You hear this a lot about the drivers from Illinois. However, the FIP’s do everything they can to live up to the stereotype.
“The traffic here is terrible.”
“At least the cost of living here isn’t as bad as [insert more heavily populated area here].”
I can’t really blame rock stars when they are performing in Kansas City, MISSOURI and yell “All right Kansas!” and the crowd yells back “You’re in Missouri, dumbass!”
Roadie secret? The name of the city is often written with a Sharpie onto a piece of gaffer’s tape and stuck to the grill of the monitor cabinet facing the lead singer. And seriously, spend a month on the road going from arena to arena and you’ll be lucky to recall what planet you’re on.
“It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there”.
Also, all the old west boutique towns and ghost towns like to bill themselves as “lawless, rough and tumble, and full of brothels and saloons” or other somesuch fanciful nonsense.
“We’ve got to drive all night and do a show in Chicago
Or Detroit, I don’t know
We do so many shows in a row
And these towns all look the same”
I hear the “best community to live in” thing all the time here. Every time there’s a hospital fundraiser, or a food bank drive, or a call to help some *family whose house burnt down you get the same rhetoric. “We live in the greatest community. Look how much we all help one another!”
*And they never have fucking insurance, the dumbshits. And it was two days before Christmas. And all the presents were already wrapped and under the tree.
One of the things I like about living in L.A. is that you don’t hear as much of this sort of bullshit.
"Don’t like the weather? Just wait a few minutes!"
What, is the sun is going to shine brighter?
"We’ve got the worst drivers in the country!"
L.A. has amazing drivers. You’ve got to know your shit to cope with our traffic.
"The mosquito is our state bird!"
Too dry for mosquitoes. Not many roaches either.
If you live in Northern Virginia you know one thing: Maryland drivers are the worse!
“X Standard Time” - “lol lol no one here is ever on time unlike any other place in the world”
I see you’ve never been to Korea Town.
To be fair, most of these do apply to lots of places but certainly not everywhere.
For example, I lived in New Orleans for a while. No one ever said downtown (or anywhere close to it) is dead at any hour of the day or night let alone 5 pm. You would also never hear about anyone being shocked about a murder or other violent crime in any part of the city.
I have lived in Boston too. I won’t say it has the worst drivers in the country because it takes skill to even get where you want to go but it does have the weirdest confluence of aggressive drivers, bizarre traffic laws, and almost unnavigable roads that exist anywhere in the country.
I have lived in New Hampshire too. The weather is really bizarre and can change in an instant. Mt. Washington is rather low for a mountain and has mostly shallow grades but it still the deadliest mountain in the lower 48 states and one of the deadliest of any mountain on earth because of the extremely variable weather in that region that can suddenly strand and freeze hikers to death even during the summer. It also has the highest wind speed ever recorded on earth.
I could go on but I don’t want to thread shit with this point because I know there are a lot of false claims out there. Maybe people are using extremes like that to form the comparison in their mind because they went to a place that was notably different some regard once and didn’t realize that was the outlier rather than noticing where they live is the real norm.
I wonder how many counties/states have a “Suicide Rock”, so named because of “an old indian legend” about a pair of young lovers who jumped together, having been forbidden to marry.
Actually, I say the opposite about my current city: It’s a nice place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit here. There are enough poorly-signed streets and unwarned speed traps and such that it can be quite unfriendly to someone who doesn’t know the area well enough.
But this only applies to a neighboring state/county/city…
The one I like is, " Spring and fall here are beautiful, … Both days, HAR HAR"
So glad to be back in [LOCAL CITY]! You guys are my favorite crowd!
heard this from a full range of acts. crowds here tend to be pretty talky. never makes much sense when I hear this.
Similarly. I grew up in Brisbane. The idea that the weather might change quickly just wasn’t a concept I was familiar with. I only got used to the idea after I’d lived or travelled elsewhere. If it’s a gloomy day here, it’s pretty much a gloomy day. If it’s sunny it’s sunny. There may be a change morning to afternoon, but not commonly.
I’ve only lived in 3 different cities (grants pass oregon, corvallis oregon, and houston texas).
In Oregon I never ever heard ANYONE say “if you don’t like the weather wait 5 minutes.” Because in Oregon (both corvallis and grants pass), the weather does NOT change rapidly… ever. If it’s going to rain, it’s going to drizzle all fucking week long. If it’s going to be sunny, it’s going to be sunny for a week or two.
In Houston I heard this for the first time in my life, and it is absolutely true. The terrible weather you get in Houston lasts, sometimes, literally for only 5 minutes. I never experienced a 40+ degree drop in temperature on a drive from home to work one morning, into a TORRENTIAL downpour, and then drove out of the rain into FREEZING weather when it wasn’t even cool enough for a jacket when I left, until I moved to Houston. So, this phrase is exactly useful for Houston, and not at all useful for (most of) Oregon. Almost every single instance of rain or stormy weather you get in Houston will last at most an hour or two. The beginning of a day is absolutely no indicator of how the end of the day will be. In Oregon, this is almost NEVER the case.
In Oregon we always razz on the “california drivers” and it’s mostly true, but only because in California you have to learn to drive aggressively and pretty crazy, if you live in a bigger city. In Oregon we barely ever have more than 2 lane highways (4 total I mean), and there’s very little traffic and everyone is very polite, waving people in, etc. That doesn’t work in a big city, and thus, California drivers come off as “crazy” to us. When I moved to Houston I learned how to do big city driving and I’m a much better driver now, but someone would probably consider me “crazy” from back home.
I did hear that Josephine County was the meth capital of the country (per capita of course). I also heard that Grants Pass had the most coffee shops per capita. I hadn’t ever heard this about anywhere else, but I was always naturally skeptical. Good to know that pretty much Everytown USA claims to be the leader in something (per capita).
Oh! and to put a spin on the nuclear target one, I heard SEVERAL times growing up that Grants Pass would be safe during a nuclear war because we were in a valley and prevailing winds from the nuclear targets would basically keep us safe (because they’d be missing us, blowing it away from us). I actually heard this from people outside of Grants Pass who had heard the factoid too, so I wonder if there’s a kernel of truth to it. So we took our pride in being “one of the only safe places in the world if there was all out nuclear war.”
In San Francisco, city of microclimates, it’s “If you don’t like the weather, walk two blocks.”
And the two seasons in our Valley of the Sun are summer and August.
“The local music scene has really gone downhill in the last few years.”
“This town can feel unfriendly or cold at first, but after you’ve been here awhile, people loosen up.”
“You can move here and live here for twenty, thirty years, but unless you were born here, you’ll never really be accepted.”
“All the cops around here just want to eat donuts and write traffic tickets.”
“The local restaurants aren’t all that good, but I know a little place that no one else does - you’re gonna love it.”
I always heard it as, “Jesus couldn’t have been born in [this town] because they couldn’t find three wise men and a virgin.”
As to bad drivers, George Carlin also said, “Everyone who drives slower than you is a moron; everyone who drives faster than you is a maniac!”