Easily the best part of Christmas vacation is reading the paper at one of your relative’s houses (because you can’t afford a newspaper subscription; are you kidding me? Those things are like $300 a year!). It’s particularly delightful this time of year because all of the journalists get to write at least one ridiculous “wacky holiday tradition” article stuffed to the eyebrows with wonderfully bad puns.
This year, the LA Times chose rightly to cover the Possum Drop. You already know the specifics of the story, even if you have never heard them before: a colorful local character annually irritates possums in honor of the holiday season. A bunch of coastal elites take issue with him. He laconically declines to be bothered by this, and makes a great number of roadkill-themed puns in the process.
Logan strokes his whiskers, deep in thought. He’s perched beside a wood stove in the back room at Clay’s Corner, a country store with a wooden possum hanging out front and a sign that reads, “Opossum Capital of the World.”
Logan has just inspected a shipment of this year’s Possum Drop T-shirts, inscribed with the message: “The Zone of Lawlessness — Clay’s Corner.” He’s still wearing last year’s shirt: “Possum, the Other Other White Meat.”
Finally, Logan speaks: “Oh, we’re gonna have a Possum Drop this year.”
Without ever having met the man, I can picture in perfect detail exactly how he delivered that sentence. The cadence, the emphasis, the drawl — my mind palace is exclusively filled with Clay Logan declaiming his possum plans.
“That box is a government-approved possum motel,” Logan says, admiring his blue plexiglass creation, which features air holes and images of an American flag and a possum’s belly. “Next thing you know, they’ll be making me put in a TV for him.”
It’s a slippery slope. All this fuss for a possum. Nothing brings me more joy than hearing what someone thinks is the next step in a dangerous process. An older gentleman this week told me that “Nowadays, men don’t know if they should even offer to help a girl with luggage,” and I wanted nothing more than to sit at his feet and listen to what else he thought men didn’t know they should do, in these troubled times.
Jones’ partner, Britt Solomon, says, “The possum never had it so good.”
“They’re being totally ludicrous,” says Rebecca Jacob, who shops at Clay’s Corner. “There are lots more important things to worry about in this world besides lowering a possum a few feet.”
Every quote in this story is pure gold. This is several orders of magnitude better than Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.
The opossums are subjected to “capture myopathy,” Kerr says, a condition he says can kill the animals. Logan’s opossums probably die shortly after being released, according to Kerr.
Informed of Kerr’s comments, Logan shrugs. “That’s his opinion,” he says.
Humanity has been in existence for hundreds of thousands of years and we have yet to come up with a more thoroughly humiliating dismissal than “That’s your opinion.”
In his back room, Logan is sharing beans and cornbread with the sheriffs of Clay and adjoining Cherokee counties, whose deputies unsnarl traffic jams during Possum Drops. These lawmen have no dog, or opossum, in this fight. But they do joke about lowering a retiring chief deputy named Melvin this Dec. 31 if the whole opossum thing doesn’t work out.
Normally, I would not find the mental image of a man facing a lawsuit cozily sharing a meal with local law enforcement in the American South comforting, but in this instance, I have no objection. I hope that possum gets dropped majestically this year.
My parents live but a few hours from this possum drop, and I had never heard of it! If anyone is debating whether to click through: Do. There are even more amazing quotes that Mallory didn’t excerpt.
I live for reading the letters to the editor in my parents’ and in-laws hometown newspapers. This Christmas, the world’s crankiest Unitarian (self-identified) wrote into the Tulsa World to remind everyone that this holiday season, we still live in a world where Guatamalan death squads murdered children. Thanks, Tulsa! We wouldn’t want to get through Christmas without contemplating some of the world’s random tragedy! Also, someone else wrote in to say that their yard waste bags had not been picked up due to being the wrong color, but they had been picked up just fine in that color bag the week before so what is going on here hmmmm?? It was not entirely clear that they understood that the newspaper is not in charge of waste disposal.
I just feel it’s ungracious to mess around with possums. They didn’t ask to be possums and are doing their best, probably.
Not this possum, who would eat all your baked goods if given half a chance
Aww, but that’s a real “possum,” not an opossum. Possums are cute and furry and Australian, opossums are kind of ugly-cute and balding and North American. Still, I’m sure both kinds would love to eat all your baked goods.
And PS, I live in the Possum Drop state and had never heard of it before either.
I read my local paper, and there were so many really boring articles by old white men mansplaining things. Like seagulls.
wait, were they mansplaining seagulls, or were you likening them to seagulls? or maybe both?
Literally a very long, condescending article about seagulls.
I’m imagining the article as being written for seagulls. “actually, not all dumpsters are the same. also, have you considered *not* squawking? just saying, maybe it’s your behavior that’s the problem here.”
That’s your opinion. SQUAWK.
i keep reading things in my parents centre-right newspaper and being outraged and wanting to vent it somewhere then im like oh…. no one cares. but but but there was this one article about how this guy wasnt a feminist, and then went to see the Victoria’s Secret show, and didn’t find the models attractive because their slim toned body types were so samey and not real and oh no what about his daughters so now he’s a feminist because. ?? The cover picture was him wearing a ‘this is what a feminist looks like’ t shirt next to a victoria’s secret model doing a vacant eyed pose, like ME MAN GOOD FEMINIST, HER LADY IN UNDERWEAR NO GOOD NO SEXY
and u just got to think
was no one at the paper like
uhhhhhhhm no
The comments section of my hometown newspaper’s facebook page is golden.
I had the honor of being written up in the police blotter of the old home-town paper. As I recall, the crime was a male and female teenager parked after curfew at public park. As we were minors our names were withheld(and we weren’t ticketed), but the car was described in detail, I suppose to alert readers to hooligan teens that were on the prowl for spots to bone in a maroon 1984 Buick Riviera. At least 4 minutes of my alloted 15 minutes of fame were used up in those few sentences in the paper.
I feel so torn. I don’t care for PETA *or* for people being mean to poor defenseless possums. And since I live maybe an hour away from this guy, I’ve already fulfilled my lifetime quota for colorful local characters several times over. In fact, if anybody wants some quaint Appalachian natives of their very own, I could send you some.
So maybe I’m just 100% on the side of the possum here.
This article did not mention possum penises. Not that it would have any need to, other than the fact that possum penises are weird – they are forked. They have two heads. Normally I wouldn’t genital-shame anyone, but I don’t think possums can read English.
That’s no excuse. Members of unforked-penis-having species are reading your words and being validated in their forked-penis prejudice RIGHT NOW.
Well, two heads are better than one, so…
My mother lives in Jersey (not New Jersey, the actual Jersey) which is this tiny island country (about 90k people) between England and France. Whenever I go to visit, she starts explaining what’s been going on politically, and it’s all ‘this pub up in St Ouen painted its walls a different colour and there’s an enquiry’ and ‘one of the connetables lost her dog’. It’s so surreal.
My mother lives in a small town in Connecticut, and the local paper included multiple editorials about how the new trash cans were too “obvious,” as well as a scathing letter to the editor about how the first selectman was a dictator because he’d decided to put a small sculpture in a park even though parks are for people and not sculptures and what if it somehow falls on someone?
Based on the number of times I’ve seen possums roaming the streets of Arlington, VA and Washington, DC, I don’t buy they are as shy as PETA says. However, they have usually been nasty, hissing, creatures that cause me to decide to wait to go in to my apartment until after the mean thing has left the front doorstep and is no longer blocking the door so I would advise leaving them alone.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
I live in Hilo and the volcano is still erupting! Lava is creeping towards homes even now. Also, at some point the Tribune became the Tribune-Herald. But it is still the daily newspaper for the island! Nothing really changes, I guess.
I came down here to say the same thing you said! I feel so proud of our little Trib making it onto The Toast. Stay safe and happy new year!
That lava doesn’t really go anywhere fast.
I was about to write something about Fernand Braudel (hi, dissertation!), and then I saw this Possum Drop business, so I spent the past half hour reading about the Possum Drop and ALMOST buying canned possum (it’s not possum; it’s dirt). This was definitely not wasted time.
So much this! Mr. Floridagal and I went to his folks house for Christmas and his mom was all about explaining the local politics of the church that we are no longer a part of (possibly in an effort to convince us to come back? Idk) and it was all “sister so and so has a negative attitude about everything now ever since her mom moved in with her” and 20 minutes into the conversation it comes out that sister so-and-so’s mom moved in with her A DECADE ago, and that the mom in question has since moved to a senior’s home and has told Mr. Floridagal’s mom that she’s super happy there but demanded that she not tell sister so-and-so that because reasons…Awesome. So much better than local politics at my folks’ house, because they live 30 minutes from Ferguson.
Two years ago the Mr and I went to visit his parents in Ocala, FL (because OF COURSE, Florida). In the local newspaper the morning after we arrived was a story about the arraignment of a man who had been arrested with a miniature donkey in his motel room.
The article took pains to point out this was the second time said fellow had been arrested for this sort of thing.
Poor donkeys.
ABERFORTH IS THAT YOU???!?
Modern newspaper journalism is premised almost entirely on bad puns. Why this should be, I have no idea; but at some point this became the default business model for the wood pulp-based news media. “If it puns, it runs,” is their motto. (Actually I just made that up, but if Gannett Publishing wants to use it, by all means give me a call.) Case in point: a Nov. 20, 2014 Hawaii Herald-Tribune article about a Congressional subcommittee on volcano monitoring, entitled “Madame Pele Flows to Washington.”
On the other hand, check out the text of that archived volcano article in the picture above. Not a lame pun in sight, instead an apocalyptic torrent of the purplest prose imaginable. “For the nonce, when standing on the trembling edge of the yawning depths of this House of Fury, one realizes what a pygmy he is as compared to the giant forces of the nether world that hold his destiny as within a swing of the pendulum.” I had no idea H.P. Lovecraft wrote for the Hilo Tribune.
I always enjoy torturing myself by reading the apartments section and noting that for what I currently pay for a shoebox with a shower and a drain in the floor, I can live like a king around here,
Similarly, my mother always buys the smallest local paper she can find for the area she’s on holiday in. As a person with a fairly ridiculous local paper (we’re a very low crime area, what our paper thinks is ‘news’ is basically just gossip) I also appreciate this, and really enjoy local paper headlines.
Sure, you sometimes get the odd murder or violent crime, but it’s mostly ‘local bike thefts rise 300%’ ‘local art student wins prize’ and – my favourite from this weeks EDP – “Archaeological dig at £7m car park suggests hats were made from cats in medieval Norwich”
As a small market journalist I am now insanely jealous of whoever got to write and report the cat hat story.
The Cat Is The Hat?
Similarly, my mother always buys the smallest local paper she can find for the area she's on holiday in. As a person with a fairly ridiculous local paper (we're a very low crime area, what our paper thinks is 'news' is basically just gossip) I also appreciate this, and really enjoy local paper headlines.
Sure, you sometimes get the odd murder or violent crime, but it's mostly 'local bike thefts rise 300%' 'local art student wins prize' and – my favourite from this weeks EDP – "Archaeological dig at £7m car park suggests hats were made from cats in medieval Norwich"
Well, two heads are better than one, so…
The Cat Is The Hat?