The Most Boring, Stupid, and Heterosexist State Songs

At every school assembly when I was a kid in Rock Island, we had to sing the state song.  You were also forced to sing it at football games, wrestling matches, and political rallies:

By thy rivers gently flowing, Illinois, Illinois,
O'er the prairies verdant growing, Illinois, Illinois,
Comes an echo on the breeze.
Rustling through the leafy trees, and its mellow tones are these, Illinois, Illinois.

Has any state song been more reviled and made fun of?

Yep.  Across the river, Iowa's state song is just as bad, if not worse:

From yonder Misissippi's stream
To where Missouri's waters gleam
O! fair it is as poet's dream, Iowa, in Iowa.


Who decided that states should have official songs to be foisted upon schoolchildren and the audiences of football teams, and who decided that they should be uniformly so awful?  And heterosexist?

I took it upon myself to read the lyrics of all 50+ state songs (some have more than one).

It was dismal.  Song after song of nonsense.

This state is full of badgers, this state is full of sod,
This state is full of sandwiches, this state is under God.

New York's is hands-down the stupidest:

New York is special. New York is diff'rent' cause there's no place else on Earth quite like New York and that's why I love New York.

What, "Start spreading the word, I'm leaving today" was taken?

Contrary to what you might think, it was not composed by a 5-year old, but by Steve Karmen, an accomplished tv commercial jingle writer: "Aren't you glad you use Dial?", "When you say Budweiser," "The Great American chocolate bar."

Maryland's state song is grotesquely bloody:

Avenge the patriotic gore that flecked the streets of Baltimore,
And be the battle queen of yore, Maryland! My Maryland!

Colorado's is all about mass extinction due to global warming:

The bison is gone from the upland, the deer from the canyon has fled,
The home of the wolf is deserted, the antelope moans for his dead

Fortunately, they replaced it with John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High" in 2007.







And over half are disgustingly heterosexist, making schoolkids and football teams sing about "Aren't you glad everybody is heterosexual?  Aren't you glad those pesky gay people don't exist?"

 How many times have you heard Indiana's "On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away," without knowing who ir what was on that riverbank?  Some guy's dead girlfriend:

Long years have passed since I strolled thro' the churchyard.
She's sleeping there, my angel, Mary dear,
I loved her, but she thought I didn't mean it,
Still I'd give my future were she only here.

Georgia has Ray Charles' "Georgia On My Mind," in which the guy thinks of his ex-girlfriend while he's in bed with other women.

Other arms reach out to me, other eyes smile tenderly
Still in the peaceful dreams I see the road leads back to you

By the way, when you google "Georgia football player shirtless," what you get is Darian Alvarez, a soccer player from Honduras.  Not that I'm complaining.

Before countering with "South Carolina On My Mind" in 1984, South Carolina's state song was a little more graphic about the guy's girlfriend getting with other guys..

Thy skirts indeed the foe may part,
Thy robe be pierced with sword and dart,
They shall not touch thy noble heart!

After that, Michigan's state song about lost love is sort of a relief.  The girlfriend is receding into the distance, while the guy moans  "What am I supposed to do without you?"

Tennessee has "The Tennessee Waltz," which we had to sing in grade-school music class; "I was dancing with my darling, etc., etc."  Missouri has "The Missouri Waltz," which has a whole complicated story about a father reminiscing to his children about his wife or ex-wife or something.

Oklahoma adopted "Oklahoma," from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, which is all about getting married and moving to the land stolen from the Indians:

Ev'ry night my honey lamb and I
Sit alone and talk and watch a hawk makin' lazy circles in the sky

Um...you know that hawk is searching for small animals to kill and eat, right?

Utah's state song is all about Brigham Young, Family with a capital F, and the "No Child Left Behind" Act.

Utah! With its focus on family,
Utah! Helps each child to succeed.
People care how they live.
Each has so much to give.
This is the place!

I just wish these guys were from Mississippi, so there'd be ten of them.

No state song extolled same-sex friendship, and the only one with any beefcake was Alabama's, mentioning two Native American heroes with muscular physiques:

Fair thy Coosa-Tallapoosa
Bold thy Warrior, dark and strong,
Alabama, Alabama, we will aye be true to thee!

Whoops, my mistake.  Those are both rivers.

Still, I imagine that grade school kids in Alabama have a lot of fun thinking of dirty meanings to Coosa-Tallapoosa.

Beefcake at the Top of Iowa

I've lived on the Plains for 5 years, which means that I've crossed "The Top of Iowa" about 12 times. It is becoming a place of pleasant memories, but I was my pleasant memories are due to traveling through twice a year, and then going somewhere else.  Are permanent residents .  Are real residents overcome by poverty and ennui?  Or worse, homophobia and Islamophobia?

1. Enter Iowa on the I-35 just south of Albert Lea, Minnesota.

2. Stop at the big red barn rest stop next to the Diamond Jo Casino.    It has a gift shop with tacky "I'm in Iowa!" knicknacks, and an ice cream store upstairs and a lot of sculpted grounds, where you can see some of the cutest guys on Earth.

Northwood, Iowa, population 2,000, features a park on the Shell Rock River, some brew pubs, the Rock-a-Billies Bar, and the Northwood-Kensit Junior-Senior High.

Searching for wrestling or swimming team photos proved fruitless, but I did find a track player.

So far, rather disappointing.

3. Turn onto State Route 3, go east and south to Iowa Falls: an art center displaying local artists, a huge antique store, a restaurant serving old fashioned phosphates, a Chinese restaurant, and more of the cutest guys on Earth.

Oddly, Iowa Falls has a college, Ellsworth Community College, with a wrestling team, but no high school.

For beefcake photos, I had to do a search for a local, then check out his Facebook friends.

Not great.  Craggy, tattooed, scary-looking guys smoking cigars and drinking out of coconuts.

And the memes.  One of the scary guys had memes saying:
 "Kneel for America!"
"When the time comes, I will give my life to defend America from Islam!"
"One nation under God, not Allah!"

I can only imagine his opinion of LGBT people.

Ok, I don't need to imagine with this hottie:
"Male and female.  The end."

Brr.  Let's move on.

4. Go south from Iowa Falls, then east on Highway 20, a long stretch with no rest stops except for The Mill, a windmill-shaped travel store with weird tacky gifts, a Godfather's Pizza, and a Subway.  More cute guys.  Its address is Holland, Iowa, a small town about 5 miles away, but the nearest town is actually Dike.

Dike, Iowa, has no dike, or any large body of water nearby; it was named for the railroad engineer Thomas Dike.  But it does have a high school, a public library, a restaurant called Slice, two churches, and a town motto: "A Slice of Iowa."  It features Watermelon Days in August and a "Razzle Dazzle" festival just after Thanksgiving.

The only photo from Dike that even started to display a physique was this one from a professional photographer, depicting a redheaded cross-country runner.

5. Continue on Highway 20 to Waterloo, then south to Cedar Rapids, 100 miles north of Rock Island, the farthest edge of my world when I was a kid.  From here it's all intimately familiar. 

I guess the cutest guys in the world are just passing through.

Home Town Beefcake #2: The Iowa Side

The Quad Cities is the cluster of four major cities and dozens of towns and villages on the Mississippi River between Illinois and Iowa.  I grew up in Rock Island on the Illinois side, and didn't have much cause to cross the river into Iowa: an occasional visit to the Putnam Museum or North Park Mall,  or the shops in East Davenport. But I still have fond memories of those occasional visits, so I'm searching for contemporary beefcake.

1.  The biggest city on the Iowa side is Davenport, population 100,000, like two Rock Islands.  Big, brash, urban.  My first boyfriend's apartment.  The Chinese restaurant where I got a sausage sighting.  The adult bookstore where I used to buy porn magazines.

In high school we used to sneak across the river to watch the teens work out at the Davenport Boxing Club, which has been training young boxers since 1924.

Davenport has four public high schools with unimaginative names West, East, Central, and North.  Rocky High didn't play against them, since they were in another universe, but occasionally we had a friend who moved across the river and invited us over.

There were also two parochial high schools, Assumption Catholic and Christ Lutheran.

And St. Ambrose College, where my sister attended for one semester.  It's the alma mater of Seth Rollins, whoever that is.

2. East of Davenport is the last of the official Quad Cities, Bettendorf, which I've already covered in a post.  See The Betten-Dorks of Bettendorf, Iowa


Then come some villages on the Mississippi: Riverdale, LeClaire, and Port Byron, where the students all go to Pleasant Valley High.  Home of the Spartans.

The Strangest Little Schools in Iowa

I thought Florida had a monopoly for oddly-named high schools, but Iowa is a close second.

1. Denver-High School in Denver, near Cedar Rapids.  Named after the city in Colorado for no apparent reason.

2. Wapsie, a farming community on the banks of the Wapsipinicon River, near Cedar Rapids, no longer exists, but it's given its name to Wapsie Valley High School in Fairbank, Iowa.

Sounds like what you say when you drop something.

3.Williamsburg is not the colonial city in Virginia, but a small town on Interstate 80 between Iowa City and Des Moines, draws travelers with its outlet mall.  I've never been tempted, thanks.









But I might want to watch Williamsburg High School football training.

4. Lake Mills High School in Lake Mills, which is nowhere near a lake with that name.  It is near the town of Northwood, with Diamond Jo's Casino and the Iowa Rest Stop, where I had a glimpse of supreme beauty a couple of years ago.

5.  Nearby Manly, one of my favorite adjectives. It's the site of this cute 100-year old Baptist church.















And some manly football players at Manly High.

6. Linn-Mar High sounds like a housing development.  It actually draws students from both Linn County and Marion. 

7. Moc-Floyd High School sounds like you're mocking a guy named Floyd.

8. Riceville High School in Riceville, Iowa, population 502.  They don't actually grow rice in Iowa; it was named after the Rice Brothers.

9. Adel DeSoto Minburn High in Ames sounds like the name of someone with a Hispanic and Scottish ancestry, but it actually draws students from three counties.  DeSoto is named after the conquistador.


10. Indianola High in Indianola, Iowa, south of Des Moines, was named after a town in Texas, which was named after "Indian" and "ola," the Spanish word for "wave."  Unfortunately, the -ola suffix in English is used for commercial products, like floor wax.

The Beefcake of Mount Vernon, Lisbon, and Cornell

The Midwest is dotted with towns named other towns.  The first residents may have come from there, but most likely someone looked in an atlas and thought the name sounded elegant.  Near my home town of Rock Island, we have Milan (pronounced My-lun), Cordova, Cambridge, Yorktown, and Cleveland, Illinois, and over on the Iowa side, Moscow, Andover, Toronto, Delhi, New Vienna, Luxemburg, Durango, Lisbon, and Mount Vernon, the site of Cornell College.

Mount Vernon, originally "Pinhook," was named after the home of George Washington in Virginia in 1847.    There actually is a "mountain," a 100-foot ridge which allows for some nice views of the surrounding countryside.  It's a college town, with the usual assortment of gyms (with the hot personal trainer in the top photo), used bookstores, brew pubs, and restaurant/taverns:  Chameleon's, the Skillet, and the aptly named Scorz Bar.  There's also a barn painted with an image of Grant Wood's American Gothic, if you're into that.

The high school has a robotics club and a trap shooting club, but no gay group (P.R.I.D.E. is something else).  It is unusual for schools in the Midwest for offering water polo.

It might also offer crew, but that might be the one in Mount Vernon, Virginia.

Adjacent to Mount Vernon is the town of Lisbon, named after the city in Portugal in 1851, for no apparent reason.  There is no Portuguese heritage.

I think the high school offers wrestling and track, but that might be the Lisbon High in Lisbon Falls, Maine.

You can tell by the mascot, a lion in Iowa, a greyhound in Maine.

Or not.

This was the only male swimmer.

But the area's main draw is Cornell College, originally the Iowa Conference Seminary  of the United Methodist Church.  The name was changed to Cornell in 1853 in honor of Methodist philanthropist William Wesley Cornell.


 No connection to Cornell University in New York, which was founded by another Cornell, Ezra, in 1865. 

Cornell has recently begun a block system, in which you take one class at a time. For instance, in fall semester 2018 block four (Aug 27 - Sept 19), you could take Medusa's  Gaze:Art in the Age of Galileo, Food and Sex in Evolutionary Perspective, Shakespeare and Freedom, and The Scientific Secrets of Crystals and Gems.

It beats Introduction to Western Civilization I.

I think it offers wrestling, swimming, powerlifting, and track, but that might be the university in New York.








You can tell by the uniforms, red vs. purple.

Or not.

I dated a Cornell art history professor, the Son of Mr. Blowfish, who kept wanting to do things in public.  The story is on Tales of West Hollywood.

The Scrappy Wrestlers of Fort Dodge

"Fan Reaction to National Wrestling Title."

The article goes on to say that Drake, from Fort Dodge, Iowa, claimed gold at the 2017 Cadet Freestyle National Championships.

Fan reaction was ecstatic, by the way:
"Natty Champ!"
"Unbelievable comeback"
 "One tough SOB!"
"Congratulations for winning Fargo dominantly!"

But doesn't he look a little...um...thin to be a high school wrestler?  Who is winning national championships?  And has fans?

I looked him up:  Drake has been attending Fort Dodge High School, where he's been very busy racking up championships in 2018, the War at West Gym, the Independence Graeco-Roman Tournament, the Northern Plains Regional, and so on.

I guess thin and scrappy is just as good as buffed.

Compare with some of his teammates.

Drew also looks rather on the thin side.

Harlan has a presentable physique.

Jonah looks rather thin.

Brody, too.

And Cullen.

Sam has a physique.  That's 2 out of 7.  I guess Fort Dodge wrestling goes for scrappiness rather than strength.

















And football goes for bulk.