The Blue Board

I nominate Memphis as a city in the South that sucks ass due to crime, the highest teen pregnancy rate in the nation, and corrupt city government.

As far as southern cities, Memphis is up there with the northern cities. Atlanta has it's bad areas as well as Birmingham and don't get me started on NOLA.

Memphis is bad, hell ATL sent their homeless folks there during the Olympics in '96. Atlanta is bad in areas but at least buckhead and midtown you can walk through. One thing that always cracked me up when I moved down South is how folks told me it was going to be racist. HA! Detroit, Boston, and other cities are way more racist than anything I experienced in the South. The South dealt with their problem, the North never did. Being from Detroit I'm not proud of that, but the stigma of the South being racist while the North is clean, is completely false and often reversed.

My girlfriend and I talked about this a few months ago. The perception is that racism is rampant in the south when really it's not. We have a theory about it and you see it especially when the major football powerhouses in northern high schools are all white teams. Then you look at the south and it's a balanced mix of races on our high school athletic teams. Kids play together and bond growing up and it basically eliminates racism.

One of her good friends is from Wisconsin and went to undergrad there. He's here at UAB for med school and he was blown away at the lack of racism here. Says Wisconsin is the completely opposite of Alabama in terms of racism.

I don't know maybe I'm a special case since my elementary school was 60% african-american and my junior high was 50/50 so I grew up with tons of friends who weren't white.

Elevators, spiders, suspension bridges.

Hurricanes.

Spiders. I go full on chick when I see one.

- Bees, the big furry ones with shiny black asses. They're fairly harmless but buzz loud as hell and tend to hover around your head the more you want them to go away.

- Movie lines when I still smoked herb. Sitting there in a crowd of strangers, not moving and thinking to myself "Everyone knows".

This thing is pretty freaky.

The loss of a child. Not sure I could handle that.

Ventriloquist dolls?