Well, bless your heart! 
Sampiro you handled the situation with classic southern charm and diplomacy.
I was really hoping this was going to be more family stories though.
It’s sort of a backhanded slam against the city for not being large enough to have “real” traffic problems. You know, a real city with real culture has to have four hour rush hour stop and go traffic jams.
Which is not to say that Calgary’s traffic system isn’t a collossal practical joke designed to kill tourists.
Well, Knoxville has horrendous traffic and I wouldn’t call it a real city with real culture. I would call it a college town with air designed to give allergy sufferers nightmares, but not a real city. I dare any big city slicker to drive in K-town on game day. Hell, drive at 3:30 on any given Friday. It’ll give you fits.
I’m not sure I really accept the whole disrespected, put-upon southerner thing anymore. Excalibre touched on some older examples of southern culture that carried to the rest of the nation. Country music and NASCAR have gotten much more popular outside of the South lately. And the last five presidents were from Georgia, California, Texas (nominally), Arkansas and Texas. Someone I know in Germany told me he’s only been to the U.S. once, to Atlanta, and was impressed with how familiar and typically american it was. That’s the image that has carried to other countries. It seems to me that the South has more cultural and political influence than population or geography would suggest.
But what do I know? I’m just a yankee.
Atlanta is hardly southern at all anymore. In fact, kids are laughed at in the private schools there if they have a southern accent. It ballooned to 4 million over the last few decades, far more due to immigration from other parts of the country than native population growth, and it now far more closely resembles other inland metropoli than anything southern. Birmingham, Alabama is similar (the steel mills pulled in people from all over the world in the early and middle parts of the century thus giving it a less-southern feel), though of course it was definitely southern in the worst moments of the Civil Rights era.
Armed and bi-polar?
Why don’t you wear flip-flops, Tevas, or Birkenstocks? That’s how we handle that problem here in California. I’m wearing shoes, but I can still see my toes so I can count to 20. Best of both worlds, I tell you.
I think the south is a more direct link to our English/Scotch-Irish past. Immigration from the late 1800s on up north (plus more industrialization) made it a lot different heading into modern times; stirred the melting pot quite a bit.
I’m a fairly light-accented southerner (well, people don’t mistake me for a midwesterner or anything), and I’ve seen the condescending looks on the faces of vanilla suburbanites from Everytown, USA when the South comes up. Like not having generic suburban sameness is some sort of deficit. Screw that. Someday we’ll long for the regional idiosyncracies we once had.
That’s excellent advice. For some reason, the Saskatchewan transplants to Calgary don’t seem to make nearly as much noise as the Toronto and Vancouver transplants (and there are A LOT of SK transplants). Some would say that’s because Calgary is so much better than anything in Saskatchewan, but we don’t see it that way - Saskatchewan was our home, and we loved it like everyone loves their home. I’ll have to remember this advice if I ever do move back to Saskatchewan, and find myself in a city of 200,000 instead of almost a million.
I thought I was going to be taken to task for saying that Bush the Elder was from Texas.
An interesting post. And I must admit I’ve never been to Atlanta, or spent much time at all south of D.C. I’m not avoiding it, just haven’t been yet.
But I was in Germany last fall. The outdoor Christmas market in Nürnburg had rows and rows of stalls selling toys, ornaments, hats, gloves, sweaters; it was quite a place. And there was one section that had booths from different countries, each identified with a city from that country. The american booth was from Atlanta. They had, among many other things, Coca-Cola lamps, Betty Crocker cake mix, and Pop-Tarts. (There may have been Harley Davidson bandanas, too; I don’t remember.) Those are not all southern things, to be sure, but it seemed noteworthy after someone else had already told me that Atlanta was “typically american.”
But I’ll stand by my overall point; that the South is currently overrepresented in the culture and politics of the nation.
I wonder if the classic southern politeness includes a sort of institutionalized non-inferiority complex. And that when something is unmistakenly successful, like Atlanta, it doesn’t count as southern anymore; preserving an image of the South as slighted to give you something to defend against.
And I love that quote from The Third Man.
I completely disagree: Atlanta is very Southern. It’s just that what constitutes “Southern” is changing in some ways.
Daniel
Well, in the summertime we can count to 20, I suppose. If I’d been born a boy I could count to 21!
It’s not like we need more than “one, a couple, some, a mess” anyway, out here in the boondocks, right?
Man, can I relate. I live in a university town in Indiana and all I hear is bitching and moaning from non-Hoosiers about how terrible the place is. Often from people who have lived here for decades. What’s most funny to me is that usually they are using as their reference point such cultural meccas as Lincoln, Nebraska and Columbia, Mo.
At a party I actually heard a woman tell a version of what is about the worlds oldest joke (but she was serious, she didn’t realize she was doing it). This really happened - Said woman (wife of a professor in the French department) was complaining about how provincial the place was and about how all the resturants sucked. It was because all anyone around here cared about was getting a ton of food for a little bit of money she informed me. When I asked if she’d tried out the new Japanese sushi place she told me that she hadn’t because she had heard that the portion size was small for the price of the meal.
I knew the OP would be worth reading. 
I live in NJ. Considering non-New Jerseyans reactions to that statement I empathize with you.
Whicn exit? 
Well, now that you mention it… 
I was explaining family relationships to a newly arrived faculty member last night who asked me, politely, about the inbreeding rumors down here. In the rural south inbreeding is one of those things that isn’t as prevalent as you hear, but incredibly interwoven family genealogies are.
For example, both of my parents had first cousins on her father’s side who are also their second cousins, even though there’s been no actual inbreeding.
My mother descends from a band of 80 South Carolinians who settled in what’s now Autauga County, Alabama, in 1818 (between the War of 1812 [which saw some very bloody campaigns in what’s now Alabama] and the Creek removal). The limited gene pool caused a lot of intermarriages between the same families, and while my mother does indeed have one first-cousin marriage in her ancestry dating to the late 18th century, the following majorly screwed up and confusing relationships involved no actual incestuous couplings at all:
Grandma Katie (my mother’s maternal grandmother) married her step-uncle. His half-sister was her stepmother, but the half was important, because her stepmother was also her great aunt (or great half-aunt). Grandma Katie’s father married as a young man one Paralee DeRamus, the granddaughter of an early settler named Ben DeRamus, and had 9 children. When Paralee died he married a much younger woman, whose name was also Paralee DeRamus, this one the daughter of Ben DeRamus [he was in his early 50s when his granddaughter Paralee was born and in his mid-seventies when his daughter Paralee [by another wife, obviously] was born, hence she was the half-aunt of the first wife). Since he had another 9 children with the second Paralee, this in and of itself made for some odd relationships between half siblings and the like (among other things, the children of Grandma Katie were first cousins and nephews/nieces of the children of Paralee DeRamus II).
Paralee II had a son, my grandfather Mustang’s cousin-uncle Reuben (remember, there’s no actual inbreeding at play), who had twelve children with his first two wives. When he was sixty he married his third wife, a teenager who had two older sisters and one older brother who had already married three of Reuben’s children from his first two marriages. Reuben and Wife 3 had twelve children (the youngest born when he was in his early 80s and bringing his number of kids to 24), who were all sorts of relationships to everybody (another set of “uncle-cousin” relationships as well as various forms of relationship to my grandfather and others.
Paydirt though was Reuben’s brother Darius. Darius and his best friend, Joel, were married to first cousins and they each had children. When Joel’s wife died young he began spending a lot of time at his friend Darius’s house and while there fell in love with Darius’s teenaged daughter Eva (Joel was in his late 30s) and the two eloped. (Darius tried to kill his new son-in-law several times but that’s another story.) Eventually the family made peace. Meanwhile, Joel’s daughter Victoria from his first marriage married a county boy who was killed in WW1 and she came home with her baby to live with her father and his family, and at some point Darius’s wife died and he began spending time at his daughter and son-in-law’s home, and whether it was love or convenience or spite, Darius married Victoria.
Darius had children with Victoria and Joel had children Eva and this was fucked up genealogy paydirt. Each set of children were the aunts/uncles of the other set of children as well as the uncles/nieces of the other set (in other words they each were the uncles of their own uncles and the nephews of their own nephews). Each man had a son-in-law who was also his father-in-law and a wife who was his own step-granddaughter, each girl had… well, you do the math.
Do the math?! I need a diagram just to get through the Grandma Katie paragraph! I’ll take your word for it - convoluted but not interbred.
:eek: I can’t, I never took advanced calculus. Seriously, I’m seriously impressed that you can keep track of it all. I can’t even begin to untangle those connections.
If I’m drawing the family tree right, this is a near-equivalent situation to I’m My Own Grandpa. Eva is Victoria’s stepmother and stepdaughter, and Victoria is Eva’s stepmother and stepdaughter, making Victoria (and Eva) her own step-grandma. :eek:
“And I’m my own grandpa!”