The Ol' No'th State

So this lovely piece of film has been circulating around a lot today, in which Miss Teen South Carolina proves yet again that beauty will often get you farther than brains but dumb will always make you a big hit on YouTube. It makes a girl proud to live in, well, the other Carolina. And (as I commented on Matt's blog, pardon my redundancy) I also give Mario Lopez a heck of a lot of credit for not just beating her senseless with the microphone right there. I'm not sure I could've shown that much restraint and decorum, myself (as Mario Lopez. What does that say?).

Poor girl. To quote Ron White, you can't fix stupid.

But it also, for some reason, reminded me of this:



Not for any other reason than I think this was the last time I saw Mario Lopez in anything other than a Saved by the Bell rerun. It's a Carlos Mencia skit. You know my love of Carlos Mencia and his deeply inappropriate humor. Let it also be known that I think Brokeback Mountain, though it may only be 64 pages, is one of the best books I've ever read, and I do think the movie more or less did it justice. This, however, this is just funny. And not in the ridiculously dumb, Trapped in the Closet kind of way.

In other news, I spent part of yesterday getting way too sunburned at the 31st Annual Lazy Daze Festival, which they describe as "one of the South's premier festivals" and I think the best one I've ever been to (and remember, I'm from Chicago). It's billed as an arts and crafts festival, but that doesn't especially fit. You hear "arts and crafts", you think plastic beaded jewelry on elastic string and woven potholders. This was, like, an artisan fair. There was tons of remarkable pottery, art, wood carving, jewelry (that didn't involve elastic), not to mention cool local arts stuff (the American Turkish Association of NC had belly dancers walking the streets, and the Cary Players had five people dressed up as pirates in the town square. I was really jealous of the pirate wench's costume, it was wicked cool). There was live music, local food, it was really great. And the whole thing ran like clockwork, they were so well organized (you should've seen the way they ran us through the shuttle buses).

If it hadn't been A HUNDRED AND FIVE DEGREES OUT it would've been a very enjoyable time.

But it was WAAAAY TOO HOT. Kool and the Gang, Cole Porter kind of hot. Because it was 105, crazy humid, and there were 60, 000 people crammed into a couple blocks of downtown Cary, which is roughly half the population of the whole sprawling town. It was hot. And we were packed in like little sardines in a toaster oven. Which was sad, because I could've easily spent another 2 hours there. Which probably would've resulted in me getting a worse sunburn and spending a lot more money, so maybe it was fortunate after all. As it is, all I bought was lemonade (as a sidebar, I'm loving the abundance of fresh-squeezed lemonade down here) and a birthday gift for my friend in Long Island, but I'm regretting passing up several purchases that would've been really good, unique Christmas gifts. I would've had to stop moving, though, and ugh, that would've been awful. The heat was bad.

Oh! But! Guess who else I found there? The local Knitter's Guild! I still have yet to locate an SNB, but there were actual knitters! And they were knitting, right there, in the wild! They also told me that essentially my entire stash was worthless down here, given, you know, how it's almost entirely wool and alpaca, and I now live where you wear wool sweaters, like, once a year.....owwwww.......thank God for my recent sock yarn addiction...