Right wingers try to steal Carlin's rant for their anti-government agenda

"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."

Mark Twain.

Who else could it be? Samuel Langhorne Clemens was probably the greatest humorist/philosopher in the U.S. over the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. It's particularly fitting to quote him here, because the subject of this piece is his counterpart over the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries.

George Carlin.

This is not what Carlin said.

In recent weeks, there has been a meme floating around the Internet in which Carlin supposedly attacks big government. He says that governments don't want people to be intelligent or well-educated, just obedient.

No one is quite sure who created it, but lately it has been coming from a group called the Heartland Institute, a quasi-Libertarian group that is best known for opposing those who say climate change is real.. Most of its funding comes from the usual suspects -- Kochs, Waltons and other right-wing moguls.

Anyway, they spread the meme as an example of "hip" anti-government thought. The only problem is, it wasn't what Carlin said.

I know that's a shock. I know most of us believe everything we hear from such paragons as the Koch brothers and the Walton kids, great Americans all.

But Carlin wasn't going after government. He has going after the kind of people who contribute to the Heartland Institute. Here's what the meme should have looked like.

This is what he really said.

Isn't that fascinating. These scumbags took a pretty powerful Carlin attack on themselves and turned it into an anti-government meme.

This isn't a misunderstand or a difference of opinion, either. The way they presented Carlin's quote was an out and out lie.

Carlin's daughter Kelly got involved, as did sites like Daily Kos and Crooks and Liars.

Eventually even Heartland had to apologize.

In a way, I feel sorry for these people. They're conservative, which means almost everyone in show business who is really hip or talented is on the other side.

The only real comedian of any note who is conservative is Dennis Miller, and the difference between Carlin and Miller is like the difference between Babe Ruth and a Baby Ruth candy bar. Of course they would love to believe Carlin was on their side.

Yeah, well, my friend Mick writes screenplays. Doesn't make him William Goldman.

Just in case you're curious, here's the actual bit as actually performed by Carlin. Ain't YouTube grand?

It isn't just sights and sounds that can evoke youthful memories

Your memory can be jogged in many ways.

We all know the reaction of hearing an old song that takes us back to an earlier time in our lives, and we're also aware of how much can be evoked by looking at pictures from when we were younger.

Just a few minutes ago, I looked at a picture of myself from 1997. I had a full head of hair and a beard in the photo and every hair visible was dark brown. No gray -- or even worse, white -- at all. By that age, my closest friend had already become a stockholder in Grecian Formula.

But for all we get from sight and sound, it's easy to overlook the way a smell can take us back. After all, most of the smells we experience in everyday life are a part of our present. There just aren't that many opportunities to smell the past as if it were the present.

But I had one today, and I swear it snapped me right back to the fall of 1967 as if it were yesterday.

The old McCormick Road dorms, UVa.

In September 1967 I was 17 going on 13, particularly in terms of social interactions with others my age. I had graduated from high school in June, and I made the wrong decision about where to go to college. Even if I didn't know it at the time.

I had had exactly four dates in high school, only one of which I drove for. Except for a taste or two of beer my grandfather had given me when I visited him in Ohio, I'm pretty sure alcohol had never crossed my lips.

I wanted desperately to be liked, which made it pretty certain I wouldn't be. I was one of those people who always tried too hard to get people to like me.

Anyway I was 17, with nothing even resembling social experience and I made the decision to go to a school that was pretty high-powered socially -- the University of Virginia.

I lasted three semesters, although by October of my second year I had pretty much stopped going to classes. I had learned to drink by then, although I was still more than a year and a different college away from having my first real girlfriend.

Bourbon whiskey

There has never been another place in my life that I have both loved and hated as much as Charlottesville, Va., although the negative feelings are really about what I allowed to happen to me while I was there. I failed completely as a student, but I impressed the members enough that I was accepted into the Jefferson Literary & Debating Society. At least I enjoyed my Friday nights.

But I have digressed too long. This was not intended to be a piece about my many shortcomings, but about smells being able to evoke memories from long ago. My time in Charlottesville was when I first discovered bourbon whiskey.

When I was unsophisticated, I drank mostly bourbon and coke, although later in my 20s and into my 30s, when I drank bourbon it was mostly from shot glasses. I liked Rebel Yell, but I was never that much of a drinker. I moved on to screwdrivers and ultimately Pina Coladas. For the last 10 years or so, I've been pretty much a two or three drinks a year sort of person.

But I do have a bottle of bourbon in my pantry, even though I have yet to drink any of it. I'm a big fan of Stuart Woods' books about Stone Barrington, the lawyer/detective who appreciates Knob Creek bourbon from Kentucky.

So I bought a bottle. It's a higher-class bourbon, something like $35 a fifth. Earlier today, I twisted the top, uncapped the bottle and just smelled it.

I swear to God, I practically swooned. All of a sudden, it was May 1968 and I was sitting in my dorm room at UVa.

Yes, even smells can bring back memories.

He's older, I'm older but McCartney is still worth seeing in concert

Back in February, right around the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, I wrote that I had never had the opportunity to see the Fab Four in concert.

I also wrote that in May 1976, I had missed the one chance I ever had to see Paul McCartney in concert.

I was 26 then, and going to concerts was a big part of my life.

It isn't anymore. With the exception of a Beach Boys concert at the Los Angeles County Fair in September 2010, the last time I went to a concert was in a different millennium.

Madigan

Actually, I have gone to a couple of shows in the last few years, but both of them were comedy shows -- Jim Gaffigan and Kathleen Madigan.

I actually had tickets to see Tony Bennett and Jackie Evancho last year, but my wife was recuperating from spinal surgery and wasn't up to going.

I really figured that was the last time I would buy concert tickets. I've got more than 11,000 songs on my iPod, so I get all the music I want whenever I want it.

But when I checked my email today, I had one from my country club. Members are given the opportunity to buy tickets to certain events before they go on sale to the general public. It's usually sports tickets for Atlanta events, but occasionally concert tickets pop up for purchase.

Today, surprise of surprises, I saw that tickets were going on sale to the public tomorrow for -- believe it or not -- Paul McCartney.

It has been 38 years since I missed my chance to see him at Capital Centre. I was 26 that summer and McCartney was 33.

Wings Over America was one of his best tours. He was young and in his prime and I was, well, I was young.

Neither of us is young anymore. When McCartney performs on June 21st at Phillips Arena, he'll be two days past his 72nd birthday. I'll be 64 and I'll be in the audience.

Tickets are a lot more expensive than they used to be. I bought two out of the third price group of five and I still spent more than I've ever spent for a show before -- about $210.

That's a lot of money for concert tickets, but when I'm on my death bed, I don't think Ill be saying I wish I hadn't spent the money. On the other hand, I would definitely say I wish I had seen Paul McCartney.

Missing out on a chance to hear wonderful grandfather stories

I had three grandfathers, although I really only got to know one of them.

First was Charles, my first paternal grandfather. He died before I was born, and his son disappeared from my life for good before my third birthday.If I ever think of either of them, which is seldom, it's like I hear a mental policeman in my head.

"Nothing to see here, folks. Move along."

Paul, lower right, on his wedding day in 1920

Second was Paul, my maternal grandfather. He was nearly 60 in my first memories of him, and he was one of the key figures in my life until he died at age 89. I know he was a flawed man, but I loved him very much and I still miss him nearly 30 years after his death.

I know a great deal about him, largely because he loved to tell stories about his life. He taught me that the most important pitch any pitcher throws is Strike One; I'll never forget his expressions of disgust when we listened to Cleveland Indians games on the radio in the early '60s. Indians pitchers always seemed to be behind hitter 2-and-0.

He was essentially a blue-collar guy, but he loved to read. He watched some television, but other than baseball games, he rarely even turned his portable radio on. The only music I remember him enjoying was "Lawrence Welk."

My third grandfather was Morris, my second paternal grandfather. I first met him in 1957, and he died just 12 years later. His son Norman was the only man I ever really knew as a father. He was my dad for more than 50 years. He died six years ago and I miss him more as each year passes.

His father emigrated from the Ukraine, came through Ellis Island and settled in New York City. He was the only real entrepreneur our family ever had. From the time my dad was growing up through most of the time I knew him, my grandfather owned a neighborhood grocery store on Ditmas Avenue in Brooklyn.

Not Morris or his store, but one very similar.

The store in the picture isn't his, and the man isn't him, but I couldn't resist running the picture since it was almost certainly within a block or two of his location.

He was open six days a week -- closed for Shabbos -- and usually at the store from before sunrise till well past sundown. I doubt I ever had another relative who worked as hard for as long as he did.

I remember a conversation with one of my sisters about how hard he worked. She told me that the reason our dad never wanted to have his own business was that he saw his own father grinding out a living working far harder than he would have needed to work had he been salaried.

I don't recall ever having a conversation with my grandfather. I was sort of intimidated by him, and I never really had many opportunities to talk with him alone. He died fairly young -- when I was just 19 and when my father was only 43.

The thing is, I never had many conversations with my dad about his life either, and he died when I was 58 years old. There was so much I would like to have known about the time and place where he grew up. I've read Chaim Potok's wonderful books, and of course seen the Woody Allen films about growing up in Brooklyn during the same period.

But I missed my chance to get first-hand stories, and I will always regret that.

I measure my Facebook friends by quality, not quantity

We all complain about Facebook, about how much time we spend there, how much information they gather about us, how little privacy we actually have.

But very few of us actually quit.

Here comes the judge

I know one person who did. She was my first girlfriend in 1970, and she spent very little time on Facebook. She quit completely when she was appointed to a Superior Court judgeship in her home state.

Now that I think about it, I can think of a second person who quit -- my lovely daughter-in-law. She and my son are doing their best to maintain their privacy, no easy task in this modern world.

It's ironic that my daughter and her husband use Facebook for all it's worth. Of course, one big reason they use it is to keep family and friends up to date on what's happening with their wonderful children.

My grandchildren, two already on the field and a third one warming up in the bullpen and due in November.

Between Facebook and weekly calls on Skype, I'm in closer touch with my daughter anywhere in the world than I was to my first wife during the last year of our marriage.

Bada bing!

I have 209 Facebook friends, which if I judge by how many friends my friends have, is probably slightly below average. My friend Mick has 647 friends, but then he was always a more sociable guy than I was. My younger brother has just 15, but he doesn't really use Facebook at all except to keep track of my daughter and her kids.

My guess is that at least a quarter of my friends are people I never met. Some are fraternity brothers from different years and some are interesting people around the country who like to keep track of what I'm writing.

Fine with me.

But of the people I know, I've got ...

... three friends who were close enough that they stood up for me at my first wedding, 39 years ago yesterday. They're in California, Florida and Virginia.

... two other friends who go way back, one to 1965 and one to 1971. I'm happy to see both of them are doing well, one in Colorado and one in Florida.

... colleagues from four of the seven newspapers on which I worked, including three who were my bosses in Virginia, North Carolina and California.

... two teachers from high school, people I liked very much and am glad to see still active.

... two women I might have married if things had worked out a little differently at the time, and a third one I actually asked, but the only answer I got from her was "You're not serious."

... my late father's closest friend, a wonderful writer.

... his son, another wonderful writer.

... the classiest person I ever met professionally, formerly a Washington Post reporter and now a star on ESPN.

... my younger brother, as I mentioned earlier.

... a half-dozen people I played a lot of years of fantasy baseball with, some of whom I still miss.

... both of my children's mothers-in-law.

... my son's brother-in-law.

... a former colleague who weighed more than 700 pounds when I knew him and now is in the mid 200s. He's an inspiration to us all.

... two friends who passed away, reminding me that I'm getting to the age when life starts taking more things away from us than it gives us.

Facebook certainly isn't the reason I get up in the morning, but it is one of the things that I know each day might bring me some kind of pleasant surprise.

That's why we do it.

That's why we'll keep doing it.

In five years, some things change and some things don't

Back when I first signed up for Facebook, I came across one of those Facebook-y things we see so often:

List 25 random things about your life.

Here's what I wrote in January 2009, when I was still living in Los Angeles, along with some comments (italicized) by way of explanation.

1. I never thought that the best thing I would do in my life would be being a father. My birth father deserted us when I was 2 and I had tremendous conflicts with my stepfather when I was growing up.

One of the few things of which I am truly proud is my performance as a dad. Of course it helps to have great kids. I'm not sure I would have been a good dad with me as a son.

2. I can be weird about songs. If there's a song that really strikes me, I'll keep flashing back to the beginning and listen to it five or six times before I move on to the next one.

I think my most recent one is "Come What May" from "Moulin Rouge."

3. Little things sometimes aren't so little. One of the five best moments in my entire life came when my daughter Pauline (technically my stepdaughter), who had always introduced me to her friends as "my stepfather," introduced me as "my dad" at Christmas 2006.

Still a wonderful moment.

4. I think my kids might be the two best people in the world.

Hey, all dads are proud of their kids, but I can tell the rest of you, you're battling for third place.

Down and Ford

5. I love movies, and they don't always have to be good ones. I've probably watched "Hanover Street," with Harrison Ford and Lesley Anne Down, 25 times.

Guilty pleasures. I've seen Melanie Griffith in "Shining Through" a lot more times than I've seen "Citizen Kane."

 6. It's tremendously frustrating to me that I can hit what is literally a perfect golf shot and then follow it up with one that is a total failure.

I'm getting better. I generally shoot in the 80s and I have broken 80 several times.

7. It's very strange to me that after never gaining weight until I was an adult, I've been fighting a losing battle with my weight ever since.

A terrible frustration.

My dad, right, in 2006

8. One of my greatest regrets in life was not appreciating my dad when I was growing up.

My dad died six years ago, and there are so many things about his life I wish I could have asked him.

9. I started out as a liberal, became more conservative for a while and now I'm probably slightly left of center.

On economic issues, I have become much more radical the last five years, an admirer of European Social Democracy.

10. I always thought it would be cool to have a sidekick.

It is, but it takes a lot away from the enjoyment when the sidekick doesn't admit he's a sidekick.

11. I've never been able to sing.

Still can't.

12. The best way to be a friend to people is to listen to them, and I've found the best way to be friends with people I wasn't friends with in high school is to write a book about them.

I just wish I could finish it before we all die.

Love of my life

13. I love my wife Nicole more than anything in the world.

My beautiful, talented, troubled wife has had such a difficult time health-wise the last three years. I hope we can get past it and enjoy retirement.

14. Few things annoy me more than born-again types who tell me I'm "not a Christian" because I'm Roman Catholic.

Religious fanatics of all types are killing our world. Everyone claims God is on their side, but I think Abraham Lincoln was right when he said I was more important that we be on God's side than that he be on ours.

15. Most of my professional problems -- when I had a career -- came from conflicts with short, balding men.

Napoleon Complex? It's real.

16. Old friends are better than new ones, because you have a history with them. My closest friend in the world, Mick Curran, is someone I probably wouldn't hit it off with if we met now.

Mick Curran

Harry Chapin said it best. Old friends are better than new ones, because they know who you are and they know where you've been.

17. On balance, I regret more things that I didn't do than things that I did.

Timidity is one of the most damaging traits humans have.

18. I played musical instruments for eight years and was actually pretty good at it, but I can't even read music anymore.

Actually, saying I was good is an exaggeration. My son Virgile was good on the sax. I was mediocre.

19. I always wanted to live in California, but L.A. would not have been my first choice.

San Francisco is one of my favorite cities in the world, with a climate I love. I came close to getting jobs there twice in 1988, but couldn't quite get there.

20. My high school graduating class of 804 had one Asian student, and she was an exchange student from South Vietnam. I was definitely not prepared for multiculturalism.

Not quite this bad, but ...

Hard to believe in 2014 that a middle-class to upper-middle class school could be so homogeneous.

21. I didn't eat pizza until I was 15.

I didn't have Mexican food or Chinese food until my twenties. Anything more exotic was completely unthinkable when I was growing up.

22. My favorite book is William Manchester's "The Glory and the Dream," a social history of America from 1932-72. I've probably read it 20 times.

I'm amazed at how many things I learned from it that I never knew, starting with the Bonus Army.

23. I am an Anglophile and a Francophile, which can be confusing.

I've loved England for most of my life, and have been married to a Frenchwoman since 1992. In the last five years, though, I have become a major Aussiephile, if that's a word.

24. If it was completely up to me, which it isn't, I would retire to the Front Range of Colorado.

At the time I wrote this for Facebook, we had never thought about retiring to Georgia. But as it worked out, we are very happy here. I'm sure we'll visit Colorado at some point in the future.

25. Other than people, the one thing I really love in the world is baseball.

I really don't know if everyone in the world has a great passion in their life, but I have loved baseball since the first time I walked into a major league stadium in 1957. I don't think so much about all the great new stadiums I've seen, but instead the ones that no longer exist.

Crosley Field in Cincinnati, the Vet in Philadelphia, Municipal Stadium in Cleveland, Shea Stadium and old Yankee Stadium in New York, Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, RFK Stadium in Washington, Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta, old Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Mile High Stadium in Denver, Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego and Candlestick Park in San Francisco.

***

That's what I wrote in January 2009, and those are my updates. The only thing that surprises me about it is that at the time I did the original list, my granddaughter Madison -- aka the Amazing Baby -- was four months old. I'm surprised I didn't say something about her somewhere.

As of April 2014, Maddie is 5 1/2, little brother Lexington is nearly 2 1/2 and a third grandchild is due in November. They are the lights of my life.

Maybe I was suffering from ADD in the days before ADD existed

In recent months, I have been having a big problem.

Is my office overstimulating me?

I can't seem to concentrate. At least I can't seem to concentrate long enough to get much serious work done. I'll set up at the computer with the idea of working, and before five or 10 minutes go by, I'll put on some music, put in a DVD and turn on the television or start checking baseball scores on the Internet.

In the end, if I get anything done at all, it's a short piece at All Voices or a blog entry here.

I have a book that was two-thirds finished three years ago and it's still two-thirds finished. A big part of that has been the difficult health problems my wife has been going through and the fact that I am pretty much her caregiver. But that doesn't mean there was no time at all to write.

All of a sudden, for the first time in my life, I find myself wondering if maybe I've always had ADD.

Or ADHD, as they now seem to be calling it.

Adults get it too, and it can be every bit as much of a problem for them as it is for teenagers.

My first real exposure to it came in 1990, my first summer in Los Angeles. I had a blind date to meet someone, so we were getting together for lunch. She asked if she could bring her young son and I was fine with it.

She warned me that he was a "little bit hyperactive." It turned out he was literally bouncing off the walls. At the end of our date, I asked her a question.

"Isn't there medication that can help with that?"

"He is medicated," she replied.

I always thought teachers were too quick to call spirited children hyperactive and start medicating them. I remember saying there was no such thing as Attention Deficit Disorder when I was in school.

But I wonder.

For the first six years of school, my grades were nearly perfect. But when junior high -- and probably puberty -- came along, all of a sudden my grades started sinking. When I reached high school, I was a National Merit Scholar and had great SAT scores, but other than band and physical education, I didn't get a single A for the year in an academic class.

I got C's in all my math classes except one, but got a 756 out of 800 on my math achievement test.

When I got to college, I literally couldn't study. If I had to memorize lists of things for a test, I literally could not do it. I think it's one reason I've always had so much trouble learning languages. Memorizing vocabulary was something that didn't come easy for me.

I have a pretty good memory in general and things tend to stick without trying. I realized yesterday that I remembered one of the first phone numbers my family ever had, a number so old (from 1957) that it had only six digits.

MIchigan 1284.

Within a year, phone numbers were standardized to seven digits across the country, and our phone number became BEverly 3-2929. I don't remember if we had an area code in 1958. Area codes made their debut in 1947 in big cities, but didn't cover the entire country until 1966.

Why do I remember those numbers? I don't know, especially the first one. But there are other phone numbers I haven't used in 30 years -- the childhood homes of my friends Mick Curran and Gary Oleson -- that still stick in my mind.

Why can I remember theme songs from TV shows I didn't even particularly like?

"There's Grandpappy Amos, the head of the clan. He roars like a lion but he's gentle as a lamb. And then there's Luke who beams with job since he made Kate Mrs. Luke McCoy ..."

"The Real McCoys" was the granddaddy of all the hillbilly shows. It came on when I was 7, and 57 years later, I still remember the song.



Maybe I don't have ADD.

Maybe I'm just weird.

In Mencken's time and now, puritanism may be our biggest flaw

"Puritanism assumes that every human act must either be right or wrong, and that 99 percent of them are wrong."
-- H.L. MENCKEN

For nearly 50 years, most of the first half of the 20th Century, Henry Louis Mencken was the pre-eminent critic of American society. He didn't waste his time on small targets like books, plays or films.

Mencken criticized America itself, and two of his best examples were the word "booboisie" and his most famous quote:

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."

But where he criticized this country the most, and indeed where other, older nations tend to smile indulgently when they think of us, is Puritanism. In his introduction to "Mencken's America," Mencken scholar S.T. Joshi said he saw it as "Americans' inveterate habit to judge all thoughts and actions from an ethical perspective, and to disapprove the great majority of them as subversive of 'good morals.'"

It's why many Americans aren't just uninterested in art but are actively hostile toward it. Look at the fuss a generation ago about the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. Instead of just accepting them as art that wasn't meant for everyone to appreciate, we had people acting as if seeing a crucifix in a glass of urine or a man with a bullwhip inserted in his rectum were somehow signs of the Apocalypse.

The bullwhip photo

When Mencken railed against puritanism, he wasn't writing about the Puritans who settled Massachusetts in the 17th century. His primary targets were the puritans in the decades after the Civil War who took aim at what they felt were immoral practices.

Anthony Comstock, for example. Comstock was a postal inspector who made it his life's work to keep the American public moral. He founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, which worked hard to keep Americans from being able to read books like "Ulysses" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and also prevented people from sending information about birth control through the mails.

Of course there were also groups like the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union, who worked for more than half a century to get Prohibition passed in the form of the 18th Amendment.

Comstock

I'm not sure there is a so-called "free" country in the world in which more people spend more time worrying that someone somewhere is having fun as the good old USA.

George Bernard Shaw, who wasn't quite England's Mencken, coined the term "comstockery" in his attack on modern puritanism.

Wrote Shaw: "Comstockery is the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States. Europe likes to hear of such things. It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place, a second-rate country-town civilization after all."

Where we seem to want to outdo the rest of the world is that it isn't enough for our modern-day puritans to keep things like pornography away from children. Our Comstocks don't even want responsible adults to enjoy themselves in the privacy of their own homes.

Essentially, what they want is to reduce everything to the lowest common denominator. There wouldn't be any movies made that every member of the family couldn't see, or any television shows that weren't fit for children. Books might be different, but only because young children might feel overwhelmed by books written for adults.

The problem is that we have never been good at compromising in this country. There really are few cases where we strike a happy medium, and a major reason for that is that it's nearly impossible to compromise when you consider something a question of morality.

And when you consider everything a question of morality, you find yourself constantly battling the world. Even when you win, you're not happy because there is always another battle to be fought.

When you never stop fighting, maybe you need to ask yourself why you're really doing it.

What is it that makes Huntington the worst place to live?

Sometimes the story behind the story is the one that really matters.

A Website known as 24/7Wall Street did an article the other day rating America's "Most Content (and Miserable) Cities." There weren't many surprises on the lists, except maybe for Provo, Utah, being at the top of the good list.

Then again, I've never been there.

Content cities are more boring in this context, though. To paraphrase Tolstoy's remark about families from "Anna Karenina," all content cities are alike; every miserable city is miserable in its own way.

So let's look at the most miserable city on the list.

At the very top -- or bottom -- of the list is Huntington, W. Va., or actually the metropolitan area that includes Ashland, Ky., and some suburbs across the river in Ohio.

Why is it the worst place to live?

According to the survey, median household income is just $39,160, just 19 percent adults have college degrees and 29.2 percent of adults are smokers.

Unhappiest city in America

Huntington adults were more likely than adults in any other American city to report serious health problems, with exceptionally high rates of diabetes, cancer and chronic pain. More than a third had high cholesterol, 46.9 percent had high blood pressure and nearly one in 10 results had had a heart attack.

Nearly 40 percent of adults were obese, and a higher percentage of adults said they were worried or depressed than in any other city in America.

Pretty awful, huh?

But what we don't know is why. What is it that makes Huntington such an awful place to live? Why would people be so completely unhappy about living there?

Well, there are reasons.

Betamax

-- Even as far back as the 1980s, the video stores had only Beta tapes.

-- The only bread you can buy in the grocery stores is white bread, and most of it is day old.

-- The movie theaters only show movies by Pauly Shore or Jim Varney's "Ernest" movies.

--  The best restaurant in town is Taco Bell.

-- They're a little off the circuit for the top concerts. They couldn't get Miley Cyrus, but they did get that group that did "Who Let the Dogs Out" 15 years ago. They couldn't get Justin Bieber, but they got his little brother Dustin.

-- The biggest stars who came from Huntington were "Hollywood Squares" host Peter Marshall and comedian Soupy Sales.

-- There are only two Saturdays per month.