This and That

Blue dots: cities that come to mind if I'm trying to name a Midwestern city to explain the Midwest to someone

Green dots: other cities among the 120 most populous cities in the US which feel probably Midwestern to me

Orange shaded region: Midwest core

Purple shaded region: yeah sure probably Midwestern but it kind of depends on context (Food? Demographics? Religion? Politics? Music? Natural environment/climate?)

Black dotted line: approximate "upper Midwest" versus "lower Midwest" boundary

Red line: approximate "the South" boundary- yes I guess I believe the South and the Midwest aren't mutually exclusive

"the Midwest is flat"

"the Midwest is not diverse"

"the Midwest was a hub for the Great Migration"

"the Midwest is union states that were not the original colonies or the far west"

"the Midwest has a significant mainline protestant population" (pink ABCUSA, orange ELCA, and green UMC on this map)

"the Midwest is farmland"

"the Midwest has wet summers and dry winters"

"people in the Midwest are of primarily German, Scandinavian, and Native American ancestry"

There are lots of these kinds of things that aren't occurring to me at the moment. But just for fun let's combine these ones into a map! There's a transparent purple layer for each of the previous maps, and a black outline for places that fall into at least 5 of the 8 regions.

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

@lymeandcoconut

#lmaooooo #my fave is that episode of white collar where neil is doing a theft #and the music they play over it is leporello's 'here's the list of all the hundreds of women my boss has fucked' aria from don giovanni #it's supposed to just sound grand and sophisticated but the guy is singing about how DG fucks tall women short women #fat women skinny women princesses and peasants he fucks them all! #and here's the numbers broken down by nationality! #he's fucked over 1000 women in spain you know!

Exactly!

Mammals: Weasel

Plants: Tree

Amphibians & Reptiles: Unchanged because they are perfect

Birds: 360° around back to dinosaurs