Strollerderby : country music

Boot-Scootin' Baby Boom?

Amy Kuras — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:02:00 GMT

Yeeehaw indeed….news reports surfaced this week that an area health agency sees a huge spike in pregnancies about five weeks after the Country Jam Music Festival in Grand Junction, Colorado.

According to Fox News (yeah, I know) Nurse-Family Partnership supervisor Wanda Scott said referrals to her agency from the Mesa County Health Department quadruple every year after the music festival known as Country Jam. Normally she sees 25 to 30 pregnancies a week, but about five weeks after Country Jam, that number skyrockets to 80.

There's a similar event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, which is sponsored by Budweiser, even, and that doesn’t seem to have the same spike in pregnancies. Is it something about the mountains and the clear Western air that stirs thoughts of procreating (or at least forgetfulness of birth control) in the redneck soul, or is it something more?

I'm also wondering why all these people are still in Mesa County five weeks after. The festival seems to be a nationally promoted thing on the order of Bonnaroo, so why would enough attendees still be in the county five weeks later to take a pregnancy test?

Mysteries abound. As do babies in Mesa County in March-ish, apparently.

Girl Wins Hannah Montana Tickets With Fake Essay

Madeline Holler — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

I have had countless conversations about Hannah Montana over the past couple of weeks, which is stunning, considering I don't think I had uttered the rather catchy (and fake) name more than once or twice total before that. In any case, all of the discussions involved one or more of these three elements: first-graders (first-graders!); $450 concert tickets (for a fake singer!); mothers living through their daughters (in this day and age!).

Until today, the sickest anecdote came from my aunt-in-law, a second-grade teacher, who told me about a first-grader at her school. The girl's mom shelled out nearly $2,000 for four concert tickets, plus transportation and dinner for the mother-daughter pairs in a limo that was taking them on the four-hour round trip. Did they open the wet bar too? Stand through the sunroof and lift up their Hanna Montana concert tees?

That story got trumped, though, when I came across this: one Texas mother's strategy to get her daughter (a first-grader ... it's always first-graders!) to a sold-out Hanna Montana concert.

The details:

Club Libby Lu, a Chicago-based store that sells clothes, accessories and other crap for young girls (we'll need to table our discussion of THIS particular merchandiser of hooker lifestyle for the pre-breast-budded for another time) sponsored a writing contest. The prize was a makeover at Club Libby Lu, a blonde HM wig and tickets for the Albany, N.Y., concert (where the debt-ridden Disney fans go to hang out with other first-graders and their moms, I presume).

The winning essay began: "My daddy died this year in Iraq." You know where this is going.

The girl's daddy didn't die this year in or out of Iraq. The named father wasn't even listed with the defense department. Instead, like customers leaving Libby Lu, the adoring fans of Hannah Montana, and anyone with a vagina appearing on the Disney Channel, that heart-breaking winning essay was all heavily made up.

Says the mother:

"We did the essay and that's what we did to win," Priscilla Ceballos, the mother, said in an interview with Dallas TV station KDFW. "We did whatever we could do to win."
Charming! Inspiring! A real warm holiday story, plus years of therapy for her humiliated and/or devastated daughter.

Here's the kicker for me: the company is reviewing the matter and "considering taking away the girl's tickets." Considering? This isn't a case-closed kind of thing? Oh, and that would also mean the mother -- already far behind the starting line on modeling, for her daughter, honesty, perspective, pride, those kinds of things -- hasn't given the tickets back? Doesn't she ...? Isn't she ...? Can someone please explain this to me?

Wasn't I just saying people are such entitled jackasses?

Strollerderby Playdate: Now With a Bit of Twang for Your Musical Pleasure

Jessica Ashley (Sassafrass) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 11:02:00 GMT

No matter how much you protest, no matter how much you turn up and shut the world out, no matter how much you pretend not to linger on the high 90s end of the FM dial, I know that somewhere in there is the tiniest bit of love for country music. Even if it comes in the form of Carrie Underwood on the alternative stations or the smudgy black eyeliner mask over honky-tonkin'-at-heart Daughtry or even some Grand Ol' School Opry sample embedded in hip-hop, you know you know at least one twangy tune. And so just to say that that's OK (really. seriously. i kid you not), here's a bit of country goodness going on in a URL near you:

* Alison Bonaguro's Backstage-101: A Country Bloglossary is a handy take-away even for we Pussycat Doll Fans4Life.

* Curtis Edmonds of Northbound's assessment of The Most Depressing Country Songs of All Time. Grab you some Jim Beam and dig right in.

* Charlie from Nobody Asked Me, But...'s talking badonkadonks with the bakidakid (sorry...even I am rolling my eyes at that lame attempt at wordplay).

* Fabulous...Mommy....FussyPants is dreaming of meeting country-by-marriage Nicole Kidman in her Target, which is totally possible, y'allses who are shaking your heads no.

* Jim Thomsen of Ninja of the Mundane is NOT a country fan. And he's really NOT a fan of Toby Keith. He's listened to Toby Keith's new album twice and is giving out mad props to his musicianship, but whatever you do, DO NOT mistake him for a country fan of Toby Keith.