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Saturday, July 27, 2013

I Was Told There Would Be No Map

I'm going to give you a map. On that map, draw an outline of the Midwest.

That's the question being posed to you at this site, which is conducting a survey on what people consider to be the makeup of the region. As it turns out, people have very different ideas on what the Midwest looks like. As Bill Rankin could already tell you; earlier this year he overlaid 100 maps of the 'Midwest' constructed by various organizations that he found on Google and found not a single place that was unanimously declared Midwestern. He took two of the maps he found and displayed them as showing mutually-exclusive Midwests; about the only thing they agreed on was that Wisconsin and Illinois were NOT Midwestern. Newfoundland showed up in someone's Midwest. New York showed up. Idaho showed up. Alberta showed up. New Mexico showed up. The Florida Panhandle showed up. South Carolina did not show up, but Georgia and North Carolina did.

I am now intensely curious as to who out there is going 'well, what's wrong with that?' to anything I just said.

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