InterDate 2.0

Bombs in the goddamn, motherfucking sand.

For no good, goddamn reason....

FUCK!

Suicide bombers kill�9 U.S. soldiers in Iraq:

"BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Nine U.S. paratroopers were killed Monday when a pair of suicide bombers attacked a small U.S. patrol base in Diyala province, the U.S. military said.

It was the deadliest attack on U.S. ground forces in Iraq since December 2005."

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Don't stuff your face with bon-bons this weekend. Get out and make a difference:

'Impeachment rallies' scheduled across US for Saturday:

"People will call for the impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney at over 100 actions planned across the country on Saturday, April 28.

The creative actions include rallies, banner drops on freeways, 'guerrilla slide shows' on the sides of New York City buildings, skywriting, and 'human murals' of people spelling out 'IMPEACH!' with their bodies at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, Coney Island in New York, the foot of the Washington monument in Washington, D.C., and other locations"

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Greed and fixed elections.... yes, it's true....

Campaign against alleged voter fraud fuels political tempest:

"WASHINGTON - For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates.

The administration intensified its efforts last year as President Bush's popularity and Republican support eroded heading into a midterm battle for control of Congress, which the Democrats won.

Facing nationwide voter registration drives by Democratic-leaning groups, the administration alleged widespread election fraud and endorsed proposals for tougher state and federal voter identification laws. Presidential political adviser Karl Rove alluded to the strategy in April 2006 when he railed about voter fraud in a speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association."

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But gays are still evil.... so are condomns.... we'll get to correcting those fuck ups in another 100 years. But babies are cool now.

Christianity: As nibble as a hunk of granite and half as smart.

or

Christiantiy: Just makin' shit up as we go along so as long it fits our needs.

Catholic Church buries limbo after centuries:

"VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Roman Catholic Church has effectively buried the concept of limbo, the place where centuries of tradition and teaching held that babies who die without baptism went.

In a long-awaited document, the Church's International Theological Commission said limbo reflected an 'unduly restrictive view of salvation.'

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Expect more shit like this when the men in charge outlaw abortion:

Birth on street corner, then mom walks off:

"San Francisco police arrested a woman after she gave birth to a baby boy on a street corner Sunday night and then walked away, apparently abandoning the baby.

A security guard who saw the woman delivering the baby on Fifth and Stevenson streets at 9:30 p.m. was calling 911 when he saw the mother get up and walk away, according to police Capt. Al Casciato.

'The kid was lying on the street and she was walking away,'' Casciato said."
......

The incident came a month after a woman gave birth to a baby on an Oakland street and walked away, leaving it in a puddle of blood. No charges were filed after an autopsy revealed that the baby was stillborn.

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This is why San Francisco is the hardest fucking place to date in the world. Best city to be in love, evah!.... Worst city to be single in, evah!

Web 2.0 Dating Games / How local geeks and nerds are hooking up right now ... or not:

"And so it goes around the bay: The gays think it's easy for lesbians, the lesbians think it's easier if you're gay ... and the straight people think it's easier if you're gay. Granted, these common assumptions leave out a couple of other important letters in our alphabet soup of sexual diversity. Dating in the Bay Area may not be a happy hunting expedition for all, yet one thing's for certain: The communities have community (from the Lexington to Manhunt.net), and the nerds have -- the Internet. And our Web 2.0 conferences. Happy hunting, and don't get stuck at home Twittering yourself on Friday night. Not that there's anything wrong with that. There isn't. End of discussion. OK?"

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DBT Lyrics Tour - Ode to Cooley

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Update:
Check out the e-card from New West. Email it to your friends!

Rednecks like to go fast. So they put a rocket makin' factory in Huntsville, Al, brought over some German rocket scientist for "rehabilitation", then, blamo, we went to the moon. Here's to Cooley!

Space City....with a little bit of Patterson

The Birthplace of Alabama

Pioneer John Hunt, for whom the city is named, occupied a cabin alongside a spring here in 1805. A town soon flourished and was the largest in the Alabama Territory by 1819. That year the leaders of the Alabama Territory met here to petition the U.S. Congress to grant Alabama statehood. The recreated 1819 Alabama Constitution Village, a block from the courthouse square, commemorates the historic events through tours given by costumed guides.

Huntsville was the cotton trading center of the Tennessee Valley during the 1840s and '50s when planters and merchants originally from Virginia and the Carolinas built impressive town homes.

Space City's one hour up the road from me.
Its one hour away from as close to the moon as anybody down here is ever gonna be.
(I'm assuming Cooley is referencing the drive from Tuscumbia to Huntsville and not his current home of Birmingham to Huntsville):

Time was when Huntsville was content to be the "Watercress Capital of the World"; the great leap forward came after World War II, when the army consolidated its rocket and missile research efforts in the city. Spearheading the project were Dr Wernher von Braun and 118 other German scientists, who came to Huntsville after a token period of rehabilitation. Von Braun's contribution of the V-2 ballistic missile to the Nazi war effort is ignored by the city, which prefers to laud his later space-age achievements, such as Explorer I, the nation's first satellite, and the mighty Saturn V.

The giant USSpace and Rocket Center, five miles west of downtown on Hwy-20, off I-65 (summer daily 9am–6pm; $15), contains a mind-boggling array of technological exhibits, hands-on displays and weightlessness simulators, as well as a giant IMAX cinema. Outdoors, in the surreal Rocket and Space Shuttle parks, redundant rockets protrude skywards in the blazing Alabama sunshine; the 120-yard, four-story Saturn V rocket is laid on its side to emphasize its immensity.

Remember Space Camp?

"While over there in Huntsville, They puttin' people on the moon..."
"While over there in Huntsville, even NASA shut down, too"

The following are some pics I snapped of the recently cut cotton fields in north Alabama over Thanksgiving last year. When you learn about Alabama history in junior high school there is an enevitable conversation about King Cotton. My granddad and grandmom use to tell me stories of being sharecroppers and going out into the fields to pick cotton. Brutal, brutal work:

Cottonseed

The Cotton Plantation State: Cotton production in Alabama was a major influence in the growth and culture of the state. In fact, Alabama'a farm economy was ruled by "King Cotton" at one time. When crops were poor or prices were down, Alabama farmers suffered. Conversely, when prices were up, Alabama's farmer prospered. In the early 1900s, Alabama farmers suffered extensively due to massive cotton crop failures.

And I put more lawmen in the ground...

The Cotton State: For reasons given above, Alabama was called the Cotton State. While many southern states were referred to as Cotton Plantation States, Alabama was singled out as THE Cotton State because of its central location in the Cotton Belt. Cotton is Alabama's leading crop and Alabama is considered a leading cotton producer.

...than Alabama put cottonseed

The Southern Thing

Ain't about no cotton fields.....

....or cotton picking lies

Uncle Frank lived in a cabin down on Cedar Creek...

Actual pic of Cedar Creek:

Pin Hits the Shell

Cooley makes a reference to racing trains from 2nd street to Avalon in the song Pin Hits the Shell. 2nd street and Avalon are 2 roads located in Colbert County. 2nd street is in Sheffield and Avalon runs through Muscle Shoals and maybe Tuscumbia.

Living on the other side of the river, (in gentile Lauderdale County) we never concerned ourselves with such low-brow endeavors as racing trains. We were too busy studying gravity's effect on the bovine post sunset and whether alcohol, orally administered (to us not the bovine), increased the hilarity quotient. Trust me when I say Gravity's NOT Gone.

Now, I'm guessing at the route Cooley and Co. use to take when they raced the trains. Take a look at the map below. If you extend the purple line past the "end" to George Wallace Blvd (gotta love that) you'll see where you had to go to beat the train on Avalon. When I took these pics we were lucky enough to have train running on the track and, yes we did beat it!

Pin Hits the Shell - racing trains from 2nd Street...

Here is the train as it ran along 2nd St.

...to Avalon.

This is the Avalon crossing

And there is the train comin' on through.

And Finally:

Cooley's favorite place in the world. Wayne's Package Store. Listen to Patterson tell the tale before "Sink Hole":