OPINION
Those Amazing Race gals;
mosquitoes are here to stay
By GRAHAM OSTEEN
Editor and Publisher
I watched The Amazing Race Wednesday night just to see how Sylvia Culpepper Pitts of Hartsville and Hilton Head did.
I don’t know Sylvia personally, but her mother Nancy sure is nice.
Although Sylvia and her teammate, Gina Diggins of Hilton Head, had the best team name – Team Soccer Mom – and by far the best attitudes, they were eliminated in the first round. It was tough business to find your way through airports and all over rural areas of Mexico while competing with a bunch of sweaty, relatively obnoxious fellow contestants. Team Soccer Mom was game for the skydiving, which was impressive, but it took only minor miscues for any team to get off track and behind the pack. It’s a competitive business, this Amazing Race.
The funny thing about it was that Team Soccer Mom seemed almost grateful when the strange yet benevolent host with a necklace on told them they were eliminated. The ladies were absolutely overcome with emotion, but they weren’t mad at all. If you had just tuned in, you would have sworn they had won.
Congratulations to Sylvia Culpepper Pitts and Gina Diggins of Team Soccer Mom. They represented themselves and her families well, and I’m sure I’m not the only person who wished they had won simply because of their good cheer and good character. They made Southerners look good, and the network producers couldn’t do a thing about it.
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Maybe the Amazing Race crowd could set up an adventure here in Darlington County. It would be like a foreign country since most people from elsewhere can’t understand a word we say.
You could give people a real county road map and use the highly unusual names to mark the course.
Imagine those creepy twin models from the Amazing Race discovering a store that advertises “Bait, beer, barbecue, catfish and dancing,” then asking Junior to point them toward Cooter’s Crossing.
It would be hysterical.
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Wallace McBride’s mosquito story on page 1A today is very interesting. Mosquitoes, South Carolina’s state bird, are nothing new, but people seem more jumpy than ever since the West Nile thing started going around.
It seems like whenever people see a mosquito now, the first thing they say is, “Oh God, West Nile.” It’s like some sort of religious mantra.
I’m not really worried about being done in by a mosquito because I’m bound to have developed some sort of immunity from having lived in the South my entire life. The majestic creatures come and go with the weather, and as Ryan Lesesne, Hartsville’s Mosquito Killer Extraordinaire says, “You’re not going to get mosquitoes eradicated. It’s just not going to happen.”
Might as well rest easy. They’ll get you when you’re sleeping anyway.
