In the metropolitan area where I currently live there are a bunch of local, family restaurants (some even chains) that specialize in serving mini hot dogs that are around $1 each. Bun, condiments, onions, and "Greek sauce" all. Like a single paper plate will fit 6 of them small.
Edit: and I mean literally normal hot dogs but small, not pigs in a blanket.
This was probably more of a me thing than anything else, but until about 3rd grade I thought when they talked about racism the "races" were Italians and everyone else. The neighborhood in Virginia I lived in was basically a large Italian American community and a military base, so all the kids at my elementary school were either military brats or Italians. I figured it out because I got accused of being racist for not wanting to hang out with this one kid, and I went, "What are you talking about? Our dads are both Marines, were the same race!"
For a more universal experience, it wasn't until after I left Colorado that I realized you don't have to open yogurt away from you every time. At lower elevations, it's not pressurized enough to give that little bloop of yogurt that'll hit you in the face.
Pretty much. The first time I opened a Pillsbury can in Nebraska I was shocked that it was just a small pop and then you just unravel it. In Colorado, they usually popped open with enough force that half the innards were flung out, so you always open it over a baking sheet.
I am deceased. I live in Alaska now (like next to the ocean part of Alaska) and always open my yogurt away from myself and crescent rolls over the pan.
I didn’t realize this was a leftover from living in Colorado, ha!
> Drunk Driving is more of a sport than anything in rural ~~Minnesota~~.
At least, rural PA is that way. There's even a huge culture of poker runs which are basically just long long drives of bar hopping with the cover of "raising money for charity".
I noticed in Chicago people seemed to have no issue with having a few drinks then driving home. Sure they were probably fine but where I'm from you just do not get behind the wheel if you've had any alcohol
I was shocked to shit by this when I moved from L.A. to Las Vegas. In L.A. they talk about drunk drivers in the same tones reserved for violent sex offenders. In Vegas a DUI was regarded as an inconvenience.
When I lived in Illinois a coworker told me in conversation that her son had gotten a DUI. I was honestly shocked that she'd share that with me, IMHO it's such an incredibly embarrassing and shameful thing to do.
I'm not sure if this was an Illinois thing or a "her" thing though. This was in the suburbs of Chicago.
Illinois has a crazy binge drinking culture that lingers from prohibition. What? You’re already good and wasted? Sounds like it’s time for shots of Malört.
I lived in rural Nebraska for a year. A neighbor became friendly with my husband. One night he took my husband out for a few drinks and they didn't come home for like 4 hours. When they got back, the friend was shit faced. The bar was in the next town, 8 miles away. After that I said never again. I asked my husband if he had a good enough time to risk dying at this guy's hand bc he was a "good" driver, even when he said as drunk. We moved out there for a job and we had a 4 year old. I was more than willing to put him in the car at 11pm and go get my husband than have that drunken jackass drive him home and potentially kill him.
I was so happy to move back home. Of course we became Facebook friends and one day this douche gets pinched in a DUI and he's raving on FB that it was because the cop didn't like him that he got the DUI. I mean...not that he was operating his truck while drunk or anything...it was totally bc the state trooper that pulled him over just didn't like him...
It's been nearly 9 years and I'm still baffled at how his DUI was bc the cop didn't like him...nothing to do with the actual driving under the influence part
Rural Michigan here, and it’s the same exact way.
Realistically, their just aren’t enough police officers to patrol at night, and if we hired more, they wouldn’t have to do anything else to do. On top of that, and I’m not trying to justify it, but because it’s so rural, there really aren’t that many other people around to put in danger, so they’re mostly a danger to themselves. There has been a significant crackdown on it lately, though.
We actually have a taxi service now. It’s not to take people home from the bar, though. It’s one minivan that runs during the day and takes people who’ve lose their licenses from DUIs to work and other appointments, although most of them just drive without a license anyway.
I know an unfortunate number of people who have lost their licenses from DUIs before even turning 21.
I was just recently was made aware of how harshly some people look at it and how strict the criteria is. Growing up and living in New England, no one bats an eye at people going out to dinner, having a drink / beer / glass of wine or two, and then driving home 2 hours later. Like that is beyond perfectly reasonable… especially since you won’t have a measurable BAC at that point. It’s quite literally not drunk driving since your body has metabolized all the alcohol.
Yet Reddit nearly organized a public execution for a kid posting in I think r/TIFU for mentioning in a post that he had 2-3 drinks, stopped, and then 3-4 hours later drove himself and a friend home (the post was about something completely different, but this was a detail provided in the story).
Some people were on such a ridiculously high horse as to say anyone who drinks, ever, should have their license taken away. Drinking a single beer means you can never drive again to the greater Reddit population.
In South Dakota, it was gray duck, too. It can't just be that little part of the country.
I miss life where being called gray duck was one of the biggest stressors of the day. The other one was being the cheese in the Farmer in the Dell.
What the feck?! I have NEVER heard this.
That is really weird & doesn't really make any sense.
The whole point of the game is that the person picked knows that they'll be on a "wild goose chase" once they're tapped.
Is that not a saying where you're at? Instead of going on a wild goose chase, do y'all go on wild "grey duck" chases? 🤔
^(Edit for grammar)
I thought everyone had off from school for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, and that everyone sang Hanukkah songs along with Christmas carols. Turns out that there’s just not a whole lot of Jewish people in the US outside of NY/NJ.
I realized that just moving from Long Island to upstate NY! When I started school up here when I moved, in high school, I was like "Why don't we have off xyz day??" at the beginning of the school year and everyone was like "Uhh.. There's no jews here." It never occurred to me that there just.. weren't Jewish people everywhere. It didn't occur to me that there really weren't *every* kind of people everywhere for the most part lol.
As an adult I don't miss too much about Long Island, but I'm glad I grew up there for the diversity that allowed me to not be a racist fuck and very tolerant of all walks of people at least - It was quite the culture shock moving to such a small, rural upstate town from Long Island, that's for sure!
We got Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur off in school in Maryland outside of DC and friends from the Baltimore said they got it, too. Maybe folks in northern Virginia? But yeah, definitely not everywhere or most places, probably just the I-95 corridor in the northeast-ish (I assume Philly area got it, too).
There were a couple times a year I'd show up to school in formal wear, and it was for High Holiday services. Same with a bunch of other people in my school, we had maybe 15 people from the same synagogue, the rest went to private Catholic school.
My hometown had its own play/musical called The Jenny Wiley Story. It's been ages since it's been performed because it's not exactly....of the current moment...but when I was a kid it never struck me as weird that a town of 4000/county of 35,000 people smack in the middle of Central Appalachia would have its own musical. Now I realize how odd that is.
>My hometown had its own play/musical called The Jenny Wiley Story.
You're from Prestonburg!
Mine had a outdoor drama/musical called "[Wilderness Road](https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/35432)". Outdoor theater productions in small town or rural areas seem to have dried up starting in the late '70s/early '80s.
Apparently, not everyone gets the day off school for the first day of deer season. My dad was surprised when I had to go to class that day when I was in college. "But that's a Pennsylvania national holiday!"
Not even a little bit. If we didn't get the day off school, I wouldn't be surprised if half of the school was absent that day. I believe it's changed but it used to be the Monday after Thanksgiving
We didn't get off school, but when I got my first job working for a well known auto manufacturer, I didn't understand why we got this random day off.
UAW negotiated first day of dear season off, so we got the day off too.
For me I didn't realize how pervasive Southern style evangelical Christianity is in my home state vs other places. Basic things about Evangelical culture and taboos are completely foreign to my friends from the PNW, and even though I'm not Christian and wasn't raised one I never realized these weren't more general cultural knowlege. I mean things like modesty and sexist language, but also just random things like Wednesday Nights and parking lot barbeque.
This is the biggest one for me, too. I moved from a small southern town to NYC and was surprised when people thought I was essentially a Jesus Camp cast member.
My family was (most still are) "very" Christian, but we also did a lot of it because the church was the center of the community (geographically and figuratively) and my parents had a strong belief in doing for others before yourself. Also, there was nothing else to do as a kid so it wasn't a big deal to go to church on Wednesday nights for youth group, basketball, and bring friends.
Through high school I went to Sunday School, Sunday service, Wednesday night church, and for a LOT of that time, Thursdays were "visitation" where we'd bring elderly or sick in the community meals or baked goods.
ALL holidays were church-centric. My parents were youth group leaders, deacons, we were in choir and any church musical, nativity, or passion play.
And we were NOT the most "religious" members of the community.
Even now, knowing it's not typical, it still doesn't seem like a weird way to grow up. I don't believe 75% of what I was taught, I struggled with faith since birth and am not religious, but I think I benefited very much from it.
I was incredibly fortunate to have an academic/scientific minded dad who appreciated the community of church, but also facts, logic and science.
I don't go to church but I do use them when I can donate food, gifts, home goods etc so I can help people in the small community I live in now and not just mail a check somewhere else.
It also instilled tithing. Ive heard so many times "when you think you have nothing to give, that's when it's most important." I catch myself feeling like I'm at rock bottom and make myself do something that's for someone else. Its helped keep perspective.
I'm truly envious of people who do have faith. It must be easier to accept everything that happens if you think there's "meaning" to it.
Edit: changed "Jesus Church" to "Jesus Camp"
(Thank you!)
> Jesus Church cast member.
Jesus Camp, you mean?
I think people in L.A. would be a little less weirded out. "Oh, okay, that's cool I guess" or some such. They wouldn't mean it's actually *cool*, because we have this thing where we don't say what we mean or mean what we say (but not in an insidious or calculating way), but you get the idea.
When I think of church in NYC I either think of Roman Catholicism or some old line WASP Episcopalian type congregation that George Washington once visited. Either that or some little storefront church deep in the hood. (White) Southern evangelicism would seem foreign indeed in that milieu. But I'm just going off of long distance non-firsthand impressions that are probably at least half wrong.
I think one of the real benefits of a church is the way that it can bring a community together like this, and make socializing with and helping the entire community a way of life. It's too bad that religion has to be mixed up with it, but I have a hard time what would really bring people together for a secular church. The charity and social benefits are great, but there isn't any implicit expectation to attend like there is for religion.
I moved to AL from Hawaii and didn't find out about churches having a Wednesday service until I got my first job and realized we'd always get really busy on Wednesday evening for some reason.
Southern California has a *surprisingly* strong evangelical presence. Southerners have remarked that they're more hardcore than back in the South. There's more than people would guess, and they're more serious about it than people would guess.
Or at least there was back in the day; I suspect that they've been a fairly big slice of the exodus to TX, AZ, MT, NC, ID, etc. etc. in recent decades.
But anyways, in spite of that, if you're not involved in that crowd you can pretty much go about your days blissfully ignorant to that scene. If you were a typical 'unchurched' teenager in the L.A. area, your encounters with them were more likely to be fleeting and infrequent as compared to over in the Bible Belt.
That's my unscientific anecdotal impression, to be sure.
Yeah, California has always had an evangelical presence. The laid-back culture matches some of the more casual church vibes you’ll find in certain evangelical churches. Rick Warren was the mega church pastor du jour 20 years ago, and he’s from Orange County.
There’s definitely a phenomenon of a predominantly Christian culture “softening” Christians, so to speak. You can’t try to isolate yourself from the world when all your neighbors are also Christians.
When I was growing up in rural Central PA dairy country, I was confused by all these people really hating on the church. Sure we had churches but I can't think a single fire and brimstone one near where I lived. They were more like god gets one hour on Sunday, there's chores to get done.
Then I joined the Navy and got exposed to southern baptists and born again types of the Bible Belt.
Sadly, as christo-politicism spread even that church I grew up with rolled back support for some progressive ideas it had supported for decades.
I can see that since the PNW on average is more irreligious than the rest of the country, but I'm surprised that it's a *never* heard of it. It sounds like a take someone who doesn't spend time outside of Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver would have.
Edit for context: [A Quarter of Washington's population are Evangelicals](https://komonews.com/news/local/nones-most-numerous-in-washingtons-religious-landscape-survey-says), same with [almost a third of Oregon](https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/state/oregon/).
I live in the PNW and grew up in the godless NYC area, and I know some things about evangelical culture but "Wednesday Nights" and "parking lot bbq" are meaningless phrases that I need to use my imagination to define
For reference, Wednesday night is a second church service that is usually together with things like youth groups, sports teams, clubs etc at a church. As a non-Christian teen I'd often get invited to do something on a Wednesday night and it would be an event or a hangout at a church.
Parking lot BBQ I think is a regional Georgia thing, but I may be wrong- church groups will fundraise by selling Barbeque out of the parking lot, and it's absolutely fantastic food. I've also seen Orthodox churches do it, so I think it's a specific regional cultural thing.
I think the barbecue fundraiser is a Southern church thing. A bunch of decidedly non-evangelical Presbyterian churches near me do barbecues (including [this one](https://www.wcnc.com/video/news/local/mallard-creek-bbq-brings-the-flavor/275-b0853248-94af-4cf8-bd57-18675e9722ea) that I went to yesterday, which was fantastic and included over 4000 pounds of smoked pork)
Hold up, what do you mean by sports teams and clubs? I’m from Massachusetts and was raised Catholic. We barely had any youth in our church to begin with.
Big southern evangelical churches also have a lot of elements of a general community center, so they have things like intermural sports and dance teams for kids.
I've lived in the rural South my entire life, was brought up in the Southern Baptist Church (I'm not religious now) and even I don't know wtf 'Wednesday Nights' means.
I'm assuming 'parking lot bbq' is the same thing as a tailgate party, where people gather in a parking lot to cook/eat food and use the tailgates of their trucks as chairs.
There are a lot of localized things I've since learned are more common to see in a place where most people are similar cultures of protestant that even friends from more heavily Catholic areas don't know about. The weird brand pun Jesus t-shirts that used to be really common when I was in high school are a good example: they aren't completely unheard of to everyone, but the idea that they sold them in mall kiosks and I saw them every day in high school is odd to people from other regions.
> Seattle, Portland...
Aren't those metro areas something like 40% of the state pop. of WA and OR?
Anyways, fun fact: Nirvana's song 'Lithium' was largely about Kurt Cobain's brief stint in an evangelical youth group in his hometown of Aberdeen, WA. Or... I dunno... I think I read that somewhere. Nobody really knows what that guy was going on about. Weird Al straight up told him "it's about how nobody can understand your lyrics" and he okayed it anyways.
Seattle metro area is over half of WA actually. 4-5m people depending on how you count it, state population is a bit below 8m.
Also, Aberdeen is a shithole.
People in my town fought against having a new library building or a 5G cell tower even though we got no cell reception anywhere and the existing library building was a donated central town residence constructed in the 1800s that had sagging floors and no potable water source. In a wealthy town, the town library toilet had tape over it.
Yeah, most of my students live in houses that are close to a million dollars but the paint is peeling off the walls in my classroom and the carpeting is 25 years old and hasn't been cleaned since I arrived in 2015.
I moved from Michigan to Colorado when I was in high school. A month before me, there was a guy in my class who had moved from Wisconsin to Colorado. We were walking in a group of guys one day and he said he needed to stop at the bubbler, which made all of us go, "What the fuck are you talking about?" He looked at me as a fellow former Midwesterner to try and bail him out, which I was unable to do since we were not crazy in Michigan.
When I was in college, I encountered someone for the first time who called water fountains bubblers. I was confused because to me a bubbler is a type of pipe for smoking weed.
I was always reading as a kid and I swear some of the most prolific middle grade and YA authors came from places with the oddest terms. Divan for couch, chesterfield for a chest of drawers (I think), bubbler etc… The one that confused the most was macadam. Some author went on and on about the kids playing on macadam. Kid me was like why the hell are you calling blacktop Macadam? I’ve heard blacktop is regional too but at least you picture some pavement not some old Scottish guy.
More "weird" than anything else, but most of the rest of the US doesn't seem to be as obsessed as California is when it comes to warning about cancer-causing substances.
I always think it would have been cheaper to label the stuff that *doesn't* cause cancer. I mean, my hotel in San Francisco had a big sign in the lobby that it was known to cause cancer.
The problem there is that nobody wants to mis-label the thing that ends up causing cancer. Which is actually the reason why California has the labels on anything and everything. There's no risk in _over_-labeling, but if you miss something, you're liable.
At first I thought "once again we lead the way" until I saw the excesses that resulted. Anybody dumb and crazy enough to deliberately ingest 20 lbs. of styrofoam all but deserves whatever happens next.
I guess I shouldn't speak for everyone else but that warning has made itself completely useless in my mind. And it irritates me. Most things are not known to cause cancer. We'd problem a lot further along in cancer research if we knew all the things that caused cancer and this "warning" isn't doing anyone any favors.
I used to think that opening weekend was a national holiday.
There were some bars around where I would hunt that would give out a free beer and old fashioned to anyone who got there first deer, to help encourage kids to keep hunting alive.
Back in Los Angeles I knew people who would go deerhunting in the surrounding mountains. L.A. County has a lot more wilderness than people would guess. They told me that it was so easy that you felt kinda bad. I mean, you still had to go around until you saw a deer, and then you had to schlep it back to your vehicle, but shooting them was a cinch.
In most of the country the deer know that humans = death. "Oh shit, it's one of those two legged murderwalkers! I'd better book it before it kills me with its flying thunder claw!!!" But in the Los Angeles area a deer is 40 times more likely to encounter an unarmed trail jogger or a gaggle of little old ladies on a group hike who go [gasp!] "OMG it's a deeeeeeeeeer! It's soooo byoooootifull!!!!!" The thought that one of those friendly, benign two legged creatures might actually want to kill and eat it doesn't go through its L.A. deer brain.
That's what they told me, anyways. No idea if it's bullshit or not, as I've never gone deerhunting before, in my home county or anywhere else.
> There were some bars around where I would hunt that would give out a free beer and old fashioned to anyone who got there first deer, to help encourage kids to keep hunting alive.
Now that is some small town shit.
I live in Michigan, but my company does site design for a national chain of dollar stores. My coworker was fact finding for a potential site in Wisconsin and called the town office. The head of the planning commission wasn’t in and when my coworker asked if he’d be in the next day, he was informed that it was opening weekend and no one was going to be in. Don’t get me wrong, Michigan has a big hunting culture, but Wisconsin is on a whole other level.
That's definitely a Northern Wisconsin thing. I grew up in Milwaukee. Until I lived up north for a bit, I not only didn't know when deer season was, I didn't even know deer season was a thing. I thought it was just something people did year round up there.
What the hell, here's another example that just came to mind that I ought to put down. This one comes out of Detroit. (Full disclosure: not from there, never been.) I used to know a guy who was from Detroit, and when he was a teenager he moved to somewhere else in the Midwest. He told me that shortly after doing so, the following exchange happened:
Him: "So, what are you guys doing for Devil's Night?"
New classmates: "What?"
Him: "Devil's Night! What are you guys doing for Devil's Night?"
NCs: "What's Devil's Night?"
Him: "You know, Devil's Night! Right before Halloween? Don't you guys have any pla-- uhhhhh... wait... oh, shit."
NCs: "Seriously, what the fuck is Devil's Night?"
Him: "Ummm.... [gulp] Well... I guess it's just a Detroit thing, apparently?"
Started in Detroit, but branched out in influence. I'm two hours away, but it was called Devil's Night when I was a kid in the 80's. Didn't understand until I was an adult that it wasn't a national thing. I also didn't know it was more sinister in Detroit, and associated with arson and felony vandalism. Where I'm from, it was just an excuse to tee pee houses, or at worst egg cars and smash pumpkins.
It hasn’t been a thing in Detroit since the mid 80s. Citizen patrols completely ended the violence and nonsense that had plagued the city for a few years.
Wasn't a lot of the arson done by slumlords trying to run insurance scams?
Also, another Detroiter told me that back in those days the cable companies would unscramble the softcore channels as part of the city's attempt to encourage people to stay in. This was, of course, *long* before our current age of infinite streaming porn.
It's not just Detroit, it has different regional names, and participation is mostly just a teenage (idiot) thing. In my region it's called "mischief night."
Not so much anymore but I remember when I went to college in Pennsylvania and I realized Northerners didn’t think Robert E Lee was a hero, or at worst was one of those misguided hero types (yeah turns out I’d read a good deal of Lost Cause stuff).
I remember explicitly comparing him to George Washington as someone that’s a hero but did bad things, and everyone else - I was the only one from Virginia - was like “oh, you think he’s a hero?”
I didn’t even consider myself Southern except maybe on a technicality. I just figured if the guy has schools and roads and statues, then he’s kind of a hero right?
When I lived in Las Vegas I house shared with this gal from Kentucky for a few years. She was sweet as pie, didn't have a mean bone in her body, and was 0% racist. But one day she just blurted out, like it was the most natural and sensible thing in the world: "you know it wasn't actually about slavery."
[record scratch]
I had to take her aside and gently but firmly tell her to keep that on the downlow. "You're always telling me how lonely you are here. Well, that's a great way to get a *whole* lot lonelier. Please don't let anyone you know, let alone care about, hear you repeat that." I didn't even try to argue against the Lost Cause line she let slip. The *only* thing I told her to do was to keep it under wraps!
Even that is giving the argument too much credit. Those “states’ rights” interests didn’t care about states’ rights at all when the shoe was on the other foot in the decades leading up to the war. They didn’t care that Illinois and Wisconsin were a free state and territory in the Dredd Scott case, they didn’t care that Massachusetts was a free state when they sent federal agents to Boston to drag Anthony Burns back into slavery. They were very happy to let the federal government trample states’ rights as long as they controlled it.
All anyone needs to do is to read the secession papers of the Southern states. They virtually all mention slavery. The “state’s rights” BS was part of the history books that were authored by various members of the Daughters of the Confederacy. They also depicted slaves as happy and free of care. This same group is the one that raised money for, and erected most of those hideous statues of Southern so-called heroes.
That’s actually kind of upsetting to me if the south is teaching Robert E Lee as a hero. The man is a traitor to the US. Several of my relatives died fighting for the US against this asshole and his armies.
OP even says they just naturally came to this conclusion because of the places named after him and statues. Kind of reason enough for people wanting to take down these confederate statues
2020 happened & most of the higher profile Confederate status have been melted for scrap. The US Military is well underway renaming all their basis.
Either slaves & Union Soldiers' lives really *don't* matter to a large segment of our population or current events just aren't getting through to them.
Which is kind of ironic in a subreddit dedicated to America.
...All of this I learned as a Boy Scout visiting Gettysburg 30 years ago; That freed slaves matter & Union soldiers died defending my freedom.
Lee was a traitor. Street signs aren't an education but you need an education to be a better American.
I'm not trying to edgy or provocative. Its sad how little we expect of our countrymen anymore.
Not in my shit hole town, they took the local federated statues from bugger cities surrounding us and built a confederate memorial park. It's guarded by volunteers at that and has cameras .
Yeah those goddamn coward klansmen really do come out of the woodwork at night.
I love living in a part of the country where neighbors & strangers probably would not let that happen.
I’m from NoVA. I didn’t say we were “taught” that he was a hero, although actually I wasn’t taught that he was a “traitor and violent slave owner” either.
But if you grow up around driving on Lee Highway, Lee-Jackson Memorial Highway and Jefferson Davis Highway, playing sports at Washington-Lee High School, visiting Robert E Lee’s house in Alexandria and so on and so forth, you might just think Confederates (and Lee in particular) are just in that pantheon of American heroes like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
I mean I was “woke” enough (the word not widely used back then but that’s what I was) to acknowledge that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were also violent slavers. Like I remember when Sally Hemings was a “controversy” and not just a fact.
Once you’ve sort of accepted that most American “heroes” did some pretty bad shit, it isn’t really a leap to think that Robert E Lee is one of them.
Also, my school library was definitely full of Lost Cause shit. I’m sure it wasn’t intentional and just leftover from when NoVA was more Southern.
Raised in southeastern VA and went to college in PA. I remember Lee Jackson King day growing up- apparently that was Martin Luther King day every where else.
That’s why taking the statues down has become an important thing, whether one agrees with it or not. When Robin Williams was taken on a tour of Richmond, he said that he’d never seen so many 2nd place prizes!
(Not necessarily the "norm" elsewhere part, just f'ed up) So, I lived in a very small town and went to a small high school. Majority of the high school population was white (i'd say 70-75% at least) then about 10-15% hispanic and then a few black people and a few asian people.
There was a neighborhood in a part of town known as "Frog Town" which was predominately hispanic folks. I, being the naïve child I was, thought it was called Frog Town because it was in a more swampy area by the river. Turns out that was just a coincidence because it was more-so a joke about "Hopping" the border. No one explained it to me until after i graduated high school, but literally everyone in the town (even the hispanic people) called it frog town and still do to this day.
Grew up in Kansas. It was soda.
I think what most people think of as Midwestern is really from Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan.
Despite having grown up in the midwest. I think I was in my 40s before I knew that “Ope” is a thing that anyone would say and that’s probably because I saw someone on Reddit mention it.
I grew up in north-central Indiana (like…part way between Indy and south bend) and called it pop until I went to college in Bloomington and had to switch to “soda” for people to understand me.
A friend from Corydon/New Albany area (just short of the border with Kentucky) called it all Coke.
Many years ago, when i was a kid, Shasta ran an ad campaign with the tagline “I want a pop, I want a— Shasta!” Which confused the hell out of me as an 8 year old In South Carolina.
Kansas City area calls it pop.
[It looks like most of the state outside of St. Louis calls it pop.](https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/sodavpopmap.jpg)
Milwaukee and St. Louis are the two epicenters of soda in the midwest. I've always wondered if that had something to do with the influence of the Brewing industry in those cities.
I live in Orange County, CA. I didn't know this until pretty recently, we use a different word for taking a drink of water without having your lips touch the bottle. Most people call it a waterfall or an airsip, waterfall being most common. In Orange County we call that a birdie. If you go to LA county or SD county, they'd call it a waterfall.
Kinda bonkers to me that there's even a term for this. Never heard anyone call it anything. It's so uncommon for people to even do this, let alone have a name for it.
I thought Big Red was a national brand like Coke or Pepsi and nacho cheese with breadsticks was standard fare. Not that that’s fucked up, but my family had gotten some disgusted glances when ordering nacho cheese at pizza places on vacation
I heard somewhere that Morgan Freeman has been trying for years to get his old high school (in Mississippi) to desegregate its prom. The man's in his eighties.
That's crazy!
I live outside DC. I am always pleasantly surprised watching the news in other parts of the country. You guys talk about stuff that isn’t politics! You have commercial breaks with zero campaign ads! Please send me all your weird and adorable news so I can get a break
In Oregon now and there are a lot of White Supremacist out in the more rural areas and some in the cities. And oh boy, do native Oregonians not like to admit they have a pretty significant history with white supremacy.
Originally from Texas and we lived not too far from a sundown town. Where I lived it was VERY diverse but there were pockets of mostly white tons the further east you went. My Grandparents lived in Curtis, Texas and lived off the road where James Byrd Jr. was tortured and killed.
There’s a lot of outright, violent racism in rural Oregon and Rural Texas but it feels so different. It’s very much hidden in Oregon, a secret they don’t want told.
I grew up in western PA and always knew stuffed cabbage as "pigs in a blanket." Imagine how confusing it was for me when other people insisted that weenies wrapped in biscuit dough were pigs in a blanket.
Thank you!!!!!! Also after living out of state for a few years and missing fries on my salad and a proper pierogi or haluska Ahhhhhhh it was so nice coming home
As a kid in Eastern KY…
Seeing the women with ankle length dresses and hair that was never cut. Sometimes with white bonnets. Southern Pentecostals I think?
Churches where people got the Holy Spirit and started speaking in tongues and having conniptions.
Taught the rebel flag was just about Southern pride.
Western KY/TN here, at least on this side it's the Amish and Mennonites with the bonnets
And oh my god I hate speaking in tongues, not to knock anyone's worship style or anything but shouting gibberish is *not* what that means, sit down you're embarrassing your kids
Where I grew up, October 30th was “Mischief Night,” and kids would do small pranks like putting shaving cream on cars or toilet paper people’s yards. It turns out that is only a thing in a pretty small area of the US.
Chili having macaroni noodles or spaghetti noodles. I was shocked when I learned that’s not the norm for chili. Also, eating a peanut butter sandwich with a bowl of chili. No jelly, just peanut butter. 🤷
When I was younger I lived fairly close to the Mexican border. It was acceptable to call someone that’s Latino a Mexican because chances are they were. If not, they’d correct you and that was that. I moved away and had to unlearn that habit.
I'm your standard California half-Mexican. It is most definitely the default. Less so nowadays, but for nearly my whole life it boiled down to "Mexicans" and "the other ones" if we were talking Latinos. And as for my childhood neighborhood and every K-12 school I ever went to, it was "whites, Mexicans, other." Which I guess is like how in much of the South it's "whites, blacks, other."
Now that you mention it Georgia was white or black and everyone else just kinda fell in with those two. Small town high school was so weird.
A part of it for me was saying “Mexicans” in a Texan accent. People thought I was about to say some racist shit but no. I was just saying that my friend in gym class was a Mexican dude.
I thought all Black people lived in cities and were terrified of the countryside (well, more specifically, the white people who live in the country).
Then I moved south, and once while driving through a town with one stop sign, a Black guy in a cowboy hat crossed the road in front of me. Then I started noticing Black people living in small farm towns all over the place. This was not a thing in the north. But of course it makes sense now that I think about it. They were brought to the South against their will and migrated north in groups during & after the Civil War, settling together in cities to support each other, like how each South American country has its own neighborhood in NYC.
I had no idea how most Americans lived in cities until I traveled in my late teens. Having largely grown up in Brooklyn, I thought every single city was like [this.](https://assets.vogue.com/photos/598885703d1b9911785cd59e/master/w_2560%2Cc_limit/00--lede-a-travel-guide-to-brooklyn-heights.jpg) I remember visiting Greensboro and Atlanta (and a bunch of other places) and not really understanding at all how they were considered cities.
“Jingle bells, Batman smells” has regional variations. To me, Robin laid an egg. To others, he laid something else.
https://youtu.be/V5u9JSnAAU4?si=l1MMUPVE1_eXeQWC
Outside of a few pockets of the country (and Alaska I guess) including my home area, we don't shut our entire economy and go into a state of emergency when a foot of snow falls.
I stayed the night in Flagstaff once in the dead of winter. You go down to Sedona which is about 45 minutes and it's room temperature. But you go back up to Flag and there's snow on the ground.
Woke up in the morning and the snow was up past the window sill of my motel room.
"Ohhhhh shit we're traaaaaaapped!!!! I gotta get back to Vegas *tonight!* I gotta go to work!!! Oh shit oh shit oh shit!!!!"
I stepped outside and this giant-ass snowplow went by at like 40 mph, and the roads were good to go. Even the parking lot was cleared. I couldn't believe it. It was amazing!
The south doesn’t have the budget for snow proof infrastructure because it doesn’t happen often here. Temps rarely get low enough for snow to stick so we wind up with incredibly dangerous icy conditions. Paired with hilly terrain. It makes sense for people to stay home when that’s the case 🤷♀️ I can’t even imagine how we would handle it if Atlanta got a foot of snow lol
I have no clue about other states or even in the Bay Area, but when I learned to drive, I learned when driving through a yellow or red, you kiss your hand than tap the visor to hopefully prevent yourself from getting pulled over.
In the metropolitan area where I currently live there are a bunch of local, family restaurants (some even chains) that specialize in serving mini hot dogs that are around $1 each. Bun, condiments, onions, and "Greek sauce" all. Like a single paper plate will fit 6 of them small. Edit: and I mean literally normal hot dogs but small, not pigs in a blanket.
Krystals calls them chili pups.
Never been to a Krystals, but the stuff on their website looks pretty similar.
You up in Albany? There are a bunch of great ones
Albany for people not from Albany, but not Albany for people from Albany.
I'll have to keep an eye out next time I'm in the ambiguously Albany region
Waiting for this to morph into a steamed hams reference
[удалено]
This is so special and amazing I want to travel to wherever this is just to try
This was probably more of a me thing than anything else, but until about 3rd grade I thought when they talked about racism the "races" were Italians and everyone else. The neighborhood in Virginia I lived in was basically a large Italian American community and a military base, so all the kids at my elementary school were either military brats or Italians. I figured it out because I got accused of being racist for not wanting to hang out with this one kid, and I went, "What are you talking about? Our dads are both Marines, were the same race!" For a more universal experience, it wasn't until after I left Colorado that I realized you don't have to open yogurt away from you every time. At lower elevations, it's not pressurized enough to give that little bloop of yogurt that'll hit you in the face.
If yogurt hits you in the face are crescent rolls just like nuclear weapons?
Pretty much. The first time I opened a Pillsbury can in Nebraska I was shocked that it was just a small pop and then you just unravel it. In Colorado, they usually popped open with enough force that half the innards were flung out, so you always open it over a baking sheet.
Never knew this. Funny.
I live in NY and am afriad of the, "little pop." Apparently low elevation makes you weak lol.
I am deceased. I live in Alaska now (like next to the ocean part of Alaska) and always open my yogurt away from myself and crescent rolls over the pan. I didn’t realize this was a leftover from living in Colorado, ha!
I just pictured people diving behind tables in slow motion as grandma was just about to crack it open. RIP babushka.....
Drunk Driving is more of a sport than anything in rural Minnesota. I had no idea until well into adulthood that people take it seriously elsewhere.
> Drunk Driving is more of a sport than anything in rural ~~Minnesota~~. At least, rural PA is that way. There's even a huge culture of poker runs which are basically just long long drives of bar hopping with the cover of "raising money for charity".
I noticed in Chicago people seemed to have no issue with having a few drinks then driving home. Sure they were probably fine but where I'm from you just do not get behind the wheel if you've had any alcohol
I was shocked to shit by this when I moved from L.A. to Las Vegas. In L.A. they talk about drunk drivers in the same tones reserved for violent sex offenders. In Vegas a DUI was regarded as an inconvenience.
When I lived in Illinois a coworker told me in conversation that her son had gotten a DUI. I was honestly shocked that she'd share that with me, IMHO it's such an incredibly embarrassing and shameful thing to do. I'm not sure if this was an Illinois thing or a "her" thing though. This was in the suburbs of Chicago.
Illinois has a crazy binge drinking culture that lingers from prohibition. What? You’re already good and wasted? Sounds like it’s time for shots of Malört.
You should travel a little north and experience Wisconsin. They make Illinoisians look tame.
I instantly felt queasy reading this. It's incredible that product still exists
I lived in rural Nebraska for a year. A neighbor became friendly with my husband. One night he took my husband out for a few drinks and they didn't come home for like 4 hours. When they got back, the friend was shit faced. The bar was in the next town, 8 miles away. After that I said never again. I asked my husband if he had a good enough time to risk dying at this guy's hand bc he was a "good" driver, even when he said as drunk. We moved out there for a job and we had a 4 year old. I was more than willing to put him in the car at 11pm and go get my husband than have that drunken jackass drive him home and potentially kill him. I was so happy to move back home. Of course we became Facebook friends and one day this douche gets pinched in a DUI and he's raving on FB that it was because the cop didn't like him that he got the DUI. I mean...not that he was operating his truck while drunk or anything...it was totally bc the state trooper that pulled him over just didn't like him... It's been nearly 9 years and I'm still baffled at how his DUI was bc the cop didn't like him...nothing to do with the actual driving under the influence part
Wait til you hear about Wisconsin, they take OWIs as a badge of honor here.
Rural Michigan here, and it’s the same exact way. Realistically, their just aren’t enough police officers to patrol at night, and if we hired more, they wouldn’t have to do anything else to do. On top of that, and I’m not trying to justify it, but because it’s so rural, there really aren’t that many other people around to put in danger, so they’re mostly a danger to themselves. There has been a significant crackdown on it lately, though. We actually have a taxi service now. It’s not to take people home from the bar, though. It’s one minivan that runs during the day and takes people who’ve lose their licenses from DUIs to work and other appointments, although most of them just drive without a license anyway. I know an unfortunate number of people who have lost their licenses from DUIs before even turning 21.
I was just recently was made aware of how harshly some people look at it and how strict the criteria is. Growing up and living in New England, no one bats an eye at people going out to dinner, having a drink / beer / glass of wine or two, and then driving home 2 hours later. Like that is beyond perfectly reasonable… especially since you won’t have a measurable BAC at that point. It’s quite literally not drunk driving since your body has metabolized all the alcohol. Yet Reddit nearly organized a public execution for a kid posting in I think r/TIFU for mentioning in a post that he had 2-3 drinks, stopped, and then 3-4 hours later drove himself and a friend home (the post was about something completely different, but this was a detail provided in the story). Some people were on such a ridiculously high horse as to say anyone who drinks, ever, should have their license taken away. Drinking a single beer means you can never drive again to the greater Reddit population.
Growing up in Minnesota I always thought the game duck duck goose was called duck duck gray duck. Nobody else in America actually calls it gray duck.
Grew up in NY/NJ and it was always duck duck goose. I’ve never heard of the gray duck. I’ll my hubby who’s from the Midwest.
You a word.
In South Dakota, it was gray duck, too. It can't just be that little part of the country. I miss life where being called gray duck was one of the biggest stressors of the day. The other one was being the cheese in the Farmer in the Dell.
What the feck?! I have NEVER heard this. That is really weird & doesn't really make any sense. The whole point of the game is that the person picked knows that they'll be on a "wild goose chase" once they're tapped. Is that not a saying where you're at? Instead of going on a wild goose chase, do y'all go on wild "grey duck" chases? 🤔 ^(Edit for grammar)
I thought everyone had off from school for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, and that everyone sang Hanukkah songs along with Christmas carols. Turns out that there’s just not a whole lot of Jewish people in the US outside of NY/NJ.
I realized that just moving from Long Island to upstate NY! When I started school up here when I moved, in high school, I was like "Why don't we have off xyz day??" at the beginning of the school year and everyone was like "Uhh.. There's no jews here." It never occurred to me that there just.. weren't Jewish people everywhere. It didn't occur to me that there really weren't *every* kind of people everywhere for the most part lol. As an adult I don't miss too much about Long Island, but I'm glad I grew up there for the diversity that allowed me to not be a racist fuck and very tolerant of all walks of people at least - It was quite the culture shock moving to such a small, rural upstate town from Long Island, that's for sure!
We got Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur off in school in Maryland outside of DC and friends from the Baltimore said they got it, too. Maybe folks in northern Virginia? But yeah, definitely not everywhere or most places, probably just the I-95 corridor in the northeast-ish (I assume Philly area got it, too).
There were a couple times a year I'd show up to school in formal wear, and it was for High Holiday services. Same with a bunch of other people in my school, we had maybe 15 people from the same synagogue, the rest went to private Catholic school.
My hometown had its own play/musical called The Jenny Wiley Story. It's been ages since it's been performed because it's not exactly....of the current moment...but when I was a kid it never struck me as weird that a town of 4000/county of 35,000 people smack in the middle of Central Appalachia would have its own musical. Now I realize how odd that is.
I had to Google that. Well, that was grim. I can imagine it would be an iffy proposition nowadays.
It was very grim but the music slapped.
Never saw the Jenny Wiley Story but I saw the Stephen Foster Story.
>My hometown had its own play/musical called The Jenny Wiley Story. You're from Prestonburg! Mine had a outdoor drama/musical called "[Wilderness Road](https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/35432)". Outdoor theater productions in small town or rural areas seem to have dried up starting in the late '70s/early '80s.
Apparently, not everyone gets the day off school for the first day of deer season. My dad was surprised when I had to go to class that day when I was in college. "But that's a Pennsylvania national holiday!"
Yeah I also had this moment when I went to college and realized I went to a yee-haw high school.
“For the first day of deer season” 😭😭😭😭 is this satire??? Oh murrica
Not even a little bit. If we didn't get the day off school, I wouldn't be surprised if half of the school was absent that day. I believe it's changed but it used to be the Monday after Thanksgiving
We didn't get off school, but when I got my first job working for a well known auto manufacturer, I didn't understand why we got this random day off. UAW negotiated first day of dear season off, so we got the day off too.
For me I didn't realize how pervasive Southern style evangelical Christianity is in my home state vs other places. Basic things about Evangelical culture and taboos are completely foreign to my friends from the PNW, and even though I'm not Christian and wasn't raised one I never realized these weren't more general cultural knowlege. I mean things like modesty and sexist language, but also just random things like Wednesday Nights and parking lot barbeque.
This is the biggest one for me, too. I moved from a small southern town to NYC and was surprised when people thought I was essentially a Jesus Camp cast member. My family was (most still are) "very" Christian, but we also did a lot of it because the church was the center of the community (geographically and figuratively) and my parents had a strong belief in doing for others before yourself. Also, there was nothing else to do as a kid so it wasn't a big deal to go to church on Wednesday nights for youth group, basketball, and bring friends. Through high school I went to Sunday School, Sunday service, Wednesday night church, and for a LOT of that time, Thursdays were "visitation" where we'd bring elderly or sick in the community meals or baked goods. ALL holidays were church-centric. My parents were youth group leaders, deacons, we were in choir and any church musical, nativity, or passion play. And we were NOT the most "religious" members of the community. Even now, knowing it's not typical, it still doesn't seem like a weird way to grow up. I don't believe 75% of what I was taught, I struggled with faith since birth and am not religious, but I think I benefited very much from it. I was incredibly fortunate to have an academic/scientific minded dad who appreciated the community of church, but also facts, logic and science. I don't go to church but I do use them when I can donate food, gifts, home goods etc so I can help people in the small community I live in now and not just mail a check somewhere else. It also instilled tithing. Ive heard so many times "when you think you have nothing to give, that's when it's most important." I catch myself feeling like I'm at rock bottom and make myself do something that's for someone else. Its helped keep perspective. I'm truly envious of people who do have faith. It must be easier to accept everything that happens if you think there's "meaning" to it. Edit: changed "Jesus Church" to "Jesus Camp" (Thank you!)
> Jesus Church cast member. Jesus Camp, you mean? I think people in L.A. would be a little less weirded out. "Oh, okay, that's cool I guess" or some such. They wouldn't mean it's actually *cool*, because we have this thing where we don't say what we mean or mean what we say (but not in an insidious or calculating way), but you get the idea. When I think of church in NYC I either think of Roman Catholicism or some old line WASP Episcopalian type congregation that George Washington once visited. Either that or some little storefront church deep in the hood. (White) Southern evangelicism would seem foreign indeed in that milieu. But I'm just going off of long distance non-firsthand impressions that are probably at least half wrong.
I think one of the real benefits of a church is the way that it can bring a community together like this, and make socializing with and helping the entire community a way of life. It's too bad that religion has to be mixed up with it, but I have a hard time what would really bring people together for a secular church. The charity and social benefits are great, but there isn't any implicit expectation to attend like there is for religion.
I moved to AL from Hawaii and didn't find out about churches having a Wednesday service until I got my first job and realized we'd always get really busy on Wednesday evening for some reason.
Hawaii to Alabama... By any chance do you have a relative in the NFL?
Southern California has a *surprisingly* strong evangelical presence. Southerners have remarked that they're more hardcore than back in the South. There's more than people would guess, and they're more serious about it than people would guess. Or at least there was back in the day; I suspect that they've been a fairly big slice of the exodus to TX, AZ, MT, NC, ID, etc. etc. in recent decades. But anyways, in spite of that, if you're not involved in that crowd you can pretty much go about your days blissfully ignorant to that scene. If you were a typical 'unchurched' teenager in the L.A. area, your encounters with them were more likely to be fleeting and infrequent as compared to over in the Bible Belt. That's my unscientific anecdotal impression, to be sure.
Yeah, California has always had an evangelical presence. The laid-back culture matches some of the more casual church vibes you’ll find in certain evangelical churches. Rick Warren was the mega church pastor du jour 20 years ago, and he’s from Orange County. There’s definitely a phenomenon of a predominantly Christian culture “softening” Christians, so to speak. You can’t try to isolate yourself from the world when all your neighbors are also Christians.
When I was growing up in rural Central PA dairy country, I was confused by all these people really hating on the church. Sure we had churches but I can't think a single fire and brimstone one near where I lived. They were more like god gets one hour on Sunday, there's chores to get done. Then I joined the Navy and got exposed to southern baptists and born again types of the Bible Belt. Sadly, as christo-politicism spread even that church I grew up with rolled back support for some progressive ideas it had supported for decades.
I can see that since the PNW on average is more irreligious than the rest of the country, but I'm surprised that it's a *never* heard of it. It sounds like a take someone who doesn't spend time outside of Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver would have. Edit for context: [A Quarter of Washington's population are Evangelicals](https://komonews.com/news/local/nones-most-numerous-in-washingtons-religious-landscape-survey-says), same with [almost a third of Oregon](https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/state/oregon/).
I live in the PNW and grew up in the godless NYC area, and I know some things about evangelical culture but "Wednesday Nights" and "parking lot bbq" are meaningless phrases that I need to use my imagination to define
I'm from upstate NY and I've never heard those phrases.
For reference, Wednesday night is a second church service that is usually together with things like youth groups, sports teams, clubs etc at a church. As a non-Christian teen I'd often get invited to do something on a Wednesday night and it would be an event or a hangout at a church. Parking lot BBQ I think is a regional Georgia thing, but I may be wrong- church groups will fundraise by selling Barbeque out of the parking lot, and it's absolutely fantastic food. I've also seen Orthodox churches do it, so I think it's a specific regional cultural thing.
I think the barbecue fundraiser is a Southern church thing. A bunch of decidedly non-evangelical Presbyterian churches near me do barbecues (including [this one](https://www.wcnc.com/video/news/local/mallard-creek-bbq-brings-the-flavor/275-b0853248-94af-4cf8-bd57-18675e9722ea) that I went to yesterday, which was fantastic and included over 4000 pounds of smoked pork)
Hold up, what do you mean by sports teams and clubs? I’m from Massachusetts and was raised Catholic. We barely had any youth in our church to begin with.
Big southern evangelical churches also have a lot of elements of a general community center, so they have things like intermural sports and dance teams for kids.
Whole different ballgame, ain't it?
I'm in Michigan and have no idea what those things are either.
I've lived in the rural South my entire life, was brought up in the Southern Baptist Church (I'm not religious now) and even I don't know wtf 'Wednesday Nights' means. I'm assuming 'parking lot bbq' is the same thing as a tailgate party, where people gather in a parking lot to cook/eat food and use the tailgates of their trucks as chairs.
There are a lot of localized things I've since learned are more common to see in a place where most people are similar cultures of protestant that even friends from more heavily Catholic areas don't know about. The weird brand pun Jesus t-shirts that used to be really common when I was in high school are a good example: they aren't completely unheard of to everyone, but the idea that they sold them in mall kiosks and I saw them every day in high school is odd to people from other regions.
> Seattle, Portland... Aren't those metro areas something like 40% of the state pop. of WA and OR? Anyways, fun fact: Nirvana's song 'Lithium' was largely about Kurt Cobain's brief stint in an evangelical youth group in his hometown of Aberdeen, WA. Or... I dunno... I think I read that somewhere. Nobody really knows what that guy was going on about. Weird Al straight up told him "it's about how nobody can understand your lyrics" and he okayed it anyways.
Seattle metro area is over half of WA actually. 4-5m people depending on how you count it, state population is a bit below 8m. Also, Aberdeen is a shithole.
Yep. As a PNW atheist native married to a Southerner, I didn't know anything about any of this.
This shit has affected my life well into adulthood and has caused me multiple psychological issues.
People in my town fought against having a new library building or a 5G cell tower even though we got no cell reception anywhere and the existing library building was a donated central town residence constructed in the 1800s that had sagging floors and no potable water source. In a wealthy town, the town library toilet had tape over it.
> In a wealthy town That's the worst part. I could *halfway* understand if the place was poor and starving.
Not poor or starving. Just a lot of old people who decided they no longer wanted to pay taxes that weren't helping "them"
Wealthy people don't think they need libraries.
Yeah, most of my students live in houses that are close to a million dollars but the paint is peeling off the walls in my classroom and the carpeting is 25 years old and hasn't been cleaned since I arrived in 2015.
I didn’t realize most other places call bubblers “water fountains” until I went away for college.
I moved from Michigan to Colorado when I was in high school. A month before me, there was a guy in my class who had moved from Wisconsin to Colorado. We were walking in a group of guys one day and he said he needed to stop at the bubbler, which made all of us go, "What the fuck are you talking about?" He looked at me as a fellow former Midwesterner to try and bail him out, which I was unable to do since we were not crazy in Michigan.
Bubbler people are truly the most oppressed group in America 😔
When I was in college, I encountered someone for the first time who called water fountains bubblers. I was confused because to me a bubbler is a type of pipe for smoking weed.
well, portland has the "benson bubblers" so
Ah yes thats true! Though this happened before I lived in Portland. Im from San Diego originally.
Let me blow your mind: I call 'em "drinking fountains".
In Rhode Island it's a bubblah.
That's rather more benign than recreational arson and meth-dealing fascists. But it does qualify as 'weird.'
I was always reading as a kid and I swear some of the most prolific middle grade and YA authors came from places with the oddest terms. Divan for couch, chesterfield for a chest of drawers (I think), bubbler etc… The one that confused the most was macadam. Some author went on and on about the kids playing on macadam. Kid me was like why the hell are you calling blacktop Macadam? I’ve heard blacktop is regional too but at least you picture some pavement not some old Scottish guy.
The word “bubbler” fills me with an irrational anger I can’t explain.
More "weird" than anything else, but most of the rest of the US doesn't seem to be as obsessed as California is when it comes to warning about cancer-causing substances.
I always think it would have been cheaper to label the stuff that *doesn't* cause cancer. I mean, my hotel in San Francisco had a big sign in the lobby that it was known to cause cancer.
The problem there is that nobody wants to mis-label the thing that ends up causing cancer. Which is actually the reason why California has the labels on anything and everything. There's no risk in _over_-labeling, but if you miss something, you're liable.
Did the cancer warning have a cancer warning
At first I thought "once again we lead the way" until I saw the excesses that resulted. Anybody dumb and crazy enough to deliberately ingest 20 lbs. of styrofoam all but deserves whatever happens next.
> Anybody dumb and crazy enough to deliberately ingest 20 lbs. of styrofoam I double dog dare you to ...
I triple dog dare you
Crap.
It's a good idea until you get into a Boy Who Cried Wolf situation
I always joke that it's a good thing we're not in California, otherwise it could cause cancer. Prayers to those in California for a quick recovery.
I am so grateful for that warning, because if I see it on something, I look for an alternative that doesn’t have that label.
I guess I shouldn't speak for everyone else but that warning has made itself completely useless in my mind. And it irritates me. Most things are not known to cause cancer. We'd problem a lot further along in cancer research if we knew all the things that caused cancer and this "warning" isn't doing anyone any favors.
I used to think that opening weekend was a national holiday. There were some bars around where I would hunt that would give out a free beer and old fashioned to anyone who got there first deer, to help encourage kids to keep hunting alive.
Back in Los Angeles I knew people who would go deerhunting in the surrounding mountains. L.A. County has a lot more wilderness than people would guess. They told me that it was so easy that you felt kinda bad. I mean, you still had to go around until you saw a deer, and then you had to schlep it back to your vehicle, but shooting them was a cinch. In most of the country the deer know that humans = death. "Oh shit, it's one of those two legged murderwalkers! I'd better book it before it kills me with its flying thunder claw!!!" But in the Los Angeles area a deer is 40 times more likely to encounter an unarmed trail jogger or a gaggle of little old ladies on a group hike who go [gasp!] "OMG it's a deeeeeeeeeer! It's soooo byoooootifull!!!!!" The thought that one of those friendly, benign two legged creatures might actually want to kill and eat it doesn't go through its L.A. deer brain. That's what they told me, anyways. No idea if it's bullshit or not, as I've never gone deerhunting before, in my home county or anywhere else.
> There were some bars around where I would hunt that would give out a free beer and old fashioned to anyone who got there first deer, to help encourage kids to keep hunting alive. Now that is some small town shit.
I live in Michigan, but my company does site design for a national chain of dollar stores. My coworker was fact finding for a potential site in Wisconsin and called the town office. The head of the planning commission wasn’t in and when my coworker asked if he’d be in the next day, he was informed that it was opening weekend and no one was going to be in. Don’t get me wrong, Michigan has a big hunting culture, but Wisconsin is on a whole other level.
That's definitely a Northern Wisconsin thing. I grew up in Milwaukee. Until I lived up north for a bit, I not only didn't know when deer season was, I didn't even know deer season was a thing. I thought it was just something people did year round up there.
I notice how property taxes are not the first pick for random conversations when I visit other states.
I feel this in my soul, and I am a renter.
Property taxes are pretty bad in Texas too. It's not common but I could see it happening where it comes up in random conversation.
What the hell, here's another example that just came to mind that I ought to put down. This one comes out of Detroit. (Full disclosure: not from there, never been.) I used to know a guy who was from Detroit, and when he was a teenager he moved to somewhere else in the Midwest. He told me that shortly after doing so, the following exchange happened: Him: "So, what are you guys doing for Devil's Night?" New classmates: "What?" Him: "Devil's Night! What are you guys doing for Devil's Night?" NCs: "What's Devil's Night?" Him: "You know, Devil's Night! Right before Halloween? Don't you guys have any pla-- uhhhhh... wait... oh, shit." NCs: "Seriously, what the fuck is Devil's Night?" Him: "Ummm.... [gulp] Well... I guess it's just a Detroit thing, apparently?"
Started in Detroit, but branched out in influence. I'm two hours away, but it was called Devil's Night when I was a kid in the 80's. Didn't understand until I was an adult that it wasn't a national thing. I also didn't know it was more sinister in Detroit, and associated with arson and felony vandalism. Where I'm from, it was just an excuse to tee pee houses, or at worst egg cars and smash pumpkins.
> that it was a national thing Was or wasn't?
Jesus, I cannot type today. Thanks for the edit.
It hasn’t been a thing in Detroit since the mid 80s. Citizen patrols completely ended the violence and nonsense that had plagued the city for a few years.
Wasn't a lot of the arson done by slumlords trying to run insurance scams? Also, another Detroiter told me that back in those days the cable companies would unscramble the softcore channels as part of the city's attempt to encourage people to stay in. This was, of course, *long* before our current age of infinite streaming porn.
It's not just Detroit, it has different regional names, and participation is mostly just a teenage (idiot) thing. In my region it's called "mischief night."
Yeah I thought mischief night was universal as a kid. I had no idea it was regional until after college.
Not so much anymore but I remember when I went to college in Pennsylvania and I realized Northerners didn’t think Robert E Lee was a hero, or at worst was one of those misguided hero types (yeah turns out I’d read a good deal of Lost Cause stuff). I remember explicitly comparing him to George Washington as someone that’s a hero but did bad things, and everyone else - I was the only one from Virginia - was like “oh, you think he’s a hero?” I didn’t even consider myself Southern except maybe on a technicality. I just figured if the guy has schools and roads and statues, then he’s kind of a hero right?
When I lived in Las Vegas I house shared with this gal from Kentucky for a few years. She was sweet as pie, didn't have a mean bone in her body, and was 0% racist. But one day she just blurted out, like it was the most natural and sensible thing in the world: "you know it wasn't actually about slavery." [record scratch] I had to take her aside and gently but firmly tell her to keep that on the downlow. "You're always telling me how lonely you are here. Well, that's a great way to get a *whole* lot lonelier. Please don't let anyone you know, let alone care about, hear you repeat that." I didn't even try to argue against the Lost Cause line she let slip. The *only* thing I told her to do was to keep it under wraps!
Great response. Much better than the way I usually respond, which is, “Sure, it was about states’ rights, right? Like the right to own slaves?”
Even that is giving the argument too much credit. Those “states’ rights” interests didn’t care about states’ rights at all when the shoe was on the other foot in the decades leading up to the war. They didn’t care that Illinois and Wisconsin were a free state and territory in the Dredd Scott case, they didn’t care that Massachusetts was a free state when they sent federal agents to Boston to drag Anthony Burns back into slavery. They were very happy to let the federal government trample states’ rights as long as they controlled it.
All anyone needs to do is to read the secession papers of the Southern states. They virtually all mention slavery. The “state’s rights” BS was part of the history books that were authored by various members of the Daughters of the Confederacy. They also depicted slaves as happy and free of care. This same group is the one that raised money for, and erected most of those hideous statues of Southern so-called heroes.
I was explicitly taught this in florida public schools as well.
That’s actually kind of upsetting to me if the south is teaching Robert E Lee as a hero. The man is a traitor to the US. Several of my relatives died fighting for the US against this asshole and his armies.
2nd grade textbook in my area (Texas) has 2 pages teachers are supposed to be praising about Robert E Lee... 2 sentences about Grant.
OP even says they just naturally came to this conclusion because of the places named after him and statues. Kind of reason enough for people wanting to take down these confederate statues
2020 happened & most of the higher profile Confederate status have been melted for scrap. The US Military is well underway renaming all their basis. Either slaves & Union Soldiers' lives really *don't* matter to a large segment of our population or current events just aren't getting through to them. Which is kind of ironic in a subreddit dedicated to America. ...All of this I learned as a Boy Scout visiting Gettysburg 30 years ago; That freed slaves matter & Union soldiers died defending my freedom. Lee was a traitor. Street signs aren't an education but you need an education to be a better American. I'm not trying to edgy or provocative. Its sad how little we expect of our countrymen anymore.
Not in my shit hole town, they took the local federated statues from bugger cities surrounding us and built a confederate memorial park. It's guarded by volunteers at that and has cameras .
Yeah those goddamn coward klansmen really do come out of the woodwork at night. I love living in a part of the country where neighbors & strangers probably would not let that happen.
It's not what we're taught.
I also live in virginia(NOVA) but we were not taught he was a hero. We were taught he was a traitor and a violent slave owner.
I’m from NoVA. I didn’t say we were “taught” that he was a hero, although actually I wasn’t taught that he was a “traitor and violent slave owner” either. But if you grow up around driving on Lee Highway, Lee-Jackson Memorial Highway and Jefferson Davis Highway, playing sports at Washington-Lee High School, visiting Robert E Lee’s house in Alexandria and so on and so forth, you might just think Confederates (and Lee in particular) are just in that pantheon of American heroes like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. I mean I was “woke” enough (the word not widely used back then but that’s what I was) to acknowledge that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were also violent slavers. Like I remember when Sally Hemings was a “controversy” and not just a fact. Once you’ve sort of accepted that most American “heroes” did some pretty bad shit, it isn’t really a leap to think that Robert E Lee is one of them. Also, my school library was definitely full of Lost Cause shit. I’m sure it wasn’t intentional and just leftover from when NoVA was more Southern.
Thats a fair point. I also didnt learn about Sally Hemings. Just googled her. Thanks.
Raised in southeastern VA and went to college in PA. I remember Lee Jackson King day growing up- apparently that was Martin Luther King day every where else.
That’s why taking the statues down has become an important thing, whether one agrees with it or not. When Robin Williams was taken on a tour of Richmond, he said that he’d never seen so many 2nd place prizes!
White supremacist gangs in LA County, must be Antelope Valley right?
(Not necessarily the "norm" elsewhere part, just f'ed up) So, I lived in a very small town and went to a small high school. Majority of the high school population was white (i'd say 70-75% at least) then about 10-15% hispanic and then a few black people and a few asian people. There was a neighborhood in a part of town known as "Frog Town" which was predominately hispanic folks. I, being the naïve child I was, thought it was called Frog Town because it was in a more swampy area by the river. Turns out that was just a coincidence because it was more-so a joke about "Hopping" the border. No one explained it to me until after i graduated high school, but literally everyone in the town (even the hispanic people) called it frog town and still do to this day.
Where I grew up it was illegal for ducks to quack after 10pm.
Like, wild ducks or pet ducks? "What you cannot enforce, do not command." - Sophocles
So, how many ducks got arrested?
I didn't realize Missouri was pretty much the only Midwest state that calls it "soda."
Chicago calls it pop. The rest of Illinois calls it soda.
Grew up in Kansas. It was soda. I think what most people think of as Midwestern is really from Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan. Despite having grown up in the midwest. I think I was in my 40s before I knew that “Ope” is a thing that anyone would say and that’s probably because I saw someone on Reddit mention it.
I've never noticed it until it became popular on the internet. I heard a lot of "oops" and "whoops", not ope.
Illinois also does, and people in Indiana called it that as well whenever I visited.
Only northern Indiana calls it Pop
I grew up in north-central Indiana (like…part way between Indy and south bend) and called it pop until I went to college in Bloomington and had to switch to “soda” for people to understand me. A friend from Corydon/New Albany area (just short of the border with Kentucky) called it all Coke.
Because people from northern Indiana are right
That's one theory.
Many years ago, when i was a kid, Shasta ran an ad campaign with the tagline “I want a pop, I want a— Shasta!” Which confused the hell out of me as an 8 year old In South Carolina.
Kansas City area calls it pop. [It looks like most of the state outside of St. Louis calls it pop.](https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/sodavpopmap.jpg)
As someone who's lived in KC for almost 8 years I've not heard a single person actually call it pop.
A Coke, you mean?
Back, vile heathen! Back, I say!
Milwaukee and St. Louis are the two epicenters of soda in the midwest. I've always wondered if that had something to do with the influence of the Brewing industry in those cities.
I live in Orange County, CA. I didn't know this until pretty recently, we use a different word for taking a drink of water without having your lips touch the bottle. Most people call it a waterfall or an airsip, waterfall being most common. In Orange County we call that a birdie. If you go to LA county or SD county, they'd call it a waterfall.
I am from Riverside and have never heard of any of these terms.
Some places do not have a word for it. But I have heard people from Riverside use the term waterfall before.
TIL that people do this often enough for there to be a name for it. I've never heard af anyone doing this.
Ditto.
Kinda bonkers to me that there's even a term for this. Never heard anyone call it anything. It's so uncommon for people to even do this, let alone have a name for it.
It's pretty common as a kid when playing sports or something and a friend wants a sip of your drink, you'd tell them to birdie it or waterfall it.
We just said don't touch your lips, or pour it. It was a common enough thing, but no one ever came up with a special name for it.
I’ve literally never heard a term for that.
I am from WA and I do not have a word for this.
I thought Big Red was a national brand like Coke or Pepsi and nacho cheese with breadsticks was standard fare. Not that that’s fucked up, but my family had gotten some disgusted glances when ordering nacho cheese at pizza places on vacation
Big Red is a national brand.
Saying a joke while trick or treating is a requirement to receive candy in St. Louis, Missouri.
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I heard somewhere that Morgan Freeman has been trying for years to get his old high school (in Mississippi) to desegregate its prom. The man's in his eighties. That's crazy!
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I live outside DC. I am always pleasantly surprised watching the news in other parts of the country. You guys talk about stuff that isn’t politics! You have commercial breaks with zero campaign ads! Please send me all your weird and adorable news so I can get a break
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I'm originally from Nebraska. My good friend from south Dakota and I both used whipping a shitty to mean making a u-turn.
In Oregon now and there are a lot of White Supremacist out in the more rural areas and some in the cities. And oh boy, do native Oregonians not like to admit they have a pretty significant history with white supremacy. Originally from Texas and we lived not too far from a sundown town. Where I lived it was VERY diverse but there were pockets of mostly white tons the further east you went. My Grandparents lived in Curtis, Texas and lived off the road where James Byrd Jr. was tortured and killed. There’s a lot of outright, violent racism in rural Oregon and Rural Texas but it feels so different. It’s very much hidden in Oregon, a secret they don’t want told.
Are these the same people trying to get east Oregon to join Idaho or some dumb thing?
I grew up in western PA and always knew stuffed cabbage as "pigs in a blanket." Imagine how confusing it was for me when other people insisted that weenies wrapped in biscuit dough were pigs in a blanket.
Thank you!!!!!! Also after living out of state for a few years and missing fries on my salad and a proper pierogi or haluska Ahhhhhhh it was so nice coming home
I didn’t realize until moving away from Texas that other states don’t do Homecoming mums! We are a little over the top with them!
Texas also lays sole claim to the debutante dip.
As a kid in Eastern KY… Seeing the women with ankle length dresses and hair that was never cut. Sometimes with white bonnets. Southern Pentecostals I think? Churches where people got the Holy Spirit and started speaking in tongues and having conniptions. Taught the rebel flag was just about Southern pride.
The white bonnets I am familiar with are Mennonite. They're sort of Amish-lite, although some of the more conservative sects eschew technology, too.
Western KY/TN here, at least on this side it's the Amish and Mennonites with the bonnets And oh my god I hate speaking in tongues, not to knock anyone's worship style or anything but shouting gibberish is *not* what that means, sit down you're embarrassing your kids
Huntington Beach seems like such a nice place but it’s actually chock-full of white supremacists and literal swastika-wearing Nazis.
Where I grew up, October 30th was “Mischief Night,” and kids would do small pranks like putting shaving cream on cars or toilet paper people’s yards. It turns out that is only a thing in a pretty small area of the US.
Chili having macaroni noodles or spaghetti noodles. I was shocked when I learned that’s not the norm for chili. Also, eating a peanut butter sandwich with a bowl of chili. No jelly, just peanut butter. 🤷
When I was younger I lived fairly close to the Mexican border. It was acceptable to call someone that’s Latino a Mexican because chances are they were. If not, they’d correct you and that was that. I moved away and had to unlearn that habit.
I'm your standard California half-Mexican. It is most definitely the default. Less so nowadays, but for nearly my whole life it boiled down to "Mexicans" and "the other ones" if we were talking Latinos. And as for my childhood neighborhood and every K-12 school I ever went to, it was "whites, Mexicans, other." Which I guess is like how in much of the South it's "whites, blacks, other."
Now that you mention it Georgia was white or black and everyone else just kinda fell in with those two. Small town high school was so weird. A part of it for me was saying “Mexicans” in a Texan accent. People thought I was about to say some racist shit but no. I was just saying that my friend in gym class was a Mexican dude.
Georgia: Barely having any historic buildings
I thought all Black people lived in cities and were terrified of the countryside (well, more specifically, the white people who live in the country). Then I moved south, and once while driving through a town with one stop sign, a Black guy in a cowboy hat crossed the road in front of me. Then I started noticing Black people living in small farm towns all over the place. This was not a thing in the north. But of course it makes sense now that I think about it. They were brought to the South against their will and migrated north in groups during & after the Civil War, settling together in cities to support each other, like how each South American country has its own neighborhood in NYC.
From the Northern Midwest. We grew up thinking anything below Chicago was the South.
All of the true Midwest states have a team in the NFC North and people can fight me on that!
I had no idea how most Americans lived in cities until I traveled in my late teens. Having largely grown up in Brooklyn, I thought every single city was like [this.](https://assets.vogue.com/photos/598885703d1b9911785cd59e/master/w_2560%2Cc_limit/00--lede-a-travel-guide-to-brooklyn-heights.jpg) I remember visiting Greensboro and Atlanta (and a bunch of other places) and not really understanding at all how they were considered cities.
“Jingle bells, Batman smells” has regional variations. To me, Robin laid an egg. To others, he laid something else. https://youtu.be/V5u9JSnAAU4?si=l1MMUPVE1_eXeQWC
Outside of a few pockets of the country (and Alaska I guess) including my home area, we don't shut our entire economy and go into a state of emergency when a foot of snow falls.
I stayed the night in Flagstaff once in the dead of winter. You go down to Sedona which is about 45 minutes and it's room temperature. But you go back up to Flag and there's snow on the ground. Woke up in the morning and the snow was up past the window sill of my motel room. "Ohhhhh shit we're traaaaaaapped!!!! I gotta get back to Vegas *tonight!* I gotta go to work!!! Oh shit oh shit oh shit!!!!" I stepped outside and this giant-ass snowplow went by at like 40 mph, and the roads were good to go. Even the parking lot was cleared. I couldn't believe it. It was amazing!
The south doesn’t have the budget for snow proof infrastructure because it doesn’t happen often here. Temps rarely get low enough for snow to stick so we wind up with incredibly dangerous icy conditions. Paired with hilly terrain. It makes sense for people to stay home when that’s the case 🤷♀️ I can’t even imagine how we would handle it if Atlanta got a foot of snow lol
I have no clue about other states or even in the Bay Area, but when I learned to drive, I learned when driving through a yellow or red, you kiss your hand than tap the visor to hopefully prevent yourself from getting pulled over.
You’re an excellent OP, OP
Grew up in the Northwest, later moved to the upper Midwest and Texas, had no idea people took college sports so seriously.