Fun:Iowa


 * Were you looking for Hell? Pretty much the same thing, though.

...which is a good description of the fire-and-ice climate. Places Rated Almanac once rated Waterloo as the having the worst climate not in an Artic, high mountain, or hot desert location for having Arctic winters, being in Tornado Alley in the spring, and having hot, humid summers little different from those of Arkansas. The temperature records for April alone are -4 F and 100 F, suggesting that one can get frostbite and heatstroke in the same month in Iowa -- and encounter a tornado as a bonus. Yuck!

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.

Famous Iowans
Is this heaven? No, it's Iowa.

This is a head-scratcher, since nobody from Iowa actually wants to be associated with the place. They either get out or want you to think they got out. As the immortal Johnny Cash (who was actually from Arkansas) once sang, "Got trapped by a girl but I wiggled free." Good move, that.


 * Country/CB radio singer C.W. McCall is from Iowa, although he wanted you to believe he was from Colorado.
 * Captain Kirk, who went all the way to outer space to escape Iowa (though William Shatner is from Canada)
 * William "Buffalo Bill" Cody, who is better known for having a Wyoming town and an upstate New York football team named after him. So he's actually from Iowa? Who woulda thunk?
 * Radar O'Reilly (but Gary Burghoff is from Connecticut)
 * John Wayne (just don't mention the name Marion)
 * Michelle Bachmann, who seems to share a lot of the wonderful qualities of Joni Ernst.
 * Steve King. The right-wing noise factory is spreading KKK culture to the north. And the dipshits who swallow it think this is conservative culture. Sadly, he's never going to get voted out. He represents the largest trailer park in the Midwest (also known as Sioux City).
 * John Wayne Gacy. He was actually born in Illinois and only lived in Iowa for 4-5 years.
 * Slipknot, a heavy metal band that, for some strange reason, has 9 members.
 * Clair Patterson, who isn't actually that famous at all, but should be.
 * Bill Bryson, the hilarious writer who can inject humor into everything (and we do mean everything), is from Des Moines.

Politics
Iowa is the third state in the Union (and the first flyover interior state) to adopt full marriage equality when its Supreme Court unanimously struck down a ban on same-sex marriage on April 3, 2009, provoking a recall of several of its Justices. Iowa was once a moderate state, having voted 6 out of 9 times as a Democratic state from 1988-2020. As of late however, it appears to be going the direction of Missouri, voting for Trump by 8 points, even as he lost nationally, making 2020 the first election since 1976 that Iowa voted incorrectly for a Republican. Iowa has one Tea Party Republican (Joni Ernst) and one occasionally sane Republican (Chuck Grassley) in the Senate, and all four of its members of the House of Representatives are Republicans (in 2020 Republicans flipped 2 of the state's House seats, therefore attaining a majority, one of them by six votes, and in 2022 the remaining blue seat was flipped in another very close election. Fortunately, Steve King was defeated in a primary, the sole Republican to (narrowly) survive the 2018 midterm elections). For reasons yet unknown, it suffers barbarian invasions like clockwork every four years.

The zeroth rule of being a politician in Iowa is do not say anything that could possibly be construed as disrespecting farmers. This goes without saying, which is why it comes before the first rule. Braley's implosion was so bad, you can bet it cost the "downticket" Dems at least a district or two, as well. He was a shoo-in for senator because he was popular in his district and Joni Ernst was far to the right. If he had merely been mediocre he would have won. It's a wonder how he was ever elected to anything. This is also what probably did Steve King in — being removed from the agriculture committee really hurt his standing in such a rural state and led to him being primaried.