This is a Monday edition of the North Carolina Rabbit Hole, which means it’s for paying subscribers only. If you’re a free subscriber and would like to upgrade, you can do so by mashing the button below. You can find out more about what you’ll get and why I’m doing this here.

Charlotte is a great city for the living, but you may be wondering, what’s it like to be dead in Charlotte? Can you go to dead nightclubs, like (insert former EpiCentre hotspot here)? Is there a lack of affordable cemetery plots?

Before I’m willing to listen to your opinions on any of those topics, you must first PROVE that you are dead. Enter, the Mecklenburg County Register of Deeds:

This tweet really really took off late last week! So, you may have some questions here:

Q: Is this real?

A: Yes! Or, at least it was. I first saw this last week, thanks to this tweet:

As you can see, this picture is identical to the picture above, and many other people have ripped it off without attribution. The top version is was tweeted out by a doctor in Cincinnati, and the original poster lives in Ontario. Out-of-towners! They make Charlotte great.

On Tuesday, I went straight to that website (which took some finding, the top Google result takes you to an outdated landing page for vital records, which then leads to a dead link, which, you know, is appropriate here). And yes, it was real. Gloriously real.

Q: So, were dead people requesting their own death certificates?

A: Nope! As you may have noticed, the “Myself” portion was gray. Meaning, no, you could not actually click on “Myself.” Hence, while I want this screenshot from a man in Oman to be real, I do not think it actually is:

At some point last week, someone at the county fixed the glitch, and so this morbidly hilarious joke is now gone.

Q: How long was this website like that?

A: An archive.org search shows that the “myself” option was there since at least August of 2020. And, again, as far as I can tell, nobody posted anything about this until now. As an inside joke, this one killed.

Folks, I made a mistake last week. I tried to own man-who-knows-everything Gerry Cohen online. But you know who actually got owned? Me.

It started because Homefield Apparel, which somehow manages to make much cooler versions of college-logo’d shirts and pants, was teasing its release of its NC State collection. As a first look, they tweeted out this very insidery t-shirt.

Howling Cow! That is a strong pull. As you can see, the person who designed this shirt was in the know. It has a reference to the state fair and the university’s dairy lab. I have no real affiliation with NC State, and yet I WANT ONE.

So, to try and prove my superiority online, I attempted to make a funny tweet:

Immediately, several people stepped up to point out that I was COMPLETELY WRONG. Howling Cow Ice Cream is readily available at Harris Teeters across North Carolina. Gerry himself decided to drive the last stake:

Dammit! Although (clears throat), while I am mostly wrong here, I am not completely wrong.

Okay, so here’s the thing. There’s this law called the Umstead Act, which basically says state government is not allowed to make products that directly compete with private business. Howling Cow Ice Cream was made mostly for educational purposes at NC State, which trains a lot of farmers and people connected with agriculture in general. They had their own dairy lab, and they decided to make a whole program that would show students how to market products that came from a farm. I wrote about this for Our State back in 2014.

Anyhow, a few places got specific carve-outs from the Umstead Act. One of them was Howling Cow, which was allowed, by law, to sell its ice cream at the state fair every year. In 2005, the law was updated to allow State to sell Howling Cow in campus. So, how did it end up in Harris Teeter?

That’s a good one. From a Triangle Business Journal story in 2019, when the stuff went on sale:

The actual ice cream that comes from NC State’s farm isn’t for sale. But they are allowed to license the Howling Cow name in the same way that they can license the university’s logo and mascot for other stuff, like, say, beer. They also provided Harris Teeter with the proprietary recipe for the ice cream (although, if you wanted it, couldn’t you just file an Open Records Act request?). So, yes, it’s got the Howling Cow name. But no, it’s not really coming from NC State itself.

(takes bow)

A long time ago (January 20), I wrote a newsletter about a TikTok that showed Switzerland, claimed to be Gastonia, got nearly 6 million views, and fooled a woman from Florida into making a special trip to Gastonia to see its Alpine beauty. Since then, that story’s been all around the world. Literally.

Now it’s reached its logical conclusion. The woman, Olivia Garcia, is getting a real life vacation to the real life mountains of Park City, Utah, courtesy of … Kelly Clarkson.

Let this be a lesson to you: If you’re featured in the Rabbit Hole, you too will receive an all expenses-paid trip to an exotic location from a former winner of American Idol*.

*-your results may vary.

In that interview, though, Olivia says something that I hadn’t actually considered before. “The name Gastonia,” she says, “sounds like something out of a fairy tale, right?”

You know what? It kinda does. My family and I went to Walt Disney World a few months ago, during which we made a stop at Gaston’s Tavern, a lunch spot dedicated to the bad guy from Beauty and the Beast. Afterward, I had this song in my head for quite a while:

Sing it with me now:

Anyway, congratulations to Olivia on her vacation, and congrats to you on having that song on your head for the rest of the day.