Utah
Utah is a state in the United States that was founded by Mormons, who were driven to the southwestern desert region by intolerant Christians.
Famously, the Mormons had to pretend to give up polygamy in order to get Utah admitted to the Union.
The most notable Mormon in recent events is one Mitt "Mittens" Romney, former governor of Massachusetts and recent GOP presidential hopeful. Except for a short stint whipping the Salt Lake City Olympics into shape, Mitt has never actually lived in Utah.
Utah is notorious for having the largest concentration of poor Republicans in the country (around Provo and American Fork particularly) as well as being the largest per capita consumers of Jello and Prozac. Their Dutch oven cooking is pretty awesome though.
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[edit] Indigenous creatures
- Mormons
- Ski bums
- Desert rats
- Jack Mormons
- Whacky fundamentalist Mormon splinter groups
- The steady stream of gamblers who clog I-80 west to the casinos in West Wendover, Nevada, every weekend
- The steady stream of gamblers who clog I-80 east to the Wyoming Downs Racetrack and OTB Parlor in Evanston, Wyoming.
[edit] Fun facts
- Of the United States, Utah has the biggest fraud problem. Sen. Ben McAdams, D-Salt Lake City noted that the FBI is investigating $1.4 billion in fraud cases in Utah alone. He quipped that "our fraud industry is double the size of our ski industry."
- Utah's state highway sign is supposed to look like a beehive, an homage to the state's nickname, The Beehive State, as well as Utah's original name, "Deseret," which supposedly means "honeybee" in the language of the Nephites, a tribe in the Book of Mormon. In reality, it just kind of looks like a ribbed condom with a hole in it, possibly an expression of the Mormon church attitude toward birth control.
- You can't detonate nuclear bombs in Utah[1] (if you somehow manage to legally own one).
- Utah is the only state where a church-owned university has the largest enrollment. Brigham Young University has about 35,000 students, while the University of Utah (the state's second largest school) has about 29,000 students.
- Of the five states that were originally independent countries before joining the Union (the other four being Hawaii, Texas, Vermont, and California), Utah is the only one that was at war with the United States at any point before joining[2] — prior to annexation the Mormon inhabitants waged a low-intensity guerrilla conflict known as the 'Mormon War' or 'Utah War' against American interests in the area. The war had no full-scale battles and mostly consisted of Mormon militias killing American civilians and seizing their property.
- Fort Douglas, the army base outside of Salt Lake City, was originally founded to discourage secessionist tendencies in the Mormon population, and is the only fort ever constructed in an American city whose guns point down at the city rather than away from it.
- The Great Salt Lake is really, really salty (between 5% and 27% salinity, depending on location and time of year), but it's still not as salty as the Dead Sea. It will eventually dry up and become part of the neighboring Bonneville Salt Flats, where all the land speed records are set.
- The Great Salt Lake is where 99% of the world's source of brine shrimp (or "sea monkeys") come from. Every year from October to February of the next year, two companies (who hold the dipoly on harvesting) descend on the lake to harvest the Brine Shrimp eggs. Workers are forced to live on site, work seven seventeen to eighteen hour days a week, and are only paid one hundred twenty dollars a day. (Which depending on the work load, averages well below the national minimum wage.) Due to the distance between the lake and any nearby city, it is not uncommon for workers who are injured on the job, or who become violently ill, to be made to wait a full day before their employer can be bothered to take them to the hospital.
- The single largest industry in Utah is dietary supplement manufacture.[3] This is due in no small part to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch's support for the quack industry.[4] Hatch co-sponsored the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, which spawned the industry.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ http://www.stupidlaws.com/it-is-illegal-to-detonate-any-nuclear-weapon/
- ↑ Excluding, of course, Vermont's long-simmering guerrilla conflict against New York before the American Revolution.
- ↑ Dietary supplements become Utah’s #1 industry, topping $7.2 billion
- ↑ Support Is Mutual for Senator and Utah Industry
