Fun:Indiana

Considering its location, you could say Indiana is the crossroad of America.

Check it out - racecars!!!
Ironically, auto racing and crossroads are a poor mix.

Indiana is a corn-growing state in the upper midwestern United States. The residents are known as Hoosiers. It is sometimes referred to as "The Midwest's South".

Cultural touchstones

• In the capital of Indianapolis, a large city pretending to be small, The Indianapolis 500 is a competition to see who can drive fastest while turning left for 500 miles.
• In 1897 the Indiana State House set the value of pi to 3.2 "If we pass this bill which establishes a new and correct value for pi, the author offers to our state without cost the use of his discovery and its free publication in our school text books, while everyone else must pay him a royalty.'"
• Indiana State Road 9 is Highway of Vice Presidents, from Shelbyville to Columbia City. The reason for the name is that four of Indiana's six Vice Presidents lived in cities along the route:
  • Thomas Hendricks — Grover Cleveland's Vice President (1885) from Shelbyville
  • Thomas Marshall — Woodrow Wilson's Vice President (1913–1921) from Columbia City
  • Dan Quayle — George H.W. Bush's Vice President (1989–1993) from Huntington
  • Mike Pence — Donald J. Trump's Vice President (2017—2021) from Columbus
• New Harmony was an early experiment in utopian communal living, hampered by crank monetary ideas.
• A community of pugilistic Irishmen (mostly between the ages of 18 to 23) living in a Parisian church.
• The magnificent Auburn, Cord, and Duesenberg automobiles were made in Auburn, Indiana. Studebaker, with more mixed results, were made mostly in South Bend. So was the awful Crosley, which resembles the infamous East German Trabant of about thirty years later.
• Basketball great Larry Bird is from French Lick. Writers James Whitcomb Riley (Greenfield), Gene Stratton Porter (Lagro), and Kurt Vonnegut (Indianapolis); comedian Red Skelton (Vincennes), screen actors James Dean (Marion) and Florence Henderson (Dale) who is best known as the matriarch Carol Brady in The Brady Bunch; astronaut Frank Borman and musical superstar Michael Jackson were also from Gary, Indiana.
• Regrettably, so was master bank robber and escape artist John Dillinger.
• The First Baptist Church of Hammond, a creepy cult megachurch affiliated with the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist movement that has produced several pastors directly linked to sexual assaults against children and other serious crimes.
• Beat the South at their own game: the Ku Klux Klan were a powerful force in the late 1910s-early 1920s, to the point that much of the state government had Klan members or sympathizers. About 30% of native-born white men in Indiana were members of the Klan at the time.
• The highly-successful TV comedy Parks and Recreation is set in the fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana. The "crop-dusting" scene in North By Northwest, and much of Close Encounters of the Third Kind are both set in Indiana.

As an American laboratory of privatization

The Indiana Toll Road is what the British would call a "motorway" and what Germans would call an "autobahn." Many Americans would call it a "freeway", but that would be technically incorrect since you must pay a toll to drive on it. The Toll Road is part of a network of toll roads that runs from the South Side of Chicago, Illinois to Boston, Massachusetts. The highway, which predates President Eisenhower's Interstate Highway system, was incorporated into that system rather than build nearby parallel freeways. (The route of Interstate 90 was overlaid onto the entire route of the Toll Road. Interstate 80 also overlays the Toll Road from Lake Station to the Ohio state line.)

In 2006, thanks to the eternal hard-on for privatization that seems to afflict all Republicans and too many Democrats, Governor Mitch Daniels and the GOP-led statehouse leased the publicly owned Toll Road to two foreign companies that specialize in operating toll roads -- Macquarie Group of Australia and Cintra of Spain. Between 2006 and 2011, the toll on the Toll Road -- which hadn't increased by so much as a penny since the 1980s -- doubled, with most of the increase going to the foreign investors. According to the Huffington Post, the lease agreement allows Macquarie and Cintra to "raise the toll annually at one of three rates -- at a flat two percent, at the percentage increase in the consumer price index or at the percentage increase in gross domestic product -- whichever is highest." The lease will expire in 2081; however, the current operator has gone into bankruptcy, and plans to sell off the lease to pay off its debts.

Red State

Indiana is an unusually red state, given its location in the traditionally purple Midwest. Even Bill Clinton failed to carry the state in either of his two elections, despite winning every other Great Lakes state as well as winning much of the American south. From 1940 through 2020, Indiana would only vote Democratic twice: in LBJ's 1964 landslide over Barry Goldwater and in 2008, when the severity of the financial crisis in the region, propelled Barack Obama to score a very narrow upset win over John McCain. Considering how the GOP has increased their strength in the Midwest, making states like Iowa and Ohio safe pickups, Indiana in many ways just foreshadowed a trend.

In perfect respect to the Establishment Clause, Indiana sells license plates with the words "In God We Trust" as part of the design, because apparently none of the Christians involved in that decision had ever read Matthew 6:1, 5-8. Interestingly, this alleged trust in God does not prevent most of the drivers from driving five miles under the speed limit. Indiana highways would generally be much safer if they had broader shoulders as in neighboring Michigan and Ohio even without the promotion of religious faith.

Famous Indianans

• Mike Pence
• William Dudley Pelley
• Matthew Heimbach
• Dan Quayle

Gallery

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  At the Indianapolis 500.

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  Gary, the most miserable city in the country.

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  Indiana Dunes State Park

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  All letters that are addressed to Santa Claus are sent here.

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  Duesenberg, a magnificent car manufactured in Auburn, Indiana.