The Other Blog

The blog on this site will focus on books, particularly on the books we publish and the subjects they cover. There will be few posts in the beginninng but it will grow, and I hope that it will grow on you.

However, for those of you that can’t get enough of my wisdom or have some more time to waste, there is another site that might be of interest to you. It’s a blog that I began in 2008. It covers a multitude of sins subjects in more than 350 posts, to this point.

In case you hadn’t guessed, it’s called the “Couth Hillbilly.” And yes, couith is an actual word, the opposite of uncouth: lacking in rfinement, cultivation or taste. Some aren’t quite certain that I picked the more appropriate of the two. There is a reason for the title.

I went through basic training training at Ft. Jackson in South Carolina. But, in our training company of 225 recruits, only 5 of us were from the South. The other 220 were from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Puerto Rico. They brought their attitude with them.

They immediately started calling us hillbillies. I responded, “Ah nevah woulds jined the army ifen I’da known I’d hafta wear shoes,” The best way to shut people up is when you tell better jokes aimed at yourself than they can tell on you. It worked.

One day, while in the top-ranked graduate school in the world in the field of international relations, five or six of us were standing around in the lobby for two or three hours sovling all of the world’s problems. One of the others, whose undergraduate alma mater was the University of Michigan, blurted out, “Crawford, you know, you talk slow but you’re really not all that dumb.”

Filtered through his buying into the stereotype, he actually meant it as a compliment. The group became deathly quiet. It may have lasted five or ten seconds but it seemed an eternity before someone spoke. During that pause, you could almost see him physically shrinkin before our eyes.

Jump on over to that site and absord the benefits and/or curses of my experiences and times as a tenured student, without the debt. The Couth Hillbilly. Enjoy.

 

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