So we are, apparently, listening to the best of Queen tonight.

My roommate, Freddie Mercury, and I are spending a quiet Saturday night at home.  My mom was supposed to visit this weekend but she's been done in by a back injury so our Hui Girls Gone Wild tour has been cancelled.  Which is fine actually.  I need to catch up on sleep and grading and midterm-planning.  And Brian May.

So the bus tour certainly was a trip.  The most surreal/hilarious/inappropriate part was the intermittent narration by some little old man they found (and I mean old, he was drafted for WWII out of college so, what, in his nineties?  I was worried he was going to die on the trip.  Or at least fall over and break a hip) that used to teach in the vet school or I don't know what.  Anyway, he grew up in the Mississippi Delta region and had lots of things to say about that.  He'd start some story about the South during segregation and then trail off for thirty seconds or more and then start up with some unrelated story about cotton gins or war bonds or whatever.

"When I was growing up around here we had a bus that would come by our house and take us to the school which I guess was alright.  I would have to bring my lunch... (very long pause)  ...when I got back from the war I sent a box of valentine chocolates to that pretty girl I met down at the community college near Meridian and I guess that was alright with her 'cuz she said that I could see more of her... (very long pause) ...we didn't have tractors like these when I was comin' up..."  It was like having Grandpa Simpson as our tour guide.

Anyway, we visited Canton, Mississippi, site of the filming of such movies as Mississippi Burning and A Time to Kill and My Dog Skip.  It does have a very pretty little town square with a courthouse in the center.  And some beautiful antebellum homes.

"They say that the reason that Grant didn't burn Canton when he came through was because it had been built by freemasons.  Though I think also they say that the women of Canton we're very hospitable.  That they were very, you know, obliging..."

Stick with the freemason story, old man.  Apparently also, the women of Canton wouldn't allow Grant to take down the metal dome of the courthouse which, according to calculations, was too heavy for the support structures of the building.  And since then some other engineers have similarly recommended that the dome come down or be reinforced.  The nice lady from the Canton, Mississippi Welcome Center proudly explained that three times now they've been warned about the dome but in 175 years the roof as yet to cave in.  A big fuck you to meddling outsiders and their laws of mechanics and tensile strength.

Then we got a tour of the Nissan factory which was pretty awesome (they have all sorts of robots and mechanized soldering machines but the steel stamper was my favorite), though I did get a little sleepy (we had to be on the bus by 6:15) and almost fell off the tram.

"When I was comin' up we'd put all the corn in a wagon..."

And then there was the catfish processing plant in Tchula.  Now, I'd misunderstood and was really looking forward to this, thinking that we'd be out at the ponds tossing in food pellets to watch them frenzy.  But no.  We entered through the door of the kill floor.  They use these vacuum hose things to suck the entrails out of them.  And have these terribly dangerous looking band-saw-like de-skinners for ripping the flesh off the hands of sleepy workers (actually, they said they hadn't had a machine-related injury in 20 years).  And then there was the trimming area where the filets (pronounced fee-lay) are hand cut.

"I had a bucket once..."

I thought all of this was very interesting to see and not as gross as I'd expected (our bus parked next to an enormous bin where the guts vacuum deposited its winnings in gurgly plops and THAT was gross as was the fact that my pants dragged on the floor a bit so they absorbed quite a bit of dead catfish water).  But, as my roommate pointed out later, there was something deeply disturbing about rolling up in our fancy bus and  peering over the shoulder of these workers that had to stand, in plastic ponchos, in dead catfish water, trimming fee-lays all day.  And these are the ones that could afford the gas to get to work.  Many apparently can't.

"and the kudzu there, it could fill up a gully so you couldn't even see it...  you could fall in neck-high in kudzu...  and then you'd be stuck."

Then we went to a working farm.  Or valiant bus driver braved the dirt roads so we could see a combine harvester at work up close which was cool.  Like a safari.  There is a special place in my heart for big, industrial equipment like this.  Big cantankerous rhinos.  

And that's about it.  They took us to a very nice hotel in the middle of the very poor town of Greenwood (the first time I've seen an armed security guard since arriving in Mississippi), home of the Viking stove factory.  We had a wine and crudite mixer with local power-brokers.  I'm sure I impressed the city councilmembers with my dead catfish pants.  Also, the vice-provost was telling me about George Wallace and how he wasn't very tall and, pointing at me exclaimed, "short!  short like you!"

I am short like George Wallace.  Don't quite know what to make of that.

"and those black boys, we didn't mix much with them.  I found out they had to walk two or three miles to their school... so... I had a bucket once..."