Thursday, August 25, 2011

Gawker on Michigan

Gawker has been running a series on the worst 50 states in America this week. Here is what they had to say about Michigan.





35. Michigan
The mitten-shaped land of miseries is a scenic and scenically troubled place to call home.

The Good: Boy oh boy is Michigan pretty. What with all them lakes they got up there and all that crazy snow and stuff. Did you ever watch this beautiful show? That covers the UP pretty well.
If you click on the link to the Sundance Channel, the theme to "Nimrod Nation" autoplays, which would be annoying if the tune weren't so pretty.
And say what you will about Detroit, but there's a kind of hard-boned, old-school urbanness to that city that is a rare commodity in 2011.
That didn't make Model D Media's Buzz section. To see why, keep reading.
The Bad: "Hard-boned, old-school urbanness" is a polite way of saying that Detroit is an absolute hellhole, the kind of place that you think about and wish that we could allocate some funds to just airlift everyone the fuck out of there. Flint and Grand Rapids aren't doing much better. Michigan can sometimes feel like a scary totem of what's to come for the rest of this fading super-nation, so it's kind of annoying to constantly have that reminder, ever teasing us.
Gawker is deliberately being a bunch of snarky clowns, but they could have ranked the state much lower higher. Honestly, I was expecting worse.

As for the passage in bold, I prefer to see a glass half full. To paraphrase:
Welcome to Detroit, Ground Zero of the post-industrial future. Great things are going to happen here, and they're going to happen here first. Whatever Detroit devises as the solutions for North America's problems will be exported to the rest of the continent. It's an exciting time to live here, and I wouldn't miss it for the world.

4 comments:

  1. Am I a bad person because I lmao at this post?

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  2. LOL. No, it means that the snarkers at Gawker succeeded.

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  3. Narb has been on vacation, but he continues to derive amusement from casual conversations with strangers.

    In this case, Narb met two nice old ladies in a car with a Texas license plate. In conversation, they both stated they were from Indiana, to which Narb responded "Oh, you're Hoosiers!".

    They replied "Yes, and do you know what a Hoosier is? It's a Hillbilly who's looking for work in Michigan".

    Had to be related.

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    Replies
    1. LOL. And didn't get here, either. Making fun of Hoosiers is something my wife and I both share, although I learned it living here in Michigan and she learned it growing up in Chicago.

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