Ah, Ozarks...

Everything about the Ozarks is funny to me. This morning I was listening to a staple of the area: Swapline. The Swapline is like the classified ads of the radio. The program accepts a certain number of paid ads each day, but the real meat of the show is people calling in with things they have to sell or want to buy. School Bus, 1987, We lived in it while we were building our house, great shape $850 417-555-blah blah blah, that sort of thing. My favorite part of the show is people calling up asking the disc jockeys to repeat a previous number. Swapline's on at 10 AM every day, callers. Have your pencils ready and pay attention. Or just read it on the internet.

But I literally almost fell out of my chair, and when I say literally I mean it in the dictionary definition rather than the common usage (which means "figuratively"), to see an ozarks couple on Trading Spouses tonight. One of the couple is from the town of Licking, which is by Boiling Springs, which isn't pronounced the way you just read it (Bolin' Springs is correct). And while the family is actually rather typical of many in the region (self-employed rural folks) they're such a contrast to the other family. The ozark family cooked and ate one of their pets, which sounds bad, sure, but the pet in question was a turkey and it had been hit by a car. Plenty of farm animals have names, and the novelty of eating something that one has fed quickly wears off. The guest mother (from Arizona or such) could not deal: "In our culture, we don't eat roadkill". It's a two part episode, so tune in next friday to see midwesterners being subtitled.