My cousin needed a ride to his brother’s wedding in Tijuana, so he called [Immigration] on himself. They’ll deport the entire wedding party, man. They get a free bus ride across the border and lunch. When the wedding is over, they’ll just come back across the border.
“Up in Smoke,” Cheech and Chong
I try not to get caught up in national news stories, but sometimes it’s unavoidable.
Minnesota has been in the news lately, and when the North Star state takes center stage, it seems to stay there for months.
I’m a Southerner, and I don’t particularly like ice or snow or hockey, so I have no interest in going to Minnesota. I have a particular dislike for their baseball team, stemming from an incident during Game 2 of the 1991 World Series. If the umpire involved had been equipped with even a few brain cells, the Hrbek debacle would have concluded with Ron Gant at first, Terry Pendleton at third, and David Justice at the plate. We only needed one run!
According to my research, the name Minnesota is derived from a Dakota word which means “clear blue water.”
Similarly, Oconee is an Anglicized form of the Itsati word Okvni, meaning “born from water,” according to rivercenter.edu.uga.
See, we have already established common ground.
Minnesota is America’s 12th-largest state, while Georgia ranks 24th. Minnesota also has nearly four times the water area, at 7,309 square miles.
However, much of Minnesota’s water is ice most of the year, so it makes sense that denizens would shout ICE OUT. I mean, who wouldn’t?
But here’s where it gets interesting. Minnesota lies between 43 and 49 degrees latitude; Georgia lies between 30 and 35 degrees.
That’s quite the difference when it comes to the length of winter and the cold temperatures one must endure. The average low temperature in International Falls in January is six degrees below.
You won’t catch me in International Falls in January.
But there was one thing I discovered during the course of my research on Minnesota that bothered me, and I couldn’t discount it.
According to Wikipedia, Minnesota has the highest number of refugees per capita of any state, a total which includes almost 80,000 Somalians.
Somalia lies across the equator with portions in both the Southern and Northern hemispheres. As a result, it’s hot everywhere in Somalia every day with temperatures ranging from 86 to 104 degrees.
Why on earth would someone living in a desert move to Minnesota?
That would be like me moving to Antarctica, where I would go stark raving mad in two weeks.
Some people, myself included, have told some cruel jokes about Somalians and various scams that recently came to light, but let’s try to exercise a little Christian charity here.
The climate difference has got to be brutal, so I don’t blame Somalians for going a little off the rails.
I mean, the whole reason we have Black people and white people and all the shades in between in the first place is due to evolutionary pressure produced by climate. When Stone Age humans left Africa thousands of years ago and headed north, Vitamin D absorption rates changed in response to that evolutionary pressure. That’s how the nomads survived. Darker skin needs less sunlight to synthesize Vitamin D, so the skin of the nomads grew lighter to compensate for the lack of direct sunlight up north.
So, if evolutionary biologists are right, Somalians will all look like Tim Walz after enduring a few thousand years in Minnesota’s thin sunlight, a disturbing prospect for them, I am sure.
But I think I see one problem no one else has noticed, and correcting it may solve all the problems in the Gopher State.
Did you know there is no Waffle House in Minnesota? Not one.
You might get smothered and covered by snow in Minnetonka, but as of right now, Minnesotans have no place to order hash browns scattered and chunked.
That’s outrageous!
Can you think of a better place than Waffle House to wait out a blizzard? There is something positively comforting about sitting inside a brightly lit Waffle House with plates clinking and bacon sizzling on the grill.
Give me an All-Star, please.
And since the restaurants would be new to Minnesota, we could call them Walzle Houses.
Or maybe not.
Selah.