Anything for a buck

It probably caught the attention of every local person watching 60 Minutes on Sunday night -- as well as anyone who has ever driven by the South of the Border billboards along Interstate 95.

Quiet, dignified and powerful, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said that he once worked at the kitschy tourist mecca that straddles the border of North and South Carolina.

He waited tables, and he wore a poncho, just like the Pedro mascot.

It was a summer job while Bernanke was a student at Harvard. His hometown is Dillon, S.C., and he needed money to pay his way through school.

Bernanke once had job at South of the Border (Fayetteville Observer, 19 March 2009)

Strange Maps: Barbecue Sauce Styles

Learned discourse from barbecue authority and UNC sociology professor emeritus John Shelton Reed, on the styles of barbecue sauce in use in South Carolina:

* The vinegar and pepper region covers the eastern quarter of the state. This is “a southward extension of eastern North Carolina-style sauce,” states Mr Reed.

* “The tomato region ditto for North Carolina’s Piedmont- or Lexington-style sauce, which is basically the eastern sauce with a little tomato added, still thin and vinegar-flavored.”

* The ketchup region is influenced by what they serve in Georgia “and most of the trans-Appalachian South – or for that matter in grocery stores – a thick, sweet, ketchupy sauce.”

* Unique to South Carolina, though, is “the mustard sauce of central South Carolina, (which) is unique to that state, and (which) gives it more distinct barbecue regions than any other.”

Strange Maps #246: Southern Sauce Sources

Delightfully, a commenter in the thread at Strange Maps made an appropriately-colored Google Maps overlay of the South Carolina Sauce Map.

See here for the North Carolina Google Sauce Map.

And there's much discussion, in the comments, of where the precise dividing lines are.

Barbecue is serious business.