Joe Biden — who declared Juneteenth a federal holiday — celebrates Juneteenth.

At the Reedy Church, yesterday, in Galveston, Texas:

"Delaware is a strange state. Delaware is the first state, but it also is a state that was a slave state, by great shame. But it fought on the side of the North, and it didn't get to the South like Maryland and two other states. And so even when the when we did Juneteenth, didn't affect people in Delaware because they weren't they weren't in the Confederacy nor the Confederate. Wasn't until the Emancipation Proclamation was occurred. What I'm trying to say is that uh I uh I I just learned a lot in the community and uh that's where I worked on East Side that's why I worked as a lawyer and that's why I got involved in public life...."

The actual fact he didn't even approach is that the Emancipation Proclamation didn't abolish slavery in Delaware. It took the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery in Delaware, so on Juneteenth — June 19, 1865 — the Delaware slaves were still slaves. The Thirteenth Amendment was not ratified until December 6, 1865. 

But here's Joe Biden in Galveston on Juneteenth, talking about Delaware, calling it a strange state, and not getting anywhere near what's so strange about Delaware that relates to Juneteenth.

Meanwhile, President Trump "celebrated" Juneteenth by writing this on Truth Social: "Too many non-working holidays in America. It is costing our Country $BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to keep all of these businesses closed. The workers don’t want it either! Soon we’ll end up having a holiday for every once working day of the year. It must change if we are going to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"

"He awoke to the sound of water dripping into a rusted sink. The streets below were bathed in medieval moonlight, reverberating silence."

"He lay there grappling with the terror of beauty, as the night unfolded like a Chinese screen. He lay shuddering, riveted by flickering movements of aliens and angels as the words and melodies of 'Marquee Moon' were formed, drop by drop, note by note, from a state of calm yet sinister excitement. He was Tom Verlaine, and that was his process: exquisite torment. Born Thomas Joseph Miller, raised in Wilmington, Delaware, he left his parental home and shed his name, a discarded skin curled in the corner of a modest garage among stacks of used air-conditioners that required his father’s constant professional attention...."

 
Writes Patti Smith in "He Was Tom Verlaine/Patti Smith remembers her friend, who possessed the child’s gift of transforming a drop of water into a poem that somehow begat music" (The New Yorker).

"It creates a little mystique about the city... It creates great curiosity about the city — people coming by all the time wanting to know what is going on, tell me about your city.""

"Wilmington has always been on I-95 between Washington, Philly and New York, you know."

Said Michael S. Purzycki, the mayor of Wilmington, Delaware — where I was born — quoted in "After Centuries of Obscurity, Wilmington Is Having a Moment/Joe Biden’s hometown, known chiefly for its dull, corporate vibe, has become the center of the political universe. Residents are thrilled" (NYT).

He compared its famously dull, corporate vibe to the unvarying “Mad Men” uniform worn by the legions of lawyers and chemical engineers who once populated its downtown: “a white shirt, a sincere tie and 12-pound wingtips.” 

“It was not a creative culture,” he said. “It was pretty predictable, stay within the guard rails.” 

The main mystery about the place seems to be identifying something, anything, that distinctly says “Wilmington.” Ask residents to name a unique feature and the universal response is a long pause....

This mayor is kind of annoying! How do you get to be mayor with such a sadsack attitude toward your city. I left there more than a half century ago, and I wouldn't take that tone. And I don't like the knee-jerk putdown of lawyers and chemical engineers. My father was a chemical engineer, and I don't think you should be overly obsequious about the "creative culture." Plus, it makes no sense to say "stay within the guard rails." Guard rails are put up to keep reckless people from going over the precipice. If people are actually acculturated to follow rules and norms, the trite expression might be "color within the lines." But everyone stays within the guard rails. That's the idea of guard rails! This man bothers me. Feeding quotes like that to the NYT! Your city finally catches the eye of the world and you have nothing to offer. 

I like that the NYT article begins with a photograph of the Charcoal Pit — even though the picture shows the sign with the first 3 letters burnt out. The caption calls it a "local favorite" of Joe Biden's. It is the Wilmington restaurant for me. I've written about it from time to time, including the when Joe Biden confused Delaware's declaration of independence from Pennsylvania with Delaware's ratification of the Constitution. He said: "We declared our independence on December the 7th." Which just by chance is today. Delaware Day. (It's also Pearl Harbor Day.) How could you grow up in Delaware and not know about Delaware Day? At the time, I said, "Maybe he was seated at the next table [from young me] at the Charcoal Pit."

"An eight-foot tall whipping post has been removed from outside the Sussex County Courthouse in Georgetown, Delaware."

"The Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs (HCA) said the post had been used to bind and whip people for crimes up until 1952, with African Americans being punished disproportionately" — 6ABC reports.

I remember growing up in Delaware and talking about whipping still being on the books as a form of punishment. Exactly how did we experience that? Hard to remember, but I think it just seemed weird, something odd about our state. It was something that wasn't actually used, but it could be. It was there. You never know!

Delaware abolished the punishment of whipping in 1972, but keeping it on display was apparently considered valuable as a matter of history. But, the director of the Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs, Tim Slavin says it ought "to be preserved in the state's collections, so that future generations may view it and attempt to understand the full context of its historical significance," but....

"It's quite another thing to allow a whipping post to remain in place along a busy public street - a cold, deadpan display that does not adequately account for the traumatic legacy it represents, and that still reverberates among communities of color in our state."

Interesting use of the word "deadpan," which I feel as though I've only ever seen as a way to deliver comic lines, and obviously there was no comedy behind the stark presence of the whipping post. But "deadpan" simply refers to the expressionless face, and the missing expression can just as well be disapproval or regret.

But something is lost when the notorious object is removed from its historical place. You can no longer go there and see and touch it and say, right here, this is where Delaware whipped its convicted criminals, and imagine that happening to you, perhaps contemplating whether you might prefer a minute of whipping to a year in prison.

From a 2013 Delaware Today article:

"We all know that Trump is a bully. But I say, I’m a New Yorker, and I know how to deal with bullies. I did it all the time. I’m not afraid of Trump and he knows it."

Said Mike Bloomberg, quoted in "Wounded but defiant, Bloomberg promises to keep fighting."

I don't think any of the Democratic candidates are afraid of Trump. They all say he's a bully and offer to stand up to him. The question isn't whether they're afraid, but whether they are capable of fighting to a win. Bloomberg's real answer on that question is that he's got all that money. And that he's more capable than the other finalists not because he's a fierce debater, but because he's moderate and normal.

By the way, I'd like to look at the new Bloomberg ads. Why can't I find a YouTube page that just gives me all his ads? Is it that the campaign wants to force me to go through a page where I give them my information (which I don't want to do), or is that they have targeted ads and they don't want me to see the ads that are targeting other people?

ADDED: About that "I’m a New Yorker" business. Sanders is also a New Yorker. I'm interested in the way United Statesians find important meaning in their particular state affiliation. Amy Klobuchar presents her Minnesotanosity as a compelling qualification. Buttigieg has some belligerent pride in Indiana. Biden finds meaning in Pennsylvania and Delaware. Warren goes all Oklahoma on us. They all act as though their particular state gives them special powers.

I like this about America, but it is a form of prejudice. It's apparently an acceptable prejudice, this notion that my state is superior to the other states, that I'm better than other people because I come from this state. I've lived in New York and experienced the New Yorker's attitude of superiority. I happen to come from Delaware, and I've learned that people don't think much of the Delaware person (unless it's a corporation), but I grew up thinking we were very special because Delaware is The First State. Like: We're #1.

But I learned long ago that no one outside of Delaware cares at all about that. New Yorkers, on the other hand, never let go of the belief that in their own superiority. You see that in Bloomberg. Who's nearly 80. And who's trying to convince the people in all those other states that he's their guy. He expects them to be awed by his superiority. But he was crushed at the debate. Where's the superiority?

Maybe he's too sophisticated to take the bait. These people can't make me mad. If you can find video that shows Bloomberg's face when Elizabeth Warren says "horse-faced lesbians" — most video shows only her at that moment — you'll see he does not look the slightest bit alarmed or intimidated. There's a slight smirk, like he still thinks his joke is funny or thinks Warren is merely amusing in bringing it up.

"They held a town pageant in Arden, Delaware, on September 5, 1910... One Ardenite, an anarchist shoemaker named George Brown, played a beggar."

"This annoyed some of the other players, because no such role had actually been written. But Brown decided to add it to the program anyway, so he dressed in rags, caked himself with mud, and invaded the proceedings, taunting the other characters and demanding alms from the audience. Many 'onlookers needed assurance,' The Single Tax Review reported, that Brown 'was only "part of the show."' This was a pattern: Brown liked to talk, and not everyone liked to listen to him. According to the novelist Upton Sinclair, who lived at the time in a little Arden house that his neighbors had dubbed the Jungalow, Brown insisted on 'discussing sex questions' at the Arden Economic Club. When the club asked him to cut it out, Brown declared his free-speech right to continue and kept talking until he'd broken up the meeting. He broke up the next meeting too, and finally, Sinclair wrote, 'declared it his intention to break up all future meetings.' At this point some of the locals wanted to have him arrested for disturbing the peace. But that required outside help, because the town of Arden did not have a police force. In fact, the town of Arden didn't have a government at all.... [E]veryone involved in the George Brown caper of 1911 is long dead. Yet Arden is still here, a little shire surrounded by an otherwise ordinary suburban landscape...."

I'm reading "Delaware's Odd, Beautiful, Contentious, Private Utopia/Arden is a suburb, an artist's colony, and a radical political experiment" by Jesse Walker at Reason.com.

I'm reading about Arden — here, in pre-dawn Madison, Wisconsin — because Meade and I were talking about growing up in the early 1960s, when you saw lots of kids outside playing all the time. I was thinking about the Arden store, where I blew my allowance every week on penny candy....



... which I ate all at once on that porch. The Arden Store, on the edge of Arden, was about 3 blocks from where I lived, in what Reason called the "ordinary suburban landscape." We thought of Arden as a strange place, where the artists lived and where taxation was very different.

The Single Taxers were followers of Henry George, a 19th century economist who argued that government should be financed solely by a tax on land values. No income tax, no sales tax, no tax on the improvements to a property—just one tax on land. The campaigners crisscrossed the state in armbands, knapsacks, and Union Army uniforms, delivering streetcorner speeches and singing Single Tax songs ("Get the landlords off your backs/With our little Single Tax/And there's lots of fun ahead for Delaware!").... The invasion was a flop.... 

"Because of Bob’s mixed blood, he was often teased as 'the little yellow boy' or 'the German boy.' He was described as shy, resourceful, and clever."

"In 1957, Marley and his mother moved to Kingston, settling in a dense, ramshackle neighborhood referred to as Trench Town. Marley fell in with a crowd that dreamed of making music. He formed a group with Neville (Bunny Wailer) Livingston, Peter Tosh, Beverley Kelso, and Junior Braithwaite. They eventually called themselves the Wailers, and their sound fused American-style soul harmonies with the island’s jumpy ska rhythms. Under the guidance of Joe Higgs, a singer and producer, the Wailers were a local sensation by the mid-sixties. But island stardom brought little financial security. After moving briefly to Wilmington, Delaware, where his mother had relocated, Marley returned to the Wailers in 1969, just in time for a revolution in Jamaican music: the jolting, horn-inflected styles of ska and rocksteady were slowing down. Reggae was the new craze."

From "Manufacturing Bob Marley/A new oral history shows just how much of his story is up for grabs," an article in The New Yorker (about this book, "So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley").

There are many interesting things in that article, but the most interesting thing to me was that Bob Marley lived in Wilmington, Delaware in the 1960s. I look up his address — 2312 Tatnall Street — and find it in Google Street View:



Google calculates how far that was from where I lived — 5.5 miles. I left in 1964, and he didn't arrive until 1965.

Do Americans get the Midwest? Can a candidate with a midwestern accent and demeanor ever get elected?

When's the last time we elected a Midwesterner President? Ford doesn't count. He wasn't elected. You have to go back to Eisenhower and by the time we elected him, he wasn't just from Kansas anymore. He was from The World — The World War. And Kansas isn't even really the Midwest I think of as the Midwest. It's too far south. When's the last time we had a President from the North that is not the East?

Here's a list the home states of all the Presidents. I was surprised to see that I could have said we have a President right now from the Midwest! It never occurred to me — even as I rewatched that Bloggingheads segment — to think of Barack Obama as a Midwesterner, despite his connection to Illinois. His demeanor and his accent don't come across as midwestern. I think of him as coming from Hawaii.

I think we've never had a President from the North that is not the East. We've had a lot of Presidents from Ohio, and in that video clip, where I'm talking about Scott Walker's chances as a midwestern-style person, Bob Wright gets fixated on Ohio Governor Kasich, but Ohio isn't what I mean when I say Midwest. Note that I have lived in Wisconsin for the last 30 years, so I have an idea of the Midwest (and the North), but I consider myself from the "mid-Atlantic region," born and mostly raised in Delaware — just about exactly at the place where the Mason-Dixon line would cross if the mapmakers hadn't switched to using a compass when drawing the head on the little man called Delaware....



I am an insider/outsider in the Midwest. I think I get the cultural style that one sees in people like Tim Pawlenty and Scott Walker who seem too bland for outsiders. I mean that I also get The Not Getting of It. It might help that my mother and her family were from Michigan. Bob is from Texas, which is a big place, so maybe that's why he blithely groups Wisconsin with Ohio. He also sneered at the notion that Delaware is the South. I forgot to ply him with the question whether Texas is the South, but we were running out of time.

This post has become a grab bag of issues, so I'll load in one more, because news broke as I was writing this: "Lindsey Graham officially launches presidential exploratory committee." In the Bloggingheads clip embedded above, I talked about the problem of a Southern accent for a Republican candidate and say I think Americans have trouble with Lindsey Graham because of his accent. But the discussion of Midwesterners is not so much about the accent — though it is a problem if it's too exaggerated (as in the movie "Fargo") — it's the modest, low-key, seemingly bland style. But that problem could be an advantage. People might be in the mood for modest blandness. Of course, Scott Walker's opponents won't accept that picture of the man. They demonize him. How do you demonize modest blandness? Oh, it's an old game here intra-Wisconsin.

FiveThirtyEight continues to ferret out the truth about what really matters — like which states count as "The Midwest"?

"To get this broad-based view, we asked SurveyMonkey Audience to ask self-identified Midwesterners which states make the cut."

See, because what you need is data. Because data can be analyzed. And with that data we learn that the heart of the heartland is Illinois. Or is "heartland" a somewhat different place? Maybe another SurveyMonkey for "heartland" and then a Venn diagram showing the overlap.

Are you in The Heartland and/or The Midwest?
	I'm in The Heartland and it overlaps 100% with The Midwest.
	I'm in The Heartland, which includes The Midwest but I'm not in The Midwest.
	I'm in The Midwest, but not the part that is The Heartland.
	The Heartland and The Midwest overlap 100% but I'm not there.
	The Heartland and The Midwest overlap to some extent, and i don't live in any of that territory.
	There is no Heartland. That's an illusion. As for The Midwest, I live there.
	There is no Heartland. That's an illusion. I believe there's a Midwest, but I'm not there.
pollcode.com free polls

FiveThirtyEight follows up with "Which States Are in the South?" I have a few questions here. For example: How did only 80-some percent think Mississippi is in The South?

Also, I have an answer about Delaware, where I was born and raised. Apparently somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of those who identify themselves as Southerners see Delaware as part of the south. Living there, I didn't know anyone who had the idea that we were in The South, but as an adult, I have been told repeatedly, often by people who were laughing at me, that's because I'm white. So maybe we need 2 maps of which states are in The South, based on 2 surveys — one from those who identify as southern and black and one from a those who identify as southern and not black.

Christine O'Donnell gets message from Treasury agent: "your personal federal tax info may have been compromised and may have been misused by an individual."

O'Donnell — the 2010 Tea Party GOP candidate for the Senate in Delaware — received that phone call earlier this year, but the breach occurred the day she announced her run for office:

[That very day] a tax lien was placed on a house purported to be hers and publicized. 

She didn't still own that house, so we didn't get to see how far the persecution of the woman — also taunted as a "witch" — might have gone.

The IRS eventually blamed the lien on a computer glitch and withdrew it.

Now Mr. Martel, a criminal investigator for the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration, was telling her that an official in Delaware state government had improperly accessed her records on that very same day.

State government accessing IRS records the day the campaign is announced and acting instantly to break her financially.



"As she was considering a Senate run, Ms. O'Donnell said she was told by a prominent political figure in Delaware that if she challenged [mainstream Republican Michael] Castle, the IRS and others would 'F with her head.'"

How pathetically little investigative journalism we've had on the IRS scandal and the effort to crush the Tea Party!

5 new national monuments.

Honoring:

Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad for escaping slaves. Charles Young and the Buffalo Soldiers. The Rio Grande del Norte in New Mexico. The San Juan Islands off Washington State. The state of Delaware.

Delaware is my home state, so I'm pleased to see:

First State National Monument in Delaware. The monument will tell the story of the early Dutch, Swedish, Finnish and English settlement of the colony of Delaware, as well as Delaware's role as the first state to ratify the Constitution. The park is comprised of three historic areas related to Delaware's rich history: the Dover Green, the New Castle Court House complex (including the courthouse, Green and Sheriff's House), and the Woodlawn property in the Brandywine Valley.

The name of the monument is based on Delaware's nickname "the First State." (It was the first state to ratify the Constitution.)

WaPo highlights a child's delight in discovering 2 males having sex.

It's horseshoe crab mating time in Delaware.

The arthropod orgy was well underway when Breanne Preisen trudged over the low dune onto the narrow beach, where tens of thousands of horseshoe crabs were getting down to the age-old business of reproduction.

“There’s a female,” Preisen said, pointing at one of the peculiar sea-things crawling along an undeveloped stretch of the Delaware Bay shoreline. “She has a male attached to her.”

Preisen inspected the cluster of horseshoe crabs more closely, then corrected herself: “Two males!” She smiled.

Of course, she smiled. The young girl has been properly educated and enlightened, and The Washington Post approves.

Many years ago, I was a young girl in Delaware, and I found 2 horseshoe crabs and was delighted that they were "attached" — the word I used — to each other. I had no idea what sex they were or, in fact, that they were having sex. If I had realized what they were doing, I wouldn't have grabbed the tail of the one in back and dragged the fucking couple along with me.

Election day in Wisconsin.

If you're here in Wisconsin, have you voted yet? What's the turnout where you are?

Who's going to win? David Blaska has his predictions:

Supreme Court: Odana Road from Midvale Boulevard to Monroe Street is a blizzard of Kloppenburg signs -- many of them homemade. Has there ever been a state supreme court race this passionate? I do love the challenger’s motto, “Elections have consequences.” Tell that to Marty Beil. No pretense here, folks. This is a “do-over” of the November 2 election that Scott Walker won by a 52-47 margin...

Yes, wish is father to the thought. But I’m knocking on wood that pro-Walker voters are just as energized as the unionistas responsible for the Siege of the Capitol 2011.

A squeaker but the good guy wins thanks to out-state disgust over bully-boy tactics: David Prosser 50.5% over JoAnne Kloppenburg. But boy, this will be close.

Will it? It seems to me it could be anything, and the interpretation of what it means after we see what it is could be anything.

***

"Out-state" doesn't mean "out-of-state." I learned that term only recently. It refers to the parts of Wisconsin beyond Madison and Milwaukee. Another term I saw for the first time is "Wisconsin nice." It was in this Wall Street Journal column 3 days ago informing us that "It seems 'Wisconsin Nice' is now gone with the wind." I've been living here since 1984 and I've never heard of "Wisconsin nice." Maybe you need to go "out-state" to hear about it, or maybe only out-of-staters look at us and say that. Maybe the truly nice people don't think of themselves as nice. It's just the way they are. I don't include myself. I didn't grow up in Wisconsin, and I don't see why I would have picked up any niceness by living in Madison as an adult. Niceness needs to be more deeply ingrained. I grew up in Delaware, where people seemed normal to me. I went back recently and was stunned by how surly people were! Proof of Wisconsin nice? Perhaps. I don't know. I'm a stranger here and in Delaware now too.

Anyway: Vote, people. Wisconsin will have the court it deserves.

Hey, I want to be in this book!

I was raised by Delaware!

"Once you understand that to the credentialed-instead-of-educated, the Constitution is a wish-fulfillment device..."

"... rather than, you know, an authoritative text, it all makes sense. And there’s no real need to know or care about the words in the text, since it means whatever you want it to mean at the moment."

Says Glenn Reynolds, linking to my post on Coons, O’Donnell, and the Separation of Church and State.

A word needs to be said about the mocking laughter that instantly erupted from the law students in the audience. Presumably, that sound meant we are smart and you are dumb. Where did they learn to treat a guest at their law school — Widener Law School — with such disrespect? They hooted O'Donnell down, and she never got a chance to explain her point. What does that say about the climate for debate in law schools? Not only did they feel energized to squelch the guest they politically opposed, but they felt sure of their own understanding of the law.

I've been studying law myself since 1978, and I still puzzle over things and try to work my way through problems. If a speaker at my school makes a statement that sounds outlandish to me — me with 32 years of studying law — I may display a puzzled expression or a smile, but I hear the person out and entertain the possibility that he has a point and that even if the point is wrong, I will have learned some new perspective on the ways of being wrong or how another human being's mind works. I try to create that atmosphere in the classroom.

What is the atmosphere at Widener? Is there no intellectual curiosity? No love of debate? No grasp of how complex constitutional law problems can be?

ADDED: Here's the video:

O'Donnell and Coons on the separation of church and state.

Somehow, I can't escape the feeling of obligation to post about this. It's a bit annoying to me, because I cannot stand when people jump to the conclusion that someone they want to believe is stupid is being stupid when they say something that seems wrong. Think first. Is it wrong?

And I hate the converse — the assumption that the supposedly smart person has said something smart. Stop. Slow down. Read/listen closely. It's often the case that what we have is a banal political disagreement. And that's what I think this O'Donnell/Coons thing is.

I really wish I had the verbatim transcript of the colloquy, and that's the main reason I've been dragging my feet posting on this. The reporters aren't presenting the quotes in a reliable fashion. And we need to begin with stark clarity that the text of the Establishment Clause is: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."

So let's look at the reporting:

"Where in the Constitution is separation of church and state?" O'Donnell asked while Democrat Chris Coons, an attorney, sat a few feet away.

Plainly, the Constitution does not say "separation of church and state," so there's nothing stupid there. It's provocative, because many people like that gloss on the text.

Coons responded that O'Donnell's question "reveals her fundamental misunderstanding of what our Constitution is. ... The First Amendment establishes a separation."

He's talking about interpretations of the text, and she was talking about the text. What we're hearing is 2 individuals talking past each other.

She interrupted to say, "The First Amendment does? ... So you're telling me that the separation of church and state, the phrase 'separation of church and state,' is in the First Amendment?"

She's telling him to pay attention to her limited point about the text.

He noted again the First Amendment's ban on establishment of religion.

Ah, here's where I hate reporters. Give me the quote. I don't think Coons quite gets it. Ah. Here. He says: "Government shall make no establishment of religion."

O'Donnell reacts: "That's in the First Amendment?" And, in fact, it's not. The First Amendment doesn't say "government." It says "Congress." And since the discussion is about what local school boards can do, the difference is highly significant.

Also, it isn't "shall make no establishment of religion." It's "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." There's a lot one could say about the difference between those 2 phrases, and I won't belabor it here. Suffice it to say that it was not stupid for O'Donnell to say "That's in the First Amendment?" — because it's not. Coons was presenting a version of what's in the cases interpreting the text, not the text itself.

The 2 were talking past each other, trying to look good and make the other look bad. It is a disagreement about law between 2 individuals who are not running for judge. It's not detailed legal analysis. It's a political debate and this is a political disagreement. An important one, no doubt. But it can't be resolved by laughing at one person and calling her an idiot, something I find quite repellent.

In which of the states is it easiest to talk to strangers?

I haven't traveled to all the states, but I've been to most of them. And while there is a lot of variety among people in different places, you can tell that there is something of a local personality. You may not notice it when you live there, but it really stands out when you travel through. For example, a few years ago, I traveled back to Wilmington, Delaware, where I grew up (and my father grew up). I was struck by how taciturn the people were. I wanted to strike up conversations. I grew up here! I ate in this restaurant in the 1950s! But I couldn't get a response from anyone. Crazy lady from out of town thinks she can talk to me. At least it helped me understand my father better.

But what's the best state if you want to travel through and have some nice, random conversations with strangers — where they won't just be polite and pretend they like you because that's the right way to act or because they want your business, but where they truly openly and easily just go right ahead and roll right into a conversation about any number of things, not boring you with their life story or problems or anything like that, but laughing at your little observations and offering up little morsels of things they happen to know? I'm going to say: Indiana!

ADDED: All this talk of Indiana made me want to dig out this passage from Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle":

Crosby asked me what my name was and what my business was. I told him, and his wife Hazel recognized my name as an Indiana name. She was from Indiana, too.

"My God," she said, "are you a Hoosier?"

I admitted I was.

"I'm a Hoosier, too," she crowed. "Nobody has to be ashamed of being a Hoosier."

"I'm not," I said. "I never knew anybody who was."

"Hoosiers do all right. Lowe and I've been around the world twice, and everywhere we went we found Hoosiers in charge of everything.

"That's reassuring."

"You know the manager of that new hotel in Istanbul?"

"No."

"He's a Hoosier. And the military-whatever-he-is in Tokyo . . ."

"Attaché," said her husband.

"He's a Hoosier," said Hazel. "And the new Ambassador to Yugoslavia . . . "

"A Hoosier?" I asked.

"Not only him, but the Hollywood Editor of Life magazine, too, And that man in Chile . . ."

"A Hoosier, too?"

"You can't go anywhere a Hoosier hasn't made his mark," she said.

"The man who wrote Ben Hur was a Hoosier."

"And James Whitcomb Riley."

"Are you from Indiana, too?" I asked her husband.

"Nope. I'm a Prairie Stater. 'Land of Lincoln,' as they say."

"As far as that goes," said Hazel triumphantly, "Lincoln was a Hoosier, too. He grew up in Spencer County."

"Sure," I said.

"I don't know what it is about Hoosiers," said Hazel, "but they've sure got something. If somebody was to make a list, they'd be amazed."

"That's true," I said.

She grasped me firmly by the arm. "We Hoosiers got to stick together."

"Right"

"You call me 'Mom."'

"What?"

"Whenever I meet a young Hoosier, I tell them, 'You call me Mom."'

"Uh huh."

"Let me hear you say it," she urged.

"Mom?"

She smiled and let go of my arm. Some piece of clockwork had completed its cycle. My calling Hazel "Mom" had shut it off, and now Hazel was rewinding it for the next Hoosier to come along.

Hazel's obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon. Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows--and any nation, anytime, anywhere.

As Bokonon invites us to sing along with him:

If you wish to study a granfalloon,
Just remove the skin of a toy balloon.

IN THE COMMENTS: EDH says:

I'm from Massachusetts, and if you ask me, the people around here are too god damn friendly.

So, I don't know where all these bastids get the silly idea that people from Massachusetts aren't friendly.

What the fuck are you look'n at?

(A dramatization.)

What to do in Wilmington, Delaware.

I'm glad to see that, among other things, Adam went to the Charcoal Pit.

That place has been around since the 1950s, and I was around back then to go there all the time with with my grandparents (who, by the way, loved "What's My Line?")

Sending his text message at 3 a.m. — the time Hillary made emblematic — Obama picks Biden.

Here's the NYT report. I didn't stay up all night waiting to see the long-withheld news. Did you? I woke up naturally, and Obama's VP pick wasn't my first thought, but it was my third or fourth thought, and I picked up the iPhone and checked — no, not for a text message! — I wouldn't hand over my number — I checked Safari to see the news.

So it's Biden.

1. That's what we expected.

2. Why the hell did he drag it out so long?

3. Someone will be very happy and not just because I lost a bet to him.

4. Respect for Delaware, my home state, despite its piddling supply of electoral votes, instead of pandering to some better endowed, showier state.

5. Biden's a good guy, experienced.

6. Another senator, not a governor, all these senators.

7. McCain should pick a governor, and now McCain can pick Romney, because his somewhat awkward facial expressions will be fully balanced by Biden's — it's a wash, smile-wise.

8. He picked the guy who called him "clean" and "articulate," so maybe that means he's not as thin-skinned as he's seemed.

9. The man known for his orating powers has picked a man who loves to talk but is somewhat out-of-control in his speech — perhaps he sees him as some kind of counterpart, for Obama has plenty of verbal glitches when he's speaking spontaneously.

10. That 3 a.m. text-time will needle hold-out Hillary lovers.

11. What do I really think of Biden? I should go back over my old posts tagged "Biden" and see what I've said over the years. But that will be the next post. [Done here.]

The David Brooks column about Joe Biden brings back a memory of my grandfather and makes me ask a question about Wilmington, Delaware.

David Brooks has a column today called "Hoping It's Biden," and I noticed this:

Biden is a lunch-bucket Democrat. His father was rich when he was young — played polo, cavorted on yachts, drove luxury cars. But through a series of bad personal and business decisions, he was broke by the time Joe Jr. came along. They lived with their in-laws in Scranton, Pa., then moved to a dingy working-class area in Wilmington, Del. At one point, the elder Biden cleaned boilers during the week and sold pennants and knickknacks at a farmer’s market on the weekends.

His son was raised with a fierce working-class pride — no one is better than anyone else. Once, when Joe Sr. was working for a car dealership, the owner threw a Christmas party for the staff. Just as the dancing was to begin, the owner scattered silver dollars on the floor and watched from above as the mechanics and salesmen scrambled about for them. Joe Sr. quit that job on the spot.

This fascinates me. I was born in Wilmington, Delaware and lived in or near it (in Newark) until I was 12. My father grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, and his parents — my grandparents Mom and Pop — lived there until they died. That is, unlike Biden, who started out in Scranton, my family was deeply embedded in the culture of Wilmington, Delaware. And reading that Brooks column called to mind something about Pop that I hadn't thought of in decades. Now, Pop was a perfectly nice man — you know Pop, I wrote about him fondly back here — but he used to toss nickels on the floor for the fun of having us scramble for them.

Is this some kind of Delaware thing?

ADDED: Was it "fierce working-class pride" to take umbrage at the coins tossed on the floor? Or was it the old rich-man pride? In my family, no one perceived it as offensive to induce a coin scramble. It was just fun. Obviously, the activity works when the coins are much more meaningful to one person than the other. Someone is willing to toss the coins for the fun of seeing the scramble, and someone else is willing to scramble. But what kind of person is disgusted by the display? The regular Joe?

ANOTHER THING: Amazing Delaware fact about Althouse: Long ago, I demonstrated how to make a hat to Governor Boggs.