You need to be careful when you come to Kentucky and base your assumptions on what people in the Bluegrass tell you about Eastern Ky--which is indeed a different place, but not entirely in the way you (or is it "they"?) describe. Lexington is where people go when they've made it and want to hide their roots, and one way of hiding them is to slam the folks they left back home in Leslie County.

You write: "These are very uneducated, very isolated white rural people who are very Republican, conservative, Bible-believing christian, and are still fighting the war between the states."

The current Republicanism is, in part, due to a savvy mixture of fear-mongering politics (here is where the "Obama-is-a-Muslim meme" obtains) and pork barrelism (Hal Rogers, a congressman who is virtually unknown in the broader US, is a champ).

The people of Central Appalachia are indeed "Bible-believing Christians," but not in a way that is easily assimilated into normative American culture. Try Pentecostalism=mainline religion. Or: preachers are agents of the devil because they get between you and your personal God. (Or, for that matter, try Xian missions that go back 100+ years.)

The Civil War ("war between the states" is a Deep South locution, and not used by most people below the age of 130) remains an interesting issue here because it was so vexed a notion in the first place. Appalachia had to decide what side to be on, and it mostly chose to side with the North. (Note the presence of colleges like Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, TN.) However--and this is why it remains a current issue--families split apart when individuals had to choose, as did communities. There were no major battles in Appalachia, but the fighting was more savage because you knew who you were shooting at.

What joins those aspects together is a deep-seated attitude of, well--is fuckyouism a word? Check out, e.g., the contortions Erik Reece has to go through in Lost Mountain to suggest why he, an outsider, has a right to speak about mountaintop removal in Southeastern Ky.

Note, by the way, that Appalachia is not monolithic. In the map of voting patterns published in the New York Times a few days ago, Appalachia was indeed mostly "red" (whether they used red or not, I forget). But the map also highlighted the areas where voters went with Gore or Kerry or both. The area described is Central Appalachia.

To proscribe "race-baiting" in the same paragraph in which she uses the most shopworn anti-Appalachian cliches is pure asshattery.

Sunday night is when I wash my dainties.

1. Go to Google Map.

2. Enter "Dice Kentucky."

3. Look at the map! Pristine, huh?

4. Now switch over to Satellite and see what God sees.

English enough for you?

And I am not a "he."

If banal stalk! (ineptly) cite chapter and worse (or be act and scene?), eggslingerexclaymationmark glom the bibliograffical necessitationmade? Quoth acquarkly? Profread? Punk-two-eight eggsightedly?

Kerflunk!

In Act Eleven, Scene Five of As You Like It, William Shakespeare did not use the twentieth-century lawyers' term he/she.

Sometimes it is.

Sports is one of the few arenas left where we are likely to see grace in action.

What is it when you stand aside and watch an injured person crawl the bases? She was, as she seemed ready to do, entitled to go around the bases on hands and knees--no time limit, take her own bloody-palmed and skinned-knees time--so what the opposing team did was, in fact, not only good sportsmanship (sic), but politically astute: rather than showing up on Sports Center as exemplars of what makes America sport great (at least in theory), they would have shown up, arms crossed and gazing blankly as another kid gutted it out, as the World's Biggest Dickheads (again, sic).

Why would a "specialist in Victorian literature" at a major university be standing in front of a board with anything about Spencer (heh-heh) on it? Is Quaid's character teaching surveys WAY out of his field? Do all hotshot profs at Carnegie-Mellon do that?

If he is grieving for his wife, is there any chance at all that this smart Victorianist mistily quotes In Memoriam?

kitchengirl quotes and writes:

"'I have a 2006 Prius and the gauges are behind the steering wheel, like on every other car.'"

"'Like on every other car?'" Smug much?

1. "Smug"? Did you mean "Unobservant"? How does placement of gauges denote extreme self-satisfation?

2. The sentence structure "X much?" is so 2003.

3. "X is so YYYY" is totally 1998.

If you are going to kiss up to Garry, at least spell his name right. Be-Bop would've.

White guys with guitars. YAWN

Like windsurfing, for instance. Nobody's going to rag on you if you windsurf.

Have I got the girl for you!

(Do you like Dickinson and Neruda?)