Al_4_ISU

I think anyone who grew up playing small town HS football, or just grew up in a place that put an excessive amount of importance on it can relate HEAVILY to Varsity Blues. Basically anyone in the rural South or Midwest.

Xennials is a thing. People born between like 80-86 who are technically Millenials, but grew up with a lot of Gen X shit. That's me to a T (born in 85, graduated HS in 03). All my baby sitters (mostly older cousins) as a kid were Gen X and so I was exposed to all their shit. I watched Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and the Goonies on repeat. The first music that I felt belonged to me was Nirvana, Oasis, Sublime, and Beck. I have very clear memories of a time where there was no internet access for regular people (I don't think I had even heard of the internet until 4th grade), and cell phones were non-existent. But I am, on paper, a Millenial. I was a freshman in HS when American Pie came out, and I definitely think it informs the way I remember that era more than Superbad (a movie I fucking love), which came out when I was graduating college. I suspect this phenomena is more prevalent in people who grew up in small towns (as I did), as pre-internet it really did take literal years for cultural trends to catch up. Varsity Blues and 10 Things I Hate About You were definitely major "high school" movies for me when I was in high school.

Roy's getting passed around that prison like a bicycle, which is the perfect result for him. So much more deserved than being killed painfully. I loved the whole ending other than I wanted maybe a little more on Indira.

They'd like mine (and others like it) if they could move past the provincialism/regional bias and accept that words can have different meanings to describe a relatively similar thing, and recipes exist to be modified, and that I don't really care what some lady in San Antonio in 1837 called "chili". But I'm pretty sure Wayne Lyon's chili sucked.

When people yell at me about how Minneapolis has become a progressive mecca, I like to point out how many more brown people have been murdered by the police there than Iowa. Yes, our governor is a psycho hose beast, but we aren't out killing minorities. I will say that I've spent time in Minneapolis since the riots, and it really didn't seem any different than before in most parts.

This is an issue I see almost daily from conservatives I know. I live 10 miles from the Minnesota border. Minnesota is heading in a much different direction politically than Iowa. This is almost 100% by driven by people who live in a 30 mile radius in the Twin Cities. The majority of people who live outside of that circle in Minnesota are absolutely fucking FURIOUS about their state level politics (much like I am with my own for the opposite reason) and Minneapolis has become this absolute beacon for right winger anger in the Upper Midwest. It's the new California around here.

There's a whole lot of that too. The average Trump voter doesn't really understand the consequences of the vote because they just have more pressing day to day shit, and they aren't very well educated. "This guy's gonna make America great again? Fuck yeah!"

I'm just not this way as a person. I know "others" who openly support Trump. The most obnoxious pro-Trump display in my county belongs to a Mexican family who moved here about 12-15 years ago. A lot of the people who support Trump simply don't believe that he's done the bad things he's done. They think it's a media lie. They're brains are broken when it comes to politics and they live in a different version of reality on that front. The facts that inform your take that it's impossible to vote for him and be a good person are outright lies in their world.

Bush barely won Iowa in 2004. Those counties had their typical margins.

A Republican hasn't won either Polk or Johnson counties since maybe Reagan vs. Mondale, FWIW.

They don't have to vote for a Democrat to make a difference. They just have to not vote.

Rural Iowans attitudes haven't changed that much - they're still very "live and let live" - they just stopped voting that way. IMO because Facebook convinced them that if a Democrat wins an election, their dicks will be forcibly cut off and their homes will be seized and given to packs of rioting urbanites.

We have a ton of rail trails. Within 30 miles of my house there are about 180 miles of rail trails, both in Iowa and Minnesota. It's one reason I have 0 intentions of leaving.

Dubuque has been gentrified but in a way that makes it feel pretty vibrant. I'm about 90 miles NW of there on the Minnesota border (and an hour from Wisconsin) in similar hilly terrain. Dubuque is a good example of one of Iowa's cool, relatively unknown places. It has a great cycling trail (the Heritage Trail) for road bikes, a really good mountain biking scene with a whole new park that opened a couple of years ago, a ski hill with similar vertical drop to what you'd find in the UP of Michigan, some excellent food options, a couple of really good breweries, and a cool downtown that features a lot of old and restored architecture that's much more reminiscent of an older city in the eastern US than it is of a Midwestern/Plains state city. It's not a vacation destination for people outside the area, but it's a really fun place to live nearby and go to for a Saturday.

It's just cold. The weather was fine besides that. It takes very little effort to put on a heavy coat, drive your warm car to the caucus place, and walk 100' into a heated building. There is a very real fatigue of the current political climate, and the people at the top of it. From 2016-2021 I saw Trump shit everywhere. There has been a slow decline to where it's down to just a handful of nuts still making displays. Did these people become Biden voters? No. But there seems to be mounting evidence of people just kinda punching out. If 15-20% of previous Trump voters just don't turn out this fall, it's going to make a real difference nationally.

I’d never claim Texas. Not cause I don’t like it - I enjoy many parts of the state and its people and cultural contributions - but I’m about as dyed in the wool of an Iowan/Midwesterner as you get. Just seems some days that I might be the last of a dying breed. My grandpa was a state representative for 20 years. He was and still is a Democrat. He has no college education, joined the Marines a month before the Korean cease fire, and then came home to farm. Guys like this used to vote Democrat in the Midwest. Not all, or even a majority, but enough that we could be purple politically. Now most of them either died or turned hard to the right. I’m very much of that political outlook and tradition and it crushes me to see the turn. He had a friend who was a Republican state rep from Alaska who would come down here to hunt pheasant in the 90’s. He’d always say “Iowa Democrats are just Republicans that don’t want you to die” and I think about that a lot.

There’s plenty of cool shit that no one knows about here, especially in the part of the state where I live. I love my low COL and unfettered access to beautiful outdoor recreation as well as having some thriving small towns with solid food options and legitimately world class breweries. But our politics have gone to shit and I’m grasping at straws on that one. I wish I could write off Trump voters as bad or stupid people, but I know too many who aren’t either. Just got to live through this.

Lots of those teams playing each other this week. Man, it would be nice tomorrow if BYU would have one of those nights where they can't hit shit from 3, because I think we can bully the fuck out of them everywhere else.

Minnesota didn't have the space in the current location to do something like that, and they legitimately utilize that whole football field space for a lot of shit in the winter. My cousin's wife is one of the event coordinators for the stadium, and they have stuff going on in there all the time that I had zero awareness of. As much as I hate that taxpayers are faced with funding the stadium or losing their team, I do think in this particular instance that they're generating a lot of usefulness from the facility despite my disdain for indoor football, particularly when you have harsh outdoor elements to embrace.

It would be a huge headache to manage in winter. The Brewers are the only northern pro sports team I can think of that uses one, and they have to deal with snow maybe every 4 years or snow during the season.

I really wish that Minnesota, Detroit, and Indy would have built outdoor stadiums. Part of the issue in Minnesota was that it's a taxpayer funded facility (I guess the others probably are too) and they needed to make it indoors to have shit like boat shows, concerts, etc through the winter to drive revenue.

You have to be pretty pleased with the season thus far. Meant to watch your game today but got busy.

Turned into a snoozer after a shaky first 10 minutes. I’ll allow it.

He’s assuredly been drinking since he woke up, and not casually either. Basically, his blood has too much alcohol in it to freeze. You’re the doctor here, but it makes sense to me.

I feel like that guy is a breathing avatar of the complete insanity that underlies any Midwestern lifer.