Hometown Pride

Here's a fun map: How Prolific STDs are Across the U.S.



My apologies to Montgomery, AL- better wrap it up, y'all. My hometown still holds the top spot in Minnesota for STDs though... so much for hometown pride.

Focus: What is your town best known for, for better or worse?

Alt-Focus: What's the greatest risk to you in your location? Earthquakes? Fires? Flooding? Dick falling off after raw-doggin' floozies?

 

My parents moved around a bit when I was a kid. My birth town of Whittier, California I do not recall, as I was a baby less than a year old when I left it. From there we moved to Boise, Idaho where I alas also lack memories as I was really, really young. And from there to Winnemucca, Nevada, where my father worked as an electrician in the mines and where I can talk about just how odd Winnemucca is.

Winnemucca, for starters, looks like this:



However, much of it looks like that only at certain times, or in certain lighting. It's a plateau desert, and it's mostly sagebrush and rabbitbrush filled with some of the tougher grasses and cacti, and at night, it's cold enough to 'freeze the ass off of a mule deer and in the day if it isn't winter, hot enough to make jerky of the dead mule deer without having to do anything but cut it.' (A man my father worked with, Joe, is to be thanked for this saying, as well as be thanked for brewing powerful homemade wine and moonshine) It's Northern Nevada, a place that is very much still the Ol' West, so much so there's a brothel district in town, and all a whore needs to do to be "official" is register their car with the local police. There's Chinese descendants, Basque shepherd descendants, bunches of different immigrant mixes and Native Americans in town, and any combination of the above. The town is about ten miles, squared. Feral dogs roamed in packs and had to be shot for eating livestock every winter. A mountain lion once came into our backyard and luckily was scared away by our large dogs, but a week later was shot while eating a neighbor's Chihuahua. I vividly recalled finding rattlesnakes as a kid and when I'd tell my dad about them, he'd come out with a shovel and chop them into pieces, and one time cooked a big rattler up for us and ate it with cornbread and deer chili. I used to catch lizards under our house, and many times when I'd go underneath our Jacuzzi in summer, there'd be hundreds of them, from at least half a dozen or more species hanging out there. Coyotes who looked so tiny tourists thought they were big foxes could be heard, every night, yapping and howling at the moon. Meth had become a slight business in my childhood there, and I'm sure it is worse now, but I remember seeing men wearing cowboy hats and women wearing sundress clawing at their faces, with anime-wide eyes and crazed expressions at the fair. People would get drunk and drive along the dirt and gravel roads with a reckless abandon, once hitting my mom's car was a John Deere tractor a drunken neighbor was gallivanting with after wrestling with Crown Royal all morning. It's a fascinatingly fucked-up place, sort of like Aberdeen, Washington or Crawford, Texas. I highly recommend a visit.

 

Focus: Mother fuckin' Burt Reynolds! Well, actually, that's Jupiter. My town is known for having one of the biggest numbers of rehab clinics, having the fourth highest millage rate in the nation, and Body Heat was partially filmed here. Soon we will be known for political corruption. So, we got that going for us. Which is nice. Vanilla Ice hangs around too. And these guys:






They're so cute! (Yes, South Park had to have based him on Greg Rice)

Alt-Focus: According to the map, chlamydia. Which is funny because about 5 people I know got it within a week because everyone was fucking everyone behind their spouse's back. I've been through a few hurricanes, never experienced any real flooding, and all I'm really worried about here are STDs. It really is that bad. It is a smoking petri dish. Belle Glade had the highest AIDS rate in the country for a long time.

Runner up is traffic accident. I-95 between Miami and Jupiter was the deadliest road in the U.S. for like 8 years running. At least one fatality a day, every day.

 

My hometown is most known as a place that a person could tube down a river while drinking heavily. Every week thousands of people flock to several different tube rental establishments... and I used to work at one back in high school. They rent their vessel for the day, rent one to lade with beer and climb on a shitty old bus to be taken up river. Stupid jokes and questions spew from their mouths. They often, and with good reason, question the mechanical condition of the bus, I ignored these pansies. They try to request songs they think will enhance their tubing experience, as if I could control what the local radio station would be playing during their 15 minute ride. Highway to Hell always seemed please them. They get dropped off and I point toward the river. A few forget to get out and have to be picked up far downstream from their car. The tubers that do remember to exit the river stagger up the hill, thoroughly hammered and gasping for breath after the climb, and begin to wonder which of them is sober enough to drive back to the big city. We always had an off duty deputy working to keep the drunks in line. They would wait til he wasn't looking and drive away.

 

Is it bad that I am in the position to question these numbers. For example, I know that I personally diagnosed a case of syphilis in 2013 (vs. the zero they have here) and have heard from the health department how much syphilis is increasing in our area. Gonorrhea - 10 cases? Pu-lease. And Chlamydia, well, frankly my theory is that EVERYBODY has chlamydia. I call bullshit.

 

This sounds eerily like the Texas Hill country. San Marcos or New Braunfels?

 

Ha - New Braunfels is exactly what I thought of. I floated down that river last year.

 

Hmm...it seems chlamydia is the big one around here too. And I could have worn that was my neighbor's name.

Houston has one of the best restaurant scenes in any place I've lived before. Because the city is so spread and largely segregated by many different nationalities, you get some of the best food you will ever eat. I went to an Afghani restaurant a couple of weeks ago and my god, it was glorious. The people were so friendly and happy to see white people they gave us free eggplant dishes.

Unfortunately, Houston is also the kind of place that when people come to visit me, I get thrown into a mild panic because I don't know what to do with guests out here. Besides obviously stuffing their faces with all kinds of food, there's not a whole lot to really see. If you come visit during crawfish season, you will have eaten enough crawfish that the amount of sodium would stop a child's heart.

I usually try to push guests into going on a road trip to either Austin or San Antonio. Galveston is a disgusting shithole that people here think is nice. If you come from any place with a decent beach, you will laugh in the local's faces as they turn brown from the water and get necrotizing fasciitis in their eyeballs.

 

I'm the guy who gives out all the ceftriaxone 'round these parts. I won't be touching anyone's genitals, with or without condoms.

My hometown is Toronto. Amongst Canadians not from the region, we are known for being a bunch of self-interested douchebags who think that we are basically New York City while being uninterested in the welfare or goings-on of the rest of the country. Which is true, but we're no more or less self-interested than everywhere else, and the little brother inferiority syndrome comes from a combination of having never traveled anywhere and thinking that it's just not fair for the country's largest city to be a dominant force in how the country works. In fact Toronto is a fantastic city that is lousy for tourists but has a lot of cool stuff going on if you bother to go somewhere other than a shopping mall or franchise restaurant. Toronto used to be the meth capital of North America back in the 80s, but now we're just know for our former crack smoking mayor.

Amongst non-Canadians, Toronto is widely known for being a city in Canada that people know the name of.

 

My hometown is most known for our mayor performing a couple dozen gay marriages as protest about ten years before it was legal, having some of the best rock climbing in the country, having a huge old hotel that people think is the inspiration for The Shining but it wasn't, having a collection of stone houses that are still standing from when the Huguenots came to the country, being full of hippies, and being where the character in Dirty Dancing went to get her abortion.

 

FOCUS: I was born in a little burg called San Jose, CA. I left at the age of six so my only memory is my grandmother's basement filled with hand-canned fruits and veggies. I hear San Jose does something with silicon these days.

There are no STDs in San Jose*. My grandmother wouldn't allow it and besides you can't catch STDs from the high-priced "escorts" who service the newly nerd dominated population. Can you?

ALT FOCUS: The greatest risk is someone will buy your 900 sq/ft faux Victorian out from under you and you will only be able to afford housing in east Oakland.


* Note that the map for SJ includes Sunnyvale and Santa Clara where the reported STDs obviously come from.

 

Focus: Most corrupt border city in Texas!
http://www.valleycentral.com/news/story.aspx?id=1233217

Although really, if you ask me, there are a few worse ones, like Pharr. I'm guessing Edinburg made it because it's the county seat, and that's where all the county/government offices are.

ALT. FOCUS: Why did they leave HIV/AIDS off of this map? Doesn't AIDS get any love? Or genital warts? Or Hepatitis?

 

Almost positive he's talking about the Comal River.

 

My city is called The Forest City because if you look at it from above eight stories up you'll see the entire place is buried under a super-massive canopy of trees. You guys know us as the home of Labatt Beer and the town where one of our citizens threw a banana at a black NHL player. I also recently and officially awarded this this city The Most Criminally Boring City In The Galaxy.

I wasn't kidding about the trees, though:


EDIT: by the way, that STD map of America is bullshit because they're isn't a burning, fiery hole where Belle Glade is.

 

Belle Glade is a town left behind. The largest concentration of HIV/AIDS in the US. However, that doesn't mean that it's the most common STD in that area.

Place is still awful.

 

My home town is known for being the wettest/rainiest/cloudiest place in Canada. There seems to be more liquor stores then people(6 for 12,000).

 

Being from Milwaukee, its known for Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, and an Alice Cooper line from Waynes World. Also, beer, cheese, and fat people. It recently had a bit of a resurgence and there is some pretty cool stuff happening downtown, great place to visit in the summer. But a few decades of horrible city government and mismanagement has left it with one of the worst public school systems in the country and a rapidly deteriorating crime situation. To the point that my Mom who grew up in a not great area of the city and has seen plenty, and thus isn't one to pearl clutch for no reason, has said there are certain areas of the city she will straight up avoid these days.

ALT-FOCUS: Living in Chicago, I think the biggest risk is being killed by a White Walker coming over the Wall in the next few years as our winters begin to approach 6-7 months in length.