by Fred Reed
Ages ago, for reasons I no longer remember, I was wandering across Asia and decided to spend some time in Taiwan. The Chinese interested me, and Taiwan was then as close as it was practical to get. Then, as now, the Chinese were thought by many to be exotic, inscrutable, devious and unlike normal people …
have a confession to make to my readers. I have been lying about Mexico. Yes. I am a poor sinner and meant no harm, but the devil got into me, and I have done wrong. I have said that Mexico was a pleasant country of agreeable people, and harmless. I have said that children here …
The other day I went up the holler to see Uncle Hant. I figured he could teach me to understand women, because he knows everything. Hant lives in a double-wide with a ’54 Merc on blocks outside, and a fuel-oil tank painted silver, and a three-legged coon dog named Buckshot. A couple of years back, …
‘Tother day late in the afternoon I went down the holler to get Uncle Hant to explain to me about law and order. Hant knows nearly ‘bout everything, more than anyone in West Virginia, even Bluefield. He makes the best shine for three counties, and sells it to yups from Washington. Hant can do pretty …
(This is an ancient column I just found, but represents a great service to humanity, so I republish it.) I’m trying to figure out sex, and why people get in an uproar about it, and run around waving their arms and hollering, and everybody’s mad at everybody else. It’s because men can’t tell sex from …
To begin, we have much too much democracy. We need to discourage people from voting. In fact, the gravest obstacle to the restoration of civilization in North America is universal suffrage. Letting everybody vote makes no sense. Obviously they are no good at it. The whole idea smacks of the fumble-witted idealism of a high-school …
You gotta understand about the Pluke Bucket and me in rural King George County, Virginia, in 1963. (Maybe you didn’t know you had to understand this. Well, you do. Life is full of surprises.) The county was then mostly woods, the high-school boys gangly farm kids who fished and hunted or pumped gas on long …
The time Frank Green and I paddled the canoe through the dry hills of King George Country in search of water would, I suppose, discourage naval historians. Fact is, we’d have had a better chance of finding water in the Sahara in mid-August of a drought year. I will say, however, that the adventure got …
Bar girls are a mistake that countless guys make when they first leave the United States. Bar girls are a mistake in two ways. First, lots of gringos think that the girls are typical of the women of the country. Second, they get tangled up with a hooker and perhaps marry her. This is bad …
The Atlantic waters off Snead’s Ferry in North Carolina are shallow, maybe 125 feet to the continental shelf. Several wrecks lie on the bottom, mostly in advanced stages of disintegration, sunk by U-boats in the early years of the war. I know them well as for years I was a member of Capital Divers, out …