35. Top 10 Outsider Observations About Oxford

Photo by Robert Jordan, Ole Miss Communications

I’ve officially lived in Oxford only two months, but it has taken me a short time to come to a few definitive opinions about my new hometown. I expect to live here for the rest of my life, so I’ll eventually have millions to share. Lets start David-Letterman style with Andy Knef, Hoddytoddy.com managing editor’s top 10. I love good food so you’ll probably notice a pattern.

1. Around here cold beer is just as revolutionary a political issue as harbor-drenched tea.

2. Self-described worldly people who call southern claims to gracious hospitality and the world’s most beautiful women a tired cliché have never been to Oxford, Mississippi.

3. Cousin Vinnie take a memo — a grit, when cooked up with millions of its fellow grits, is where dead, perfectly seasoned shrimps go to swim when they get to heaven.

4. It’s virtually impossible to get a bad piece of chicken in this town.

5. For hard-core readers it’s a scientific fact that you can enter Square Books a fair-haired college student and leave with hair in your nose and a dunlap around your middle. From the visitor’s perspective, no time will have passed at all.

6. Pecan pie, whether you put your accent on the pe or the can, is heavenly at Taylor Grocery.

7. Speaking of heaven, at church on Sundays I find the southern fried Catholicism served up at St. John’s the Evangelist tender and not the least bit dry. And ditto for all the other fine church people I’ve met at Baptist day care sites and Methodist Summer Bible School camps around town.

8. Tailgating before the Ole Miss game in the Grove is so fun it makes the actual outcome of the game almost incidental. I’m kidding! I’m kidding! I’m kidding!

9. It’s politically incorrect — in fact hazardous to your health —to ever politely say you root for both fine state universities in Mississippi.

10. And finally, my number-10 observation about the wonderful town of Oxford: Hotty Toddy doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it does when you first arrive here. See #2 and #8. But you’re not far off. It’s about passion and excellence.

Share your personal observations about what’s best about Oxford.

— Andy Knef, Managing Editor, HottyToddy.com