Many Chicagoans have an unhealthy obsession with berating surrounding states. (Bloomington: bill, vacation)

[tomcho]

Originally Posted by aragx6

^I see your point, but I spent summers in Gulf Shores and can tell you its truly lovely. I could see myself owning a condo there for vacations.

Can't argue about MS though ... it's like the place that time never touched down there.

Gulf shores is amazing. My in-laws have a condo right on the beach and they made out like bandits after the oil spill. BP offered a settlement to all vacations owners what was basically an average season long rental income over I believe the past 10 years. I think the check they received was more than double what they typically net in a summer with their 1 BR unit.

[Tex?Il?]

For those of you who said you could never live in Indiana, I'm afraid you might be proving the OPs point.

Besides, you do realize you could live in Hammond, and be a quicker drive to downtown than most other suburbs. right?

[Drover]

Originally Posted by Tex?Il?

For those of you who said you could never live in Indiana, I'm afraid you might be proving the OPs point.

We don't care.

Originally Posted by Tex?Il?

Besides, you do realize you could live in Hammond, and be a quicker drive to downtown than most other suburbs. right?

I'd rather commute from Ganymede.

It'd be quicker yet to commute from Garfield Park or Englewood. I still wouldn't want to live in either.

[tribecavsbrowns]

Originally Posted by Tex?Il?

I guess it depends on how you define cosmopolitan.

I believe the more transplants you have from a much wider geographic range, and when the foreign born population is more educated and exposed to more cultures then that can bring up the cosmopolitan index of an area.

When people immigrate as large families, have lower levels of education and more blue collared jobs, and live in communities where people come frome the same region that they came from, I think that is diverse, but NOT cosmopolitan. Not that theres anything wrong with that.

A population that is 90% white, but where there are more people that have traveled to other countries and been exposed to more cultures, then that is cosmopolitan.

Cosmopolitan is more of a mindset, that includes being more well traveled for what your income allows, which college faculty, and even government employees often time are. College faculty and high level government employees are often going to be more cosmopolitan than the average person.

SWPL, basically.

[chicago103]

Originally Posted by Tex?Il?

For those of you who said you could never live in Indiana, I'm afraid you might be proving the OPs point.

Besides, you do realize you could live in Hammond, and be a quicker drive to downtown than most other suburbs. right?

Why does Hammond have such a horrible reputation? Don't people realize it is nowhere near as bad as Gary? The area around the Robertsdale neighborhood of Hammond and Whiting I think is actually kind of nice and quaint. Sure it is not the greatest place, certainly not a fancy place to live but they seem to be pretty solid old school family neighborhoods. It is still a bit too isolated to me but I would rather live there than in most of the outer suburbs in Illinois. I mean if you are used to Kenilworth or the Gold Coast the place might seem ghetto but the northern part of the city near the casino never felt bad to me. Hammond after all is now the largest city in NWI.

[thePR]

Originally Posted by edsg25

well, at least we aren't being told here that, between poverty, crime, and economic collapse, we are falling apart at the seams and soon will be a tenth of the size of Houston. Without its charm.

I suppose then this is progress.

BTW, does anyone remember the answer to "Why do Chicagoans pick their noses more than people in other cities?" I forgot the responses, but remember they were doozies.

For the record, Mad Magazine reports that Chicago has more insane-questions-about-itself than any other city on internet forum; I'm kvelling with pride.

Meanwhile I'm wondering how we Chicagoans have this unhealthy habit of berating neighboring states when it has been my experience that Chicago area folks relate far more to Wisconsin than we do to our state of Illinois (which Chicago folks think only has three places exist outside of Chicagoland: Galena, Champaign-Urbana, and very regrettably Springfield) while Wisconsin is basically our whole statewide playground.. Go figure.

Do you have a link to that Mad Magazine reference?

[Vlajos]

Originally Posted by Tex?Il?

For those of you who said you could never live in Indiana, I'm afraid you might be proving the OPs point.

Besides, you do realize you could live in Hammond, and be a quicker drive to downtown than most other suburbs. right?

So now I should lie? I could care less how close Hammond is, I will never consider living there.

[SJaye]

Originally Posted by Drover

Liberal, yes. Open-minded.... eh. One thing I learned particularly after spending a good deal of time in Bloomington and living in Madison is that the academic brand of "liberal" is often anything but open-minded and that the self-styled notion of an "open-minded liberal" often falls somewhere on a sliding scale between self-delusion and outright fraud. I've never been in such a group-think environment as when I lived in Madison. When you argued with what passes as "conventional wisdom" in Madison, people would often get visibly angry. And frankly the atmosphere in Bloomington was just plain toxic.

I lived in Madison, Wisconsin for several years and I couldn't agree with you more!

[Vlajos]

Originally Posted by SJaye

I lived in Madison, Wisconsin for several years and I couldn't agree with you more!

I went to UW-Madison. While I am a liberal, I'm not crazy.

[Chi-town Native]

Originally Posted by Drover

Sorry, I didn't have my camera handy so that I could post examples on Youtube or something. But it would be something along the lines of, say, insulting the other person's intelligence or claiming they're a menace to society.

No, I just meant were you referring to one specific argument about some specific hot-topic like global warming, collective bargaining, etc.

I definitely get the impression the standard mentality is on the left of the political spectrum when it comes to the students, but you've also got that state capital aspect, so I've heard there are still a healthy amount of conservatives there, just more outlying than in the campus area.

Plus, it's Wisconsin - which means when it comes to things like concealed carry laws people of all stripes usually veer to the right, or maybe more libertarian is a better description.