A week ago I did some traveling of my own, up along the mountains in North Carolina. And I found mudfarmer central.

Well, not exactly. Canton, NC isn't exactly a home to indentured servants and mud-specked uprisings against the evil magistrate, but it does sport a massive (employee-owned) paper factory that lends much of the same air of desperation and bad-egg-ambience as its fictional counterpart. There is also some extraordinarily beautiful scenery, one hell of a steep street, and some great little shops downtown.

And there is, in fact, mud.

Not any sort of commercial grade product, but any place got dirt got mud. I bought an old apothecary-type bottle at one of the little antique shops we stopped at and I used it to collect some actual authentic gen-u-ine Canton mud, which now sits proudly on my desk. Beats a t-shirt any day. Had to ship it home, I didn't want to explain to airport security why I was transporting mud. "Yep. Clay, really. Be surprised how many things it ends up in… hey! Where are you taking me?"

But what I want to know is, where are the browncoat entrepeneurs? If i lived there I'd be bottling this stuff up as fast as I could shovel and selling it on eBay. If they can sell empty cans labeled "Florida Sunshine" they can sure sell some Canton mud. And there's a lot of Cantons in the U.S.

Anyone does this, I want a cut.

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