N.C. talks slow? What do eee-uuuwww think?

“Last week, I spent two months in North Carolina. I was in a courtroom, listening to the testimony of locals. Locals speak slowly.

“I know North Carolina is not the Deep South, and yet somehow its cadences are slower than in places such as Mississippi, where the syrup is thicker but seems to squeeze out more rapidly, like a blaat from a ketchup dispenser. In North Carolina, words and phrases ooze, like sap. The pace of discourse is glacial. The word ‘you’ is two and a half syllables, pronounced ‘eee-uuuwww.’ ”

— From Gene Weingarten’s column in the Washington Post

Among the 106 (at last count) online responses: “Ever few yars we enlist Gene to come down and write a dismissive and derisive column about N.C. To keep you carpetbaggers away. Thanks again, Gene. The check’s in the mail.”

 

A peek inside Lenoir’s ‘beating heart of digital age’

“If you’re looking for the beating heart of the digital age — a physical location where the scope, grandeur, and geekiness of the kingdom of bits become manifest — you could do a lot worse than Lenoir, North Carolina….

“Here I am, in a huge white building in Lenoir, standing near a reinforced door with a party of Googlers, ready to become that rarest of species: an outsider who has been inside one of the company’s data centers and seen the legendary server floor….

“[Afterward] I feel almost levitated by my peek inside Google’s inner sanctum. But a few weeks later, back at the Googleplex in Mountain View, I realize that my epiphanies have limited shelf life. Google’s intention is to render the data center I visited obsolete.”

— From “Google Throws Open Doors to Its Top-Secret Data Center” by Steven Levy in Wired (October 17) 

For the rest of us there’s a just-released virtual tour of the Lenoir facility, including its NASCAR-themed office decor.