Brucellosis is a problem with cattle because calves drink unpasteurized milk.

I just got my first ever check for growing milo (sotghum), so at least red America is helping on that front.

Possibly incorrectly taking the OP as serious: no? (a) Is there some reason to see Warren Zevon as having any insight here vs your average urban artiste, and (b) the lyrics just read like standard disdain/condescension. In some ways that disdain is probably warranted, but it doesn't make it insightful.

I'm going to red America tomorrow. Waco via Gainesville, FL, and Dallas.

Is 3 a parody comment?

Total contempt carries its own force of authenticity for sure.

I read the lyrics heebie shared, and something about "Feliz Navidad" primed me to see the word "outro" as Portuguese ("huh... alternate version?"). Honestly, "red America" is a genuinely foreign country to me. I've always lived on the borders of it, and my own culture is very closely related, but I don't understand it at all and probably never will. So I have no idea how to distill the essence and also no desire to drink it.

Not exactly sure of the assignment,, but I'll offer James McMurty singing about the North Texas Southern Oklahoma Crystal Methamphetamines Industry: Choctaw Bingo.

Lyrics here.

Posted here before, references the Kum & Go on the Will Rogers Turnpike in Oklahoma. (Kum & Go being rebranded as Maverik after being bought last year.)

Those assholes. I didn't know that.

I enjoyed Zevon's song more, as a sort of R-rated Weird Al song. I have almost encyclopedic knowledge of Weird Al songs, so take this for what it's worth. "Merry Christmas from the Family" sounded only a tiny bit less gross in terms of content while being a lot more kitschy, and the actual twangy sound of it was a lot more grating, in my opinion.

Just talking about personal enjoyment there, though. I don't know if I'd call either of them charming or insightful.

"R-rated Weird Al" is a more accurate description of Warren Zevon than it should be.

I never met a gas station I didn't masturbate at.

4: if real.america means where trump voters reside i'm heading there too, off to beverly hills.

It's probably the same. I've never been to Florida as an adult.

5: No, probably just missing something. I know nothing of WZ.

I'm going to red America tomorrow. Waco via Gainesville, FL, and Dallas.

You could visit with so much of my family. Fortunately all of whom are extremely blue.

They're Smurfs.

for more witty LA Jews* with songs on topic, there is several to choose from Randy Newman's Good Old Boys album.

*Zevon actually half-Jewish; just learned his father was a bookie associated with Mickey Cohen.

17: From this profile -- https://www.theringer.com/music/2018/9/7/17830460/warren-zevon-career-music-albums

(That article is really good at capturing what is appealing about WZ as a musician and concerning as a person.)

Born in Chicago on January 24, 1947, Zevon's mother, Beverly, came from a nice Mormon family and his father, Willie "Stumpy" Zevon, was a hard-bitten Jewish immigrant from Russia who found work as a bookie connected with notorious L.A. gangster Mickey Cohen. His parents split up and made up endlessly during Warren's childhood, ping-ponging the precocious boy between different households after they relocated to California.

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead recounts the most famous childhood story in Zevon lore: At age 9, Stumpy suddenly reappeared and gifted young Warren with a piano that he won in a poker game. Warren beamed, though his mother immediately ordered the piano out of the house. A fight ensued. Warren then watched his father pick up a knife and hurl it at his mother's head. Fortunately, his aim was slightly off. And Warren got to keep the piano.

Zevon was a bit of a child prodigy -- he later claimed that he had the highest ever IQ recorded in Fresno. (Now there's a good Warren Zevon song title.) At 13, he impressed his junior high music teacher enough to warrant an invite to a recording session for the great Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who subsequently hosted Warren at his home several times. Once, he even let Warren sip some of his scotch.

I've never been to Florida as an adult.

We may have similar used car histories, but we have extremely different histories on trips to Florida as an adult.

Any Gainesville Airport tips?

I found the gentle wisdom of the lyrics in this song from Red America both pleasant and conducive to a deeper understanding of the brotherhood between all people.
Lyrics kick in at 0:39.

https://youtu.be/zH4rkf9D6XM?si=ZlOXIRSM9valopgc

20: It's very small, but there are still parts with the original pebbled walls that I remember from childhood. You used to have to exit the planes onto the tarmac and walk into the terminals, which I thought was very special in childhood, but now you'll take a normal jet bridge connector. It has a nice atrium area in the middle. Does that help?

If memory serves, it's a Pepsi airport instead of a Coke airport, which is of course a major bummer when it's Diet Coke Time, or when you want to stay prepared for Diet Coke Time.

My uncle saw a guy get hit by lightning while on the tarmac, so I'm glad to hear about the jetways.

In Gainesville???

I think so. He's lived there like 50 years.

Well I'll be.

Does he remember the pebbled walls?

Sometimes he drives to Jacksonville to fly.

Not just the remaining ones, of course.

Yes, my parents do that, too.

I was going to say Gainesville Airport is small enough to not require tips for its use, but pebbled walls and Pepsi are good tips! We also usually drive to JAX or TPA or MCO, but it's very nice when one of GNV's few routes makes sense.

I don't think Mossy's contribution is too nasty, but the Statler brothers were gentler with Class of '57. Lyrics are easily understood, but here's a link.

i was wrong when i thought that my allergies couldn't be worse in la than in sf. there will definitely be no mascara for the event tonight.

It takes quite a special soul to take a product labeled "bile" and complain that it isn't charming.

Bear bile is a delicacy here.

35: aw shucks.

Oooo Pepsi airport. That's rough.

I don't really drink soda these days.

Minivet: de gustibus and all that for sure. But I've been repeatedly impressed by how -topical- Zevon's songs (written in the 70s and 80s, right?) remain, 40+ years later. I mean, not just Play it All Night Long, but Mohammed's Radio, The Envoy, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, Excitable Boy, and probably others I'm not remember at the moment.

I won't claim that he's more prescient than other songwriters; just that, well, wow so much of his oeuvre seems to have stood the test of time as social commentary. At least, to me.

38: I was wondering if there was an actual Pepsi Airport, either one sponsored by Pepsi or literally an airfield built for the Pepsi-Cola company's use, and even thinking it might be cool to go there as it's so much something Americans would do. Yes, the Pepsi-Cola Airport, there's probably a giant can by the main gate, a statue of the Founder, and some sort of weird regional sandwich with an official health warning. Probably one of those weird American airports with the full set of IFR navigation aids but no air traffic control and those runway lights you have to switch on yourself by keying the radio mic even though it gets multiple 737s every day.

Such a let-down, eh?

(who's going to get the secret joke? maybe Ajay?)

I knew Spike would understand.

There is Coke at the Charlotte Airport. But all of the gate agents have little backpacks of transparent plastic. Like at a grade school where the administrators are worried about some kid bringing in his dad's freedom wand.

When people here have backpacks of transparent plastic it's because they're carrying a cat or a rabbit or something.

I am right next to the "pet relief area."

In Pittsburgh, you just have to hold your dog over the people toilet.

This is a small airport. I could not find the pebbles.

I won't claim that he's more prescient than other songwriters; just that, well, wow so much of his oeuvre seems to have stood the test of time as social commentary. At least, to me.

I feel like when you're doing in-your-face social commentary, you have to take big swings, and that means some big misses.

I'm curious if you think this particular song in the OP stands that test of time within his work.

I think they're over by the bathrooms, on your way to the luggage carousel and pick up.

Welcome to Gainesville, Moby. Sorry about the pebbles. Enjoy the anomalously cold weather!

We sent our kids to the big state school -- which is much better than the crappy state school that The Missus and I went to -- but we had to think hard about it because it's a Pepsi school.

I'm leaving in three hours.

So I'll have another chance to look at the airport.

Try visiting the bathrooms before you go through security. Once you go through security, you're doomed to a pleasant atrium with rocking chairs and diet Pepsis*, but no pebbled walls.

*rhymes with sepsis.

And then welcome to Texas.

I'm going to pee on Florida at least three times.

There's only one place to buy coffee and there's a very old woman taking 10 minutes at the front of the line.

There's a guy here who looks kind of like Netanyahu. Can I call the ICC so they can check?

There's also another place to buy coffee.

I wouldn't buy coffee at this hour. You want to sleep tonight, don't you?

Try a diet coke. oh wait, you can't.

Have you ever seen Dallas from an Embraer 175 at nigh

Oh dear.

+t

Dallast

Yout

Anyway, I now know where Baylor is. I also know where 'Chip Gaines' is, but I don't know why I should care.

You, a prolix nincompoop: we have to understand that one of the most serious public health challenges in the west of Scotland is the sharp recent rise in obesity linked to unhealthy diet, which we will for the sake of brevity refer to as
Me, succinct and memorable: CHIP GAINS

'Chip Gaines' means that no matter how far you get from Gainesville, a little chip of it stays with you forever. Find this Chip and eat it.

Reminds me of a favorite Football player name from the '60s Cleveland Browns- Chip Glass. Looking him up I see there was a Chip Glass baseball player who was drafted by the Cleveland Indians but who never played in the bigs. Both just nicknames apparently,; I thought the FB was his real name.

What's so great about these pebbles anyway? Are they made form the eye teeth of Seminoles or something?

Each little pebble is a tiny rock of nostalgia. Make America Pebbled Again.

Minivet: "I'm curious if you think this particular song in the OP stands that test of time within his work."

"Sweet Home Alabama, play that dead band's song"

Absolutely. Absolutely. I remember reading about a county in Eastern Tennessee (or maybe Kentucky) that had the highest rate of Social Security Disability recipients in the country. Mostly white county. This was right around the time the ACA was coming into force, and these worthless wastes of protoplasm were all het up about those other people who were getting something for free from the government; as I remember it, they were pretty explicit that they though Black people were stealing benefits that ought right to be going to them right there.

I guess my unbounded contempt for those people gets in the way of a dispassionate appraisal of that particular song though, so not sure my assessment is worth much.