It’s simple economics: when (current) supply doesn’t meet demand, new actors find it profitable to enter the market as suppliers.

I was nonplussed; it struck me as that funny.

What I could have said, but didn’t, was something like, “Sonny-boy, I *am* where I came from; it’s you Old-Worlders who need to go back to where you came from.”

(*) who looked to have as much European ancestry as I have

And, it seems to me that the GOP currently controls the Georgia state legislature, correct?

Why, then, has a member not yet proposed a bill of censure (or whatever it’s called in Georgia) condemning Erica Thomas for bringing discredit to the state government by perpetrating a race hoax and fomenting racial division in the United States?

Is there some procedural difficulty? Some political risk I don’t foresee? Or are they just too nice and careful to bother highlighting the excremental wickedness of one of their members who pulls a Jussie Smollett?

(I wonder whether she has a prior record of perpetrating race hoaxes? Perhaps in college? These days it seems like every single time I hear that some beleaguered black woman has been victimized by swastika graffiti or caricaturish narrative-supporting expressions of racial bigotry, every single time, it turns out to be a hoax. I don’t recall all the instances, but my gut estimation is that I’ve heard of fifteen or so of these hoaxes just in the last decade.)

I’m pretty dark. Expose me to the sun and I get darker pretty fast. When I was growing up in Kali I used to get into fights all the time with guys who thought I was Mexican or Iranian.

Then I moved to Virginia and I get into a fight with a guy calling me all sorts of derogatory terms for Italian. And I’m like, “Yes!” Finally one for me.

Don’t believe me if you don’t want to. I’m not a rotten person. I read the Bible. I pray. Oh, do I pray. But I seem to draw to me the kind of person who wants to get into a fight. And so I’m like, well, OK. There I am minding my own business and along walks up so-and-so. Can you please go away. Pretty please.

No, you’re not going away. I’m not much good at boxing. I’m a lot better at wrestling.

I will never get tired of your mouse story, by the way. For me it’s spiders. And I’m actually pretty good around spiders. In that I can and will engage and kill them. I can even let a tarantula crawl up my arm.

But they terrify me.

A further amusement for me about “chopped-liver-eating-yankees” – which to me refers to a Jewish person most likely from NYC- is that I grew up in New England with a much different definition of “Yankee.” In New England, a “Yankee” is someone whose ancestors were living in New England before 1776. As my parents were from “away,” though also with pre-1776 roots, I wasn’t considered a Yankee in New England. Most New Englanders aren’t Yankees. The Yankees I knew in my hometown were plain, unpretentious sorts.

My parents were both born in Mass. I was too, but my Dad’s unit was drafted and transferred when I was 3, so I don’t count Mass. as my “home” state. Still…to your “chopped liver” comment… we were stationed in Germany for several years, and chopped liver _is_ a dish they enjoy. (waste not, want not, maybe?). I’m inclined to think that the chopped liver came from the Pennsylvania Dutch, who weren’t actually Dutch, but Deutsch – that is German. Pennsylvania still counts as Yankee, I think!
Not an expert, but maybe??