Home, Home on the Range

So I will be incommunicado for a little while, ducklings, as tonight I am making the journey home. I'll be there until Tuesday, which is about the exact amount of time I am comfortable spending in the 'Ta (aka Wichita, KS, known as the Breadbasket of America, the Birthplace of Aviation, and most graphically, the Abortion Capital of the World, and hence home of the Summer of Mercy, in which insane people sent their children to lie under cars because that would logically precipitate the closing of the women's health clinic on Kellogg). I love my parents very much and actually miss them quite a bit, and wouldn't mind living closer, but I don't think I can live any closer geographically to the state of Kansas...

Little known fact: the Pope won't fly over the state because there is a known portal to hell above it. I kid you not. It sounds absurd, and it is absurd, because honestly, the Devil seems like a mover and a shaker that enjoys a good time, and none of those desires would be satisfied by a trip to Kansas. So maybe he uses that portal for a calming vacation? Or maybe it's the portal to the "nothing ever happens, Waiting for Godot" version of Hell...

Other fun statistics about Kansas:

• It is scientifically proven to be flatter than a pancake. The terrain of your average cake of pan is hillier and more slopping than the entire average terrain of Kansas.
• The state has not once, but twice voted to change the high school education standards to either not require the teaching of evolution or require the teaching of intelligent design.
• In the 2004 election, only a single county in the state was blue. ONE.

I could go on, but it depresses me. The nice thing about going to Kansas is it allows me to re-aline my liberal principles, especially in regards to the Opinion Line on the daily Op-Ed page. It is an anonymous call in line that yields the most backwards, ignorant hateful opinions I have ever heard. It's like the highlight of my day. I promise to return with some doozies. Here are some that I found online today, for your amusement (my comments are in italics):

Press 1 for English. Press 2 for deportation. Here is the ignorance and hate I spoke of.
• • •
I admit that my dog gets out. He is a good dog, but he doesn't look like he is good, and I'm sorry for the people who have to encounter him. umm....ok? why did this get in the newspaper?
• • •
When Wichita has a thunderstorm, run the weather ticker across the screen and let people know what's going on. Don't come on television acting as if it's a major weather issue, such as a tornado. This is an ongoing issue with the citizens of Doo-Dah, whether or not the weathermen should break into a show to report on the weather. Now, to be fair to the writer of this comment, the weathermen in Wichita treat every storm as though it was the end of the world. It gets very dramatic, with our NBC affiliate weatherman, Dave "Armageddon" Freidman sending ridiculous messages to his wife through the camera, like "Honey, I won't be home tonight, tie the cat to the oven and lock the kids in the basement". This is all pretty unnecessary, because Kansas is really flat. REALLY flat. Which means you can pretty much see a storm rolling in for like, 6 hours. That's why when it gets to be "tornado season" up here, I just laugh and laugh. There is nothing like a Great Plains storm, where the sky turns green, the barometric pressure drops so fast you'd think you were in a horror movie, and you literally feel as though the contents of heaven are being flung upon you by an angry God. The storms up here are child's play in comparison. I once had a tornado warning happen while I was in my freshman dorm, which was essentially a large cement box that went 9 stories into the air. All the little weather lemmings went running down the stairs into the death trap that was the basement of the dorm, so about 2000 freshman in a n area designed to hold broken down cardboard boxes and the frozen food-type product that masqueraded as dinner. I took one look and the sky and said no way is there a tornado out there. Count me out of the clausterphobic dance party.

So enough about Kansas. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Really dumb fish in a really boring barrell.