True Blood : #OccupyBontemps ! thanks @jamisonsf

I laughed so hard ..just love it!

Go Ask Dallas- True Blood Trivia: Bon Temps cable TV - what's up with the bears ?

Sookie says “TV sure hasn’t gotten any better in the last year.”

Q: What's the deal with Bon Temps cable channels - why is there only bears fighting to watch?

A: Man,  I don't know here is what Jessica is watching when Hoyt comes home (top ) and what Sookie and Jason are watching ( below )  ....

Sookie is sure right, "TV sure hasn’t gotten any better in the last year !!"

Record breaking snow storm hits Bon Temps !

(Photo at left Merlotte's Bar and Grill gets snowfall.)

After dropping over a foot of snow on North Texas a massive snow storm moved into Bon Temps today. Mayor Sterling Norris and sheriff,Bud Dearborn report that the Sheriffs office and City Hall will open at 10 am.

Renard Parish library, Bon Temps branch, according to librarian, Barbara Beck will open at 12 noon.

Shirley " Catfish " Hennessey of the Renard Parish Road Crew says to expect roads to be slick and travel dangerous. They are sanding some bridges in the area.

All other businesses might be closed or opening late -please call ahead. Sam Merlotte says they will be open for lunch and will have plenty of hot coffe and Chili ready for customers.

The snow is breaking all weather records kept for the past century.

Kids playing in snow in Shreveport( phtoto right)

Snow storm visits South http://www.shreveporttimes.com/article/20100212/NEWS01/2120345/1060

Bon Temps is it ? 'The Worst Fake Cities On Earth'

Fantasy versions of urban life are on the rise, from a backwater, vamp-infested Louisiana town to Robert Rodiguez's new privately-owned Black Falls. It's time to check out our gallery of the worst fake cities on the planet.

Read on

Small-town Southern life a muse for author Harris

Small-town Southern life a muse for author Harris
The Associated Press, June 17, 2009

MAGNOLIA, Ark. (AP) -- Vampires typically roam the fogged streets of London or the humid nights of New Orleans, opulent worlds filled with beautiful monsters and formal balls.

Trailer parks and honky-tonks didn't fit — until author Charlaine Harris took a chance with a telepathic barmaid named Sookie Stackhouse.

Now, Harris' Southern Vampire Mysteries series has hit The New York Times' list of best sellers, gained fans far beyond her south Arkansas town and inspired a television series on HBO. Though fueled by sex, violence and hints of humor, Harris' novels hold a mirror up to a South where race and societal change permeates through her prose.

Still, the mother of three said her only concern at first was finding something that would sell.

"I'm no crusader," Harris says. "I just like to make a point. If people get it, good. If they don't, OK."

Stackhouse's fictional hometown of Bon Temps, La., resembles the South in which Harris grew up, filled with waitresses who wear Keds sneakers and shop at Wal-Mart. Trailer homes dot the rural pastures of the north Louisiana town and pickup trucks fill the parking lot of the bar where Harris' heroine works.

For Kevin Durand, an associate philosophy professor at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, life in Bon Temps evokes where his family once lived in Louisiana.

"As she describes the place, it's a place I've been," said Durand, who specializes in pop culture ghouls and vampires. "I've seen all of those things before."

That sense of place allows the fantastic to seem commonplace, especially as wereanimals, fairies and witches crowd into the story around Stackhouse and her vampire associates. Even the vampires, though satiated with artificial blood produced in Japan, struggle with scheduling nocturnal home repairs.

In a way, Harris, 57, says she wanted to serve as an "anti-Anne Rice," allowing humor and reality to drive her novels.

"I just drew on my knowledge of what it's like to live in a small town from the viewpoint of a person who

has very little disposable income, ... a person who's really having to count their pennies, plan ahead to pay their property tax," she says. "That's most people, I believe."

That pretty much is a picture of Magnolia, a city of 11,000 only 20 miles away from Louisiana. There, the small county courthouse sits in a square near a gazebo. Murals of magnolia flowers and oil derricks, once the town's lifeblood, cover building walls. A diner across the street hosts a workday crowd, but don't look for a bottle of beer — it's a dry county.

It's here where residents stop the roughly 5-foot-tall redhead in the grocery store, even if they've never read one of her books. She volunteers at her church,

where members don't raise eyebrows at her violent and racy tales.

The county library, a converted Assembly of God church that has a steeple in the parking lot for sale, stocks a whole shelf of Harris' novels, including her early mysteries.

"Everything Charlaine writes goes over like a helium balloon in Magnolia," said assistant library director Dana Thornton.

Harris' Stackhouse novels read quickly, ramping up at chapters' ends in the pattern of her many trade paperback mysteries. While pulpy love entanglements and murders snare Stackhouse, the novels also provide a glimpse of social criticism. Vampires, once in

self-imposed exile, "come out of the coffin," an intended parallel to the acceptance of gays in the world.

"It just seemed like a very similar situation to me," Harris says. "It's just admitting publicly the existence of something that we've always known existed privately."

Those vampires attract Stackhouse, a mind reader, as she can't hear their thoughts like normal people. They brood like other vampires flooding bookstores and move theaters, but Harris endows them with a dark power harkening back to Bram Stoker, Durand said.

"They're still not the cuddly little teddy bears with teeth kind of deal; they're still a threat," he said. "The

only reason that they don't wipe out everything is because they restrain themselves."

Race also plays a part in the novels. Few black characters exist on the pages, a problem Harris acknowledges. The first Stackhouse novel also hints to the need for a black and a white funeral home in Bon Temps, something Harris writes is tradition rather than racism.

Harris herself grew up in Tunica, Miss., during the 1960s. Now home to casinos lining the bank of the Mississippi River, the Tunica of her childhood was 80 percent black and surrounded by rice fields. The town's high school finally integrated in 1969 when Harris was a senior.

"It was very painful and frightening. Honestly, I congratulate the two young black women who graduated from my class," she says. "I don't know how they did it."

Those angry with sweeping societal change make their way into Stackhouse's town after supernatural creatures reveal themselves. Stackhouse finds herself targeted by them, her "disability" of being able to read minds often placing her in harm's way. A terrorist bombing against vampires finds her helping firefighters recover victims as the smell of "hate" hangs in the air, an allusion to 9/11.

"I saw so many people (like that) when integration came in, people who hated change without really

understanding what it was going to mean or really looking at it from any other perspective than their own comfort," Harris says.

Another disaster, Hurricane Katrina, hits close to home for the book's characters. Vampires struggle to cover damaged roofs with blue plastic tarps. Stackhouse takes storm victims into her home — though they are witches, of course.

Some readers got angry about using hurricane in her novels and accused Harris of exploiting the tragedy. However, she believes it would have been impossible not to mention it.

Read on

True Blood new 'Welcome to Bon Temps' web page

New 'Welcome to Bon Temps' Website

We think it's probably HBO UK because of the use of the photo of Grans house, De Soto pharmacy etc .

Sure is great - makes me want to visit. Oh wait, I'll be there on Saturday :-)

http://www.welcometobontemps.com/

Bon Temps Bumper stickers

I fly Anubis Air.

Eric's: "I'M THE CURE FOR YOUR INSOMNIA!"

FANGTASIA...Our Nightlife Will Suck You In!

I ♥ Vampires

Got Fangs?

Shifters Are People Too

What is the favorite dog in Bon Temps ? The Louisiana Catahoula Leopard Dog

Terry bought a very expensive Catahoula hunting dog about every four years.
He wasn't turning in the old models for new ones. Something always seemed to happen to Terry's dogs, though he took great care of them. After he'd had the first hound about three years, a truck had hit him. Someone had fed poisoned meat to the second. The third one, the one he'd named Molly, had gotten snake-bit, and the bite had turned septic. For months now, Terry had been on the list for one in the next litter born at the kennel in Clarice that bred Catahoulas.'

The idea that Native Americans bred their dogs with or from red wolves is not supported by recent DNA work. Several recent studies have looked at the remains of prehistoric dogs from American archaeological sites and each has indicated that the genetics of prehistoric American dogs are similar to European and Asian domestic dogs rather than wild New World canids. In fact, these studies indicate that Native Americans brought several lines (breeds) of already domesticated dogs with them on their journeys from Asia to North America.
There is a plethora of published sources detailing the domestic dogs found in prehistoric archaeological sites. Clearly, the red wolf was not the only canid located in the Mississippi River Valley before the arrival of Europeans. There were also foxes and grey wolves as well as various domesticated Native American breeds.
In the 1800s, French settlers arrived in Louisiana with their Beauceron.
They told of strange looking dogs with haunting glass eyes that were used by the Indians to hunt game in the swamp.[9] It is thought the Beauceron and Red Wolf/war dog were interbred to produce the Catahoula. The word 'Catahoula' is actually a combination of two Choctaw words 'okhata', meaning lake, and 'hullo', meaning beloved... or a French transformation of the Choctaw Indian word for their own nation, 'Couthaougoula' pronounced 'Coot-ha-oo-goo-la'.(Don Abney) Jim Bowie and brother, Rezin Bowie, who spent much of their youth in Catahoula Parish are reported to have owned a pair of Catahoulas. It was said that they would sleep with a Catahoula at their feet.During the early 1900s, Teddy Roosevelt used the Catahoula when hunting. Louisiana Governor Earl K. Long had an interest in the breed and collected them. This interest was recognized by an annual competition known as Uncle Earl's Hog Dog Trials. In 1979, Governor Edwin Edwards signed a bill making the Catahoula the official state dog of Louisiana in recognition of their importance in the history of the region.

http://www.akc.org/breeds/catahoula_leopard_dog/history.cfm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catahoula_Leopard_Dog

'Let me have another': What Bon Temp drinks

For the story taking place much of the time in a bar there really isn't that much drinking in the Sookie books. Oh yeah, pitchers of beer but this is what I came up with for mixed drinks.
Who drank them and when ...

Soookie says in From Dead to Worse " I didn’t know a single malt scotch from a hole in the ground, but Sam did, of course, and he gave me a shining clean glass with a very respectable shot of it. I serve liquor, but I seldom drink it. Most folks around here drink the real obvious stuff: beer, bourbon and Coke, gin and tonic, Jack Daniel’s."

What did I miss ?
Do we find out in the books what Jane Bodehouse drinks ?

Bourbon
Eggs Benedict Bk2

Bourbon and Coke
Sookie Bk 1 Merlotte's
Anny Bellefluer Bk 2
Catfish Hunter Bk 5
Kevin Bk4

Gin
Gin and Tonic
Sookie Bk 1 Fangtasia ( recipe)
Kenya Bk4

Champagne
Champagne Cocktail
Sookie Bk 3

Scotch (single malt Scotch)
Copley Carmichael Bk8
Father Lintrell Bk6

Rum
Rum and Coke
Selah Pumphries Bk 8
Jasper Voss Bk8

Whiskey
7&7
Claudine
Jason Stackhouse Bk2
Liz Barrett Bk2
Whiskey Sour
Sid Matt Lancaster Bk1

Vodka
Screwdriver Sookie Bk2

True Blood Dvd sneak preview: Interactive map of Bon Temps on Blu-ray

Bon Temps and environs

Sookie Stackhouse loves Car Talk and listens on Red River Radio, the local Public Radio Station

Yes, everyone got it right, it was Sookie who loves listening to Click and Clack on Car Talk radio.

What's also interesting to note is that she listens on Red River Radio which is REALLY the public radio station for the Bon Temps area. In Shreveport area, Sookie's radio is tuned to 89.9 FM.






From Book 6 -Definitely Dead

The birds were tweeting and chirping, the bugs were buzzing, and the pollen-heavy air was full of peace as if it were yet another plant emission. I was sitting on the front porch in my pink robe, sipping my coffee, listening to Car Talk on Red River Radio, and feeling really good, when a little Dodge Dart chugged up my driveway. I didn't recognize the car, but I did recognize the driver. All my peacefulness vanished in a puff of suspicion. Now that I knew about the proximity of a new Fellowship conclave, Tanya's inquisitive presence seemed even more suspicious. I was not happy to see her at my home.

Common courtesy forbade me from warning her off, with no more provocation than I'd had, but I wasn't giving her any welcoming smile when I lowered my feet to the porch and stood.
"Good morning, Sookie!" she called as she got out of her car.
"Tanya," I said, just to acknowledge the greeting.

Thanks TES , Rita, Naomi, Tracie.

The Red River Radio Network is a community-supported service of LSU-Shreveport and is the non-commercial source for NPR News, classical music, and more for East Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and parts of Mississippi
Support it HERE

Anyone remember who listens to Car Talk, the popular NPR radio program ?

Email: True Blood in Dallas

http://www.cartalk.com/

Bon Temps : Who lives here ?

Home is where the heart is...who lives these places ?












and here -Email me with your guess Email: True Blood in Dallas

Ask Dallas: Vampire Kingdom of Louisiana : how are the sheriff areas divided up?

Yet another great question from a reader....
There is actually a wonderful scene in Bk 8 where Sookie on the floor in her pajamas gets out her old Louisiana state map and a pencil (so she can later erase the lines ) and draws out what she thinks are the vampire sheriff area boundaries ...

This is the scene :

In honor of the chilly night I pulled on my fleecy pajama bottoms, white with pink sheep, and a white Tshirt. I unearthed my map of Louisiana and found a pencil. I sketched in the areas I knew. I was piecing my knowledge together from bits of conversations that had taken place in my presence. Eric had Area Five. The queen had had Area One, which was New Orleans and vicinity. That mad e sense. But in between, there was a jumble. The finally deceased Gervaise had had the area including Baton Rouge, and that was where the queen had been living since Katrina damaged her New Orleans properties so heavily. So that should have been Area Two, due to its prominence. But it was called Area Four. Very lightly, I traced a line that I could erase, and would, after I'd looked at it for a bit.

This is my idea of how it might look

Jesus Christ, Shepherd of Judea Part I : Sookie and faith

"Jesus Christ, Shepherd of Judea " , that's a very familiar exclamation to readers of the Sookie Stackhouse books and I decided to take a closer look at churches, religion, the Bible and prayer in the Sookie books.

Sookie is most definitely a Christian believer and regularly attends the Methodist church in Bon Temps. She frequently talks of her faith , the Bible, prayer and attending church. She enjoys going to church, even if she doesn't always listen to the sermon but spend the time quietly reflecting.

Frankly, I don't always listen to the sermon. Sometimes the hour in church is just a time to think, a time to consider where my life is going. But at least those thoughts are in a context

She and Gran are regular members of the Methodist Church and she continues to attend alone after Gran dies and when her work schedule permits. In future posts, we'll look at mentions of the Bible, prayer and more.

What have I missed, are there other churches mentioned that I missed ?

The various churches mentioned in the books, their minister's and any known members are:

Bon Temps Methodist Church
o Location: Bon Temps
o Reverend: Rev Collins
o Members: Sookie, Gran , Hoyt and Maxine Fortenberry

Tabernacle Holiness Church (bk 9)
o Location: Bon Temps ( near Hotshot)
o Reverend: Rev. Marvin Norris
o Members: Norris family members have funeral there

Free Will Church of God's Anointed (Bk4)
o Location: Bon Temps?
o Reverend:
o Members: Danielle and Holly

Bon Temp Catholic Church ( bk6)
o Location: Bon Temps
o Reverend: Father Dan Riordan
o Members: Tara Thornton

Fellowship of the Sun (bk 7)
o Location: Minden
o Reverend:
o Members: Arlene, Rafe Prudhomme

Gethsemane Baptist Church (bk3)
o Location: Bon Temps
o Reverend:
o Members: Maxine Fortenberry (early books)

Good Faith Baptist (bk1)
o Location: Bon Temps (Gran mentions it as a possible meeting place for Descendants of the Glorious Dead in Bk1)
o Reverend:
o Members:

Greater Love Baptist Church (bk4)
o Location: Bon Temps
o Reverend: Jimmy Fullenwilder
o Members:

Bon Temp Episcopal church ( bk6)
o Location: Clarice
o Reverend: Father Kempton Littrell
o Members:

Grace Episcopal ( bk5)
o Location: Shreveport
o Reverend:
o Members: Colonel John Flood

Glen Cragie Methodist Church (bk2)
o Location: Dallas
o Reverend:
o Members: Hugo Ayers

We'll leave the light on for you

Who lives where ????

All the news that's fit to print

Twice in True Blood we see resident reading The Bon Temps Bugle
who are the two residents we seeing reading the paper ?

What do the inhabitants of Bon Temp like to read ?

What's this underneath the "Inquiry" ( National Inquirer) on the coffee table at Lettie Mae's ?
What True Love will survive ?






Here is a better view of it flipped around...

Google maps of the Sookieverse

Bon Temps is a couple of miles south of I 20, which runs all the way across Louisiana. It lies between Ruston and Shreveport. But the distance can sometimes expand or contract, depending on this writer's needs.

Charlaine Harris

Bon Temps is according to Sookie about an hour away from Shreveport.

Bon Temps must be closer to Monroe than Shreveport as Denise Rattray told Hoyt that she would not sell him any weed unless he took Mack Rattray to the hospital in Monroe. We know Hoyt did because Sheriff Dearborne's niece is the emergency room nurse at the hospital in Monroe and she told Bud Dearborne that she saw them there. If Bon Temps was closer to Shreveport, it makes sense to go to the hospital there.

Rev Newlin was killed on the freeway. He must have been closer to Dallas/Fort Worth than Shreveport but he wasn't necessarily in Dallas/Fort Worth.

It's about a 3 to 3 1/2 hour drive from Dallas/Fort Worth to Shreveport.
It's about another hour from Shreveport to Monroe.

In 1.03 Mine, the vampire Malcolm (at Bill's house) says they have a long ride back to Monroe. I guess "long ride" depends on the circumstances.


Place on map above

Monroe, LA

Shreveport, LA

Bunkie, LA
Patty's Pie House is "off I-49 way south near Bunkie"

Dallas, TX

Baylor University Medical Center
3500 Gaston Ave Dallas, TX 75246 more info > 3500 Gaston Ave Dallas, TX 75246

What do the the inhabitants of Bon Temp read and watch on TV?

What do the the inhabitants of Bon Temp read and watch on TV?

TV
In episode 1 Bill Maher is on the TV at Grab- it- Quick
In episode 8 Eddie says he loves watching" Heroes" on Monday nights
In episode 10 Lafayette is watching the Bad and the Beautiful 1952 w Kirk Douglas
In episode 11 Sookie and Sam are watching a Maw and Paw kettle movie (don't know which one -do you ?)
In episode 12 Sookie is watching the Shirley Temple movie "The Little Princess" 1939

Books
In Episode 1 Tara is reading the Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

Also in Episode 1 Gran is reading Last Scene Alive ( bk 7) in the Aurora Teagarden mysteries by Charlaine Harris.

In episode 10 Eric has on the shelves behind his desk a copy of Bram Stokers' Dracula.

Tara's Mom reads 'The Enquiry ( kind of like the National Enquirer) more here about that pile of papers