Original Names of All Fifty States
Alabama — Bamalama
Alaska — Freezeyerassoff
Arizona — Levi’s Sandbox
Arkansas — Suweee-Suweee
California — Cocina del Diablo
Colorado — White Man’s Mountains
Connecticut — MILF Party Central
Delaware — George Washington’s Pissoir
Florida — New Israel
Georgia — Scalp-u
Hawaii — The Hoochie-Coochie Islands
Idaho — The Base
Illinois — Jimmy’s Discount Land
Indiana — The JC Mellencampment
Iowa — Mutt
Kansas — Jeff
Kentucky — Chicken Puck-Puck-Puck!
Louisiana — Susie’s House of …
Dan Reeder
When being an outsider means being yourself.
A self-exiled maker of earworms appeals to the child and the grown-up in each of us.
All hail HJ Linderman!
In 1972, art critic Roger Cardinal introduced the term “outsider art” in his book of the same name. The label was his own version of French artist Jean Dubuffet’s earlier art brut — a label describing, in Cardinal’s words, “the only art which can truly be described as inventive, the art engendered outside the influence of society: by those certified insane; by those who claim inspiration from the spirit world; and by the innocent, upon whom the stamp of stereotyped culture has failed to make an impression.”
It’s a bit of a flex to be an outsider these days, with society being both intrusively omnipresent as well as something people feel increasingly guilty to be a part of. Everywhere we turn, media personas are peddling ideas, lifestyles, and aesthetics in a nonstop onslaught of suggestion. Our transformation into mirrored mosaics of impersonal impressions, with many (if not most) of us …
The Front Porch
County Highway is a proudly tariff-free, bullshit-free, political-propaganda-free, and AI-free publication. We hire real writers, artists, and editors and encourage them to do great work. Then we print that work on paper, because that’s the way that God intended for humans to read.
A big part of the reason that we exist is that we grew up with the printed word. When the internet came along, we soon recognized a difference between the way people read a printed page and the way that they were being trained to read online.
A glowing phone or computer screen is in fact a different medium than words printed on paper. The essence of the former is public. The essence of the latter is private.
This distinction is not a matter of feeling nostalgic for the smell of grandpa’s aftershave, or being opposed to technology. Both the printed word and the infinitely interlinked world of the …
