Pigs on the wing

Let's face it: 1884 was just a funner time to be a white guy in Illinois floggin' hog ringers.For one thing, you didn't have some damn actress getting all up in your grille about how you mangled your pigs. People thought of pigs as what Nature intended bacon to come from.

Plus you could print this awesome little map of your country with all sorts of fracking insulting names for other people's states and practically nobody would punch you in the puss for it.

And the other cool thing? These are actual nicknames; really. I kid you not. Somebody somewhere actually tagged these various states with these handles.

Missouri? The Puke State, because in 1827 enough Missourians turned up in a mining site that some smartass observed it looked like the Show-Me State had "taken a puke" on Galena.

We Oregonians are fine with Webfoots, and I'll bet that if anyone remembered that Nevada was called the Sage Hen State, or Rhode Island the Gunflint State they'd pretty much shrug.

But Kentucky the Corn Cracker State? And what about Florida; "Fly Up The Creek" State? Illinois the Sucker State? South Carolina the Weasel State (since they pretty much invented secession I'm fine with that, the cousin-marryin' bastards)? Nebraska Bugeaters? New Mexico the Greaser State - you want a side of racism with that ethnic slur, sir?

Man, things sure have changed since 1884.Y'just can't slur 'em like you useta.

White by Northwest

From the website "Fast Company" comes a rather fascinating series of maps that show the racial topography of a series of large U.S. cities. For example. here's my home, Portland.A red dot is 25 caucasians, blue dots are the brothers, green dots are Asians, orange are hispanic/latinos, and all "others" are gray. The data is from Census 2000.

You will note that Portland is as pink as my own skin; there's a patch of blue in NE Portland and some orange scattered about the North and Northeast and along the Sunset Highway corridor in Washington County.

But that's about it.

We really are the Great White North.

I'm not quite sure what to say about that. It keeps us from having a lot of the racial politics and racial friction other cities have. But I'll bet it also makes it damn hard to be one of those blue or orange or gray dots when everybody around here looks like red-dot Whitey McWhitebread.

That makes me feel sort of uncomfortable.

I wonder how my daughter will come to feel about that?