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Al_4_ISU

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Everything posted by Al_4_ISU

  1. We have a ton of rail trails. Within 30 miles of my house there are about 180 miles of rail trails, both in Iowa and Minnesota. It's one reason I have 0 intentions of leaving.
  2. Dubuque has been gentrified but in a way that makes it feel pretty vibrant. I'm about 90 miles NW of there on the Minnesota border (and an hour from Wisconsin) in similar hilly terrain. Dubuque is a good example of one of Iowa's cool, relatively unknown places. It has a great cycling trail (the Heritage Trail) for road bikes, a really good mountain biking scene with a whole new park that opened a couple of years ago, a ski hill with similar vertical drop to what you'd find in the UP of Michigan, some excellent food options, a couple of really good breweries, and a cool downtown that features a lot of old and restored architecture that's much more reminiscent of an older city in the eastern US than it is of a Midwestern/Plains state city. It's not a vacation destination for people outside the area, but it's a really fun place to live nearby and go to for a Saturday.
  3. It's just cold. The weather was fine besides that. It takes very little effort to put on a heavy coat, drive your warm car to the caucus place, and walk 100' into a heated building. There is a very real fatigue of the current political climate, and the people at the top of it. From 2016-2021 I saw Trump shit everywhere. There has been a slow decline to where it's down to just a handful of nuts still making displays. Did these people become Biden voters? No. But there seems to be mounting evidence of people just kinda punching out. If 15-20% of previous Trump voters just don't turn out this fall, it's going to make a real difference nationally.
  4. I’d never claim Texas. Not cause I don’t like it - I enjoy many parts of the state and its people and cultural contributions - but I’m about as dyed in the wool of an Iowan/Midwesterner as you get. Just seems some days that I might be the last of a dying breed. My grandpa was a state representative for 20 years. He was and still is a Democrat. He has no college education, joined the Marines a month before the Korean cease fire, and then came home to farm. Guys like this used to vote Democrat in the Midwest. Not all, or even a majority, but enough that we could be purple politically. Now most of them either died or turned hard to the right. I’m very much of that political outlook and tradition and it crushes me to see the turn. He had a friend who was a Republican state rep from Alaska who would come down here to hunt pheasant in the 90’s. He’d always say “Iowa Democrats are just Republicans that don’t want you to die” and I think about that a lot.
  5. There’s plenty of cool shit that no one knows about here, especially in the part of the state where I live. I love my low COL and unfettered access to beautiful outdoor recreation as well as having some thriving small towns with solid food options and legitimately world class breweries. But our politics have gone to shit and I’m grasping at straws on that one. I wish I could write off Trump voters as bad or stupid people, but I know too many who aren’t either. Just got to live through this.
  6. Lots of those teams playing each other this week. Man, it would be nice tomorrow if BYU would have one of those nights where they can't hit shit from 3, because I think we can bully the fuck out of them everywhere else.
  7. Minnesota didn't have the space in the current location to do something like that, and they legitimately utilize that whole football field space for a lot of shit in the winter. My cousin's wife is one of the event coordinators for the stadium, and they have stuff going on in there all the time that I had zero awareness of. As much as I hate that taxpayers are faced with funding the stadium or losing their team, I do think in this particular instance that they're generating a lot of usefulness from the facility despite my disdain for indoor football, particularly when you have harsh outdoor elements to embrace.
  8. It would be a huge headache to manage in winter. The Brewers are the only northern pro sports team I can think of that uses one, and they have to deal with snow maybe every 4 years or snow during the season.
  9. I really wish that Minnesota, Detroit, and Indy would have built outdoor stadiums. Part of the issue in Minnesota was that it's a taxpayer funded facility (I guess the others probably are too) and they needed to make it indoors to have shit like boat shows, concerts, etc through the winter to drive revenue.
  10. You have to be pretty pleased with the season thus far. Meant to watch your game today but got busy.
  11. Turned into a snoozer after a shaky first 10 minutes. I’ll allow it.
  12. He’s assuredly been drinking since he woke up, and not casually either. Basically, his blood has too much alcohol in it to freeze. You’re the doctor here, but it makes sense to me.
  13. I feel like that guy is a breathing avatar of the complete insanity that underlies any Midwestern lifer.
  14. Death, taxes, Otz losing to the Pokes in Hilton
  15. I’ve been pushing snow since 4AM. Wife has a crock pot beef stew with copious amounts of garlic and onion and a glorious looking chuck roast from my buddy’s cow. It’s planned for supper
  16. I got it once. It was about -15/20 outside and we got called to a fire at an autobody shop. It was full of all sorts of explosive flammable shit and cars, so we set up outside and just poured water on the fucker at enough of a distance to not really be warmed by the flame. I was a rookie at the time and didn't get to go in either. A little patch of exposed skin below my eye got it, and it was probably 2 years before it finally cleared up completely, but it was never that severe.
  17. Don't even get me started on the fuckery of modern tornado warnings.
  18. I feel like we get advisories we shouldn't all the time. If it gets down to 0 we get a "life threatening cold alert". If it gets over 90 we get a "heat warning advisory". It's Iowa. We get well below 0 every winter and well above 90 every summer. We don't need advisories for either, and I'm frankly a tad insulted that NWS thinks we do.
  19. As someone who lives in the rural Midwest and did so in 2019, surveillance cameras still aren't super common in general - with a couple of exceptions: 1) trail cams for hunting, and 2) the ones paranoid fucks put up on their property. The Tillman ranch would likely have them for both purposes in 2019.
  20. There are obvious political overtones to this show. Why should we have to dance around that in a thread about the show?
  21. Yeah, in 2019 Roy Tillman is getting invited to the White House and given a Medal of Honor. Probably being recruited as a running mate.
  22. I went to a Vikings game late last year and saw absolutely no obviously stupid fan behavior. I hadn't been since 2014, and that day the first thing I encountered were 2 guys in Zubaz who had passed out and pissed themselves next to the elevator. It was night and day.
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