I Owe You One

As you may or may not know, I live in California. And since 99.999% of "Californians" are not from California, the question that inevitably comes up is, "Where are you from, originally?" When I answer Iowa, I am treated to a series confused notions of the Midwest. I told the last person that I had given up defending my home state, so I'll give it one last go and send interested parties a photocopy when the need arises.

Lets start clearing up some of those misconceptions:

1) Iowa is the Buckeye state and you guys grow megatons of potatoes.
It may be tough for all you coasters out there to wrap your tongues around all those vowels, but in order those states are Ohio (oh-hi-oh), Idaho (I-duh-ho) and Iowa (I-oh-uh). Iowa is the one that grows corn and lots of it.

2) Iowa is soooo flat, like I mean soooooo flat. Sorry, contestant, you may have been thinking of other midwestern states such as Nebraska or possibly Kansas. As a matter of fact, some of my fellow scientists have proved that Kansas is actually flatter than a pancake.

3) Iowa is the most developed state in the nation, that must be soooo depressing to look at (I wouldn't even dignify this as a misconception except for the fact that someone actually said this to me). For anyone whose knowledge of where food comes from goes no further than the CostCo parking lot, it turns out that crops have to be grown somewhere and Iowa happens to be one of those prime spots and a beautiful one at that as this painting by Grant Wood illustrates (its rolling hills also happen to contradict that point above as well).

4) If you build it they will come... Contrary to popular belief, if you do in fact build an indoor rainforest in Iowa, people will not actually come to see it. OK, I admit it, nobody outside of Iowa ever had that misconception.

What else can I say:

Iowa, certified by Frodo and approved by the Kutch!

This post brought to you by the Iowa tourism board!