Like how "rich" are the rich people she's talking about? Are these just lawyer/doctor kids or are their parents going to be up against the wall when the revolution starts?
In most of Alabama I bet doctors and car dealers can buy a significant portion of their home county. That's the tranche I bet is central to the system. People whose parents have nesting yachts - don't they get them on the sailing team at Stanford instead?
I always get conflicted talking about the Greek system, because at the most generic level the benefits are things I got from my hippie co-op and I did think were kind of great:
All the specifics about sororities range from not my kind of thing to wow that sounds awful, but the generic "joining a social network that while it may not be your best friends immediately does connect you to a fairly large group of people for mutual aid and support" works pretty well for college students, I think.The first and most obvious reason -- even to the women themselves -- is social structure and friendship. A lot of them talk about their desire for "sisters" in their videos in ways that sound pretty hollow, but friendship is what they're grasping for: a network of friends and community and a path forward through the maze of college. That's why I was convinced to rush as a Greek-system-resistant freshman at a liberal arts college, and I've long heard the advice to undergraduates (particularly at big state schools) that joining the Greek system is your way to get "plugged in" at school (as opposed to finding yourself lonely and lost in a faraway dorm or apartment off-campus).
Obviously there are SO MANY ways to get "plugged in" to college life, but the Greek system is the cheat code. Before school even starts, you have somewhere between 100 and 400 "friends," or at least people who will do things with you, tell you where the parties are and what time you should show up to them -- and orient you to the campus, class, help figure out study groups, have people who can talk to you about what professors to seek out or avoid, etc. etc.
Nesting yachts are like little Russian dolls for rich people?
Voluntary group for friends in big colleges absolutely makes sense. The college radio station and glass shop/sculpture department were the equivalent of fraternities for me at Washington U (backup school for people who didn't get into Ivies, generous scholarships for kids who tested well, hi) in the eighties.
I went to grad school at Ohio State which is huge and not selective, lots of students rented big houses in big groups, having a way to see the same people regularly would be a challenge there without joining something. AHP is indeed good, I like her writing, thanks for posting.
The built environment of sorority vs. fraternity houses. Sororities have been expected to have a mature live-in chaperone (house mom) which necessitated more clubbing together. Other factors too, but adding up to, sorority houses are bigger.
I used to live south of OSU at 10th and Hunter (maybe). Looking at Google maps, they gentrified the shit out of the undergraduate slums.
6: right! When your yacht is so big it carries around a smaller one for day trips.
Very few marsupials own even a small boat.
And possums don't particularly eat lots of ticks. They will eat lots of ticks if there's no other food, but if they have a choice, they will eat not-ticks.
At the risk of repeating myself, the recent TV show Kidding is pretty good about depicting Columbus-- the main character, who's basically a functional adult, lives in a building mostly housing students for a while. I liked the show a lot, that part was a tangent.
So much misinformation about marsupials.
14: Is still too soon for me to want to see Ohio on the TV.
14: That came up painted in a different light from a developer I follow (reluctantly, he knows interesting technical things but he's a bit of a twit outside that) yesterday:
People who do student housing are just built differently. It never gets better... Every single year you have the entire building renewing at the same time. If you miss the leasing window, the unit will sit vacant the whole year. If you lose a leasing agent at the wrong time, you can get screwed. And it's a market completely divorced from every other one. You know who loves being near loud bars and campus? College students. You know who HATES that? Literally everyone else. (Other than some creeps... you do get some older non-students who try to lease a single room in a suite.)
We once got a really cheap house in December. It failed to rent in August.
It was at 10th and Hunter, now that I think of it. One of my roommates went on to live in Wales.
Months before rush begins, all PNMs submit elaborate rush application packets filled with a personal video, a resume, and reams of recommendation letters from women in their life (preferably sorority women, preferably sorority women from the University of Alabama). They scrub their social accounts to curate an identity that seemingly matches their desired sorority
Jesus Fucking Christ.
"Gee, maybe reading this in-depth thing from an actual former sorority* member will lead me to sympathy/empathy with this horrifying thing that's appeared in my timelines."
Nope. No it will fucking not.
*possibly I've never typed this word before? My fingers had no idea how to do it, I had to peck it out carefully. I knew the spelling, but my fingers were just stumped
19: But outside of Wales it's too ____ to ____ .
(On topic because sociological quiz/survey.)
Sure, the fraternities aren't supposed to have "Old South" parties anymore, complete with "Lost Cause" uniforms for the men and specifically tailored antebellum dresses for the women. But they've figured out how to get around it by calling it a Derby party. For them, the costumes of the South are the costumes of the South, regardless of what name you affix to the party itself.
Seriously, burn it all the fuck down.
Do they all have Covid now
Semi-off topic, there has NOT yet been a huge COVID spread at Wooster, where Iris goes. They've been there 2 1/2 weeks, and by this time last year, literally 50% of the campus had tested positive or was about to. Not counting chickens, but it's definitely not the petri dish situation it was last year.
Looking at local wastewater, numbers are up from the effectively zero of June/July, but you have to zoom way in. Relative to late May, it's nothing, and relative to times when it was going around (late winter this year, early fall last), it's below nothing. But of course it's trending up, so we don't know how high it's headed.
(Golden Gooses, by the way, are shoes that are $600-900+ and look like purposefully dirtied up Converse -- and a current staple of RushTok)
Seriously, running out of torches over here.
the generic "joining a social network that while it may not be your best friends immediately does connect you to a fairly large group of people for mutual aid and support" works pretty well for college students, I think.
100%, but I have no idea why it should be Greeks. Like, these opportunities absolutely abound at college, precisely because college students want and need it. As lw says, college radio and metal shop and every other thing provides this. Traditional dorms* provide this. A solid subset of majors provide this.
Point being, I get why people to whom greek life is tailored want to join, and IMO it's useful to have them label themselves so everyone else can keep their distance. But they're quite pointedly not for everybody, and I think it's malign for people who don't belong to feel excluded, let alone for them to expend tremendous effort just to be excluded.
*I'm a distant outlier on this, as someone who lived 4 years in a traditional dorm, but I firmly believe that apartment-style dorms are bad for freshmen, and not great for sophomores. Basically all of my remaining college friends who weren't in architecture lived in my dorm.
23: The show The Vampire Diaries had a lot of that - not just the vampire characters having been TiDOS soldiers, but also a lot of reminiscing in the modern-day Virginia setting about the town's antebellum history, antebellum-themed balls, etc. No complicating that narrative over 171 episodes 2009-2017.
Actually, I'll go further: every kind of social network at a college is easy-in, easy-out, except for Greek life. As a freshman, I played rugby, engaged with Catholic groups, and was enmeshed in my major (literally spent as much time in studio as in my dorm room, most weeks anyway). In the end, none of those were the center of my social networks, and that was fine, because I wasn't too invested in any of them. I did play rugby for 2 1/2 years, but because I liked doing it, not because I made any friends*. Obviously I remained in architecture school, but unlike most of my peers, my classmates were never more than a plurality off my good friends.
But my point is that college is precisely when young adults should be trying out new things and trying on new identities, and then taking them back off, but greek life militates against that, especially in this crazy version where you effectively start rushing before you even graduate HS.
*not in a bad way, just none of them were guys I hung out with away from the sport
27: I got like 10 minutes into Hell on Wheels; as soon as I realized it was another goddamn "ex-CSA in the West" story, I checked out.
Some schools ended up with large Greek systems sort of incidentally because the school didn't build enough student housing and the town was too small for the rental market to fill the gap. This was definitely the case at Cornell and I suspect at a lot of other northern schools. The result is that the Greek system is a big presence but not as intense or all-encompassing as in the Southern schools where it's most highly developed (there are limits on when and how Rush happens, etc.).
I went to the same college as half of my high school class, so it was mostly the same social circle.
We had an identity based on drinking cheap, light beer.
That was MIT when I was there. You had a temporary room when you arrived as a freshman and they were counting on about 1/3 of the freshmen moving into frats within the next five days before all the rest of the students arrived and needed their dorm rooms. You got a lot of free lobster and steak out of the rush parties.
They've since required all freshmen to live in dorms and have built enough housing to meet that, although I don't know how much that increased pressure to move upperclassmen out of dorms.
31: MIT as well -- in the 80's fraternity (and Independent Living Group, which is the category my hippie coop was in) rush week was before classes started freshman year, because the school guaranteed housing to all freshmen but didn't have dorm space for all of them, so some had to be systematically diverted to off-campus living situations.
34 to 31. The identity was not around light beer but much stronger stuff, which is why freshmen must now live on campus, because one died drinking too much as part of initiation.
I'm not saying it was a great culture, and I wouldn't drink a Keystone Light now if it was free, but it did mean I could never become a beer guy during the "let's use all the hops" days.
You got a lot of free lobster and steak out of the rush parties.
The independent living groups that allowed women apparently had lower budgets than the frats.
Oh definitely. It was easy to tell looking at the daily rush schedule which were the big nationally supported frats (SAE, PTD), who were the next tier frats (TEP, SX) and who were the ILGs.
I mean, I'm not complaining. Rush at the two houses I went back and forth between was super fun, just in a homemade kind of way. And the food was excellent both places.
The super pleasant aspect of kids just going off to college being part of a five day meat market is that the frats had to fill their beds quickly so there was little time making friends or getting to know people who you might be living with for the next four years. If you were spending too much time hanging out somewhere that they didn't think you were a fit, they would take you aside and firmly suggest you spend your time somewhere else (a practice known as "flushing"). And since the university was invested in freeing up their dorm beds by making freshman matches to frats, there was a centralized checkin system whenever you visited a frat and recording who had been flushed.
Actually, I'll go further: every kind of social network at a college is easy-in, easy-out, except for Greek life. As a freshman, I played rugby, engaged with Catholic groups, and was enmeshed in my major (literally spent as much time in studio as in my dorm room, most weeks anyway). In the end, none of those were the center of my social networks, and that was fine,
That's a great point. I remember thinking, as a freshmen (with the arrogance of youth) that I felt a little sorry for people who showed up convinced that they knew what they wanted to major in. If they were wrong they could waste a lot of time figuring that out, and even if they were correct it just seemed like a wasted opportunity for curiosity. You could say the same thing about social life.
I don't get lobster rolls. Lobster is nice, but fuck off with the hotdog bun and the mayo.
In Connecticut they just use melted butter.
Cotton candy, sweet as gold
Let me see that Lobster Roll.
That MIT stuff is NUTS.
CMU was surrounded by cheap housing*, and there was a substantial amount of campus housing, so the frats & sororities weren't a functionally important source of beds, although it might've been 10% of students. Probably lower, though. There were 1 or 2 sort of known-to-be-dorky frats, plus the Jewish frat; all the rest were various flavors of stereotypical douchebro.
Interestingly, CMU frat parties used to draw huge numbers of Pitt women, possibly** because they had free beer. In winter you'd see a stream of desperately underdressed women hiking up the street from one campus to the other.
*Now the housing is much less cheap, and they've built new dorms plus acquired an apartment building or two.
**I'd say probably, but that would imply that I know for a fact that the beers free
That MIT stuff is NUTS.
CMU was surrounded by cheap housing*, and there was a substantial amount of campus housing, so the frats & sororities weren't a functionally important source of beds, although it might've been 10% of students. Probably lower, though. There were 1 or 2 sort of known-to-be-dorky frats, plus the Jewish frat; all the rest were various flavors of stereotypical douchebro.
Interestingly, CMU frat parties used to draw huge numbers of Pitt women, possibly** because they had free beer. In winter you'd see a stream of desperately underdressed women hiking up the street from one campus to the other.
*Now the housing is much less cheap, and they've built new dorms plus acquired an apartment building or two.
**I'd say probably, but that would imply that I know for a fact that the beers free
even if they were correct it just seemed like a wasted opportunity for curiosity
I had a mid-range crisis at the end of 1st semester. It was a staggering amount of work*, and I very much wanted a breadth of classes. Fortunately, although the Bib/Myth class I wanted to take was either full or had a conflict, the prof for it allowed me to join her 300 level 20th Cen Poetry seminar, and I ended up taking a class with her or her teaching partner (they were like an old married couple, shared an office and everything) every remaining semester. One of the most important people in my life, actually.
NB the options for an architecture degree are 5 years Bachelors, with a Day One commitment, 4+2 Masters if your undergrad has an Arch. Studies (or similar) major, or 4+3 for any undergrad. The extra year(s) of commitment made no sense to me. I actually still think the 4+3 model is kind of dumb (although more common these days) because it's an inherently high attrition rate subject--you can't know if you're good at it until you're immersed in it--and squandering a year of grad studies seems mad to me.
*I want to say 18 all-nighters, but that actually sounds low, and may have been the 2nd semester tally.
The nice thing about lobster roll vs whole lobster is you don't need a Bib.
My shirts are all covered in butter stains anyway.
I like my lobster like I like my women, above room temperature and not tossed with mayonnaise.
I would assume, though I haven't looked into it, that one of the reasons Greek life is huge at Alabama is that it allowed for segregated housing much later than dorms did.
I was vaguely aware of rushtok, because RWM keeps me up-to-date on tiktok trends. The main thing I knew was that #BamaRush is a strong enough brand that people *at other schools* posting rushtok videos take them #BamaRush for the clicks.
Of course I'm not interested in rushtok, and have only been watching #spintrend tiktoks. Which combines two of my great interests: Taylor Swift's song August and obscure animals being cute.
https://www.tiktok.com/@atlarchiethecorgi/video/7271285777638640939
https://www.tiktok.com/@blackcreekwildlife/video/7271063770678447403
https://www.tiktok.com/@blackcreekwildlife/video/7270293403831913774
https://www.tiktok.com/@aqniagara/video/7271304536877321518?lang=en
28 and 44, wisdom for the ages.
I'm still friendly, in a loose way, with a couple of people from my freshman dorm. 47 years later. If I'd gone Greek, my college experience, and my whole life after that, would have been unrecognizably different.
IKITTSB, but I ended up in Montana because I had a week to kill after my post-freshman-year summer job, and was having an issue with my then-gf,* so I went to visit a dorm friend in her last week at a summer job in Glacier Park. I was hooked.
* Absence was my most attractive quality, but it took her another 6 months to fully embrace it.
"You know who loves being near loud bars and campus? College students. You know who HATES that? Literally everyone else."
The most alien part of a very alien thread. Really? Literally everyone else but students hates being near loud bars?
22-year-old Americans graduate, put their caps and gowns neatly away, and think "well, no more drinking for me! Now I've got my B.A. I'll be tucked up in bed with a nice camomile tea by 10 pm every night for the rest of my life!"
If graduates live near the bars they drink in, how will they find time to drive drunk after going out?
57: there's definitely a difference between a college party neighborhood and a neighborhood with young professionals who also like to go out and party.
14: I'm curious about this now. Have you seen Poser?
It was filmed in Columbus, and a bunch of local musicians appear in it.
Yeah, even grad student bars are just a totally different thing from college bars.
Part of the difference here is that US culture around drinking if you're 18-21 is completely dysfunctional. The other difference is that British people drink just so much more than Americans, and especially go out to drink so much more than Americans.
"The other difference is that British people drink just so much more than Americans"
Actually they don't.
British people drink an average of 11.45 litres of alcohol per year, Americans drink an average of 9.97 litres. Not a vast difference - France and Ireland are both well above 12.
And it's not that the numbers are being skewed by a higher number of abstainers in the US. 11% of British adults are lifelong teetotalers; 9.7% of American adults. American drinkers drink slightly less per year as British ones.
But they're much worse at holding their drink.
Americans die from alcohol related conditions at a rate of 3.5 per hundred thousand per year. In Britain it's 1.76.
13.9% of American adults are alcoholics; 8.7% of British adults.
"Yeah, even grad student bars are just a totally different thing from college bars."
OK, that explains it. As an undergraduate I drank in the same pubs as graduate students and indeed professors. Obviously some bars have on avrage a younger crowd than others, but the idea of a bar that absolutely no one over 21 goes to is... weird.
Further to 62, it will be readily apparent that, every eighteen seconds, Americans collectively consume a volume of alcohol that would fuel a rocket powerful enough to deposit Taylor Swift on the surface of the moon.
Charley, I assumed you had grown up in Montana! huh!
Means only tell you about the number of serious alcoholics, and don't say anything about a typical person.
British people are almost twice as likely as Americans to drink a few times a week and almost twice as likely as Americans to drink every day.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/10819/britons-steadier-drinking-habits-than-americans-canadians.aspx
I feel like 62 is evidence for exactly opposite of what Ajay is claiming. The median Brit drinks more than the median American. America has more lifetime alcoholics and extreme binging college students.
My experience is also that essentially every western academic working in the UK can drink essentially every western academic living in the US under the table. Now academic culture may not be typical, but it's abundantly clear that there's a difference. The amount of alcohol drank per person at any major Oxbridge occasion is far more alcohol than I have ever drank in one day in my entire life.
I remember going to England in the 90s and being shocked that the number of drinks you could have in a week before the university health people looked at you with concern was twice as high as what they said at home.
Beer for beer it was the same, but the American beers were 12 ounces and the British beers were pints.
68 was me.
This wouldn't have been true in the 90s, but since then we've made up for our smaller beers by upping the abv. I think a typical British 20oz pint has less alcohol than a typical 16oz American craft beer.
I went from Keystone Light to Newcastle Brown. Which was an improvement.
Obviously some bars have on avrage a younger crowd than others, but the idea of a bar that absolutely no one over 21 goes to is... weird.
Of course no American bar is exclusively patronized by people under 21 because that's illegal, but enough undergrads are 21-22 that "undergrad bar" is a doable business model in college towns/neighborhoods, and the characteristics of those bars are typically unwelcome to everyone else even if they like to go to bars themselves.
65 Yes, but only because I was a really late bloomer.
(I lived from age 1.5 to 13 in Fort Worth.)
Also those establishments tend to have loads of people with fake IDs.
With the exception of parents on certain weekends, I'd basically assume that anyone over 30 entering our most studenty bars was there to kidnap and murder someone.
75: Yes, a willingness to be not overly fastidious about ID laws is a key part of the business model.
The cops send in kids to conduct stings here.
I miss bars. I met my wife in a bar where I was a regular. It was the arty, academic, journalists' bar in Memphis, and the owner was a character -- the sort of person who got profiled in the newspaper regularly when a new reporter got hired and discovered her. I used to gamble on backgammon with the owner, and she kept getting better and started to consistently beat me. The night I got fired, she let me (it dawned on me much later) win $1400. (I had lost about $500 to her a week earlier.)
I miss paper newspapers, too.
I'm getting sentimental because my wife is out of town, my kids should be in college (but my daughter is closed in her room here with Covid) and I'm two beers into a night of sitting in front of screens and drinking beer -- not in a bar.
The cops send in kids to conduct stings here.
Another key part of the business model is that liability for violating ID laws tends to fall on the employee rather than the business.
Our main business with this model had 120 people busted by police for fake IDs in one semester at their three locations. Mostly this is people standing in line to enter the bar since "Once an underage drinker is inside, [officers] have to prove that the quality of the ID that gained them entry was poor enough that it should have been detected by the person checking at the door."
46: I just want to personally thank you for this earworm. To the left! To the left!
Thanks to SP and LB for filling in with the vintage (also my era) MIT details. This last week one of the MIT fraternity houses finally quit dithering and decided to admit women (well, all genders, really), was promptly denounced and dropped by its national fraternity organization, and just as promptly was adopted by the *other* national organization of that fraternity that exists specifically for the all-gender chapters. Which my wife is telling me about because she is a member of one such chapter. Fun experiences in retrograde gender norms!
Also, 80:
Another key part of the business model is that liability for violating ID laws tends to fall on the employee rather than the business.
How's that? Around here the usual punishment for being caught serving underage people (and without a safe harbor of having received good-enough fake ID) is suspending the liquor license for a day or so, which definitely hits the business. And they do routinely run stings where underage people are sent to buy alcohol without ID.
(All of my underage drinking, and there was relatively little of it by most standards, was at private parties and houses)
Around here the usual punishment for being caught serving underage people (and without a safe harbor of having received good-enough fake ID) is suspending the liquor license for a day or so, which definitely hits the business.
This is something that definitely varies by state. My impression is that the main burden typically falls on the employee but I'm sure that's not true everywhere.
"
With the exception of parents on certain weekends, I'd basically assume that anyone over 30 entering our most studenty bars was there to kidnap and murder someone."
SAME TBH
Late to the thread, but I went to a school where 42% of the undergrad population was "Greek." (Ugh.) The oddest detail to me was that there were social and professional fraternities. The professional ones I knew best were for architecture and music education (!). The social ones were basically as you'd expect. The professional ones were a little weirder. They were co-ed, and the told members that this was a networking opportunity that would make valuable professional connections. My roommate freshman year pledged the architecture fraternity and was immediately shadowed at all times by two trolls she'd befriended, Doug and Gary. I think she had a crush on Gary, and he was OK-ish, a normal garden variety jerk who took advantage of her crush to have her do as much of his academic work as possible. Doug was handsy and physically intimidating, a big ol' farm boy, and I loathed him. The pledge activity I remembered the best was when she came home with burnt fingers because the "pledgemaster" required the pledges to recite the Greek alphabet while holding a lit match. If they finished before the match hit their fingers, they could blow it out. There was also the week with no showering or brushing teeth, but much of that was spent at the frat house or studio so it was less memorable. I attended a few parties at the frat house, and they were kind of awful in a stereotypical way - someone trying to jump out second story windows, people fucking on couches, etc. I have no idea whether the roommate is a practicing architect or found the professional connections useful. I do know that living in the house (which was sort of a foul place, ironic for architecture students) was very, very cheap, even for a low cost-of-living school. I think the membership fees and house charges were half what the dorms cost? It was good enough that another roommate, a graphic design student, joined the following year.
At any rate, this all is weird but weirdly familiar. At least in the upper midwest, there weren't the confusing streams of identically dressed girls walking from block to block like there were at UT at rush time.
Ahaha. How did I miss this? My wife's niece is in a sorority at Bama. Too real, and pretty rough on a lot of the girls...
You didn't go half-assed on the marrying-into-white-people thing.
I knew professional coed fraternities existed, but I had no idea they ever created themselves as nasty-ass beer-soaked-couches regular frats with added bonus of live-in-sexual-harassment-opportunities.
I just think at this point that we all need to admit that if we were casting an all-British remake of Apocalypse Now we would have Michael Caine as Willard, Sean Connery as Kilgore, Tom Courtenay as the photojournalist and Noel Coward as Kurtz.
What no Dickie Attenborough?
(We've got to do this and...The horror! The horror!)
Mr. Darcy killing everyone in a church to Freebird is really interesting film making.
Dickie Attenborough as thr general who gives Willard the mission.
Jack Hawkins as the Chief, Malcolm McDowell as Lance the surfer.
I'd have Brian Blessed as Kurtz but in that case as the PBR skipper. John Hurt as the photojournalist.
John Hurt as the journalist works. But it has to be Noel as Kurt's because once you've imagined him delivering the line about the snail crawling over the edge of the razor you can't imagine anyone else in the role.
Long ago on a drunken and drugged summer afternoon some college friends and I cast a Looney Tunes Apocalypse Now!
Bugs as Willard, natch.
Yosemite Sam as Col. Kilgore ("Charlie don't surf, rabbit!")
Elmer Fudd as Kurtz (for similar reasons as your 97)
Sylvester as the photojournalist
Foghorn Leghorn as the PBR Chief ("I see, I say, I see, I say, we are not taking this heah boat into Cambodia!")
The MIT frats used to be notorious for trashing beautiful brownstones in the BackBay. I think some of those buildings were sold to individuals, just as some of the condos have been converted back to single families for uber rich people.
My Dad told me that the fraternities at Hobart in 1962 had libraries, and the students who joined them had to maintain their grades or something. Or maybe they just had easay examples.
97: yup, could definitely see Hurt eating the scenery in that one
Speaking of eating, at brunch today there was a little boy (toddler) at the next table. He was standing on the seat while his dad fed him a spoonful of eggs. Foolishly, the dad looked away because the kid started chewing. The kid just leaned over the dad's plate, opened his mouth, and, noiselessly and expressionlessly, let everything drop.
Joan Sims, Hattie Jacques and Barbara Windsor as rhe helicopter-borne Playmates, Sid James as the MC.
I feel this would bring the appropriate sense of disorientation and surrealism to the sequence.
ok now do it with a British all-women cast. No more than two roles for Helen Mirren.
Jenny Agutter as Lance the surfer
||
Props to the day drunk redneck a few tents down from us who is burnt to a crisp and sporting a large "MAMA TRIED" tattoo across his pec.
|>
Don't you take that Coppertone with me.
Oh Ruby, don't take your 'tone to town!
109 is great.
110 might be great but I don't know the Kenny Rogers connection.
It's a little random, but my commenting skills are not what they used to be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDOznxiEcdM
(109 is great, and everyone should know to listen to Mama.)
Kids today don't know that before he sold chicken, Kenny Rogers was a singer.
Oh, I was thinking it was riffing on Don't Take Your Guns to Town, so I was stuck. Plus not knowing that song.
I did not know that Kenny Roger's song. It was nice until it got all murdery at the end.
That was country music for you. Now it just sucks.
Kenny Rogers in the before times.
119: At least I was up-front about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzl7ISjYAWo
Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene
I'm begging of you, please don't take your guns to town
Tumble out of bed and stumble to the kitchen
Pour myself a shot of ambition
Shine my boots and comb my dark hair down
Jump in the shower
And the blood starts pumpin'
Out on the streets, the traffic starts jumpin'
And folks like me are takin' our guns to town.
This Is Just To Say
I took the guns to town
That were in the locker
And that you were probably saving
To shoot the sheriff with
On a warm summer's evenin'
With Jolene and headed nowhere
I met up with a gunman
He was tired of herding sheep
So we took turns a-shootin'
Out the window at the mobbiks
'Til Mordor overtook us
And he began to speak
He said, "Jole I've made a life
Out of travelin' through the space-time
And crossing up the ballads
With some lines that just ain't mine
And if you don't my me sayin'
Your beauty's beyond compare
Your flaming locks of auburn hair
Can condition my condition anywhere
To ward men off from wrong, or speaking ill,
Some people say "you need the proper gear.
A bullet's better medicine than a pill" -
This though is wrong, though right it may appear.
This saying helps, I think, to make it clear -
"Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown".
It means that power won't free your life from fear -
I think I will not take my guns to town.
Life isn't free, and death's a heavy bill,
It weighs a man down, year on sorrowing year.
A grave's a hole you'll never really fill,
So think before you move that trigger sear.
This kind of talk you may think rather queer
From one like me, a gambler of renown
But this is something we all need to hear.
I think I will not take my guns to town.
Prince, to this simple rule I will adhere -
I'll don my boots but set my firearms down.
I'll head off now to get a quiet beer -
I think I will not take my guns to town.
Poetry, hooray.
Of course, people here can't even remember not to take their guns to the airport.
I tried searching for the Chesterton poem 125 is based on, and suddenly Google was all worried about my mental health and welfare. You search for "I think I will not kill myself today" and the only thing it gives you is hotlines. Adding quotes, and Chesterton poem solved it.
I didn't recognize the reference, because we don't have a culture here in Greater Appalachia.
A commenter from Appalachia
Said "Poetry's not in our nachia.
Try that in the hollers
And jest see what follers -
Like all show-offs, they'll probably hachia."
LB is more cultured than me because I didn't know it was a Chesterton poem. I vaguely thought it was Dorothy Parker but I think I was confusing it with the one that ends "you might as well live".