Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

There's always the national hot dog eating competition that's held on the 4th. That's certainly a real thing 😋

@Zuljaras So I just gave it a try myself, not looking at a map, just imagining one and listing the states in kind of random order in under 2 minutes. I forgot 3:

Utah (we actively try to forget that one in hopes the Osmonds disappear. They don't but we still try.)
Nebraska (why is this a place? Who ever goes to Nebraska?)
And Maine. F***** Maine. Even worse than Nebraska. What ever happens in Maine? Nobody goes to Maine, nobody comes from Maine, nothing important is in Maine. It's hanging out in the middle of the ocean. It's cold. It's wet. It's stormy. I'm pretty sure they only reason we have it is that Canada keeps regifting it.

It's good for lobsters and postcards of lighthouses.

@NEStalgia New Hampshire is up to 12 this year. Someone had twins, so they’re beating out Rhode Island by 7

@HobbitGamer At least Rhode Island has a cooler name. It sounds like a place you'd want to go but every time Siri tells you you've arrived at your destination, all the signs say "Welcome to Boston".

Nobody wants to go to New Ham Shire. Except politicians looking for pork. But even if you try, by the time Siri tells you you're there you look around and realize you're in ****ing Maine.

@NEStalgia I know Maine because Bioshock Infinite starts on the coast of Maine. Before that I never knew it was a state but I knew that the best lobsters are there.

Rhode Island from Family Guy.

Never knew about Nebraska

Utah I know for the Incident in the Nutty Putty cave where John Jones could not be taken out and they sealed the save with his body inside forever. It was very fascinating and terrifying story for me.

And I know some more stated from Video Games of course and Movies. But all 50 is king of impossible for me without a map

@NEStalgia I disagree, Rhode Island’s name doesn’t beckon me. It’s like the corner store knock off Isle of Rhodes. Or that it has some visitors center with a slot car track running straight across a model of the state, just to get in a pun about it being the Road in Rhode Island.

@Zuljaras Nebraska has corn. That's about it, but they have corn.

Lobsters are so abundant in Main that they're dirt cheap. Everywhere else, surf & turf is "market price", $40.... Maine, it's like $1. They eat it every day as a staple food. Now think about this for a minute. A cold, stormy, waterlogged, remote state swarming with insurmountable quantities of lobsters. No wonder Bioshock Infinite started there! Why does anybody live there?

Well, Utah, is more famed for the 2000 Salt Lake Olympics...but good for knowing the obscure ones And of course the Osmonds. Mormons & traditional polygamy (though they're trying to dial that back.)

Those cave things....I'll never see the appeal of cramming yourself into "caves" that are little more than narrow tunnels. I've seen caves. Real caves. Huge gigantic, cathedral-esque rooms. One could call them....cavernous. Little rock tunnels are not worth of being called "caves." That's just asking for trouble.

Yeah, everyone likes poking fun at Americans and our global geography skills, but technically the US is physically larger than Europe (minus the part of Russia that sits on Asia, technically) and has almost as many "states", so I do wonder how many Europeans easily know US geography as badly as Americans know European geography Of course American's not knowing American geography, that's just our horrible education system.

I had a substitute teacher in elementary school who could name all 50 US states and their capitol cities in sub 30 seconds. It was a crowd pleaser.

Yes, one of the unfortunate things about living in a state with a well-known major city is that 1. Outsiders forget the rest of the state exists, 2. Those that do acknowledge the rest of the state think it's only full of corn, and 3. Once in awhile you have someone come along who thinks said major city is the state capitol... :facepalm:

@Zuljaras While @NEStalgia isn't fully wrong on this matter ( 🤪 ), some of us who are map nerds do know where many other countries are located. Heck, my shower curtain is one big world map that only neglects Antarctica.

@Tyranexx Thing is, my mother has literally worked jobs that rely on computers since before I was born. Not programming, but jobs that use a computer daily for the majority of the work. She's used everything from DOS to Windows 10 and has almost certainly, more hours overall using computers than even I do. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect her to understand, "click Steam, type in your password, click stardew valley, open the game" And she says the game wont open. I can't think of any reason why that is.

Which is why I'm guessing it's more a white lie - that she doesn't want to say she doesn't actually want to play the game. I know she'd like it, because she LOVED Farmville 2. But for whatever reason, she doesn't want to try it.

@Tyranexx - You and NBN have the added bonus of a decent chunk of humanity referring to your home state as “Ill-in-noise”. It’s like a cheese grater on my brain when I hear it.

@Tyranexx if your shower curtain is a world map, I can only guess your kitchen is decorated in multiplication tables, and your bedroom is Disney's Frozen.

@bimmy-lee ill noise would be a great description for Chicago though. The down side if illinois, is that it contains Chicago.

@Heavyarms55 Sounds like my own mom; she's been dealing with computers both at work and at home since the mid-90s. She's tech-savvy in some ways, but in others....eh.

It could be worse though; she could be my dad. The guy is scared to touch anything more complicated than a TV remote. We used to have to browse the internet for him. He finally got his first smart phone a few months ago. My brother made it as simple for him as possible by hiding or deleting all the apps he wouldn't need and putting the rest on the home screen.

@bimmy-lee Cheese grater is an understatement; nails on chalkboard is more like it. Granted, pronunciations in the same language can vary (caramel for example), but there's only one correct way to pronounce Illinois.

I suppose this is the same for most states with large cities, but people often make the mistake of assuming that I'm from near the Chicago area. I've only been up there three times, four if you count a brief layover at Midway on the way back to Indy on a school trip.

@NEStalgia No to the kitchen, but my bedroom does have a blue theme. It has nothing to do with Frozen; it's just my favorite color.

@Tyranexx Uh huh. Sure.

@Tyranexx My father managed to be both tech-savvy and out of date at the same time. The tech he would learn, he would master. But then he'd cling to it well past its use-by date. I remember when he moved to a new house and when the company came to set up the internet, my father asked where he could connect his laptop - the worker laughed because he thought my father was joking - asking about a laptop as old as that was. Which is what convinced my dad to finally upgrade. He was still using AOL dial-up as late as 2009. But gosh darn it all, he knew how everything worked!

@NEStalgia Funnily enough, I DO need a new set of sheets and a comforter....

@Heavyarms55 Oh, geez. I remember dial-up. Sooo slllllloooowww. It was a happy day when my parents finally got broadband internet. The only problem is it hasn't really improved much since...though they're lucky they could get it at all. A cousin of mine lives a little outside the service area and has to use wireless internet.

The problem with my dad is that he doesn't even try very hard. He's fairly decent with some forms of machinery and equipment, so I don't know what his issue is. I think he's afraid he'll make a laptop self-destruct by breathing on it.

I gots me a feeva. Seems like the allergy onset turned into the congestion and chest crud. Gonna hit up my doc tomorrow, get me one of them sick notes.

The Corona virus epidemic is so Toxic

@NEStalgia - Well, Chicago is probably my favorite big city in the US. Part of that is probably proximity, I’m only a few hours away; nearly equidistant from my own state’s version of a big city, Indianapolis, but I like Chicago much more. It definitely has just about every negative that comes with a big city, but it has a lot of positives as well, and the natives are a mostly friendly bunch.

@Tyranexx - Yeah, everyone knows you give it the proper French Canadian flair and pronounce it “Ill-in-nwa”.

Blue can be a tough color to paint and match, but I love it as well. I have two blue paints in my place, a robin’s egg (my newest color, and I love it, but only have it in one room at the moment), and one closer to a primary blue, but a few shades lighter and brighter. The darker one is the base coat for the accent wall in my daughter’s room, it’s an egg shell finish, and then I put pink, orange, and red polka dots over that in semi gloss. The red dots look like they’re moving on the blue background. It’s pretty fun.

@HobbitGamer - Hope you feel better, don’t get yourself locked up in no quarantine.

@Tyranexx No joke, I used to sign in to AOL, grab my Game Boy and go take a crap, and come back, and maybe, it would be finished getting online. Sometimes.

Some people just don't like some things. Maybe your dad is just like that with digital tech.