Cleaning out my drawers, I find regional news items (some newer than others) from the worlds of religion and business, with some miscellaneous statistics for garnish. Beginning with religion (of a sort):

In Tupelo, Mississippi (where Elvis was born in 1935), two brothers went on trial last year for attempting to murder Judge Tommy Gardner—by hexing him. Leroy and John Henry Ivy hired a hoodoo hit man from Jamaica to do the job, and all was going well until the judge’s wife got suspicious. Seems the Ivy boys called her to ask for a photograph of her husband and some of his hair.

Apparently this sort of thing is big business in north Mississippi. The Wall Street Journal, ever alert to the commercial implications, reported that the mojo department of A. Schwab Department Store in Memphis sells about twenty-one tons of hoodoo supplies a year.

But if you think weird occult practices appeal only to poor ignorant rural black folk, think again. Last year a Floridian dying from a brain tumor offered his services as a messenger to the dead. For $20 Ken McAvoy promised to deliver your message to anyone on the other side, and he ofFered a written guarantee.

And then there’s Sherri Cash, a well-off ignorant urban white woman a/k/a Venus Moonbaby. Ms. Moonbaby tests auras and sells healing crystals at a New Age pharmacy in Atlanta. “There’s a theory,” she told America magazine, “that Atlanta is a reincarnation of the continent of Atlantis and that a lot of people who were in Atlantis together have been pulled back to Atlanta.”

Maybe that explains why somebody thinks farmers’ market employees in Georgia need California-style human potential training. Last year in an Atlanta court eight employees of the DeKalb Farmers’ Market claimed they were fired or mistreated after they refused to take part in self-actualization sessions developed by Werner Erhard. Erhard, you may recall, is the Californian who invented “est,” in which people pay large sums to be locked in hotel ballrooms with strangers and denied access to toilet facilities. Personally, I prefer mojos and goofer dust.

I’ve said before that the only reason to care what Californians do is that we often seem to wind up imitating them. That said, here’s another enormity to watch out for: the Sausalito City Council has established a “cholesterol-free zone,” by requiring restaurants to offer no-cholesterol food to patrons. Any decent barbecue joint would go out of business first.

Wonder what Sausalito would make of this sign from Sharp’s Stop & Shop, spotted by the Arkansas Times:


FROZEN
YOGURT
NIGHTCRAWLERS

Actually, that might sound good to folks who like raw fish.

Speaking of raw fish, after Ben Jones, the actor who played Cooter on The Dukes of Hazzard, got elected to Congress, he told the Washington press: “You think I don’t have culture just because I’m from down in Georgia. Believe me, we got culture there. We’ve always had sushi. We just used to call it ‘bait.'”

Jones isn’t your usual blow-dried pretty-boy Southern pol. Not to put too fine a point on it, he went through a few wives and a lot of whiskey before (as he told the reporters) “I awoke naked in a tattoo parlor in Talladega, Alabama. I knew it was time to change my lifestyle. So I went into politics.”

Maybe old Cooter could moonlight explaining Southern culture to Californians at Berkeley, where a professor of business has suggested that courses on the cultures of “such subgroups as Mormons, Armenians, and white Southerners” should be required. Actually, according to the Chicago Tribune, Professor David Vogel was making fun of a proposal to require a course on the cultures of black, Asian, Hispanic, and “native” Americans, but it sounds good to me. If anyone needs a consultant I’m available at my usual rates.

One Southern difference from Californians that needs explaining was revealed when Compton Advertising Inc. asked 1,007 adults how old they felt, compared to their actual age. College graduates, the financially welloff, divorcees, and Californians (not mutually exclusive groups, obviously) are likely to feel younger than they are. Southerners are more likely to act their age: only 59 percent feel spryer than they should, compared to 70 percent of Westerners. This may help to explain another difference, reported recently in the Wall Street Journal: a marketing director at the company that makes Northern-brand toilet paper says that “Californians go for more sheets,” and thus for thinner paper, while Southerners like it thick.

Or then again, maybe Southerners are just wiping up stuff. Another Journal story reported that when Monsanto asked a sample of American women who in their households is most likely to spill and stain things, most pointed the finger at children under 12. But not in the South Atlantic states, where 38 percent indicated that their husbands were the main household slobs. Elsewhere only 10 to 18 percent picked the old man.

In other marketing news, the makers of Mountain Dew last year announced a campaign to “reposition” that soft drink. Apparently its core market now comprises what a former product manager calls “the pickup truck and construction set,” folks who (he told the Wall Street Journal) “had their glory days in high school”; for them. Mountain Dew is “a nostalgic vehicle back to those glory days.” (Shoot, and here I thought we just liked the way it tastes.) Movie star Patrick Swayze—a Southerner, but a polished one—was to be featured in ads designed to appeal to city slickers. Mr. Swayze achieved stardom in Dirty Dancing, but he is surely better known to Chronicles readers for his role in the anticommunist classic, Red Dawn. (Wolverines!)

An interesting fact: the Journal reported that Mountain Dew tickles innards with greater than average frequency in a “curving swath of geography that starts high in the Dakotas, bends down through rural Illinois and Indiana and whips around into the Carolinas.” Strange, but this peculiar piece of territory is home to a remarkable number of Chronicles writers. Yahoo.

Still saving your Confederate money? The London Times reported the sale at Sotheby’s of 5,000 Confederate bonds held all this time by British and other European investors. They brought £352,000 at auction, nearly twice the £180,000 estimate. That’s still pretty far from their original $60,000,000 value, but they’re coming back.

More business news: USA Today reported last fall that the 56-foot chicken which has long been the most interesting feature of the Atlanta suburb of Marietta would soon be gone with the wind. It was supposedly not in keeping with the new image of the restaurant it has graced for the last 26 years.

Despite Georgians’ attempts to disguise their essentially down-home nature, though, they’re still too country for the cosmopolitan management of RJR-Nabisco—or so I surmise from the rumor that the cigarette and cookie company may be moving its headquarters again, this time to New York. When RJR recently moved to Atlanta from Winston-Salem, the company’s new president explained that the Camel City was too “bucolic.” A writer for the North Carolina Independent reported that “when we heard that, half the town scrambled to whip his ass and the other half scrambled for their dictionaries. It was the first time in history, friends, that the educated class was first to fight.”

Wonder what they’re going to do with that chicken? I say give the bird to RJR.

It is true that we have a rather old-fashioned business climate in much of the South. A newsletter called Credit Card Bankruptcies, for instance, reports that the seven states where Chapter 13 bankruptcies make up the highest percentage of all filings are North Carolina (62 percent), Tennessee (60 percent), Alabama (56 percent). South Carolina (55 percent), Georgia (50 percent), Arkansas (46 percent), and Mississippi (40 percent). In New York and Massachusetts, by comparison, the percentages are 17 and, 16, respectively. If I understand this correctly. Chapter 13 simply involves a stretched-out repayment plan, not outright welshing. It is, in other words, the honorable way to deal with financial embarrassment.

It may be relevant that North and South Carolina have the lowest ratios of lawyers to regular folk in the country (1:694 and 1:654), while New York and Massachusetts have the highest (1:234 and 1:212). It’s also interesting that the IRS reports that Southerners (along with Westerners) are below the national average in “voluntary taxpayer compliance”—which suggests an underlying principle that I’ll let you figure out.

The Japanese know a good thing, even if RJR doesn’t. They’re coming in droves, and Tennessee Illustrated has given a new dimension to Southern hospitality by publishing a list of handy phrases for its readers. “Haguki to hoppeta no aidani hitotsumami irenasai,” for example, means “put a pinch between your cheek and gum.” “Vorusu wa sugoine” translates as “how ’bout them Vols?”

But making things easy for newcomers can be carried too far. In a completely revolting development, the Memphis airport has replaced the dulcet Southern tones of Ginny Moss with the crisp Yankeefied accent of another woman on its public address system. The Commercial Appeal quoted an airport spokesman who said that Ms. Moss was originally chosen because her accent was “a voice that was typical of this area, something that said: This is the South, this is Memphis.” Unfortunately, Yankees and foreigners claimed to have trouble understanding her. That, in my view, ought to be their problem.

Our problem is that some Memphians complained that her voice was too Southern, “that this was a sound the airport should not promote.” They should take a cue from the seismologist right there at their own Memphis State University who told the Wall Street Journal that “Massachusetts and Texas are inching toward each other, and that’s bad news.” He was talking about the prospects for a major East Coast earthquake, but the proposition is true in general.