Who needs soap operas when we’ve got small towns?

[JohnH]

JohnL is not MaxPC

What does that have to do with the price of eggs in North Carolina?

[ohio jones]

Just had to get my opinion out there on this important issue

Opinions are more easily modified than evidence.

[JohnL]

Ran into the Pot Stirrer at the hardware store. Looks like he didn’t learn anything cause he’s still trying to stir the pot in the community. Now he’s claiming that the guy at the Red Cross that organizes the volunteers is trying to cover up a shortage of volunteers. He claims the numbers don’t lie, etc. Whatever. Probably makes him feel important to spout off like that.
If it’s really an important issue I just tell folks to go talk to the Red Cross guy and see what he has to say about the numbers. There’s plenty of reasons and interpretations for such things. I haven’t seen the guy who bullies people at all this week. He might be on vacation.
Those new air return grills look good and I sure do like those latches instead of the screws

[Bootstrap]

Weird place. Every stereotypical trope about Appalachia happens in this "holler", always carefully marked with Appalachian language, but nothing specific, nothing that feels like a real place, nothing with real detail. Apparently, the people have names like "The Bully" and "The Pot Stirrer", and it's sure good that they have JohnL to tell them what is right, if only they would listen to him.

When I try to take any part of this, I run into things like this:

A family’s coon dog went missing or says the guy who owned him. He was angry because he thought the dog had been stolen but it hadn’t. His wife had loaned the dog to her brother to tree some coons getting into their garbage cans.

I have owned a Treeing Walker Coonhound, and I have friends who hunt coons. Apparently, this dog is valuable enough that when it goes missing, he does not assume that it might have run off, gotten hit by a car, or whatever, the obvious conclusion is that it must have been stolen. Normally, a dog like that is well trained, not seen as a family dog, and in my experience, not lightly lent to friends who have not trained with this particular dog.

He doesn't ask his wife - why not? That's the first thing I would have done if my dog were missing. Apparently, his wife loans his coon dog out to people like his brother in law to tree coons when they get into their garbage cans. No discussion of what happens next. Treeing the coons does not solve the problem. Securing the garbage cans would solve the problem. Maybe he shot the coons? But what prevents other coons from going after the garbage? My current dog trees coons all the time, but I still tie my garbage cans shut so the coons can't get into them.

When I try to take other stories seriously, I hit the same problems ... and part of it is that this really reads like humorous writing based on Appalachian stereotypes, everything is too neat, nothing fails to fit into the cliches and tropes. I know people in small town Western North Carolina. When they describe things in their towns, they don't talk like this.

[Soloist]

Wife: In our holler, which is becoming more and more populated, but the people still holler a lot, my son has taken to trapping squirrels/possums/hoping for a coon, and pay him a dollar a catch. He gets upset when one of his big traps go walking, and I think one was loaned out to a friend who was losing chickens, and one was loaned out to a relative. Shiny bits of tinfoil really work well, but they’re sneaky little creatures. The others come to peanuts or peanut butter and whatever other random stuff he happens to use.

We also have a new reptile at the bass pond over here. Not very big, but I would certainly holler if I tripped over it at night.

[JohnH]

Weird place. Every stereotypical trope about Appalachia happens in this "holler", always carefully marked with Appalachian language, but nothing specific, nothing that feels like a real place, nothing with real detail. Apparently, the people have names like "The Bully" and "The Pot Stirrer", and it's sure good that they have JohnL to tell them what is right, if only they would listen to him.

It's very, very interesting, since as someone presently living in Appalachia, and who spent lots of time around his very Appalachian grandparents who also lived there, I never saw any of this. Nobody had nicknames that were derogatory like that, although there were quite a few inexplicable nicknames like "Bo" and "Turtle".

The put-on Appalachian language feels about as silly as people who try to affect a British manner of speaking, which comes across in a particular absurd way online (although it is interesting when the two paths cross, as they seem to have done recently on this forum). Actual-Appalachian people just write out things in regular standard American English.

When I try to take any part of this, I run into things like this:

A family’s coon dog went missing or says the guy who owned him. He was angry because he thought the dog had been stolen but it hadn’t. His wife had loaned the dog to her brother to tree some coons getting into their garbage cans.

I have owned a Treeing Walker Coonhound, and I have friends who hunt coons. Apparently, this dog is valuable enough that when it goes missing, he does not assume that it might have run off, gotten hit by a car, or whatever, the obvious conclusion is that it must have been stolen. Normally, a dog like that is well trained, not seen as a family dog, and in my experience, not lightly lent to friends who have not trained with this particular dog.

Indeed. I have a friend - well, a member of this forum, actually, that's where I met him, but now we're real life acquaintances and he's quite good friends with my wife's cousin - who breeds and keeps coonhounds down in Arkansas. The idea of "lending' such a dog to... patrol wheelie bins? It's one of those things that simply has probably never happened.

He doesn't ask his wife - why not? That's the first thing I would have done if my dog were missing. Apparently, his wife loans his coon dog out to people like his brother in law to tree coons when they get into their garbage cans. No discussion of what happens next. Treeing the coons does not solve the problem. Securing the garbage cans would solve the problem. Maybe he shot the coons? But what prevents other coons from going after the garbage? My current dog trees coons all the time, but I still tie my garbage cans shut so the coons can't get into them.

It sounds like an amazing service - one I sure wish I could hire locally. You just call up a guy's wife and she runs a couple of expert-trained dogs who will solve your raccoon rubbish problems.

When I try to take other stories seriously, I hit the same problems ... and part of it is that this really reads like humorous writing based on Appalachian stereotypes, everything is too neat, nothing fails to fit into the cliches and tropes. I know people in small town Western North Carolina. When they describe things in their towns, they don't talk like this.

The one thing I can give this writing credit for it is that it isn't AI. It's something way beyond AI. A truly massive corpus of generated text, but the long-running question is "why".

[JohnL]

Wife: In our holler, which is becoming more and more populated, but the people still holler a lot, my son has taken to trapping squirrels/possums/hoping for a coon, and pay him a dollar a catch. He gets upset when one of his big traps go walking, and I think one was loaned out to a friend who was losing chickens, and one was loaned out to a relative. Shiny bits of tinfoil really work well, but they’re sneaky little creatures. The others come to peanuts or peanut butter and whatever other random stuff he happens to use.

We also have a new reptile at the bass pond over here. Not very big, but I would certainly holler if I tripped over it at night.

Is it a non-venomous black snake like a king snake? They can be good to have around for killing rodents and venomous snakes.
Raccoons and coyotes and the occasional bobcat go after chickens here. Coon dogs are prized for helping with coons and possum. Coyotes weren’t a problem until about 20 or 25 years ago. Don’t know what attracted them here. They go after chickens and folk’s pets. Once in awhile I hear about a pack that takes down someone’s Billy goat and even a cow one time. The younger men like to set up traps and kill coyotes when they start to be a problem in an area. One man in his 30s from the next holler has a side income where folks call him to come deal with problem coyotes. He gets a lot of business from chicken farmers. Folks with small flocks used to let their chickens run in their yards but between the coons and the coyotes it’s not safe to do that anymore.
Saw the Bully on Sunday. He was in a good mood. They’d gone on vacation down to Lake Mattamuskeet near the coast for bass fishing. Looks to be he caught some good sized bass and he was asking me about how to smoke them. I told him to get one of those smoker tubes and I’d give him some applewood chips so he could smoke them on his grill. I’ve never given him cause to get mad at me I just mostly listen to him. He really doesn’t like pot-stirring folks who start in with silly put downs like they’re better than everybody else. But he’s also known to get mad at little things that he thinks he knows better about so he’s got his faults too. Don’t we all.

[JohnH]

Wife: In our holler, which is becoming more and more populated, but the people still holler a lot, my son has taken to trapping squirrels/possums/hoping for a coon, and pay him a dollar a catch. He gets upset when one of his big traps go walking, and I think one was loaned out to a friend who was losing chickens, and one was loaned out to a relative. Shiny bits of tinfoil really work well, but they’re sneaky little creatures. The others come to peanuts or peanut butter and whatever other random stuff he happens to use.

We also have a new reptile at the bass pond over here. Not very big, but I would certainly holler if I tripped over it at night.

Is it a non-venomous black snake like a king snake? They can be good to have around for killing rodents and venomous snakes.
Raccoons and coyotes and the occasional bobcat go after chickens here. Coon dogs are prized for helping with coons and possum. Coyotes weren’t a problem until about 20 or 25 years ago. Don’t know what attracted them here. They go after chickens and folk’s pets. Once in awhile I hear about a pack that takes down someone’s Billy goat and even a cow one time. The younger men like to set up traps and kill coyotes when they start to be a problem in an area. One man in his 30s from the next holler has a side income where folks call him to come deal with problem coyotes. He gets a lot of business from chicken farmers. Folks with small flocks used to let their chickens run in their yards but between the coons and the coyotes it’s not safe to do that anymore.
Saw the Bully on Sunday. He was in a good mood. They’d gone on vacation down to Lake Mattamuskeet near the coast for bass fishing. Looks to be he caught some good sized bass and he was asking me about how to smoke them. I told him to get one of those smoker tubes and I’d give him some applewood chips so he could smoke them on his grill. I’ve never given him cause to get mad at me I just mostly listen to him. He really doesn’t like pot-stirring folks who start in with silly put downs like they’re better than everybody else. But he’s also known to get mad at little things that he thinks he knows better about so he’s got his faults too. Don’t we all.

What a ridiculous list of things that have never happened.

[sojourner]

Wife: In our holler, which is becoming more and more populated, but the people still holler a lot, my son has taken to trapping squirrels/possums/hoping for a coon, and pay him a dollar a catch. He gets upset when one of his big traps go walking, and I think one was loaned out to a friend who was losing chickens, and one was loaned out to a relative. Shiny bits of tinfoil really work well, but they’re sneaky little creatures. The others come to peanuts or peanut butter and whatever other random stuff he happens to use.


We also have a new reptile at the bass pond over here. Not very big, but I would certainly holler if I tripped over it at night.

Is it a non-venomous black snake like a king snake? They can be good to have around for killing rodents and venomous snakes.
Raccoons and coyotes and the occasional bobcat go after chickens here. Coon dogs are prized for helping with coons and possum. Coyotes weren’t a problem until about 20 or 25 years ago. Don’t know what attracted them here. They go after chickens and folk’s pets. Once in awhile I hear about a pack that takes down someone’s Billy goat and even a cow one time. The younger men like to set up traps and kill coyotes when they start to be a problem in an area. One man in his 30s from the next holler has a side income where folks call him to come deal with problem coyotes. He gets a lot of business from chicken farmers. Folks with small flocks used to let their chickens run in their yards but between the coons and the coyotes it’s not safe to do that anymore.
Saw the Bully on Sunday. He was in a good mood. They’d gone on vacation down to Lake Mattamuskeet near the coast for bass fishing. Looks to be he caught some good sized bass and he was asking me about how to smoke them. I told him to get one of those smoker tubes and I’d give him some applewood chips so he could smoke them on his grill. I’ve never given him cause to get mad at me I just mostly listen to him. He really doesn’t like pot-stirring folks who start in with silly put downs like they’re better than everybody else. But he’s also known to get mad at little things that he thinks he knows better about so he’s got his faults too. Don’t we all.

What a ridiculous list of things that have never happened.

Well, since I do like a good mystery, let me pile on.

I don’t really have a reason to doubt this article as truth.
While the OP has in the past shown that he’s a bit forgetful (Such as starting multiple threads with similar content only a few months apart) he’s talked quite a bit about smoking.
If someone is spinning tales, it’s really hard to keep things straight especially if you’re older and forgetful to begin with.
Even tho I believe he feigns ignorance in regards to MaxPC, I don’t think that his posts are primarily fiction. IMO he’s interested in conversation but not interested in exposing the link between himself and MaxPC. Perhaps because Max wanted it that way.

[Bootstrap]

Apparently, the people have names like "The Bully" and "The Pot Stirrer", and it's sure good that they have JohnL to tell them what is right, if only they would listen to him.

It's very, very interesting, since as someone presently living in Appalachia, and who spent lots of time around his very Appalachian grandparents who also lived there, I never saw any of this. Nobody had nicknames that were derogatory like that, although there were quite a few inexplicable nicknames like "Bo" and "Turtle".

I think there's a reason for that. Where I grew up, there were basically three families who could walk to each other's houses, and each family had a bunch of children and one car. In a small town, you know everyone, they are your social circle, you have to get along with them. Where I come from, at least, people would have pushed back if I tried to give people nicknames like this. I would never have written about them on some online forum with derogatory nicknames like this for humorous effect.