It means religion and all the fuss that yanks make about it.
a few more:
Blow jobs from fat birds in oval offices ( we only care if it’s the manager of the national football team)
OJ
Race
The draft
Vietnam
NASCAR
Barbeque
I’ve eaten grits, and I’m not sure how you can distinguish between grits and shit.
Most discussions on American celebs just whoosh past me, particularly if they are TV personalities.
Despite my interest in foods, I also find some American food discussions difficult to understand - if it’s about fast food or ‘products’, it can be really bewildering - “Hey, what do you folks think about Bucket-O-Fluff? Is it as good as Miracle Foam, or are you a dyed-in-the-wool Fuzz-U-Like guy? I used to like FrothBuddy, but they don’t make the stuff anymore”
- I have absolutely no idea whether you’re talking about something you’d eat, wash your hair with, or use to clean the floor.
All these replies and no one has yet to mention Fluffernutters. So, Fluffernutters!
It’s a marshmallow fluff and peanut butter sandwich. It’s gross. It’s good.
What does he say about the term “midwest”? The three states I most associate with that term are Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska, but within the last 10 years or so I’ve started to hear people using it to describe states as far east as Ohio :eek: and many people’s lists (like one from earlier in this thread) leave off Colorado altogether.
Garreau says that the Midwest isn’t really a significant socio-economic-cultural-political grouping in the U.S. Putting together everything from Ohio to Montana is creating a grouping that doesn’t really hang together. I disagree with Garreau that Washington and New York are that much of anomalies. They are just parts of the Industrial Northeast (the area that Garreau calls the Foundry). Sure, the industries there are mostly white-collar ones that don’t actually engage in manufacture, but that’s true for most of the eastern part of the Industrial Northeast, and it’s increasingly true for the western part of the Industrial Northeast. I spend much time driving between Baltimore and Washington, and the difference isn’t really that big.
When I was in England last month, I was trying to explain to British friends what the U.S. was like using British geographical terms. First, Boswash is a lot like southern England. Boswash is the cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, along with their metropolitan areas. It has approximately the same population as southern England, and it’s approximately as crowded. Second, Chipitts is a lot like northern England. Chipitts is the cities of Chicago, Toledo, Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, along with their metropolitan areas. (Perhaps this should actually be Chuffalo, with an extension to Buffalo.) They’re not quite as crowded as southern England or Boswash, and Chipitts and northern England have about the same population. They both were leaders in manufacturing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Both went down in importance in the mid-20th century as manufacturing became less important. In the late 20th century they began to pick up again by switching to non-manufacturing industries.
Now, Chipitts is just the western half of Garreau’s Foundry, minus some of the more rural areas. Boswash is the eastern half of the Foundry, minus some of the more rural areas, plus the southern part of Garreau’s New England. Both the Foundry and New England can be divided further than Garreau’s classifications. (Incidentally, the area that Garreau calls New England are the six states usually called New England, minus the New York suburbs in Connecticut, plus the Canadian Maritime provinces. As I pointed out, the Foundry is a reasonable grouping, but it can be further divided into a western half, Chipitts, and a eastern half, most of Boswash. I think Garreau’s New England can be usefully divided into the southern part, which is mostly Boston and its suburbs, and the northern part, which is much less urban.
The states most commonly referred to as Midwestern are those that were carved from the Old Northwest Territory, control of which passed from France to Britain in 1763 after the Seven Years’ War (French and Indian War), and from Britain to the United States in 1783 after the Revolutionary War.
The lands were those north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River, with the Great Lakes separating them from Canada. I am a lifelong Midwesterner, and I have never heard Colorado described as Midwestern. That is just Western. And most of us would call Nebraska and Kansas part of the Great Plains states, if for no reason other than their unrelievedly boring topography.
Despite the perceptions of some, agriculture does not dominate these economies. For example, in the state of Illinois, services, manufacturing, and finance are the leading economic activities, each contributing 15 times as much to the total income generated in the state as does agriculture. In Wisconsin, only 1 percent of workers were employed in farming (including agricultural services), forestry, or fishing.
Easy. Shit is brown and is the one I haven’t ingested. :dubious: