Random Thoughts

The Blue Ridge News Observer is Fannin County’s only newspaper. It is publishes twice weekly, and it is a classic small town newspaper.

It only focuses only local news, and that means the news within Fannin County. In one issue last year the front page story was the water level in Lake Blue Ridge.

The police report always appears on page 2. It lists the names of all persons arrested in Fannin County and the charges against them. There is no anonymity in Fannin County, even for the most petty of crimes. I better mind my ways after I move there.

Another section of the paper lists the dates, times, and places of the meetings or events of all clubs, churches, and organizations in the county. That’s where you will discover that the Salem Baptist Church is holding a potluck dinner on Friday night or that the Missionary Baptist Church is presenting a guest speaker to discuss his experiences doing missionary work in Guatemala. (There are a lot of Baptist churches in Fannin County. I was actually surprised to see an Episcopal church.) A recent edition of the paper revealed an upcoming free seminar on birding in coastal Ecuador, that the Welcome Hill Baptist Church #2 (there are two of them?) will hold a nightly revival next week, and the date of the annual Farmer Family cemetery decoration. Whew! So much to do, and so little time to do it.

The movie listings section is not that big. Blue Ridge boasts one indoor theater and a drive-in theater. The indoor theater has two screens. I think the movies change once a week. If that’s not country, nothing is.

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The most recent big news from the News Observer is that Walmart is going to build a Super Center in Blue Ridge. That’s great news since it means that I will not have to drive to the next county to go to one. Just about everything you need to live in the country can be found at a Walmart Super Center. That’s where I’ll get my beer, guns and ammo, fishing supplies, work boots, and bib overalls.

I haven’t been to a Walmart Super Center in the country enough to know if the same subset of weirdoes do their shopping there as in an urban area. If so, the new Walmart may also have some entertainment value. I’d like to think that country folk have more dignity than your average urban Walmart shopper. I can’t imagine a farmer wearing spandex and ballerina slippers.

Alas, the new Walmart will not have hard liquor—Fannin County is still a dry county as far as the hard stuff goes. For that I will have to go to the next county or to nearby Tennessee or North Carolina.

Unfortunately, the nearest Sam’s Club is about 50 miles away. Meredith and I envision making bulk purchases monthly at Sam’s Club: 500 chicken wings, 25 pounds of hamburger, an industrial-sized jar of Frank’s Hot Sauce, etc. We will have to analyze whether the savings of buying there offsets the expense of driving there.

It would be great if there were Tractor Supply Company, Northern Tool, and Harbor Freight store in Blue Ridge. There is a Tractor Supply in the next county, but the nearest Northern Tool and Harbor Freight are on the north side of Atlanta. Those are great stores for country living.

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I know very little about blogs and blogging. I’d like to spruce this blog up, perhaps insetting pictures with the text, but I haven’t figured out how to do that.

Blogger, the blog engine I’m currently using, keeps statistics on how many views a blog has. I was surprised to see that this blog has attracted close to 200 views. However, on closer examination I realized that most of those views came from computer search engines rather than people. The rest of them came from Blogger counting my multiple views of my own blog. That probably accounts for half of them. That sure dampened my dreams of going viral.

Another curious thing is that Blogger has a little map that shows what part of the world the views come from. After my first two posts, the map showed that the majority of views came from Alaska, Russia, and China. I can’t figure that one out. I wonder if the NSA was involved? Maybe it was deceptively showing Russia and China as the origin of the views in order to disguise the fact that it was conducting domestic surveillance. Since then, the map shows that most of the views have come from the United States. If the original views did come from the NSA, does the shift in where the views came from mean that the NSA has concluded that my blog is no threat to national security and is no longer monitoring it? How can my blog threaten national security? Apparently no one has read it yet. It’s hard to start a one man revolution. A massive protest would be me standing on the corner waving a cardboard sign. A one man riot would just be silly.