Futile Horn

06.27.2003 - 1:44 am (it's like someone dropped a house or something)

Is it wrong to think, "Strom Thurmond, dead at last?"

My sister caught me on AIM today. She says that she is looking for someone to help her track salamanders in the swamp. "Someone" apparently means me. At first I was gonna say no, but I did the math in my head and I realized that my sister works long days, and she needs to work... say about 40 days a month. Plus I figure I could chalk it up as an experience. If I was going to spend a summer in the jungles of Honduras with its intestinal parasites and armed bandits, I can brave a few days in eastern Pennsylvania with the bears and the ticks. She tells me the ticks would be minimal. To me an acceptable level of blood sucking monsters: zero. But I am a man or a sissy terrified of insects?

All right fine, it's true, I really hate bugs.

What I am finding interesting is that when I graduated from school, I knew Greek much better than Latin. However now that I am relearning them both, I am having a much easier time with Latin. (I might even like it a little more. Shhh! Don't tell a soul.)

I spent most of yesterday afternoon watching History Channel programs about famous feuds. Suttons and Taylors, Hatfields and McCoys, Whites, Garrards, Bakers, and Howards. I confess I like these kinds of stories.

The last quarter of the Hatfield-McCoy show was spent trying to dispel the hillbilly stereotype that these two families have unfortunately become emblems of. There was a Hatfield woman who said something like, "I am always getting asked if I've shot a McCoy lately. People are surprised to find I have teeth." It's one of the last socially acceptable prejudices (along with anti-Catholicism. I am not a huge fan of Christianity in general, but this is still bigotry in it's plainest form, and thin veil for a disparaging view of the ethic groups that constitute this religious faction). It is pretty offensive that a group of people can caricatured and demeaned without censure because they are white.

Born to play the funky céilí,
Futile Horn