoughts for a Saturday night:

  • For those of you who may have been concerned about this, the secret ingredient in Wednesday’s cake, while no particular improvement to it, also proved not to be particularly detrimental either. In other words, no one (myself included) really noticed.
  • I spent today in Columbia with my parents, visiting an elderly cousin I hadn’t seen in a good twenty years or so. This being the south, we’re ALL cousins here, so I’m not 100% sure of the relationship. She was my grandmother’s first cousin, which makes her (I believe) my first cousin twice removed. Yes, this being the south, people also pay attention to distinctions like that. Makes it easier to keep up with who’s off limits for breeding.
  • Is it just me, or do truck lane restrictions actually make driving on the freeway MORE dangerous rather than less? Around here, trucks are restricted to the right two or three lanes of urban freeways. In theory, I assume it’s supposed to make drivers in the left lane feel safer. In practice, however, it just makes truckers behave like assholes in lanes where other drivers expect to be moving at a slower pace. So you end up with big rigs riding your ass at 70MPH when you’re not even IN the fast lane because (a) they CAN’T pass and (b) they WON’T slow down.
  • Why is every freaking freeway interchange in South Carolina NAMED for someone? And why is it always someone with a stupid nickname in quotation marks, like Jefferson C. “Buzz” Dingleberry, or something similarly idiotic? As honors go, having your own memorial onramp must rank just slightly above having a toilet in New Jersey named for you.

Winston-Salem, Family, and Boy

We went up to Winston-Salem again this weekend. Have I mentioned what an attractive and interesting place it is?

Anyhow, I took Mark to the airport this morning so he could return for another two weeks in the City of Doom. I miss him already. The past two weeks went by way too fast, with lots of food, more travel than usual, etc. Now it’s cold, I have no one but Edgar (who generates very little body heat) to keep me warm, and I need to get back to the neglected job quest.

I love my boy. And my mom and dad. Especially after the past ten days or so.

Triangle Weekend

The above was, of course, a photo opportunity which couldn’t be missed.

We spent the past weekend in Durham, with a quick side trip to Raleigh. Mark excelled at keeping my mind off something that was bothering me by feeding me regularly and driving me around in the snow all day on Saturday. We ate at Honey’s and Grayson’s and The Angus Barn and Le Coco and Spanky’s. The Angus Barn was particularly fun, because I’ve been driving by the place on the way to the state fair since I was a kid, and I’d never once been inside.

On Sunday, we got to see Becky, who I hadn’t seen in over a year, and who showed us more of Chapel Hill than I’d probably ever seen before. Then we headed home, loaded down with newspapers I’m still reading. Aside from our accommodations at the worst Red Roof Inn in the country, it was a very good weekend.

 

What I Like About the South

That’s what I like about the south:

  • Standing in line at the cafeteria behind the elderly Chinese couple who are having chicken pie, black-eyed peas, and turnip greens.
  • Talking to the very proper, almost geeky librarian who tries to supress her southern accent, but — if given the opportunity — wouldn’t get rid of it entirely for anything in the world.
  • Knowing that any small town big enough to have a Wal-Mart Supercenter probably also still has a daily newspaper.

Message Board Moron

I’ve had my websites for a little over ten years now. I added a message board to this one five or six years back, because it amused me and because I thought some of my visitors might enjoy it. I also added a much nicer one at another site, which actually gets traffic.

Over the years, I’ve only pulled a few messages and I’ve banned very few users. Ninety per cent of these pulls and bans were for spam. A few more were obvious trolls (people who simply wander in to any message board they find and start posting statements designed to piss people off and get a reaction whether on topic or not). Only in two cases have I pulled posts and/or banned regular posters for specific content violations. Both of these cases have been recent and both revolved around posts which I perceived as racist and inflammatory.

I mention this now because some people (including the recently-purged poster) may have gotten the idea that I remove posts from my message boards because I don’t like the grammar they use. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m a language snob, I know I’m a language snob, and I usually manage to grit my teeth and cope with other people’s more casual approach to grammar and punctuation. Maybe the confusion with the recent post occurred because it just happened to occur at almost the same time as a language rant I’d posted just a bit before. This was a coincidence.

Just for the record, here is the post I pulled from the Otherstream message board:

Hey big guy, don’t forget to mention NC’s newest Idol star “Rhonetta Johnson”, she’s making all the crack head/ghetto mama’s proud thru out the Charlotte area! A fine product of our welfare system, as I heard she know’s her ABC’s to G, and can count to eleventeen. LOL

As should be apparent, the problems with this post are definitely not limited to the bad grammar and punctuation. However, it IS a bit ironic that the poster has the audacity to criticize someone else’s educational attainment when he can’t even seem to compose a sentence himself, isn’t it?

This individual has posted on my message board many times before, and sometimes even has expressed some valid and relevant opinions. Other times, I’ve generally just ignored him and laughed off whatever he was trying to say. On one occasion, he made some pretty blatantly unfounded comments about me. I didn’t “censor” that, but this last bilge was just a little too much.

Maybe I should’ve just left it there and let him dig his own grave. Maybe I should have just pulled it down and let the incident pass. Or maybe I should’ve made it more clear what had happened when I commented on it earlier. Either way, I just wanted to clarify for the record.