Hooker Tuesday
Zmirak posted at Taki yesterday. As always, highly entertaining. Perhaps the most interesting excerpt:
Blues legend John Lee Hooker, whom I tracked down in Mississippi and quizzed by phone about what inspired his early hit, “Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom.” His Delta accent was so impenetrable that his answers sounded to me like “Ahz lifn rount Greenville batden n'I'd dis gurlphren werkt in a genamens club”¦.” I stammered, completely confused, until his manager jumped on the other line and translated John Lee's answers into Yankee. I learned, among other things, that the author of the immortal “One Bourbon, One Scotch, and One Beer” was now a Jehovah's Witness, so I wouldn't see him at Last Call. Nor did his sect believe in eternal damnation; it turned out that his classic “Burning Hell” blues was in fact intended as a tract.
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You'll know I'm an attorney in an agricultural area when I tell you that I found this piece fascinating: farmland prices increasing rapidly.
The most expensive farmland in the U.S. was in Massachusetts at $12,200 an acre, followed by Rhode Island and Connecticut. The least expensive was in New Mexico, where land prices averaged $630 an acre. Northeast states were the most expensive of the 10 regions in the lower 48 states tracked by the USDA, with an average price of $5,080 an acre. The least-expensive area remained the Northern Plains, at $1,110 an acre. Values grew fastest in South Dakota, where prices jumped 21 percent to $990 an acre.
I'm surprised the acreage is that cheap. In my area (southwestern Michigan), farmland acreage is selling at nearly $10,000 an acre. Perhaps that's not the average price, but it's the price I see in the deals I work on and it's what my colleagues are seeing. This map (Adobe document, see page 5) says Michigan farmland is going for $4,150 an acre. I'd like to find some of those parcels.
Aside: It cracks me up that North Dakota is selling for $765 an acre. If they're not careful, Microsoft might take them over.
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Nothing a high-powered rifle to the head couldn't solve: A death row inmate scheduled for execution says he's too fat to be put to death, claiming executioners would have trouble finding his veins and that his weight could diminish the effectiveness of one of the lethal injection drugs. Or take Chris Rock's response when questioned about the effectiveness of lethal injection and other sophisticated forms of execution: "What about stabbing? That usually works." (rough quote)
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Great, now the men will demand bullet-proof jock straps: German police women are to be issued with bullet-resistant bras.
