Worst state in the US

not as bad as AZ, which admittedly has tucson and good scenery but not much else.

― omar little, Saturday, April 28, 2012 7:44 AM (33 minutes ago)

Tucson is great and I dig living here but it's not some kind of oasis from the issues the rest of Arizona is facing. Por ejemplo, Tucson Unified School District has been part of a desegregation case since 1978:

In 1978, plaintiffs Mendoza and Fisher were told that TUSD would be required to remedy the ill effects of past segregation within the district. They could not have known that their fight for equality was only just beginning. What was initially presented as a five-year desegregation plan stretched into 30 years. In 2009 TUSD was granted unified status and released from court supervision despite the court finding it had “failed to act in good faith in its ongoing operation of the District under the Settlement Agreement.”

TUSD began operating under its Post-Unitary Status Plan, which promised that the district’s MAS program would be expanded. TUSD did support the existing MAS program, but it failed to follow through on its promise of expansion. Because TUSD also abandoned other important policies outlined in the plan, the court revoked the district’s unified status in 2011, saying it had failed to act in good-faith compliance with the order to integrate schools-yet again.

sorry, it was originally filed by the NAACP in 1974.
1974!

A few Florida highlights: Gulf coast beaches and towns, the Everglades in winter, the giant Bryan Ferry poster in my living room.

Sorry to anyone who lives there but the only time I ever went to Arkansas (Little Rock) it really seemed like a bad alternate dimension.

i drove through some v beautiful places in arkansas once, missouri tho seems like it might be p bad

yeah I thought arkansas was pretty

oklahoma is the real wasteland

I also heard that Florida was crazy but it was the panhandle were all the bad craziness went on

xp

OK has Tulsa & OK City and a buncha great Route 66 stuff still

i spent like a week in okla once including drive clear across it, it has some character imho, i still vote missouri, the show me state is def our most repugnant state motto

That corner of OK, Arkansas and Missouri is quite pretty. Driving through the Ozarks down to Fayetteville and across to Tulsa was a joy.

You can always find something good to say about any shitty state.

its true connecticut has many beautiful things too

I think I posted this on another thread, but a point in Oklahoma City's favor is the street named after Charlie Christian:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/df/CharlieChristianAve.JPG/220px-CharlieChristianAve.JPG

Alfred, what are the Everglades like during the winter? What are the best gulf coast towns iyo?

I adore Sanibel and Captiva islands. Tarpon Springs too.

The Everglades are much cooler in January. I would not recommend a nature walk or air boat in July.

Sorry to anyone who lives there but the only time I ever went to Arkansas (Little Rock) it really seemed like a bad alternate dimension.

Would like to hear more about this. Not as a defensive citizen of the LR Metro, but as a fan of bad alternate dimensions.

And Abbott, if you think Tucson's bad for having a deseg crisis more than 35 years old, our school district is still in the courts over 1957. Which is really weird because as the Little Rock School District tries to keep itself as close to 50/50 b/w, it offers this "majority-to-minority" rule where white kids from other districts can go to LR schools since LR schools are more like 60/40 black. Works out for my family.

I've only been to the NE once, a round-trip from NYC to Bennington, VT, to Concord, NH, to Portland, ME back to Boston, Providence and CT. CT just looked like one big suburb to me and it didn't help that my only stop was at a Friendly's for dinner.

Can i just say here how much I hate that red state/blue state designation? It always confuses me 'cause here in Canada "red" = Liberal & "blue" = Conservative.

I kinda think Conservatives got the better color. You want to be RED or do you want to be ~blue~ ;_;.

* Post cold war, obv

Florida has a few things going for it, as does Texas. OK for the win (lose).

You know what state I know nothing about? Idaho. What's the deal with Idaho?

Xpost most of populated America looks like a strip mall. The prettiest places are the ones with no people.

The state with the prettiest name,
the state that floats in brackish water,
held together by mangrave roots
that bear while living oysters in clusters,
and when dead strew white swamps with skeletons,
dotted as if bombarded, with green hummocks
like ancient cannon-balls sprouting grass.
The state full of long S-shaped birds, blue and white,
and unseen hysterical birds who rush up the scale
every time in a tantrum.
Tanagers embarrassed by their flashiness,
and pelicans whose delight it is to clown;
who coast for fun on the strong tidal currents
in and out among the mangrove islands
and stand on the sand-bars drying their damp gold wings
on sun-lit evenings.
Enormous turtles, helpless and mild,
die and leave their barnacled shells on the beaches,
and their large white skulls with round eye-sockets
twice the size of a man's.
The palm trees clatter in the stiff breeze
like the bills of the pelicans. The tropical rain comes down
to freshen the tide-looped strings of fading shells:
Job's Tear, the Chinese Alphabet, the scarce Junonia,
parti-colored pectins and Ladies' Ears,
arranged as on a gray rag of rotted calico,
the buried Indian Princess's skirt;
with these the monotonous, endless, sagging coast-line
is delicately ornamented.

Thirty or more buzzards are drifting down, down, down,
over something they have spotted in the swamp,
in circles like stirred-up flakes of sediment
sinking through water.
Smoke from woods-fires filters fine blue solvents.
On stumps and dead trees the charring is like black velvet.
The mosquitoes
go hunting to the tune of their ferocious obbligatos.
After dark, the fireflies map the heavens in the marsh
until the moon rises.
Cold white, not bright, the moonlight is coarse-meshed,
and the careless, corrupt state is all black specks
too far apart, and ugly whites; the poorest
post-card of itself.
After dark, the pools seem to have slipped away.
The alligator, who has five distinct calls:
friendliness, love, mating, war, and a warning--
whimpers and speaks in the throat
of the Indian Princess.

I've only been to the NE once, a round-trip from NYC to Bennington, VT, to Concord, NH, to Portland, ME back to Boston, Providence and CT. CT just looked like one big suburb to me and it didn't help that my only stop was at a Friendly's for dinner.

― pplains, Saturday, April 28, 2012 2:11 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wth were u doin

xxpost Well depression's no fun, but neither is anger, really. Kinda never cared for either red nor blue overmuch, as far as apolitical nonemotional colo(u)r preference goes.

GREEN ftw! (Coincidentally how I voted last election too, lol)

Maybe not even a suburb, CT. I'm used to miles and miles of access roads with Best Buys and Texas Roadhouses. Those are a blight, sure.

But in CT, I felt like I was driving past miles and miles of fenced backyards and overpasses barely 12 feet tall.

I looked it up - I was on the Merritt Parkway. Not saying it was ugly, just amazing that it never felt once like I was out of the burbs, especially after a week of driving around Vermont, NH and Maine.

wth were u doin

chick in portland, but that's neither here nor there.

oh ha i thought u meant u drove between all those places and only stopped at friendlies

merritt pkwy is a quality road imho, no trucks allowed

merrit parkway is awesome

such a stark contrast to 95

Sorry to anyone who lives there but the only time I ever went to Arkansas (Little Rock) it really seemed like a bad alternate dimension.

Would like to hear more about this. Not as a defensive citizen of the LR Metro, but as a fan of bad alternate dimensions.

I don't know, I was on tour and we only spent a day or so. I got off a bus in downtown Little Rock on a Saturday night in the summertime and the whole way in the place was just eerily unpopulated. Nobody, absolutely nobody, was walking around, hanging out, or anything at all. When we got out of the bus there was one old guy that stepped out of a video store and told us we were in the middle of nowhere. All the kids we met were real nice and it was fun, but everyone seemed to have kind of given up in general or something. I don't know, weird vibes.

But yeah basing a perception on a state on one day's experience with a dozen or so locals. Kinda silly.

such a stark contrast to 95

― dayo, Saturday, April 28, 2012 2:32 PM (35 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah it doesnt have the malls n casual dining chains cause it parallels 95 where they all are

Yeah, downtown N/LR can give off a "Night of the Comet" vibe sometimes. I hear ya.

I took Merritt to get off of 95. Just didn't realize that it wasn't a backroad, I guess.

One of my favorite vacations. Drove up to Brooklyn. Took the really long way to Portland. Had an interesting time which included a cameo appearance by 80s rock band The Tubes. Drove too quickly back through Boston/RI/CT and back to NYC.

Then back home where Tennessee really is the longest state east of the Mississippi.

vt is legit beautiful ime although nh is kinda w/e it still has a more authentic new england backwoods charm. i grew up in a really lovely part of ct but its unrelentingly square and ersatz colonial

― Lamp, Friday, April 27, 2012 10:24 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nh is so much more raw than vt, maybe not as bucolic but the most scenic parts owne

whites >>> greens, fuiud

racist

new hampshire is the worst because of their presidential primaries tbh

isn't it filled w/ libertarians

gbx went to dartmouth and is best friends w/dick cheney fyi so take that into consideration when weighing his important vt/nh opinions

^^
..
o

he did dick cheney's open-heart surgery, didn't you know?!?

dick cheney shot gbx in the face?

all of my grandparents live in ct and when i read lag∞n's thing about wasps i did not even think of WASPs because i remembered there were a lot of wasps in my grandma's backyard and said to myself, "i didn't know that all of connecticut had a lot of wasps"

just try to get out of that state w/o getting a nasty sting u cant

i went to mystic seaport when i was a little kid, and to a fancy hotel there about 10 years ago for a convention. those two times are the only significant amounts of time i've ever spent in CT.

ct has the best pizza and it has beaches with lots of jellyfish

mystic seaport is cool

groton not so much

You know what state I know nothing about? Idaho. What's the deal with Idaho?

I live extremely close to Idaho and kind of love it because it's amazingly beautiful and has a lot of cool stuff going for it and think it's pretty underrated in a lot of ways.

On the other hand it's very reactionary in a crazy libertarian way in the north and in a religious nutjob way in the south and combining these turns it into one of those states that means it'll be like one of the last five to ever legalize gay marriage.

It does seem to have lost a lot of it's explicit racist / separatist vibe over the last 20 years or so, with Arizona picking up a lot of the slack in terms of being the scary western cowboy state. Though there is an actual KKK guy running for county sheriff in one of the counties near the Canadian border right now.

One of my dad's brothers retired to Idaho (Riggins), opened a little gas station there to keep busy, and lives right on the Salmon River. Most idyllic place I've ever been. It would be easy to spend entire decades just sitting in a lawn chair out back, sipping a cold drink, reading a book and waving at the rafters and innertubers floating past.

Then diving in at that little bend in the river where they always tip over and scoring mad coin, watches, and jewelry.

I guess I have been to Idaho before and it is pretty in an oh my god I'm going to fall into a ravine sort of way. though I do remember stopping at some backwoods diner that did have a backroom emblazoned wIth confederate flags. Figured it was a klan klubhouse, tbh.

ct has the best pizza
this is true