Worst state in the US

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

Seeing the thread title made me wonder what was the most innocuous U.S. state. Probably Delaware.

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.

I spent ages 7-22 in Idaho, Ruby Ridge, neonazis, all that. Moved to NM and had to work really hard to convince non-white friends that being from Idaho didn't mean I was going to be a violent racist (tho I don't really blame them for thinking that, I mean my fucking aunt just bought an "anti-Obama gun" *96 tears*). I got accepted into University of Arizona two months before SB1070 and now I'm living here. I feel like I have this weird curse of living in the wild west hot spots of odious racist news.

that's it icey, next time i reprogram dick's pacemaker i'm setting him to "kill"

...kill YOU

Seeing the thread title made me wonder what was the most innocuous U.S. state. Probably Delaware.

hahahahaha ... no.

Probably Vermont, but I wanna say that Maryland is somewhere in the running.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

i'd probably say Maine in a pinch if i had to name a "most innocuous US state."

i look at Miami as a sort of West Berlin, surrounded by the East Germany that is the rest of Florida. that's how i see Atlanta, too, come to think of it.

Lol yeah i can see that. Tho I think you can miss out on some real treats with that attitude. Athens, Savannah, all the cool waterfalls and caves in the mountains of North GA. And Macon, which I've only been to once, but any town where you can see the Allman bros. graves in beautiful Rose Hill Cemetery, shop at the official Otis Redding store, and visit Indian Mounds is pretty damn cool.

Carrollton's nice too.

i'd probably say Maine in a pinch if i had to name a "most innocuous US state."

Maine's where that killer demon clown killed all those kids. Also where the four kids found that dead body in the woods.

i personally look to the midwest for my innocuousness

i might've said a Midwest state as an example of innocuousness too ... until the denizens of several such states went & elected evil asshats like Scott Walker, Michelle Bachmann and Steve King.

Probably Vermont, but I wanna say that Maryland is somewhere in the running.

Ha, yes, I'll consider this next time I'm hanging out in Fredneck.

Hawaii seems pretty innocuous

Queen Liliʻuokalani would like to have a word with you.

Idaho has three essential things, at least:
- The caldera entrance to Twin Falls
- SR 95 from Boise to Coeur D'Alene. It takes forever and it's so pretty.
- Priest Lake

On a cultural level, eh. Built To Spill play Seattle more often than most Seattle bands. And Boise is a loooong drive, if that gives perspective.
That KKK sheriff candidate is probably running in the same county as Priest Lake, to be fair.