[ SECRET POST #2621 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2621 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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05.
[Hard Candy]


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[Luther]


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13. [SPOILERS for Teen Wolf]



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14. [WARNING for incest]



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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #374.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: USA: Iowa

[(Anonymous)]

First, some people--usually from Back East--may tell you that Iowa is completely flat and covered in corn. This is a malicious slander. Iowa is only mostly flat. We do actually have hills--several of them. (Some on the eastern border and some--the famous Loess Hills--on the western border. Loess is wind-transported silt, and it makes peculiar geological formations--the only other ones of comparable size are in China.) And the state is not entirely covered with corn. We also have soybeans. (most of both are genetically modified.) We are not, by the way, the place where they grow potatoes. That's one of those other states that begin with "I."

The part where I live--right in the middle--was scoured pretty flat by the glaciers only about 12,000 years ago. The land was tallgrass prairie when the settlers came--a sea of grasses that could grow to 6 feet or taller, interspersed with huge, spreading oak trees that grew naturally in park-like groves. In less than a hundred years, there was hardly any of this landscape left--it was swept away by vast fields of corn and wheat. The farmers were kind of biting the hand that fed them, because it's the roots of the grasses--which go down as deep as the shoots are tall--that build up the soil as they decay. We're proud of being children of the soil here--even if we do let the soil wash down the Mississippi.

Historically, Iowa has been an agricultural state since European settlement, and although we have fewer and fewer family farms with every decade, we're still an agricultural state. My job, right now, involves transcribing interviews with farmers about their conservation practices. One young man was the fourth generation of his family to be farming in his part of Jasper County; another farmer was well on in his nineties and sounded like he had every intention of farming when he was 100.

Interestingly enough, just about every farmer who was interviewed said something on the order of "Farmers are stubborn people!" This stubbornness is such a famous Iowan trait that there's a song about it, from Meredith Willson's The Music Man:

"Oh there's nothing halfway about the Iowa way to treat you
When we treat you (which we may not do at all).

"There's an Iowa kind of special chip-on-the-shoulder attitude
We've never been without that we recall

"We're so by God stubborn we can stand touching noses
For a week at a time and never see eye to eye

"But we'll give you our shirt and our back to go with it
If your crops should happen to die."

And that describes a lot of us pretty well. I mean, we eat lutefisk (see making_excuses' thread, above) out of sheer bloody-mindedness. We also have a state fair where an annual attraction is a life-sized cow carved out of butter, and a profusion of foods that are deep-fried and served on sticks, whether they should be or not. In election years, we are known for being the site of the first primary election in the country--only, being Iowans, we don't have a primary where we mark a ballot or pull a lever; we have the Iowa Caucus which involves neighbors meeting at the local school auditorium or city hall for a lot of arguing. We're weird that way.