Reasons I am SO ready to leave the South:

• I ordered a club sandwich at a local restaurant last week, and it came with all the typical stuff--3 slices of toasted bread, bacon, lettuce, tomato, turkey--and an EXTRA-THICK SLICE OF BOLOGNA! Who the hell puts bologna on a club sandwich, and doesn't even warn people about it first? Good lord.
  
• Forget "y'all." In my locale, the preferred collective form of address is "you-uns." AND, I learned just yesterday, that's made possessive by saying "you-uns-es." I. AM. NOT. KIDDING.
  
• Every single time I go to the YMCA, I hear the very same song playing on the very same Contemporary Christian radio station. Thank God for iPods.
  

Rail-Splitter, indeed

From the March 7 issue of "The New Yorker":
Further Proof That Lincoln Was Gay

The first draft of the Gettysburg Address began, “Four score and seven years ago-ish . . .”

When Lincoln was a boy, he would walk twenty miles through the snow every morning to buy magazines.

Lincoln was raised in a log cabin with a dirt floor, which he vacuumed.

Lincoln liked to say, “All men are created equal, except at the beach.”

Lincoln’s greatest regret was the movie version of “Phantom.”

Lincoln named his horse Mister Horse.

Lincoln wanted to call it “The Emancipation Proclamation—The New Sensation!”

Lincoln urged Congress to bind the nation’s wounds “with malice toward none, with charity for all,” although under his breath he murmured, “except for a certain red-headed lieutenant, and he knows why.”

As a young country lawyer, Lincoln often bartered his services for house seats.

For more than four years during his twenties, Lincoln shared a bed with his friend Joshua Fry Speed. It is now believed that he loved Joshua Fry Speed for his winning personality, and not because his name sounds like a George Foreman product.

The friendship finally ended when Speed told Lincoln, “You’re not the President of me!”

Another friend, Billy Greene, said that Lincoln’s thighs were “as perfect as a human being’s could be.” Lincoln was said to have responded, “It’s called Pilates.”

Lincoln was known as the Rail-Splitter. Few people realize that this was a cocktail.

When Lincoln was told that Lee had surrendered, he gasped and exclaimed, “Oh no she didn’t!”

Just before his first inauguration, he told Mary Todd Lincoln to go home and take one thing off.

Lincoln grew his beard because he thought it looked hot on Ethan Hawke.

Upon entering Ford’s Theatre on that fateful night, Lincoln whispered to his wife, “I hear it’s slow.”

Springtime for Hitler and Germany!

I've been daydreaming lately about doing some European traveling. To that end, I'm checking out travel web sites, particularly those that let me know exactly what the tour-group approach entails. I think I can understand what one company in particular is going for, but their description of their "Third Reich Walking Tour" in Berlin gives me pause nonetheless:

An opportunity to recreate Hitler’s Third Reich in the heartland of the Nazi Regime.

Hmm. Do we get to invade Poland afterward?