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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Monday, June 22, 2009
Filling the air with pure thuribulum goodness…the latest from Sam.
We follow that septic sludge with Bud Selig’s most joyous #### you to Atlanta fans, our yearly parade of soul-grindingly annoying fans from the NEC. Three games of transplanted Yankee fans soiling the seats of our fair grounds, followed immediately by an equal dose of their paternal twins from Boston. Oh, joyous day. How can we, the unworthy denizens of Atlanta ever thank you Mr. Selig? If not for your ever-brilliant notion of making the World Series essentially meaningless by playing the leagues against one another in the middle of the summer we’d never have the chance to see all of the loud, obnoxious sprawl-eating invaders gathered together in one place like this! You’re the best.
I hate interleague play. I hate people who think a baseball stadium full of families is the proper place to get drunk and moan “Yoooouuuuuuk” like a water buffalo in heat. I hate anyone who thinks Derek Jeter deserves anything more than a good garroting. All of which pales as shadow compared to the burning summer sun that is my hatred for the man who unleashed this unholy calvacade upon us.
[sigh]
At least we get a “break” with Philly in town before the Mets faithful storm in from the upper ‘burbs and add a layer of self-loathing and little brother syndrone on top of the class and gentility we’d otherwise expect this week.
Repoz
Posted: June 22, 2009 at 05:11 PM | 205 comment(s)
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When I lived in Mississippi it was explained to me that the South consists of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina. That was it.
As oppoosed to what? "You guys"? Sheer barbarism.
You know we know when you're trying to do that, right?
Whereas I, of course, insist on including Arkansas from Little Rock down. Before cable, at least, the capital of SW Arkansas was Shreveport.
Youse guys! Y'all is a very handy word. It just is.
You're confusing "southern states" with "The South." Your explanation is true as regard to The South, also known as The Deep South.
We have plenty of waffle houses in Indiana. Of course, much of Indiana is northern in name only (though not the Region, which does seem largely bereft of Waffle Houses).
Yeah, it was about a soldier going to Ft Campbell to get processed before he shipped off to 'Nam.
I have a good friend from Richmond, VA. He makes the same mistake. As far as I can tell, until you get into New Jersey "the south" consists of where you are at any given moment and south of that.
VERY far.
It is a handy little word/phrase.
There does seem to be a measurable Southern flavor to the state's central section.
Pistols at dawn, sir.
Typed like a true son of the South.
Muskets or moderns?
(It's nothing personal, but you have to draw the line somewhere, and you have to do it before you get to Texas I'm afraid.)
I'm all too aware of that, sad to say, having grown up a mere *shudder* 40 miles or so from State Line Avenue.
Varies with usage. In my experience "y'all" is both singular and plural, as needed. The singular usage is acceptable because in the south it's generally assumed that if you invite someone over for lunch they'll bring at least two or three friends or family of their own. We are a very communal society like that. Hell, we used to take the kids to the lynchings. If you're speaking to a larger group you may want to be more specific and use "all y'all." Note that there is no "of" involved in that phrase.
I know that; I'm sure my son will learn. He's got a pretty innocent face so maybe it'll work for him.
As far as I can tell, until you get into New Jersey "the south" consists of where you are at any given moment and south of that.
In PA, we consider VA and KY the northern frontier of the South. WV, MD and DE are not "in the South" to us.
Oh, the Red? Well, I'm OK, then -- it's about 10 miles west of home.
If you were a state that fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, you're the South.
Florida screws that up, though.
Applicable to the possessive as well, as in: All y'all's base are belong to us.
MD is half and half. WV and DE definately not. (Had to explain to a friend, back in the Democratic primary, that just because WV has a lot of unrepentant racists doesn't mean it's a southern state. If your state exists because you didn't want to join VA in seccession, you're not in.)
Florida screws everything up.
Florida screws everything up. Why should this be any different.
EDIT: Dammit Sam. I suppose you'll want a Coke for that.
The lower half of DE (below Dover) definitely has a southern feel to it. Might be all them chickens. :)
L33t has dialects?
bingo. i'm glad i don't live in the south anymore, but i do miss my old mawmaw's gumbo something awful.
Southern Maryland,I'd include too, but not most of No Va.
As for the guy who was talking cross burnings, we don't cotton to that kind of talk. You'll be fixin' for a whuppin' if y'all talk like that down here now.
Q: How does a Southern Belle say "Go F- yourself?"
A: "Thaaaaat's niiiiiiice..." (pronounced "nahce")
A: "Trust me."
This was my grandma's trick (she was from Phenix City).
this is used along the lines of, "well, my brother's daughter got pregnant and ran off with the mailman leaving her four kids alone and stole all my brother's money. Bless her heart."
Also, nobody in the South says, "well, shut my mouth".
Well, hit my head and call me "Shorty," I thought the'all did...
I was told the acceptable term was 'Southron'.
I have watched for it since but still haven't seen it used anywhere.
Varies with usage. In my experience "y'all" is both singular and plural, as needed.
Agreed, but I've also heard "y'alls" plenty of times as well.
Should anyone from the south ever say to you "Bless your heart" you have been gravely insulted.
I'd say more patronized than insulted, at least in a "choose your weapons" sense. I had a girlfriend who grew up on a farm in Star, North Carolina, and was as pure a southerner as you'd ever meet in just about every respect. She used "bless your heart" and "bless his heart" all the time, and it was nearly always to convey a acknowledgment of a person's inherent sweetness along with a varying degree of disrespect for his judgment. To give an example, she might hear about a child who tried to light firecracker under a trash can but wound up nearly blowing his hand off, and say "this poor little boy tried to blow up his neighbor's trash can and almost wound up in the hospital himself, bless his heart." She would never use it in reference to someone she considered "mean," or her deadliest epithet---"small."
EDIT: What Flournoy said.
Nah. I don't really think of other Midwestern states, even heavily rural ones, as Southern. But much of Indiana, as Meatwad notes, is much closer to Kentucky in a cultural sense than it is to Ohio or Illinois, particularly south of U.S. 40.
I was probably being 'punked'.
You know, I somehow can't picture Larry Bird ever saying "bless your heart."
It *might* be a southern AA thing. Maybe. But I've never seen it.
Yeah, I know that, as you can tell by that link, but I think Mr. Bird may still be a "bless your heart" holdout....
When I ate at the Waffle House in Richmond, VA, they didn't have sweet tea. I was shocked.*
* Note, this was 20+ years ago, so they may have learned better by now.
Okay, I get it now. Yeah, we *pronounce* "southern" "sUH-thrun." I read "Southron" and pronounced it internally like "Sauron" and it just made no damned sense at all. I mean, what the hell would the Eye of Southron be looking for anyway? Unless you use the Confederacy as Mordor, rise again, yadda yadda yadda. But Saruman's going to be a lot less creepy if he has to give Gandalf sweet tea while he's held prisoner.
I believe I've gone off the rails. Damn.
The Eye of Southron is probably looking for an impending NASCAR crash.
The term "Southron" is actually used in LotR, to refer to peoples (both human and otherwise, IIRC) from south of the parts of Middle Earth that are the main focus of the trilogy. They generally fight on the side of Sauron for reasons that are never fully explained.
Where the skies are so blue...
For a state its size (tiny), Maryland has unbelievable variety. How many other states have the ocean;
a bay that splits the state in two;
a major mountain range;
a classic old style big city;
a more or less classic 21st century megalopolis complete with urban sprawl;
New Jersey style truck farming;
a leftover handful of tobacco farmers;
and a part of the state whose social mores nearly match that of the Old South.
The truth is that if you drive U.S. 50 and U.S. 40 from east to west, from Ocean City to Garrett County, just about the only type of landscape you won't find would be swampland, Alaskan tundra or Arizona desert. The only state that beats it in terms of variety would be California.
Oh, and Maryland mirrors the country as a whole in one other way: The Democratic parts of the state are growing, and the Republican parts are shrinking.
In the 19th century, the term Hoosier originally meants someone from the slave states who migrated to the Old Northwest Territory (OH, IN, IL, WI, MI).
The Great Lakes were largely responsible for the migration to WI and MI, so that was largely Yanks. Some went due west from PA to OH. IL and IN began as Hoosier states, but then Chicago took off and with the Erie Canal many Yanks went to northern IL as a whole. That left Indiana as the Hoosier state.
Indiana was less affected by late 19th and early 20th century immigration than many other parts of the north. (Generally, the 1920s KKK did best in the most homogenously old-stock WASP states, and they were stronger in Indiana than anywhere else).
There are exceptions and one shouldn't paint with too broad a brush (nevermind that I've been doing just that), but IN has more a southern heritage than any other northern state.
I didn't know all the history. I've just lived here (in several different parts of the state) for 20-plus years and this pretty much sums my experience. The only area that's truly different is the Region (where I live now) and to a lesser extent the band of counties along the Michigan border. The Region is nothing like the rest of the state in a cultural sense.
Nah. The editorial page editor of my old newspaper in Little Rock uses it all the time, or at least used to.
He was from Shreveport & should have had some idea what he was talking about, but he was also one to put on airs. I doubt that's changed, somehow.
Of all the big cities in the Midwest, Indianapolis, even moreso than Cincinnati, was the one most settled (at first) by southerners. And none of the northern Indiana cities was enough of a counterweight to those influences the way Cleveland (and to a lesser extent Toledo) are for Ohio.
And don't think for a second that Illinois doesn't have big sections that are distinctly southern in their mores, particularly Little Egypt around "Kay-ro" (Cairo), which is both figuratively and literally much closer to Mississippi than it is to Chicago.
How many businesses in your current Yellow Pages are named "Dixie"?
When I lived in Durham in the early / mid 60's and again in 1969-70, it seemed as if there were well over 50 such businesses in a city of what was then well under 100,000. Dixie Diner, Dixie Barber Shop, Dixie Vim gas station, etc., etc. But the last time I was down there a few years ago, I can't hardly remember seeing any. Are my impressions true, and have "Dixie" businesses faded at the same rapid rate as the song?
And as a related question for Sam, when did the Atlanta Journal (or the combined AJC) drop its slogan, "Covers Dixie Like The Dew"? Or does it still have it?
And when did Alabama drop its "Heart of Dixie" license plate?
Certainly in Southern Indiana and Illinois, there were quite a few sun-down towns that existed even beyond the sixties.
Well, it was a mixed bag. The county I lived in for 14 years was founded by Abolitionist Presbyterians from Kentucky. There were a lot of places like that throughout Southern Indiana (though it didn't stop some of them from becoming quite inhospitable to blacks).
And then there is Martinsville, which remains an abomination.
YellowPages.com returns 217 hits for businesses named "Dixie" in Atlanta, GA.
That's pretty much all we got left separating us. We used to be able to hold our superior form of auto racing over 'em, but they went and invited the taxi cab circuit up to the Speedway and spoiled that.
I know there are counties in Southern Indiana that are 98%+ white, so that is also a difference.
Is it 'Stars Fall On.."[Alabama] now? or maybe i'm thinking of something else
Sometime after I moved here in 11/01. I've bought an educational tag every year I've been here just because I didn't want that slogan (or its successor, "Stars Fell on Alabama").
Well that and the nepotism that allowed the mongoloid son to take over. FTG.
That's what the tags say. I always accuse them of memorializing space junk. Most of them don't get it.
"In January 2002, the phrase "Stars Fell on Alabama" was added to Alabama's license plates, and the traditional "Heart of Dixie" slogan was reduced to a very small size."
That just makes it more like the Highland South (e.g. East Tennessee) rather than the Lowland South (e.g. most of Mississippi.)
btw, dixie is a term that originated in louisiana.
from wiki: The word 'Dixie' refers to privately issued currency from banks in Louisiana. These banks issued ten-dollar notes, labeled 'Dix', French for 'ten', on the reverse side. The notes were known as 'Dixies' by English-speaking southerners, and the area around New Orleans and the Cajun-speaking parts of Louisiana came to be known as 'Dixieland'. Eventually, usage of the term broadened to refer to most of the Southern States.
That doesn't surprise me, since for so long the face of the AJC on the national level was Cynthia Tucker, whom I understand has recently been given the shaft.
YellowPages.com returns 217 hits for businesses named "Dixie" in Atlanta, GA.
That's a lot more than I would've expected at this point, but thanks for the info. Any idea how many girls are named Dixie these days?---At one point that name was even more common down your way than Scarlett.
Good info, phred. My most vivid memory of Dixie the tune stems from the Redskins games of the 50's, when the Redskins band would always end its pregame show by marching up and down the length of the field playing one chorus after another of Dixie, to the wild cheers of what then was a largely redneck fan base. It was no coincidence that the Redskins were then run by the most notoriously racist owner (George Preston Marshall) in the history of professional sports.
In fact, when the pressure started mounting in the late 50's for the Redskins to drop its white-only hiring policy, Marshall not only told everyone to f*ck off, he even briefly changed the line in Hail to the Redskins from "Fight for old D.C." to "Fight for old Dixie," just to stick it to them. That lasted from 1959 through 1961, but after that the pressure finally broke his resistance---out went the "Dixie" line and in came Bobby Mitchell.
We had a features copy editor in Little Rock whose full name was Dixie Land. Probably she's still there.
For Montgomery, the count is 73.
I will now leave work & drive home, coming within, at most, a couple of miles of "the First White House of the Confederacy."
I love it, and I love the name in general, just as I love any name with a distinct regional flavor. And I'm sure that if you search long enough you'll somewhere find a woman named Dixie Cotton or best of all, Dixie Dew---bless her heart.
That just seems so weird given the Washington, DC area and what it looks like now, and even, to an extent, what it looked like, at least demographically, then. DC was "Chocolate City" in 1960 as well as it still is today. (Actually, it might well be whiter than it was in 1960 now.) It seems weird from the perspective of 2009 to forsake that large a percentage of one's potential fanbase; DC has long had a decent-sized Af-Am middle class.
You have go to pretty deep into Virginia or Maryland to find many redneck types these days.
a long time ago in new orleans at one of the papers i worked for, i hired a woman who was one of five sisters from an old new orleans family, every one of the girls was named mary, and each was known by her middle name or a nickname. the one who worked for me, mary clothilde, was known as missy. which was also my wife's name.
my father's mother's father was named napoleon laborde.
if you haven't guessed, i'm pretty cajun.
Well.......maybe. You definitely won't find them in Arlington and Falls Church. Say, west of Gainesville and south of Fredericksburg.
That just seems so weird given the Washington, DC area and what it looks like now, and even, to an extent, what it looked like, at least demographically, then. DC was "Chocolate City" in 1960 as well as it still is today. (Actually, it might well be whiter than it was in 1960 now.) It seems weird from the perspective of 2009 to forsake that large a percentage of one's potential fanbase; DC has long had a decent-sized Af-Am middle class.
The city of Washington** went from about 70% white in 1950 to about 70% black by 1970, and in 1960 it was about 55% black, though the term "Chocolate City" term didn't take root until the mid-60's. The main cause of the shift was white flight brought about to a great extent by blockbusting. It was not DC's finest hour, and AFAIC you could have taken every banker and real estate agent in the city and put them in the Lubyanka. It would have been too good for them. (/rant)
And to many people it did seem weird that the Redskins would forsake that large a percentage of its potential fan base, especially since in fact there actually were a fair number of black Redskins fans, in spite of it all. But you have to remember that beyond his personal racism, George Preston Marshall's TV network extended southward all the way to Louisiana---and if Dallas wound up being "America's team," then for several decades the Redskins were "Dixie's team." This was before the national TV agreement split the money, and Marshall profited immensely from this arrangement, and it didn't hurt his marketing strategy that the Redskins remained the only all-white team in the NFL, at a time when the white South was up in arms against anything and everything that smacked of "race mixing."
**which in 1950 represented the majority of the DC area's population---well over 800,000 at that point. Tyson's Corner was then a rural crossroads, and there were huge stretches of undeveloped land between downtown Bethesda and the (very small) town center of Rockville. And there indeed was a very big African American middle class, centered around Howard University, but like all other aspects of middle class black life those days other than the occasional musician, it was entirely invisible to whites--- and all of the Washington Post's classified ads were segregated by race.
I'm pretty damn sure that Dixie comes from Dixon of the Mason-Dixon Line fame. As in, "Dixie" is the land south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
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