Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

Washington Post’s Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

We won’t go back.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Pelosi: “He either is stupid, or he thinks the rest of us are.” Why not both?

“Loving your country does not mean lying about it’s history.”

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

When they say they’re pro-life, they don’t mean yours.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

The willow is too close to the house.

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

You are here: Home / About that Prairie Home Companion Thing

About that Prairie Home Companion Thing

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It sounded like Brad Paisley was just listing euphemisms for idle chitchat, but he may very well have been giving a shout-out to us. Here is why.

I know Brad. We’re not BFF’s and I haven’t talked to him in decades, but he grew up in Glen Dale, WV, which is basically known as the speed trap between Wheeling and Moundsville on Route 2 about 20 miles from Balloon Juice World HQ. He attended West Liberty University, which is approximately 5 miles from Balloon Juice World HQ, and while he was there, he had a professor in English named John Cole. You know him as the man behind the voice here, mortified to see his wife filming his dogs drying off on the furniture:

At any rate, my dad taught there, and for years ran Elderhostels during the summer, which was basically summer camp for the olds. They would come and do all sorts of things, take classes, attend lectures, tour the area, and every now and then they would have Intergenerational Elderhostels, where grandparents would come with their grandchildren for a week of camp. Dad thought Brad was very talented and a great kid, and he would come to camp one night and play for them all. This was during the 1992-1997 yeas, before he was famous.

So it may be just coincidence, or he may actually be a reader. Who knows?

Reader Interactions

75Comments

  6. 6.

    raven

    I shot the hoop at West Liberty when I was at a conference at Oglebay Park in the 80’s!

  7. 7.

    Mnemosyne

    Aw, man, I wanted to vote on the Commenter Least Likely to Be Brad Paisley, but I think FYWP disappeared it because he’s currently banhammered. Starts with Mc, ends with an N

  11. 11.

    Keith P.

    Brad Paisley vs. Wil Wheaton. Balloon-Juice celebrity reader face-off. Two men enter, one man leaves.

  12. 12.

    raven

    @Poopyman: Small world ain’t it? I’m just looking at the google earth Oglebay map and remembering how totally nuts we got there. I was on the board of the North Carolina School of Sprts Management, one of five or six extension schools for people in parks and rec. The manager of the park was close to one of the faculty at NCSU and it was a way to fill the rooms in the winter. We’d take the insane “Wheeling Limo” a Checker Cab with steel plate welded to the bottom because the interstate was full of pot holes! WL was the only place with a court that we could get so we’d take a bunch down there and run a few games.

  13. 13.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Mnemosyne:

    McLaren got the ban? I must’ve missed that.

    (Posting this only to see if the embedded italics tags can thwart FYWP.)

  14. 14.

    Major Major Major Major

    Given that I have never, ever, ever heard the phrase “balloon juice” refer to anything but this blog, and neither has anybody I’ve told about it, I think the odds are good that Brad knows about it.

    Unless it’s a bit of WV argot.

  17. 17.

    catclub

    @Poopyman: WaMonthly noted that Christie does not really have any good Congressional connections.
    The last major interaction was him complaining that the GOP congress could not approve post Sandy aid to NJ.

    He was a US Attorney under GWBush, though.

  18. 18.

    raven

    (CNN)House Speaker Paul Ryan would back out of chairing the Republican National Convention in July, if Donald Trump asks him to, his office confirmed Monday.

    Ryan first made the comments to a home-town paper, telling the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "He's the nominee. I'll do whatever he wants with respect to the convention."

  20. 20.

    NotMax

    @catclub

    Used to be a daily internet stop, but since the latest changing of the guard has become more and more lifeless, blah and overly talky.

  24. 24.

    D58826

    DOJ is filing suit against NC HR2.

    On twitter some one asked the gov. how he planned on checking the ah ah er how to say it — credentials of the bathroom scofflaws.

  25. 25.

    gogol's wife

    My impression was not that Brad Paisley wrote that sketch. Didn’t some writer just go through a bunch of names of social-media and blogs and find the ones that seemed to be about contentless blather?

    He said “Yakity-yak,” but isn’t it YikYak? That’s what all my students are on, anyway.

  29. 29.

    catclub

    Speaking of transmitted music:

    Pinkstone claimed that he had lost 20 years’ worth of music files as a result of signing up for Apple Music; as he explained it, the service had hoovered up the collection of MP3 and WAV files he had been keeping in his iTunes library and replaced them with streaming versions that lived in an Apple-owned cloud. The original files, as Pinkstone understood it, had been deleted off his computer in the process.

    Sounds not friendly. Sounds like he did not have separate backup copies. Ouch.

  31. 31.

    patroclus

    Wow! Loretta Lynch just made the most powerful pro transgender rights statement ever made by in the history of the U.S. in announcing a DOJ lawsuit challenging NC’s law. She ain’t playin…

  32. 32.

    catclub

    @raven: If this were happening to Democrats there would be giant screaming headlines of “Democrats in Disarray!!!!”

    Making them pick between Ryan and Trump will also be side-splittingly fun. Accent on splitting.

  35. 35.

    ruemara

    Actually, I’m Brad Paisley. On the full moon, I’m Wil Wheaton. The $19.95 I spent on wigs & moustaches was totally worth it.

  36. 36.

    Major Major Major Major

    @D58826: That’s what boggled my mind the most about these laws, more than every other WTF aspect which is basically all of them (katie)–talk about targeting an identifiable group due to animus, or whatever the proper terms of art are.

  38. 38.

    Schlemazel Khan

    I see that DHS and US-CERT have issued a warning for WordPress v4.5.1 and earlier recommending immediate updating to 4.5.2 as there are 2 vulnerabilities that will allow an attacker to take control of a server . . . just sayin

  39. 39.

    Major Major Major Major

    Uh-oh, Hillary better watch out!

    David Sirota reveals that “Dems just installed an anti-Sanders icon on the board of a huge bank to oversee the party’s new platform!” The Bernie folks are super pissed.

    One small problem, they’re talking about Barney Frank.

  40. 40.

    NotMax

    Sigh. Day 4 of rain. Gonna have to set the riding mower blades to frappé when things dry out.

    Switching gears, anyone watching second season of Outlander?

    Have downloaded the first five episodes for when have the time and inclination, but not looked at any of it yet.

  41. 41.

    Eric U.

    the fact that they will lose in court probably is a feature, not a bug. They don’t really care, they just want to pretend.

    The problem is that they let the vigilantes loose to do what they want regarding the policing.

  42. 42.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Trollhattan: Once you click through the EULA and put in your password, you’ve given the program access and legal permission (both implicit and explicit) to do whatever the hell it wants with pretty much anything on your computer, as long as it’s spelled out in the EULA, is my understanding.

  43. 43.

    Betty Cracker

    @gogol’s wife: That’s what I figured too.

    @catclub: I’ve resisted Apple’s attempts to lure me onto Apple Music, but it’s hard to believe Apple would go in and overwrite files on a harddrive without permission. Not sure who “Pinkstone” is — is it possible he’s just going by what he sees on iTunes and not checking his files?

    Regardless, at this point, iTunes is just dysfunctional, even if Apple isn’t overwriting files. I realize their plan is to herd us onto iCloud, and I’d be okay with that if they didn’t make it such a fucking awful and frustrating user experience.

  44. 44.

    scav

    @patroclus: Heard it too. Seemed pretty forthright, but I’ve not been paying attention enough to know if it was standard or had some extra blunt juiced added to it.

  46. 46.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Davebo: It would be wrong not to speculate.

    @Mnemosyne: McCain comments here? Who knew?

    @patroclus: Glanced at it on MSNBC. So proud of this administration’s handling of LGBT issues. Wonder if we’ll see NC Officials back down in humiliation. Fighting so hard for the right to discriminate is not a good look.

  47. 47.

    NotMax

    @Major Major Major Major

    Presume you’ve heard or read of the recent hardware update from Asus which for all intents and purposes broke the motherboards on that brand of computers. Salt in the wound is that Asus announced they won’t be providing a fix for Win 7 users.

  48. 48.

    WaterGirl

    I just KNEW he was going to say “oh my god!”. I was not disappointed!

  50. 50.

    catclub

    @Trollhattan: I think confusion by the poster is one possibility. Legal? Once you give some program access to your hard disk, all bets are off – you gave them access, I bet it is in the terms of service that you carefully read.

    As far as I know, Ubuntu does alot when I run the update program on my computer as root – that update program runs shell commands – so I am just as vulnerable, unless I have off-ethernet-connected backup. Or Ubuntu is less destructive.

  51. 51.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    So it may be just coincidence, or he may actually be a reader. Who knows?

    wouldn’t he have been a reader before your conversion?

  54. 54.

    JPL

    I haven’t seen Baud around today.. Maybe he is giving a speech and raising money.

  59. 59.

    Major Major Major Major

    @catclub: Ubuntu is less destructive than Windows, but that’s a pretty low bar.

    OSX is starting to get pretty clunky, I’d love a scaled-down version like Mint for Ubuntu, but it’s still your best commercial bet by miles.

  60. 60.

    The Golux

    @Betty Cracker:

    …is it possible he’s just going by what he sees on iTunes and not checking his files?

    Nope. They even took his own recordings (of himself), converted them from lossless .wav files to mp3, and uploaded them to the cloud. So he has to have access to Apple music to hear his own music. Fortunately, he had relatively recent backups, but he’s going to have to be damn careful to keep it out of the clutches of Apple.

  61. 61.

    MuckJagger

    @catclub:

    Did that to my Ipod as well. When I clicked “okay” for the latest latest latest update, anything that was on there that wasn’t explicitly purchased via ITunes — mostly CDs, but a few converted songs from YouTube of songs not commercially available — just disappeared from my Ipod faster than you could say…

  65. 65.

    FYWP

    @Mnemosyne: Hell, nobody told me I’d been banhammered. Of course I wouldn’t know, would I?

    Hence, this is a test. If it posts, we’ll know that I’ve not been. FWIW, I’m not Brad Paisely. I acknowledge that this is a pseudonymous nym, which might be a bit too meta even for me.

  67. 67.

    Misamericanthrope

    Am I the only one here that has a serious distaste for Prairie Home Colostomy? Have always found the pining (even if just feigned) for the days when blacks knew there place and when gays didn’t exist to be severely off-putting. I now literally race across the room to turn off the radio when I hear the opening music on Saturday afternoons.

  68. 68.

    PurpleGirl

    JGC — that’s a great little video of the doggies playing on the couch and chair. Scampy little things aren’t they. And cute.l

  69. 69.

    gbear

    Chuck Johnson at Little Green Footballs is feverishly tweeting American Public Media.

  70. 70.

    reality-based (the original, not the troll)

    @Misamericanthrope:

    Ok, I don’t get his at all. so pining for your halcyon midwestern childhood may not be your thing , that’s cool. (I actually had said childhood, wasn’t always halcyon but PHC still makes me laugh.

    But whatever you think of the show, Garrison Keillor is a ferocious and committed liberal. The man almost had a breakdown over the stolen election of 2000, he threw punches (on air) at Bush while our idiot media boys and girls were still fellating the Texas Idiot as hard as they could.

    the 60s and 70s may have been/were racist, misogynist, and homophobic by 2016 standards, I agree. But pokiing gentle fun at people who’s mannerisms and mores seem trapped in that era does not, IMHO, constitute approval of same. Do you refuse to watch 40’s noir detective movies for the same reason? How about the way Bogart talks to Dooley Wilson in Casablanca?

    y’see my problem here. (Also, I moved back home from CA to North Dakota 8 years ago – so I’m living the Lake Woebegone dream, here, don’t knock my tribe! )

  71. 71.

    reality-based (the original, not the troll)

    @reality-based (the original, not the troll):

    um – i went up to fix my typos – I do know the correctt usage of “who’s” and “whose” – and it said I didn’t have permission to edit this comment? It’s my comment! Was it because I used an “F” word and I’m in moderation for it?
    Or because it’s in response to a comment up-thread?

  72. 72.

    Mom Says I'm Handsome

    I’m convinced that Apple, Microsoft and Google have all painted themselves into similar corners: they have so many software engineers on staff that they have to keep them busy doing something — that “something” being the modifications of features that worked perfectly well in prior releases, fuck you very much. Plus Apple has a lot to gain by herding customers to the content they offer on the iTunes Store.

    I switched from iTunes to MediaMonkey three months ago and I couldn’t be happier.

  75. 75.

    AndoChronic

    I just finished an Air Force tech. class with Brad’s niece. Small world ’tis.

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