October means several things around here. The weather gets cooler. It also starts to rain again although its been unusually dry around here lately. Then there is Octoberfest. I’ve written about it before. Every year around mid-October the town of Cleveland holds a big barbecue competition downtown. Winners go on to participate in the World…
Every place has a culture. Mannerisms, customs, traditions, and ways of doing things all vary between nations, states, regions, families, and towns. The variety of cultures across the world is fascinating in all its diversity. The same holds true in our country. The culture of New York is not the same as California, which is…
Ever since moving down to Mississippi I have lamented the lack of dancing of any sort in the whole state. There is certainly no contra dancing. In fact the only time I’ve seen the word dancing used at all was to refer to a concert which took place during Octoberfest 2013 in Cleveland. However as…
Some days are uneventful. Nothing goes wrong and nothing goes right. You just coast. Last Monday was not one of those days, however. At around 10:15 AM, someone I knew and respected was shot dead in his office. The shooter was also someone I knew albeit not well. Never in my life did I think…
Summers around Cleveland tend to be slow. Teach for America comes in June and leaves about six weeks later. As the corps members are arriving, professors and students are fleeing town. Most of them only get one time a year to go on vacation, do research, and rest. So not much happens between June and…
The trip was work related. For the past year I have been chair of a group made up of users of Delta State’s library management system. We have a conference every year and this time it was held at MSU. All the same it was a great opportunity to visit an institution I’d previously known…
Early on one of the things I lamented was the lack of a good pizza place in Cleveland. There is Domino’s, Pizza Hut, and more recently Papa John’s, plus frozen pizza from Walmart and Kroger. However another place sits just beyond the edge of town on the south side of Highway 61. It’s called Lost…
A year and a half ago, I wrote that Cleveland is a divided land. The legacy of segregation is clearly on display. The white community and the black community seem to exist in largely separate spheres, interacting only at Delta State, Walmart, and Kroger. Otherwise people live their lives totally apart. I haven’t…
The Mississippi Delta does not rank very highly in a lot of things. Those include health care outcomes. Rates of obesity, diabetes, and cancer are very bad around here. The same goes for life expectancy. There are many causes of which poverty is likely nearthe top. However the agricultural chemicals farmer use probably don’t help….
Welcome to the new Rambling New Yorker! For some time I’d felt it was time for a change. My old platform, Blogger, worked well enough for a while. But it just didn’t give me enough control over the layout. So after much consideration, I made the plunge and migrated my blog into a self-hosted WordPress…