I received this message today from someone in my fantasy baseball league, in which I've been running a close second to the sender for about two months straight:

"Whet must not be allowed to win the league. Anyone from south of the Mason-Dixon line should be oriented toward Little League. That's your World Series."

Sadly, this is untrue. People below the Mason-Dixon line, or at least the part I grew up in, don't participate in the famously all-American Little League, not with all the enmity we still hold about the War of Northern Aggression. We do Dixie Youth Baseball. I shit you not. People from, like, anywhere else are always kind of surprised to hear that. I think I still have a uniform from my time in the Dixie Youth with team sponsors Classy Cut 'n' Curl on the front and the, um, somewhat less classy logo below--the old Dixie Youth logo.

To my knowledge this was not officially known as the "Balls and Bars," but there you go.

The South: it's weird. At least, thank God, the Roanoke Valley Rebels became the less offensive and actually more appropriate Roanoke Express, seeing as it's a railroad town that wasn't much a part of the theater of war. The fact that it's hockey, though, is still pretty inexplicable no matter what you call it.