Some of ya’ll never been down south too much, I’m gonna tell you a little bit about this,
So that you’ll understand what I’m talking about….
Most of the year i don’t get out very much. I go to a lot of baseball games, but if the Royals haven’t made the playoffs I don’t have much to do from October to Spring Training. Which is the same thing as saying I never have anything to do from October to Spring Training.
So I go on long and pointless road trips by myself.
I checked into it an it’s true - over 60% of the homes in Butler Missouri do in fact have electricity.
Butler is actually only about thirty miles or so from my house. Robert Heinlein, the sci-fi writer, was born in Butler. He wrote Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I never read either of those. They also made his book Starship Troopers into a movie with the same name. I didn’t read the book or see the movie. I think they may have assigned a Heinlein short story in ninth grade , but I can’t remember for sure. If they did, I almost certainly didn’t read that either.
One night, however, me and another guy rode to his birthplace in the middle of the night and stole a limb from the shrubs in front of his house to keep as a souvenir. Eccentric loners with no real social skills need to do SOMETHING to keep busy on the weekends too, you know? And this was the best Idea we had came up with for that night. This was a few years before the Internet got popular.
Another time I had the cops called on me for giving away Popsicles in front of a convenience store, but that’s a whole other story. And not a very good one either, so onward…
That’s not a sentiment you see everyday.
This was either in Arkansas or Mississippi, I forget which. And since Arkansas and Mississippi are pretty much the same thing I don’t guess it matters much.
This is a sign on Highway 61 just before Memphis.
I didn’t get a picture of it, but I also saw a sign that advertised “Chitterlings 24/7″. I wonder how many people wake up at 5 am on a Thursday morning with a craving for hog’s assholes? If you don’t know, that’s what chitterlings are - pork intestines and rectums. It’s not pronounced like it’s spelled - “Chitterlings” rhymes with “Shit-lins”
We lived in the south when I was little, and when we were driving around in a mostly black neighborhood and wanted my dad to stop at McDonald’s, and he didn’t want to, he would tell us that we couldn’t because they put chitterlings on their hamburgers there . If we wanted to stop to use the bathroom he told us that we’d catch black plague from the toilet seats.
I know that’s a pretty racist thing for him to have said, but it probably did save him a lot of time and money. Life is full of trade-offs like that.
There is a place in Arkansas that’s actually called “Toad Suck”. I didn’t take this next picture - I just saw the sign on the highway that said “Toad Suck- Next Exit”. I had been driving for about 36 hours at that point and was about just about falling asleep at the wheel (You’d think that I’d find the prospect of my rapidly impending death on the freeway exciting enough to keep me awake, but I guess not.) After I got home I looked up “Toad Suck” on line to see if it was real, or just something I dreamed. It was real.
Is being the prettiest girls at a toad sucking festival really something to be proud of? I’m guessing this photo didn’t make it into either girl’s scrapbook.
I went to the Civil War battlefield site in Vicksburg, Mississippi. The battle was over long before I got there, now it’s just a big park and graveyard. Mostly the other people I saw there were just using it as a place to jog or walk their dogs. But it did have a lot of cannons, monuments and plaques all over the place.
It must have been an horrible battle. Brothers would fight against brother. In the 1860’s it was much safer to be an only child.
They even had a gift shop on the battlefield, but seem like a poor business decision to me. How many solders would’ve wanted to take the time to shop for nick-knacks during one of the major battles of the civil war? Besides that, it seems foolish for them to have been selling bumper stickers decades before the bumper was even invented.
I do admit, however, that it would be pretty cool thing to have a t-shirt that said “I Went To The Battle Of Vicksburg And All I Got Was This Lousy Amputated Leg!”.
They had this exhibit about civil war era battlefield medicine. It was pretty rough back then. Sometimes they would saw a guys leg off, and all they had to give him was a shot of whiskey. You’d have to be a pretty hard core alcoholic to even consider agreeing to a deal like that.
This is a monument honoring the Union soldiers from Ohio. Many Civil War Historians feel the battle could have ended hours sooner if they just would have aimed their cannons in a more conventional manner.
And here’s a monument in remembrance of all the sex toys that were lost or destroyed in the battle of Vicksburg.
About 8/10 roadside motels advertise that they are under new management. I don’t stay in any of those motels. I’d just stay awake all night wondering what had happened there before that was so horrible that they felt they needed to make it very clear that the old guys weren’t around anymore.
The motel I did stay at had a card listing all the fancy amenities that they offered that, apparently, the other motels didn’t. These are real:
-Toll free 911 calls.
- Parking lot.
-It’s possible to have pizza delivered to your room.
-Vending machines.
- A phone
-Towels.
-An office
…. pretty fancy.
Motel tip - Water cost money. So whenever you check in be sure to ask the clerk if you can have a discounted rate it you promise you won’t take a shower. If that works, then try to get them to take another couple of dollars off the rate if you agree not to to flush the toilet during your stay.
I went to Graceland. We lived in Memphis back when Elvis died. One of the first memories I have that I can pin down a date to is Elvis’ funeral. i remember watching all the cars drive by. According to my mother I told my dad that they “all ready took Elvis to the junk yard”, but I don’t remember saying that.
These are the clothes Elvis and Priscilla wore when they got married.
And if you look closely you can see that she was very cold that day.
This is the back yard of the main house where Elvis and the Memphis Mafia beat Tom Jones to death and buried his corpse in the flower garden.
This is where Elvis kept his horses…
And here is the kitchen where they were prepared.
This is Elvis’ grandmother’s tombstone. It’s interesting for two reasons.
1- she was still alive in 1980 - that sure doesn’t sound right.
2- I zoomed in on the bottom part of the grave marker to show that they actually had the stuff on the tombstone copyrighted. I guess they were afraid that it they didn’t there would be a bunch of bootleggers making cheap, fake knock-off replicas of Elvis’ granny’s grave.
Elvis’ anti-drug message.
This is what it looks like when you put a laser pointer up your nose…
…and here is where you go after you put a laser pointer up your nose.
