Rough translation

"You didn’t have to speak English to dig coal,” John Brunett said one recent afternoon, summarizing the cultural forces that gave birth to the pepperoni roll, the signature product of his family’s bakery."

Rock, paper, scissors, gun, fishing knife

Newhouse slammed Summers' hand against a pillar in the room, causing her to lose her grip. Newhouse then took the gun and pointed it at Summers, who had by this time gotten back into her purse and retrieved a fishing knife, according to the criminal complaint.

High-tech dirt roads, courtesy of Massey Energy Co.

Massey [WV coal company] is working with the Mingo County Redevelopment Authority to provide the Mingo and Logan County area with a state-of-the-art dirt racetrack.

Sir Arnold Toynbee is a hairy ainus

Mountain people have long been considered exotic. The eminent British historian Sir Arnold Toynbee described the residents of Appalachia in 1947 as "the American counterparts of the latter-day white barbarians of the Old World -- Rifis, Albanians, Kurds, Pathans, and Hairy Ainus."

-Salon.com

Obama a close second in WVa

But that's not his only problem in rural West Virginia. "They won't go for a black man, that's just it," R.K. Horton, a retired heating and air conditioning business owner, said of his neighbors. "I don't think it's being racist necessarily, they just don't like black people that well." For that matter, it's not just his neighbors. "The arrogance and all that bothers me more than black, but black is a close second," he said. "

Simply gay in Welch, WVa

"He was simply a gay man in Welch, West Virginia. And because of that we can only assume that Chief Bowman assumed he had HIV and it was unsafe to even touch him," Saxe said.

AP, March 3, 2006

WVa man's life made easier

"It keeps me from having to carry cash or a checkbook" said Hiers, who sometimes stops by the Sterling convenience store twice a day to get lunch, fill up his gas tank and pick up rations for his hour-long commute home to Charles Town, W.Va. "It makes my life a little easier, especially if I just want to get in and get out."

msnbc.com, 9 June 2005