Blessed Are the Gun-Toters, For Theirs is the Paranoid Fantasy

A Kentucky Assembly of God Church is hosting a "bring-your-gun-to-Church" Sunday.

We are not making this up.

Free Advertising for Foxx?

Visiting the homepage for The Appalachian Visitor Center, an advertisement-driven for-profit website, we were startled to be confronted by that all-too-familiar visage, giving her blessing to $$ tourism.

How many furriners, given The Madam's recent notoriety, might turn around their plans to come here, seeing who represents (?) us in Congress?

Lights! Camera! Action!

We're generally not agreeable about government-funded corporate welfare. As a rule, it makes us dyspeptic. But this idea currently up in the N.C. General Assembly, has our full support.

According to the N.C. Film Office, in the past 27 years some 800 movies and 15 TV series have been filmed in our state, vastly enriching the local areas where they set up with jobs (temporary, but still), props, services, even the occasional trained dog. Having supplied props and furniture to both "The Winter People" (1989) and "The Last of the Mohicans" (1992), we loved to see "the movie people" coming. Generally, they paid cash.

Don't know what the current statistics are, but back in the mid-1990s North Carolina had risen to third among all the states for on-location movie production, behind California (duh) and New York. Third. There for a while we were experiencing a building boom of studio facilities. The best known and largest is in Wilmington, but they're scattered through the middle of the state too. That's infrastructure ... and jobs, lots of jobs. How many extras, weapons experts, horse wranglers were hired for just "The Last of the Mohicans"? Thousands. The ripple effects are pronounced. Our western mountains are still visited by people who were first stunned to see them represented in that Michael Mann movie.

In fact, it was the movies that put Hendersonville, Hickory Nut Gap, Bat Cave, and Chimney Rock on the map back before World War I. When I was actively researching Hollywood history, I was astounded to discover that film crews were flocking to Asheville and Hendersonville every summer beginning in 1910 to make dozens of "two-reelers" that were shown in the nickleodeons of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Hickory Nut Gap and Chimney Rock got utilized repeatedly as background for moonshiner and feud shoot-'em-ups as well as a series of movies about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Those silent films didn't create Asheville as a destination, but they certainly didn't hurt. Movie crews and troops of actors regularly monopolized the rooms at the Esmeralda Inn, that historic stopping-off place near Bat Cave that (alas) burned down (again!) a few years ago.

What's being proposed in the General Assembly is a very modest tax rebate, a far more productive investment, IMHO, that the millions offered Dell, Google, and various other corporate flim-flammers.

Odd Man, Out

So South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's staff was just plain lying for him when they announced yesterday that he was on a hike.

Instead, he was in Buenos Aires without telling his wife and four kids.

"I wanted to do something exotic," Sanford told The State newspaper.

ADDENDUM
The "something exotic" that Sanford was doing turns out to be an Argentinian woman.

Watauga ... Most Under-Insured County in N.C.

According to the U.S. Census, in 2005 Watauga County had the highest percentage of uninsured people in the whole state of North Carolina ... some 31 percent (hat-tip: MEM). Some 49 other N.C. counties had over 20% of their residents uninsured. Those numbers are probably higher now.

Meanwhile, N.C. Senator Kay Hagan is dicking around with the future of the public health, trying her best to find a way to pump even more money into the gigantic boondoggle of the for-profit private insurance rip-off, while denying her constituents any true shot at basic health-care insurance reform.

Down the Primrose Path

That's George W. Bush in 2005, addressing the delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention, the wholly owned subsidiary of the national Republican Party.

That call & response cheerleading may be a contributing factor to why the Charlotte Observer says this a.m. that the Southern Baptists have awakened to a perceptible decline in their numbers. Writes Yonat Shimron:

Having pushed out moderates and liberals during its decades-long revolution, the convention, which gathers in Louisville, Ky., on Tuesday, is finding itself losing members and performing fewer baptisms.

Although the losses are not dramatic -- membership in the SBC fell by 38,482 people, about 0.2 percent, in 2008 -- they are particularly painful for a denomination whose singular reason for being is to make converts.

In other words, if you're a Baptist and not nailing new pelts to the cabin walls, you're certainly a failure if not something of a disgrace. At least that's what they used to tell us kids in Sunday School. (So I'd march right out and try -- unsuccessfully -- to convert my nearest neighbor, who bought her likker from my own bootlegging great-aunt. I never attempted to convert that aunt, given the odds ... and the personal hazard.)

Anyway, reporter Shimron works the margins of the whole big problem of a major American religious organization getting itself so thoroughly associated with a now failed politics, and what the fall-out from that association might end up being.

The New Wind Generator at ASU

Went up on Friday. To get a sense of the scale, that's a man standing at the top of the tower.

Starting in 2004, the students at Appalachian State University have voted overwhelmingly to "tax" themselves $5 per student per semester to fund the Renewable Energy Initiative (REI), its mission "to reduce the environmental impact of Appalachian State University by replacing the university's existing sources of energy with cleaner forms of renewable energy...." Some 82% of students voting in 2004 supported the initiative. Last year 93% of students voted "yes!"

This wind generator is the latest installation on campus funded by that $5 assessment. Previous projects have included biodiesel/solar/photovoltaic projects, with more to come. This generator will produce an estimated 150,000 - 200,000 kilowatt hours annually, enough to power 10-15 homes. (Lots of technical background info at this REI page, including some very cool simulated movies of how the generator will look to a person driving up Rivers Street and a 360-degree fly-around of the site behind the Broyhill Inn.)

New N.C. Blog Has Roots in Foxx Country

Anne Schroeder Mullins, who blogs the "Shenanigans" column at Politico.com, was the one who outed the Virginia Foxx staffer who sent out a sort of open invitation to fellow Capitol Hill workers while her boss was away: "Office beers. on taxpayer time. you're welcome, fightin 5th district."

Now Mullins is reporting that the staffer "is back home in North Carolina" ("resigned" from Foxx's staff, she says) and has launched her own blog, "Political Prostitutes," where we've just spent some time grazing on the pique.

The main meme here is quite clear: everyone in Washington is a whore, and that includes politicians of both major parties and most of the press. There's a whole bunch of (actually rather vague) talk about screwing people and people getting screwed, coming and going. The former staffer writes up her own screwing by a supposed friend who sent the original problem text message to Mullins, and we can't help feeling sympathetic.

Time Stands Still Saturday Night

We had it marked on our calendar all year, but an e-mailed article from a friend reminded us this morning, and our pulse quickened involuntarily. The Summer Solstice arrives very very late Saturday night, actually at precisely 1:45 a.m. Sunday morning. That’s the precise moment that the Northern Hemisphere’s tilt toward the sun reaches its maximum stretch, seems to shudder from the tension in its deepest machinery like a diver on a bungee. The Solstice ushers in the longest day of continuous sunlight on June 21st but also begins the earth’s grinding tilt back toward our winter.

It was evidently a High Holy Day among the Druids, but the Incas, the Aztecs, the Chinese, and many other cultures noted the appearance of the sun on this day every year, that it seemed to stand still (“solstice” literally means “sun standing still”). Maybe it was the solstice when Joshua got his freak on: “Sun, stand thou still,” sez he, and according to Joshua 10, the sun obeyed.

But Joshua wanted more daylight so he could slaughter more Amorites. The sun stands still for us modern Druids for wholly benign sustenance ... so that we can knit lettuce, weave beets and onions, sew together our great cloaks of corn and beans and squash, hem ourselves up with potatoes.

We’ll be awake at 1:45 a.m. Sunday morning and in our garden, performing by the light of the fireflies the rites of thankfulness for the generosity of the good earth. (And, yes, this is how rumors of devil worship get started.)