My favorite Tam category.

People from the frozen north talk about how bad it is there, how our winters are nothing. People in the south talk about how hot and humid it is there, and our summers are nothing.

Here’s the thing: The midwest is home to the broadest range of weather (and I mean WEATHER) that you ever did see. We have summer heat as oppressive (as Jean Shepherd once said) as a 500 lb woman sitting on a camp stool. We have winter cold as miserable and dry and booger freezing as you can get, (once you get below zero any lower number is just more mere misery, -4 will kill you JUST as efficiently as -40, just a tiny bit slower. Tiny) We have tornadoes that will wreck an entire town, or slice through a neighborhood taking out this house but not that one, pulling the siding off a barn and leaving the shithouse alone. We get humidity that is nothing short of misery, rainstorms that inundate, feet of snow. People drive trucks and SUV’s not because they’re cool, but because they often need them just to get where they are going. Add corrupt politicians and horrible roads to the mix, and you have a recipe for the toughest motherfuckers on the planet. People who will go out in horizontally blowing sleet to sit in a tree stand for 9 hours to hunt Bambi.

yeah, we grow ’em tough here. I like it fine. Weeds out the weak.