As Hurricane Sandy was swirling off the east coast of the United States a few weeks ago, and people in its path began to freak-out a bit, a predictable thing happened. Folks in other parts of the country began to mock the reactions of people who would be affected by the storm. Because, you see, that’s what we do. We love to see people panic over the shit we deal with all the time. It makes us feel good.
God knows, I’m guilty. When we lived in Southern California, for instance, I delighted in the chaos and hysteria a few raindrops triggered. It would start sprinkling out, and STORM WATCH 2000 would interrupt regular programming on TV and radio. Then it seemed like cars were bursting into flames, freeways were crumbling, and people were throwing themselves off tall structures. It was fantastic! We’d moved there from Atlanta, where it rained approximately every day. I couldn’t stop smiling, or making snide comments. At least until the body bags were parachuted in.
I read lots of comments on the internet as Sandy approached New Jersey and New York, especially from people in Florida and Louisiana, and other states that get pummeled by hurricanes every year. “Pussies!” they shouted. “We eat CAT 1 storms for breakfast down here!!” they mocked. The fact that NYC was involved made it even more delicious. Most of them shut up when houses started tipping over, and submarines ended up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, or whatever. But a few of them continue to sneer.
With your help, I’d like to put together a guide to United States inter-regional mockery. How’s that sound? I’ll get the ball rolling, with the ones that jump immediately to my mind, and you guys can take it from there.
Northeast
Love to mock: southern states that occasionally experience a freak snowstorm.
When we lived in the aforementioned Atlanta, we got BLASTED by snow around Easter one year. It was a full-on blizzard, resulting in something like a foot of accumulation. It was very strange, for that part of the country. And the whole region shut-down for days on end. Power was out, the streets were impassible, and (are you ready for this?!) stores were running out of beer. And folks in the northeast just laughed and laughed and laughed, and repeated the phrase “light dusting.”
Southeast
Love to mock: places outside the south being threatened by hurricanes or tropical storms, regions of the country suffering with higher-than-normal humidity, Southern California and their reaction to rain.
I love the south, but it’s frequently uncomfortable. It’s hotter than mule piss in the summer, and the humidity makes you feel like you’re swaddled in a blanket soaked with sea water. For months on end… So, when someplace is hammered with a blast of high humidity, and they start to complain about it, the mockery machine cranks into action. Then they apply some Gold Bond medicated powder, and mock some more.
Middle o’ the Country
Love to mock: people outside the region frightened by the mere suggestion of a tornado.
I fall into this category. Tornadoes scare the crap out of me. I’ve been in several situations where we were asked to take cover, and almost had to throw my underwear in a dumpster after things finally settled down. When I was a kid some kind of freaky tornado-like thing came whipping through Myrtle Beach, SC, where we were camping, and it was probably the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced. Campers were tipped over, our canvas awning ripped off the side of our trailer and went sailing across the clubhouse, my mother was nearly decapitated by an airborne Krispy Kreme box… And even though decades have passed, I still get sweaty palms when people start talking about tornado warnings, and such. So, go ahead Iowa: mock away!
West Coast
Love to mock: people unaccustomed to earthquakes, mudslides, and enormous brush fires.
I attended a work meeting in San Francisco years ago, and there was an earthquake. We were inside a hotel conference room, around a giant table, and the shaking commenced. There were chandeliers in the room, and they began clanking and making a racket. An alarm went off, and a recorded voice told us to move to an interior room. And all us out-of-towners did as we were told, with oh-holy-shit expressions on our faces. But the locals just stood up, stretched, and sauntered over to the food table. As I made my escape, I looked back and saw some guy taking a bite of a chocolate-covered strawberry, without a care in the world. And later that night, at dinner, the mockery took hold — as required by the rules of the universe.
And you guys can take it from here. I focused on weather, and that sort of thing, but there’s no reason you can’t expand the scope a bit. In the comments section please help me build a Guide to U.S. Inter-Regional Mockery.
And I’ll be back on Monday.
Have a great weekend, my friends!
Now playing in the bunker
Treat yourself to something cool at Amazon!
When if comes to mockery you are the king.
“it”
First?
Not even close
Dang it. Mocked again.
I think I’ve lived everywhere so I mock everybody. I actually was living in OKC when a tornado went through and people shut the f down. My girlfriend was hiding in the basement, etc.
I know the odds of dying in a tornado are pretty low so I don’t take them seriously.
I don’t like floods, they scare me but I avoid them by living on high ground. Done and done.
And nobody…ANYWHERE…can drive. Period.
Possibly first.
We experience tornadoes all the time, but I cannot ignore them. Our town was decimated last year by one. Several of my friends lost their homes, and many people did die. When we are under a watch, I get very nervous.
Two words: U-Haul
Not weather related, but everyone everywhere is positive that the area adjacent to them has the worst drivers ever to ply the pavement, and also that no other place suffers the traffic headache they do.
And wherever you are from has the best drivers.
And just because you have a good driving record does not mean you are a good driver.
Your statement is only correct if you live next to Boston. Seriously, that’s where no-fault insurance originated. No one else comes close.
Living in Houston, we get our share of torrential thunderstorms, hurricanes and the like. But snow is a rarity. 2 years ago the forecast predicted significant snow and ice for our area. Local news warned of “Snowpocalypse 2010” (from what I recall). The entire city shut down, schools were closed and you could almost feel the anticipation/panic. And then…..NOTHING HAPPENED! Not a single snowflake. The weather guy was like, “uhhh…whoops!”
Is it wrong to mock my own region?
No. They are so scared. If they get it wrong the other way they are screwed too. I need a job where I’m wrong more than right.
Not if it is Texas. Even if you succeed we will still mock you.
If snow starts to fall in Oregon, traffic screeches to a blistering halt. People are terrified of it and become annoying drivers, even when it doesn’t stick.
Thanks for the Allentown shout out Jeff!
Southwest: Loves to mock people about drought.
We get rain nearly twice a year. On a good year we get almost 12 total inches of rain. When we hear folks in Atlanta bitching “We’re merely minutes away from a fresh water source” and moaning about “Tonguekissyourdaddy Lake got down to 12 foot deep this year”, we don’t laugh; but we do wish our lake actually had any water instead of just dust. We are usually happy if rain actually reaches the ground though.
South: Southerners like to talk about how spicy they like their food.
Whether it’s Texes Chili, poorly interpreted Creole food, or some anise flavored spicy Miami pork. People from the south are willing to cause physical damage to their nervous and respiratory systems to prove that something hotter than microwaved lava doesn’t bother them. Cause they from the south.
I’ve got a friend from down south that comes up to visit now and then. When it gets “cold” (below 30F) and he’s ready to leave, he bundles up like he’s going out in a blizzard just to walk the fifty feet to get to his car with heated seats (heavy jacket, gloves, knit cap).
Out of friendship I bite my tongue.
People in the Pacific NW love to mock the rest of the country, because they don’t know how to give a decent blowjob.
See Reply below. I don’t know how you Millennials keep up with all this tweeting and thumbing and replying. I still use a typewriter and scanner to comment on this site. Fuck.
jtb
Being from New England and pretty much raised on my fathers lobster boat, mocking the “seafood” in other parts of the country was almost taught in elementary school.
Catfish? Don’t you mean cat food? Florida lobsters? No claws = no balls. Don’t even get us started on Manhattan clam chowder…
Of course, marinating in lobster bait every summer during my adolescent years has kind of put me off the whole fish thing anyway. I mean, I KNOW what fish are doing in that water. No thanks.
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Annual rainfall in the South Sound area is 39-51 inches per year, depending on the neighborhood. It comes down a quarter of an inch at a time, so, in the fall, winter and spring, it rains an average of every fucking day. After watching reruns of McMillan & Wife and reading Semi Tough for the third time, what do you expect us to be good at?
jtb
I want the Batman squirt gun depicted in “WVSR Classic”, and I want it now.
Thanks for your consideration.
John
JTB-
the water flow on the gun was sort of backwards, but I laughed at that thing like a 12 year-old!
I don’t know if the entire South is this way, but I can attest to the fact that there is nobody more paranoid and overreacting than the fucks in Alabama. Buying up bread and bottled water at every mention of rain or, God help us, snow. Completely over the top.
There was a bad tornado around 1990 and several people died. I’ve yet to meet a single mother fucker who doesn’t claim he was right in the middle of it. Bunch of liars. One guy told me that he was walking his dog when suddenly he realized that he was just holding an empty leash and there was a perfect hole in a brick wall across the street that was supposedly made by his dog’s body. Fucking charlatan.
I have just heard some news that defies ALL mockery:
Hostess Bakeries has just shut its doors–forever!
No more Twinkies, Cupcakes, Fruit Pies, or Ho-Ho’s. If I had hair, I’d be whipping my hand through it wildly. This is a disaster of enormous proportions! I think I’m going to cry… 🙁
This aggression will not stand, man. We’re talking about two or three of the basic food groups vanishing from the grocery shelves.
My buddies did not crawl through the mud in Nam so Hostess could surrender to a little labor pressure.
We must have Cupcakes. We must have Twinkies. We must have fruit pies, particularly cherry.
Let there be music in the cafes at night
And revolution in the air.
jtb
“Oh I can get oyu a pie. With cherry. There are ways, Dude.”
In one fell swoop, “Little Debbie” suddenly became “BIG Debbie” as the primary purveyor of snack cakes and baked goods!
On a brighter note (if that’s even possible), there’s apparently no need to stockpile Twinkies and lemon fruit pies anyhow, since the Mayan calendar ends next month…
So that’s how the Mayans knew…
The bastards. If you run those circular stones backward, they probably say, “No Twinkies, you’re fucked; no Twinkies, you’re fucked…”
I heard on the news that Hostess will be selling the rights to the name. I expect the rights will be purchased by some group of (former?) board members, who will then reopen the now-union-free bakeries. But I could be wrong.
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It has been long known that Canada has been a staunch supporter of union-free Twinkies. They are the ones that will snatch up the rights and include in the deal an agreement to build a 16ft high fence along our borders to keep out the winter Jet Steram when it dips too far south causing people in Mississippi and Louisana to sacrafice household pets in hopes of warmer weather.
I don’t know how you show your fuckin face in 2013 if your Mayan. Seriously.
That means you were living in Atlanta in 1993, Jeff – the year of the ‘Super-Storm’:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Storm_of_the_Century
I was living in Gainesville, FL and we had tornado warnings that Friday night (and a lot of shit got blown over) but by Sunday afternoon, we were having snow flurries. Driving down the street, you could see people gawking through their windshields like they thought they were driving through nuclear fallout.
I’ll have to consult my big book of tornadoes to find the one that found you and your family in Myrtle Beach, presumably in the early 70’s.
Yep, I lived there from 1989 to 1996. Sixteen inches of snow in Atlanta! I didn’t want to exaggerate, and said it must have been around a foot. Crazy, man. I remember walking from our apartment in Little Five Points, to the Disco Kroger, and buying beer. Everybody had the same idea, and there were long lines of people, all holding cases of beer.. Nothing was moving in that city, except for people carrying their beverages home.
I had to connect through Atlanta the following Thursday and there were still big piles of snow along the runways and taxi-ways where the plows had pushed them. Snow on the ground in Atlanta; I never would have believed it if I hadn’t seen it.
This might be a good time to mock the different kinds of regional barbecue (Memphis, Carolina, Kansas City, etc.)
You know, nobody ever talks about “Ohio-Style” anything–maybe there’s a reason for that. I just don’t know…except for Cincinnati-style chili–which is NASTY!
Nasty?! You, sir, are no John F. Kennedy.
Sorry–can’t help it, I just don’t like the stuff.
One regional thing I DO love however, is the pepperoni roll, which seems to be indigenous to WV. Those things are AWESOME!
Skyline Chili & Donatos pizza – two of the best things to ever make it out of Ohio.
Donato’s is excellent, but as a former Daytonian, I must confess that Marion’s Pizza is the best I’ve ever had. However, it is available nowhere outside of the Dayton area.
Marion’s Pizza (Ohio style pizza) is the best thing ever created.
I can’t say this out loud down here near Memphis, but my favorite wet ribs are at Montgomery Inn in Cincinnati. I don’t know what style they are (Kansas City maybe?) but they’re better than the wet ribs anywhere else in the nation.
And I asked my Kroger to carry canned Skyline just so I could make 5-ways and coneys down here.
I went to high school just down the street from Montgomery Inn and have never had their ribs. And I call myself a native Cincinnatian.
Zat the chili with nutmeg in it or whatever? Disgusting. Hey, speaking of BBQ, you ever hear of Alabama’s famous BBQ? No? That’s because it’s shit. There’s one guy in Decatur that cooks dried out chicken and dips it in mayonnaise. Mayonnaise! And he gets himself on national tee vee somehow. Don’t even get me started on their nasty ass pork sandwiches, soaked in vinegar and piled with tasteless slaw. Disgraceful. Give me some Texas brisket any day. These people are idiots.
Oh, and famous pizza, you guys ever have Little Seizures? Goddammit. My wife buys it all the time. Five bucks. What a kick in the balls.
Driving down the WV Turnpike, I look in my mirror and see a car right on my arse. I’m doing 75 on one of the few pieces of straightaway on that road. The prescribed speed is 70.
I get into the right lane and thy dumbass passes me at 80 or so. I get back into the left lane as we approach the curves and hills. The moron is driving a yuppie sports car, but has to slow to 60 on the “dangerous” curves. Meanwhile I have to turn off the cruise control in my 3/4 ton van.
The driver is nearly always a northerner. Pisses me off.
Get out of the left lane slow poke
Keep Right Except To Pass.
.
Here in Minnesota we get the full gamut of weather – 100 degree heat with humidity, 20 below windchill, 3 foot snowfalls, tornadoes and crazy thunderstorms. We all keep well supplied with flashlights, blankets, and food stores. We mock you all!
Bet yout stare down your nose at anybody that bitches about their mosquitoes, too.
Since this just happened to me the other day, I’m mocking my own east coast.
The day AFTER the Nor’Easter (and mind you, we did get 10 inches of snow which melted in 2 days) some fucktard driving in front of me just had to play the part of Mr. Concerned. On an 8 mile stretch of windy back roads this friggin’ idgit would not only slam on his brakeson every curve but also turn his hazards on. Isn’t that nice and distracting? Brighs, Hazards, brake lights.
Mocking away.
Seriously, when the sirens go off around here it doesn’t mean take cover. It means go outside and see if you can spot it. I know…not very smart. Have never seen one though…just amazing clouds. We sat outside through one siren a few years ago, mocking it, only to find out that a town 20 miles north of here was flattened by an F-5 tornado. Oops.
Good Afternoon Surf Reporters…
My parents retired in the late 90’s and moved from the Pittsburgh area to central Florida. I talked with Mom a few days ago and inquired about the weather.
“It’s very chilly here today.”
“What’s the temperature?”
“Oh, I’d say LOW 60’s.”
Low 60’s… meanwhile the high temp in the Burgh was 37 and the wind chill was in the 20’s. Low 60’s is T-shirt weather around here.
We had a heapin’ helping of Pittsburgh weather at the Steeler game Monday night. Raining sideways at 35 degrees, up in the 500 section. It was colder than a tin shit house on a shady side of an iceberg. Even though we were under the overhang, it wasn’t far up enough to keep the mist from blowing in. It was terrible game weather.
I’ve sat up in those nosebleed seats before at a Pitt/WVU game in late November, and I can confirm what you are saying. Goddamn horizontal snow, I couldn’t get enough booze in me to forget about the cold. You could just see the wall of snow coming up the river from the west.
In the northeast there is a little known sect that worships tree sap. In 1968 a man from Fairfield, Ohio moved to a small (and still undisclosed) town and bought the local market. Shortly after he started carrying Log Cabin ‘maple syrup’ he was branded a herertic, his store was burned to the ground and he was syruped and feathered. While riding the bus taking him back home he was attacked by a swarm of bees and died.
This morning the temp was 58 as I drove by the local high school down here in The OC. You’d have thought it was a ski lodge in Aspen in January the way those kids were dressed. The pussification of our youth is a terrible thing to witness.
I prefer the word ‘vaginification’
Va-Jay-Jay’d
This morning I saw kids in cargo shorts waiting for the bus here in K’lumbus…it was 25 degrees!
Those of us from the Pacific Northwest find panic over rain vastly amusing. Not so amusing to have to drive among those whose brains apparently shut down when confronted with wet pavement, though.
In my current area of residence, everyone starts grabbing jackets and sweaters when it’s below about 65. I can get down to low 50s before I even really want long sleeves. (On the other hand, summer in inland California is pretty brutal for someone who grew up on the Oregon coast.)
I felt bad for people losing property, personal items in the east coast storm. For those who tried to ride it out when they got 5-6 days of lead time, fuck-em.
Survival of those with a brain is nature’s way.
As a former resident of NYC, I mock those who can’t figure out a subway system. Also those who think a bagel is a “roll with a hole”.
As a former resident of upstate NY and western Mass., I mock those drivers who freak out when it snows.
As a current resident of the Washington DC area, I can’t abide anyone complaining about their traffic. LA gets a pass.
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http://fightlinker.com/a-short-history-of-fighters-crapping-their-pants/
Here in Michigan, otherwise known as the Lower Canada Belt, we mock people not only for the snowpocalypse thing, but for saying they’re “cold” if the temperature is above 40 degrees. “You’re cold? You can see your breath? This morning when I went out to my car, my eyeballs froze. THAT’S cold, ya babies. And to top that off, when I got out there, it was so cold my car wouldn’t even start. I don’t even want to hear about your sub-tropical ‘cold’.”
Well la Dee DA.
Being from the northeast, I do enjoy mocking the southeasterner’s reactions to snow ‘down there”. Especially when the news shows some really great dumbass snow “drivin”.
I still recall one clip one I was a kid………… a whopping inch or two of snow in “hotterdenanarmpit” texas or whatever, and the accompanying video of mass chaos on the street as cars slide and slam into each other………. at the dizzying speed of 5 to 10 miles an hour. Or the shots of folks sending rooster tails of snow from their tires, while the car goes nowhere at all, while the operator can’t seem to grasp the concept that, eh, FLOORING the gas won’t gitcha far on a slippery surface, not far at all. I found it all the more hilarious that my blue haired grandma could likely outdrive em’ all in snow, even with a rear wheel drive ancient chevy impala with summer tires. I do enjoy such clips to this day…….. but not nearly as much as when I was a little (r) shit.
Odd thing tho……. if the slippery surface is mud, even several feet thick, those southerners can kick anyone’s ass as far as driving. Go figure……..