- U Got The Look Antipasto Salad
- Sign O' The Times Seafood Display
- Diamonds & Pearls Scampi Station
- Lemon Crush Chicken
- Raspberry Beret Salmon
- Purple Rain Potatoes
- Alphabet Street Medley
- Little Red Corvette Chilis

Simon Peter said to him, "Lord, where are you going?" Jesus answered him, "Where I am going, you cannot follow me now, but you will follow later."

"My parents were in Kiwanis and Rotary because at that time, it was important to join," [director of membership affairs for Vietnam Veterans of America Inc., Robert] Thomson said. "You made business contacts and networked. But because of the Internet and the way our lives have changed, a lot of people don't see that need as much anymore.

"Veterans service organizations face that same challenge."

In Debbie Tye's case, the series often presents her saying one thing and doing another.

"I don't want to be on that stage. . . . I never have," Debbie Tye said just before the camera shows her energetically acting out Emily's talent routines in the audience to cue her daughter while she's onstage. (Husband David appears only briefly.)

Unfolding without narration, the show presents much of its context through occasional graphics, which tell viewers that Debbie Tye and her mother, Susan Caldwell, spend about $2,000 per pageant, or $20,000 a year on competitions...

"We've seen other mothers throw an absolute fit if they don't win," said Caldwell, a widow of who lives next door to her daughter and granddaughter. "And if you've got a film crew that gets you up at 5 a.m. to film you all day . . . you're tired by the end of it."

Debbie Tye and Barron offer the same list of complaints often cited by those who are shown unflatteringly in documentaries or reality shows: editing that pushes separate events together or takes comments out of context; filming done when subjects are unaware; a finished product that is far more embarrassing than the subjects expected.

But as I listened to [editor of the Austin American-Statesman, Richard] Oppel and others dig beneath the surface of their longstanding displeasure with their perception of the northern press's paternalism, I grew more interested in the shape of the caricature than the fact that it exists. As the presidential primaries unfolded, it struck me that the country, and, by natural extension, the press, often use the South as a convenient box to contain all sorts of problems, situations, and conditions that are actually national in scope--race, white poverty, the cultural rift forming between the religious and the secular, guns, abortion, gay marriage, the gradual extinction of rural life, states' rights, the continuing debates over the size of government, the contours of American morality, and the identity of the major political parties. As a northern journalist who has recently spent time reporting in the rural South, I find myself deeply conflicted about this practice, increasingly attuned to both its potential and its risks.

To try to understand the southern identity in historical terms is to quickly realize that over time there have been many Souths: the sunny South, the savage South, the agrarian South, the Jim Crow South, the violent South, the cracker South, the frontier South, the antebellum South; H.L. Mencken's Old South, populated by "men of delicate fancy, urbane instinct and aristocratic manners--in brief, superior men--in brief, gentry," the suffering South, the moral South, and the list goes on. Even now, when interviewing astute observers of the region, it becomes rapidly clear that to talk about the South is to speak with southern mythologizers, southern debunkers, southern redeemers, and southern reinventors. Running clear through most of these narratives, however, is the theme that in some fundamental sense the South sits apart from the rest of the country. (italics mine)

James Cobb, a southern historian at the University of Georgia, told me that this phenomenon can be traced directly to the birth of the American press. Even before the Revolutionary War, the literary market was concentrated in the North and it defined the country in its image. America was supposed to be New England writ large, while the South, Cobb said, was portrayed as colonial, lacking the dynamism of the national character--the antithesis of America. By the early twentieth century, the notion that the region was culturally separate had become particularly pronounced.

The difficulty with this enterprise is that the South is still often cast as completely other. So, as Peter Applebome, the former New York Times Atlanta bureau chief, who has argued that the rest of America is becoming more like the South, told me, talking about race in the South becomes a way of not talking about race in the rest of the country. It's a point worth highlighting, and it extends beyond race. As we head into an election, Richard Oppel believes that the political horserace stories that can casually frame God, guns, and gays as southern concerns promise to oversimplify southerners' relationship to these issues, and, at the same time, relegate the national struggle to come to terms with these same issues to the periphery of the debate. All of which seems to highlight James Cobb's observation that many have come to believe that what "is wrong with America has metastasized across the country from its origins in the South." The trouble with that, he said, is that nobody has an explanation for why the rest of the country provides such a wonderful "export market" for these Southern values. Given all of this, how can the press capture the region in a nuanced way that also offers insight into the country at large? Part of the trick is to make clear what elements of a story are southern and what are national.

The bottom line? Even as archrivals McDonald's and Wendy's International have turned in sizzling numbers recently, privately held Burger King's U.S. sales dropped 6.6%, to $7.75 billion, in 2003, according to industry researchers Technomic. "This may be Burger King's last stand," says restaurant analyst David S. Palmer at UBS Securities in New York. "The next six months will determine the future of Burger King."

"Oh yeah, initially I was thinking this would be my 'Dollars' trilogy. I was going to do a new one every 10 years. But I need at least 15 years before I do this again," the director tells Entertainment Weekly magazine in its April 16 issue.

Tarantino says Uma Thurman, who plays a bride out for revenge in the series that began last year, won't be the star.

"The star will be Vernita Green's (Vivica A. Fox's) daughter, Nikki (Ambrosia Kelley). I've already got the whole mythology: Sofie Fatale (Julie Dreyfus) will get all of Bill's money. She'll raise Nikki, who'll take on The Bride," he says. "Nikki deserves her revenge every bit as much as The Bride deserved hers. I might even shoot a couple of scenes for it now so I can get the actresses while they're this age."

"The Constitution of the United States is extraordinary and amazing. People just don't revere it like they used to," Scalia told a full auditorium of high school students, officials, religious leaders.

He said he spends most of his time thinking about the Constitution, calling it "a brilliant piece of work."