Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at 
Laura's friend Kara preserves my bon mot for the benefit of the intertubes:
"It just amazes me," said Laura's friend Josh, "how much of a divide there is between northern and southern California."Only 49 states to go."Yeah, we never had that in Maryland," I said.
"Well, it's not really big enough to have a northern and southern division," he pointed out.
"True. Mostly we've got They Who Produce Crabs versus They Who Do Not Produce Crabs."
"Oh, I'm sure everybody's producing crabs in one way or another," he said.
"You're right," I realized. Laura's friend Josh: the great political unifier.
Comments
Constantly sending water to those whiny people tends to annoy you after a while, especially when it trashes the delta in the process. :-)
The Bay Area is north of SoCal, but it isn't really Northern California. You need to go on a road trip up to the Oregon border (I'd suggest taking the coastal route at least in one direction). CA is so large that it's really hard to get a handle on how many regions (and subregions, and sub-subregions) there are in the state.
Posted by: Ron | February 7, 2008 1:20 PM
1. Just for the information of readers not familiar with the State of Maryland, there is just as big a divide between Western Maryland, the Eastern Shore, the Washington Suburbs, and the Baltimore region as there is between Northern and Southern California (just for the record, I was born and raised in Los Angeles and was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley).
2. The divide between Northern Virginia and the rest of the state is possibly even larger then the North/South California divide.
3. The divide between New York City and Upstate New York (defined as everything North of the Tappen Zee Bridge) is just as great as the North/South California divide.
I suspect that the same is true of Chicago and Downstate Illinois, and Boston and the rest of Massachusetts.
Posted by: SLC | February 7, 2008 1:56 PM
I second all of SLC's observations, and add that the Virginia/Maryland faceoff, in the DC area, is a force to be reckoned with.
Posted by: Kara | February 7, 2008 2:13 PM
The largest county in California is San Bernardino County. There are 9 states of the US which are smaller in area, and Maryland is in that nine, with about 12,400 sq.mi. compared to SBC's 20,100.
There are 106 countries across the world smaller in area than San Bernardino County.
(Locals say it San Ber'dino, and old timers call it Berdoo.)
Posted by: Lummox | February 7, 2008 3:51 PM
I recall a northern Virginia native trying to pay for something with a check in Richmond and being told that they didn't accept checks from out-of-state.
I was visiting Chicago many years ago. While watching the local news, the anchor divided the state up into "the city, the suburbs, and downstate", with a tone that suggested this was in rapidly decreasing order of importance.
Posted by: Kevin W. Parker | February 8, 2008 9:06 AM