Max wrote:

Which one of us is Bernie?

Maybe Fors is Bernie?

* May I be completely grumpy for a moment? Thanks ... enough with the squirrel nonsense. This is the NLCS. These are important games. The World Series is on the line. The Cardinals are coming home for three consecutive home games. We don't need gimmicks. We don't need people trying to cash in on squirrel junk. The attention should be on the players, the competition, the pressure of high-stakes baseball. This isn't some half-wit baseball town. This is one of the most respected baseball towns in the history of the game. We don't need some manufactured squirrel hype to enjoy the LCS baseball story. Players like Freese (just to mention one of many) ought to be getting the attention.
To the happy-talk St. Louis TV and radio people, and to the Post-Dispatch as well: We've had our fun. The 15 minutes has expired. I beg you to find another cute story. Please end this now. It's embarrassing. Thank you. If the fans want to carry on with the squirrel, well, I'm not in charge. Do as you wish. I just needed to vent. Thank you.


Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/sports/columns/bernie-miklasz/article_ba8cff28-f3c4-11e0-94bb-0019bb30f31a.html#ixzz1aWf1cJCZ

Hey c'mon, maybe you weren't around in the old old days, but my last girlfriend before traveling off to indonesia all those years ago was from olney, home of the white squirrels.  (and fwiw, i think mags's wife was also from olney).  my mom's whole family is/was from that area, stretching from Vincennes/Lawrenceville at one end to Mounds/Mounds City on the other, with relatives dotting every other little town down there.  I spend a lot of time down there when i was a kid, with the big thrill being a trip to the rock candy shop in Sumner.

The reason I mentioned it was because some people think it's an African American thing, to go making up novel spellings of names, but my experience is that it's actually a rural midwest/border state thing, and maybe that's where the AA's got it.  And it works both ways, too: novel spellings at times, and novel pronunciations with traditional spellings at other times.  My mom told me about growing up with a boy named "Reen", only his mom spelled it spelled it all funny on his birth certificate, R-E-N-E.  And the story went on that he got to the army and they called out "Re-NAY" but with the correct last name.  The guy had an awkward moment with the drill sergeant, turned sort of rad faced, and then had an a-ha moment about 'small town boy goes to the army and learns about the big wide world.'

Last edited by Max (10/12/2011 4:07 am)

alz wrote:

Max wrote:

alz wrote:

She replied with "We don't have to spell it that way, we could use 'Dartanyan'."

Is your wife from the rural midwest /border state region?

A little town called Breese Illinois, where you can't see much besides corn and cows, and it smells like pigshit all summer long. As sad as that may sound to you, I married her.

Breese?  Breese is a preppy little town compared to the rest of rural Illinois.  They have some soda that looks like urine that they harp about.

"May I be completely grumpy for a moment? Thanks ... enough with the squirrel nonsense."

Bernie's being a little too vitriolic, but I blanched a little bit after Game 2 when I saw a fan holding a sign with some reference to the squirrel.

"funny" should have been in quotation marks.  yes, rene is the normal spelling, but I was trying to adopt the small town southern illinois mentality in that post.  The longer version of the story is that the boys mom had read the name in bool, and thought "Reen", spelled Rene, was a splendid name for a boy . . . never knowing of course the standard pronunciation.

Max wrote:

APRTW wrote:

It is a shit hole town these days.

It used to have a very attractive little square, so I'm not quite sure what you mean.  In the old days, all those towns were shit hole little towns if you were looking for something other than clean, tidy little midwestern villages built around a square with an IGA and a Ben Franklin.

Richland county isnt bad but there isnt much nice housing in Olney anymore.  The city is pretty run down and they have alot of trashy people, drugs and such.  It has went down hill alot in the last 10 years.

It isnt the meth.  It is just the economy and unemployment.  When money is short people dont maintain their homes like they would if things were better.  Things get to looking run down and then home owners that maintain their property are run out of town because they dont want to live nexted to a dump.  They have to sell their house for less then it is worth and someone buys it who doesnt maintain it as well as they did.  Before you know it the whole block is run down.

In the old old days, we used to take 57 to Effingham, then down to Olney and across to Lawrenceville.  Then, when Nixon dropped the speed limit to 55 on the interstates, we used Route 1 from Watseka, down through Danville and all.  Eventually, we discovered Indiana 41 just across the border.  Not sure if that was always there and we were just too ignorant to know, or if there were big improvements back in the late 70's / early 80's that made that the option of first.  All of those routes showed how nice the vast swaths of America that coasters derisively call "fly over country" are.

APRTW wrote:

Route 50 doesnt go through Effingham

Yes, see the subsequent post.  From L-ville, turn right at Olney toward F-ingham