For BBQ

[Larry]

Just so Cletus gets the one for Wonky. It could be worse....

[Larry]

Where'd you go Cletus? I thought you had lots to say about me? Or do you only do that when I'm not here?

[cletus1]

I go to bed around 9:00 Larry. And I only have stuff to say about you when you post something that I disagree with which is almost everything.

I have also been busy earning vacation money so I can go someplace very warm and sunny this winter so I don't spend as much time here.

But go ahead and say something stupid; I dare ya.

[Scar]

Cool a bbq thread. Can we bring our wives and kids to this thread?

[Scrapper]

Cool a bbq thread. Can we bring our wives and kids to this thread?

Just how many wives and kids do you have?

[bbqboy]

counting his mom?

[bbqboy]

http://travel.nytimes.com/2013/08/07/tra...es-oz.html
Kansas and New York City have more in common than I thought.















Both are mostly laid out in planned grids of right angles rather than natural curves. Both have more numbered streets than named ones. Both get politically pigeonholed by outsiders, though on opposite ends of the spectrum. Both have a densely populated place called Manhattan (one admittedly more densely populated than the other).

But most of all, visitors to each arrive primed for what they might find from images implanted by pop culture. For New York, that can mean anything from “Sex in the City” to “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.” In Kansas, of course, it’s a perennial classic: “The Wizard of Oz.”

Judging by the number of “you’re not in Kansas anymore — wait, yes you are!” messages I got from East Coast friends when they found out I was in the state, it’s pretty clear that Dorothy, Toto and Auntie Em still top Bob Dole, Sam Brownback and Kathleen Sebelius as its standard-bearers.

I hoped to bring an open mind to my visit, which fell at about the halfway mark of my cross-country trip from Louisiana to North Dakota. The plan: explore some local museums, regional food and a natural preserve that could exist only in this part of the country. Yet even I fell under the poppy-scented spell of Oz.

Within an hour of crossing into southeast Kansas from Oklahoma on a Saturday afternoon, I was in Franklin (population, 375) asking a woman named Phyllis Bitner what I might do that evening. “There’s a community theater performance of ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ” she said.

Given that cultural immersion and frugality were two of my top missions on this trip, the idea was too good to pass up. So I headed to the Pittsburg Community Theater, named for the 20,000-person Kansas city just over the Missouri state line. Members of the theater group told me they weren’t doing “The Wizard of Oz” because it’s a Kansas story but rather because it has plenty of roles for children, who were height-cast as Munchkins.

Despite tickets priced at a mere $5 and $10, the show was admirably elaborate, complete with a full pit orchestra, flying witches, an impressively flimsy scarecrow and, in the role of Toto, an unflappable dog named Bear. Local critics raved. “That was awesome,” a kid named Dillon, who was sitting in front of me, enthusiastically shouted after the Munchkinland scene. “Creepy!” he cried after the witch shot fire out of the end of her broomstick at the scarecrow. After the show, he had his picture taken with the Cowardly Lion in the lobby; I hung out with cast and crew myself around the corner at a bar called JST Bobby G’s, where a ’90s cover band called Bill and Monica’s Excellent Adventure was playing.
cont.....
http://travel.nytimes.com/2013/08/01/tra...zarks.html


Dinnertime comes early in the Ozarks, even during the long days of summer. So after I lingered over smoked trout, fried chicken liver and blackberry cobbler at Rockbridge Trout and Game Ranch’s friendly restaurant, wandered around its barn-red 19th-century grist mill and drove off to look for a motel, there was still daylight to spare. At 8 p.m., as I reached the utterly rural intersection of Missouri Routes 5 and 95, the sun had still not quite yet set. It was what photographers and filmmakers call the golden hour, when the last light of the day gives whatever land it falls on a temporary visual upgrade. So I stopped, parked, and sat on the hood of my car. Sloping pastures glinted and cattle grazed halfway to the horizon, beyond them purplish pink clouds hovered over barely distinguishable low-slung hills. The Ozarks were, finally, stunning.
Follow the Frugal Road Trip

The Frugal Road Trip
Part 2: Memphis
Elvis, barbecue and baseball are just part of this leg of the journey.
- Part 1: Louisiana
-




“Finally” because the region, which straddles the Missouri-Arkansas border, is at best competing for Miss Congeniality in the pageant of American mountain ranges. They are more like hill ranges — and some point out they are really not even that, but valleys carved into a plateau, as if the reflection of hills in a vast lake became the hills themselves.

But what the Ozarks lack in soaring grandiosity, they make up for in subdued beauty and cultural quirkiness. They are a place to hike and canoe and fish and rubberneck as you drive by old-fashioned pickups residents have left to rust on their properties, the whole time taking joy in even the slightest changes in elevation, so absent from this stretch of the country.

I based myself in Harrison, Ark., which I had chosen because it was close to the Buffalo National River (like a national park, except water-centric) and because I found a pretty-looking inn called the Queen Anne House, where I could take a break from run-down motels but pay a motel-like price, $55 a night plus tax. What is billed as a historic town was the actually quite pleasantly humdrum; a front-page headline in the local paper the day I arrived was “Council Approves Dirt.” (To be fair, it was dirt needed to shoot scenes for “Bald Knobbers: The Movie,” currently in production.) Even when I had to drive far, I flipped between radio stations like Big Country 99 (The Rooster) and 102.5 FM (The Ozarks’ Best Country) and caught up on two decades of Tim McGraw lyrics. (“I had a barbecue stain on my white T-shirt, she was killin’ me in that miniskirt.”)

But the Ozarks has its own, more local genre of music: the fiddle jam. If you’re willing to drive, you can find one most days of the week. In preparing for my trip, I had rather randomly contacted Fred Phister, a retired professor of English and longtime editor of the recently defunct Ozarks Mountaineer magazine; he directed me to the Monday night jam in McClurg, Mo.

The directions, though, were vague: I had no starting time or address. Seven o’clock seemed a likely fiddling hour, and reaching the speck of a town, it didn’t take much work to find the former general store, a white clapboard building that the owner opens just once a week for the jam and the potluck supper that precedes it.

They get the occasional stranger here, and I was peremptorily directed to fill a plate with sausage and potato casserole and a fruity green salad (and eye the Nilla-wafer-studded banana pudding I’d come back to shortly), before being gently drawn in to conversations by the mild-mannered crowd. “We’re not related, but we’re like family here,” said Mona Decker, a retired history teacher who talked my ear off and then apologized, quite unnecessarily, for talking my ear off. “It’s the same people week after week.”

The crowd soon split evenly into musicians — fiddlers, banjo, guitar and bass players sitting in a rough circle — and spectators, most of whom played cards and gossiped rather than spectating. The music was rollicking and lively, typical of Ozarkian music from this region (or so I was told); it was led by David Scrivner — a disciple of Bob Holt, the regionally famous fiddler who used to lead the sessions and died in 2004.

Ozark folk music has roots in the Appalachians, and the two regions’ linked history also share a more illicit folk tradition: moonshine. Just as city slickers have revived their own Prohibition tradition with chic, legal versions of the speakeasy, refined moonshine has made a comeback in the mountains where it was big business back in the day. Appalachia may be the legal-moonshine capital, but Copper Run Distillery in Walnut Shade, Mo., claims to be the Ozarks’ lone licensed producer. You can take a free tour of the modest facilities, see the custom-made copper still and hear how the makers “cut the head and tail off the snake, and leave the heart” — resulting in a more refined, smoother product (which, now that it’s legal, might more accurately be called unaged whiskey). The distillery also produces aged whiskey and rum; a tasting flight of each is just $5 and is generous enough to require a designated driver. I found the moonshine quite smooth, though I didn’t catch the “hints of delicate caramel” the Web site touts — more like hints of the low-grade grain alcohol we used to spike punch with in college.
cont..............

[Scar]

Cool a bbq thread. Can we bring our wives and kids to this thread?

Just how many wives and kids do you have?

It doesn't matter does it? Stay out of my bedroom and stay away from my scrotum.

[Scrapper]

Cool a bbq thread. Can we bring our wives and kids to this thread?

Just how many wives and kids do you have?

It doesn't matter does it? Stay out of my bedroom and stay away from my scrotum.

Perhaps you should take your own advice.

[PonderThis]

No, he wants to control his own life and control others, too.

[Scar]

Cool a bbq thread. Can we bring our wives and kids to this thread?

Just how many wives and kids do you have?

It doesn't matter does it? Stay out of my bedroom and stay away from my scrotum.

Perhaps you should take your own advice.

Why should I stay out of my own bedroom?

[Scar]

Hey Boy. If you could put your hate bucket away for a second then maybe we could help each other out. I have a garden that needs weeding and some dog turds that need picking up. There are a couple shiny coins in it for you.

Oh, stay off my personal thread unless I give you permission.

[Scrapper]

Hey Boy. If you could put your hate bucket away for a second then maybe we could help each other out. I have a garden that needs weeding and some dog turds that need picking up. There are a couple shiny coins in it for you.

Oh, stay off my personal thread unless I give you permission.

Good grief. Screw off. Get a life.

[csrowan]

Hey Boy. If you could put your hate bucket away for a second then maybe we could help each other out. I have a garden that needs weeding and some dog turds that need picking up. There are a couple shiny coins in it for you.

Oh, stay off my personal thread unless I give you permission.

Sorry dude, but "your" thread has put out a restraining order on you. You have to stay at least 50 forums away from it at all times.

Next time, try treating your threads with respect.

[Scar]

Hey Boy. If you could put your hate bucket away for a second then maybe we could help each other out. I have a garden that needs weeding and some dog turds that need picking up. There are a couple shiny coins in it for you.

Oh, stay off my personal thread unless I give you permission.

Good grief. Screw off. Get a life.

I was not talking to you. Please move along now and mind your own business.

[PonderThis]

It's a public forum and anyone can participate. So stick that.

[Scrapper]

Hey Boy. If you could put your hate bucket away for a second then maybe we could help each other out. I have a garden that needs weeding and some dog turds that need picking up. There are a couple shiny coins in it for you.

Oh, stay off my personal thread unless I give you permission.

Good grief. Screw off. Get a life.

I was not talking to you. Please move along now and mind your own business.

I am a member of RVF in good standing... anything and everything here is my business.

[Scar]

Hey Boy. If you could put your hate bucket away for a second then maybe we could help each other out. I have a garden that needs weeding and some dog turds that need picking up. There are a couple shiny coins in it for you.

Oh, stay off my personal thread unless I give you permission.

Good grief. Screw off. Get a life.

I was not talking to you. Please move along now and mind your own business.

I am a member of RVF in good standing... anything and everything here is my business.

Actually, it is not your business, it is not "your" anything. A "member in good standing", is this a country club?

[bbqboy]

so your business is to harass me and be a supreme asshole? At least you're not lying about that.

[Scar]

Hey Boy. If you could put your hate bucket away for a second then maybe we could help each other out. I have a garden that needs weeding and some dog turds that need picking up. There are a couple shiny coins in it for you.

Oh, stay off my personal thread unless I give you permission.

I noticed that my windshield is kinda buggy so you can clean that for me too. If you do a good enough job then my sandwich crust is all yours.