Linky Friday: Fifty Stories For Fifty States
Alabama: Apple CEO Tim Cook is apparently a native of the Yellowhammer State, and says his life was changed there.
Alaska: Researchers plan to give away pregnancy tests in Alaska bars.
Arizona: Scott Fistler a Republican running for Arizona District 7 congressional seat. Cesar Chavez a Democrat running for the Arizona District 7 congressional seat. They’re the same guy.
Arkansas: Little Rock VA patients wait two months, on average, to establish care.
California: The experiment in San Francisco with peak price parking is, according to supporters, working very well
Colorado: The Centennial State has become something of a hub for space business.
Connecticut: A hoarder in Connecticut was killed when her floor collapsed.
Delaware: Delaware celebrates not being Pennsylvania.
Florida: In Tampa, a family ate a steak that was laced with LSD and while at the hospital had a baby who was not a hallucination.
Georgia: An Atlanta father and son reeled in an 880 pound fish.
Hawaii: NASA planned to test out a flying saucer over the islands, but alas it didn’t quite pan out.
Idaho: It was an exciting day, with a Moose on the loose.
Illinois: Meet the ten most boring places in Illinois.
Indiana: Minor League baseball team Gary Southshore Railcats have decided to theme their uniforms for Michael Jackson.
Iowa: Due to having one of their offerings getting the distinction of “Worst restaurant meal in America”, eight Long John Silver’s Iowa locations are closing.
Kansas: There were tales of a water slide so powerful that it sent its riders airborne. Turns out, that isn’t true. Still looks like a badarse ride, though.
Kentucky: To protect its servers, a restaurant in Newport became a no tipping establishment.
Louisiana: National ethanol policy is threatening Louisiana’s shrimp season.
Maine: Local quilters are joining astronauts in completing a space quilt.
Maryland: An appeals judge has restricted who can be on the state’s sex offender registry.
Massachusetts: The Bay State is too busy dealing with Arthur to celebrate July Fourth.
Michigan: A man in West Michigan needs your help to remove his nearly 100 pound scrotum.
Minnesota: The Minnesota Vikings want an MLS soccer team.
Mississippi: According to some reports KFC ejected a girl whose face was disfigured by a pit-bull attack was asked to leave a KFC for ‘disrupting the customers’ with her presence. Except that KFC says that didn’t actually happen and the Facebook page for it has disappeared, but KFC says it will be paying for girl’s medical bills anyway.
Missouri: A pair of Kansas City twins were born 39 days apart.
Montana: Hannibal Anderson and Lisa Grace want Montana’s urban and rural areas to get along better.
Nebraska: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is scaling back the assigned risk to the state’s nuclear power plants.
Nevada: There is a controversy in the Miss USA pageant: Miss Nevada may not actually be a Nevadan.
New Hampshire: The drunkest state in the union? The least drunk is, of course, Utah.
New Jersey: The Garden State is apparently the home of a sixteen foot great white shark.
New Mexico: A bachelor party finds a rare mastadon fossil.
New York: Nobody seems to want to and/or be able to live there, but Lloyd Alter says Buffalo is da bomb.
North Carolina: The horrifying story of a daycare center used as a pornography outfit.
North Dakota: The oil boom is a bonanza for archaeologists.
Ohio: A surgeon in Ohio makes $2,800,000 a year.
Oklahoma: A dog stolen in Houston was discovered two years later in the Sooner State.
Oregon: In addition to being one of two states that won’t let you pump your own gas, Oregon is one of four states that has outlawed bail bonds and bounty hunters.
Pennsylvania: An eighth grader dropped out of the honor society because she was tired of taking drug tests.
Rhode Island: The Ocean State probably has the worst economy in the country.
South Carolina: In the Carolina waters, it’s difficult to know if you’re in North Carolina or South Carolina, which is important as far as fishing laws go.
South Dakota: Ever wonder what it looks/sounds like to be in the middle of a South Dakota tornado? Here you go.
Tennessee: A woman in Memphis was banned after trying to climb the fence and give cookies to lions.
Texas: A house near Fort Worth dangles over a lake cliff, while a sonar reveals that Houston’s bayous house over 100 vehicles.
Utah: Residents are having to bail out their local-utility attempt to provide fiber broadband.
Vermont: Environtmentalists in the Green Mountain State are leading the fight against wind turbines.
Virginia: A prom king in Norfolk was, fortunately, able to make the ceremony after getting bailed out of jail for his involvement in a drive-by shooting.
Washington: A four year old girl solved the mystery of a break-in.
West Virginia: Verizon turned its landline business over to a competitor, and complaints dropped by two-thirds
Wisconsin: The Badger State not only has beaches, but has a nude beach. Unfortunately, the state’s beaches as a whole ranked 23rd out of 30 in terms of water quality.
Wyoming: Residents of Wyoming are getting antsy as the resource boom encroaches on their cities.
“Alaska: Researchers plan to give away pregnancy tests in Alaska bars.”
One can only hope that this plan goes better than that time researchers gave away pregnancy tests to Alaskan bears.Report
Also, I’m no chemist but that “LSD steak” story sounded fishy to me the first time I heard it. As I understand it, heat destroys LSD, and the steak was cooked in an oven. So it was either something else, or maybe there was so much LSD that it wasn’t totally destroyed?Report
Bur food in Florida being laced with hallucinogens explains so much.Report
Really it doesn’t. Not quite.Report
You don’t need hallucinogens to explain Florida (but it helps!)
Basically, the state is Too Damn Hot, and it makes people crazy.
That, plus the fact that some inexplicable magnetic pull seemingly draws the rest of the country’s weirdoes to Florida when they have nowhere else to go.
If you are looking for the nation’s nuts: check America’s wang.Report
Yep. Florida.Report
Massachusetts?Report
PA link doesn’t match the description.Report
People have been talking about moving up and reviving Buffalo for years. The area is a lot more economically depressed than Philadelphia ever was. Philly always had natural tourism (for reasons obvious to today) and the Barnes Foundation. Pharma and Insurance industries are located in and around Philadelphia, and many major colleges and universities. There are universities in Buffalo including a major SUNY campus but it is a very harsh winter up there and a very hard sell.Report
Nobody REALLY wants to shuffle off to Buffalo, then?Report
4 weeks out of the year, it’s the nicest place in the world to live. Not contiguous weeks, of course.
There was also a decent run for their football team for a while.Report
This is America. Losing in the finals is worse than finishing last.Report
Who knew that musical theatre was in your realm of knowledge?
More seriously, there seems to be a story about artists and other types from NYC moving to Buffalo every few years and then discovering that there is great and cheap property but no jobs? Certain parts of NY State have revitalized because of the increasing costs of NYC but those areas tend to be much closer to the city as to allow a commute a few times a week like Hudson, NY.
Maybe this says something about my personality and luck of where I was born but I don’t understand moving to an area unless you have school or a job lined up unless it is a real boom town where jobs are a dime a dozen. I was visiting my mom and she had International House Hunters on and the episode featured a young couple from New Jersey that wanted to move to Puerto Rico for the Island life. At one point, they mentioned that the husband was a construction worker and they thought it would be easy for him to get work in Puerto Rico. My only thought on hearing this was that they were both on the naive to dumb side because they don’t know that Puerto Rico’s economy is in shambles and the island is poor. Very, very poor.Report
Buffalo may seem cheap at first, but soon you realize how hard it is to live with the bills.Report
There is no shame in consistently being the best team in the AFC.Report
Who knew that musical theatre was in your realm of knowledge?
Hey, you take that back.
My knowledge of that song comes from far more reputable sources, like Abbott & Costello and Looney Toons and Afghan Whigs.
Report
I, too, was introduced to the phrase by Mr. Greg Dulli.Report
when your plan includes “high speed rail from nyc” you should probably just give up then and delete the article from laptop. it’s one of those “super cheap urban living” fantasies, along with “find a cool neighborhood with no downsides that’s 20% under what i want to spend” and “make every property ever built from now until forever rent controlled” and “eat enough florida steak to imagine a world in which either of the previous two plans is remotely feasible”.Report
Will, I haven’t gone through all (actually, any) of these yet, but kudos in putting together this appropriately-themed (and lengthy) Linky Friday.Report
Nebraska: The link goes to a “page unavailable” apology.
Texas: The house was located south of Fort Worth, not near San Antonio. The owners’ insurance policy doesn’t cover earth movement, so they’re probably out the $700K cost of construction. Hope the geologists who reportedly gave the site a clean bill of health back in 2012, prior to construction, have good liability insurance. The cleanup tab the owners will have to cover will be about $100K.Report
Massachusetts added, Texas corrected, and Pennsylvania and Nebraska links updated.Report
Since you forgot DC, an NPR tradition, visitors at the National Mall reading the Declaration of Independence.
http://www.npr.org/2014/07/04/328204572/reading-the-declaration-of-independence-a-tradition-continuesReport
Vermont: So, what are they going to do for electricity? The Vermont Yankee nuclear plant (75% of in-state generation) is due to close at the end of this year. Do they expect Hydro-Québec to pick up the slack? Is there enough spare capacity in neighboring states? Do they have the transmission facilities to import that much more power?Report
Vermont: I read through the comments on that piece and where they will get power from wasn’t discussed. There was a lot of concern about Big Companies/out of state developers and how much the noise and turbines would have messed up a natural area. Those may be decent points but just being more efficient isn’t really an answer. They also seem up in arms about consumers having to pump out money to the developers. So that may have some decent points but no answers.Report
The nuke people in Vermont cited the low cost of natural gas as the reason for the closure, so I’d assume natural gas. And maybe out of state generation?Report
Interesting. Vermont Gas, apparently the only supplier in the state, and Canadian owned, says on its FAQ page that all of its gas is sourced from Canada, most of that from Alberta ultimately. It only serves a part of the state, all of thatt (relatively) far from the Vermont Yankee site. In-state NG generation on that scale would seem to require some combination of pipelines and new plant construction. There would be some potential benefits to reusing the non-nuclear parts of Vermont Yankee (similar to the Fort St. Vrain power plant in Colorado, where the steam turbine and generator has been reused with NG as the heat source in place of the retired reactor).
I don’t know much about the New England ISO, but this summary page has an overdependence on NG as the #1 risk to reliability in the region. IIRC, this past winter the ISO had to dispatch significant amounts of oil-fired generation because of constraints on the delivery of NG. IIRC, in Nine Nations of North America way back in the 1980s Garreau suggested that New England would rather freeze in the dark than compromise their ideals. Fortunately, not my problem.Report
A surgeon in Ohio makes $2,800,000 a year.
But he has to pay the full tax rate on that, because he’s not something socially useful like a hedge fund manager.Report
Re: Pennsylvania. Regularly drug testing middle school children is so effing crazy. And the comments on that story in favour of it? Nice way to off shore your parental responsibility. Ugh is all I can say. (that and that I’m glad I’m Canadian) .Report
Maryland, (not) my Maryland?Report
Sigh. Added.Report
First Massachusetts is missing, now this?
I’m beginning to think that Will has an irrational fear of M’s, seeing them as nothing more than W’s that have been inverted for some sinister purpose.Report
16 of the 50 start with either “M” or “N”. That seems excessive, and makes it easy to miss an ‘M’ or ‘N’ state from time to time.Report
“16 of the 50 start with either “M” or “N”. That seems excessive”
See?! It’s a conspiracy, man!Report
The New’s and North’s have a good reason, but what’s the excuse for the rest of them? (I’m looking at you, Nevada. “Washoe” wasn’t good enough for you?)Report
North Dakota wants its name to start with “D” I think.Report
Related to WI – The Naturist Society mentioned in that article is headquartered in my hometown, I once turned down a temporary gig editing their newsletter.
I found it exceedingly odd to have them in our town, I figured one would prefer a home where the climate is a bit friendlier to the lifestyle 8 months of the year.Report