[High Praise! to Mental Floss]
The Most Impressive Thing About All 50 States
Here’s my challenge to you: click on the link and find out what the “most impressive” thing about your state it. Then come back and leave something MORE impressive in the comments.
I’ll start: Wisconsin – World’s Largest 6-pack
Also, calling Wisconsin for Trump put him up & over 270.
[Think you have a link that’s IMAO-worthy? Send it to harvolson@gmail.com. If I use your link, you will receive High Praise! (assuming you remember to put your name in the email)
Let me correct New Hampshire’s entry: the only state with NO sales tax and NO income tax.
Suck on that, everyone else.
Yet you still managed to send a Democrat to the Senate. Shocking. 🙂
California – soon to be the world leader in craft pot dispensaries, and home to the world’s largest hobby train system (maintained by Governor Jerry Brown)
Tennessee – Nashville has a full-scale replica of the original Parthenon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenon_(Nashville)
Oregon has the most diverse terrain. There are on;y two you wont find there arctic tundra and tropical jungle.
Well,Biltmore House is mighty fine. I would also note that North Carolina is one of leaders in turkeys and bricks. It is, however, number one in sweet potatoes grown and has the largest chest of drawers.
So Florida has Fort Zachary Taylor. Big deal, Mental Floss.
I’d like to point out that everyone who has walked on the moon started his trip in Florida.
And FrankJ used to live here.
New York — #2 state in wine production with 26.4 million gallons, second only to California. And with our government we need all the booze we can get.
Illinois- Unlike the federal government, when our leaders get caught for pay-to-play, they get thrown into prison.
Illinois – we are #1 in worst credit rating of any state.
I remember the Old Style six pack, I think they made half Special Export later. I attended UW LaCrosse 75-79.
Wisconsin is also known for the Bong Recreation Area (not what it sounds like)
You mean it’s not named for the ace Richard Bong?
Iowa – twenty million pigs, the most in the nation (the reason that Iowa has twenty million pigs and California has San Francisco is that Iowa got first choice)
Massachusetts:
The first book printed in what is now the U.S. was the Bay Psalm Book produced in Cambridge in 1640; a copy was sold for a record $14,165,000 in 2013. These days, the state is home to the second and third largest public libraries in the United States (the Boston and Harvard University Library, respectively).
While the Boston Public Library is the second largest one in the country after NY, Harvard University is NOT a public library. It is a private library that does permit some public access to some of its collections. Oh, and the BPL owns the OTHER copy of the Bay Psalms book.
“The Bay Psalm Book’s selling price of $14.2 million is well in excess of the previous auction record for a printed book, established in December 2010 at Sotheby’s London when a copy of John James Audubon’s Birds of America sold for $11.5 million.”
Yes, we have a copy of the Audubon book as well.
Makes my First Folio seem worthless. I’m going to burn it. No, don’t try to stop me…
BPL has a copy on display right now. Amazing how many books a library can have.
You’re f’in kidding me. Are you f’in kidding me? You’re not, are you? I would travel to f’in Boston to see a copy of that. An original, or a copy? Holy crap! I’m impressed!! I was just joking around, looking for the most unbelievable thing I could think of. I could’ve said “Dead Sea Scrolls” — don’t tell me you have those!
Sorry for the f’in “f’in”.
I find it interesting that ALABAMA has a “Vulcan statue in Birmingham was made for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair”.
I had no idea Star Trek was that old.
They didn’t have Guantanamo on the list, but fun fact: the facilities are noticeably better than Alcatraz or Leavenworth.
Plus, their leather hockey masks don’t smell like they’ve ever been used before.
And their straitjackets? Straituxedos, I’d call them!!
CT birthplace of Samuel colt and colt firearms.
.. also the birthplace of Daniel Webster. Which means everyone else in the country pronounces everything else wrong. By definition.
Um, Noah Webster. Missed the correction window by a wide margin.
Arizona has a lot of amazing stuff and Mental Floss picked a pretty good one.
The only thing that springs to mind (Grand Canyon-related) is that the first guy to ride a boat down the Colorado through the entire canyon (starting at the Green River in Wyoming, finishing around where Lake Mead is today) did so after having lost an arm in the Civil War.
His name was John Wesley Powell
Speedway, schmeedway. Yes, it is impressive, but did you know that Fort Wayne, Indiana hosted the first professional baseball game? Or that the nation’s first amusement park, Santa Claus land (now Holiday World), opened here in 1946? Or that there’s a tree growing out of the top of the first state capital in Corydon? Or that we keep an exhibit of liberals housed at I.U. in Bloomington as a sort of freak show? Folks drive over from Beanblossom and Gnaw Bone to marvel at the collective stupidity.
Kansas: the Kansas Cosmoshere & Space Museum is one of the world’s premier space museums. It has the largest collections of U.S. space artifacts outside of the Smithsonian, and largest collection of Soviet space artifacts outside Moscow. Its many attractions include an SR-71 (which was towed through the streets of Hutchinson to get there), the Apollo 13 space capsule, a full scale mock-up of a space shuttle, and a top-notch IMAX theater.
Georgia: Hogzilla ’nuff said