It is May in Memphis..............

"Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Smoke wafts up from the environs of Tom Lee Park on the banks of the Mississippi River in downtown Memphis. Competitors from all over the country have arrived to prove their prowess in Barbecue over all comers.

For three days in May each year, the best cooks from the Barbecue Contests of the country meet in Memphis to determine the divine swine. This year is no different. Weather has always be either glorious or totally uncooperative, depending on your point of view. Thousand Six is no exception. Today has been a gorgeous day, yet an ominous cloud has cast its shadow across the "Big Muddy" from Arkansas. Locals are praying for a weekend of good weather.

Either way the swine will be divine, the ribs tickled, sauce tasted, and "everything but" will be just fine.

Check out the official site at: http://www.memphisinmay.org/

Tomorrow I will visit the park to sample the offerings on the altar of the barbecue gods. Like football in the South, Barbecue is like a religion; everybody has their own preference and favorite. Don't disparage it, don't fight about it, if you don't like it, find your own and support it!!

Long live Barbecue!!

"The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play." ~ Arnold J. Toynbee

Other fascinating moments in Republican History

"Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit." ~ Edward R. Murrow, journalist (1908-1965)

The 1920s Republican administrations in Washington openly endorsed Mussolini, and with the aid of J. P. Morgan, they helped engineer hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of credits and loans to the Fascist government.

The relationship between Mussolini and the Republicans was so embarrassingly close that President Coolidge’s ambassador to Italy, Richard Washburn Child, helped ghostwrite Il Duce’s “autobiography," surely one of the odder and more (deliberately) forgotten moments in U.S. diplomatic history.

http://www.theorientalist.info/levs.php?location=New%20York&id=26/

"A man might die for honor or kill for arrogance. In broad daylight the terrible vision of sin might strike him down by the tavern well or back of his own corn crib. It was a land of the fiddle and whiskey, sweat and prayer, pride and depravity." ~ Robert Penn Warren