Why Minnesota Is Better Than Arizona

About a month ago my brother emailed me a picture of his thermometer at his house. He and his wife live in Chandler, Arizona (next to Phoenix). The outdoor temperature read 121.9 degrees.

ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY ONE POINT NINE DEGREES!

At least it wasn’t 122!

In Minnesota that’s what ovens are preheated to when lutefisk is cooked. (Lutefisk was originally invented by the Norwegians to glue their boats together and was never meant to be eaten. But tradition has it that Sven and Ole were out fishing in one of the fjords one day and when they got really hungry, Ole said to Sven, “Hey Sven, this glue doesn’t taste too bad!” Whereupon Sven answered, “Well den maybe you should have Lena cook you up a batch for breakfast!”)

When I saw that picture of my brother’s thermometer I began to think about the ways that Minnesota is better than Arizona. Here are the top twenty:

1. Your state’s name comes from the Spanish “Arid Zona,” meaning “But Bob, it’s a dry heat!” Our state name means “Land of Sky-Tinted Water.” Doesn’t that just sound calming and soothing?

2. We have spiders that look like puppies and eat flies and mosquitoes so we can sit outside in the evening.

You have giant spiders that eat people! This big one was hiding under my brother’s pillow and was intending to embalm him that very night!

3. You have maybe 200 lakes; we have 10,000 plus. And some of your lakes are classified as “intermittent.” Do you know what that means? Simply that sometimes they don’t look any different than the desert around them! (“Hey honey, it’s so hot, let’s take the kids out to the lake.” “Well ok, but call first to see if there’s water in it.”).Plus our lakes were made by Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. Moreover, we can drive on our lakes in winter – bet you can’t do that! And we have………… (drum roll please)……………..Lake Superior!

4. Your big city of Phoenix has at least 100 days of 100 degrees above zero every year whereas our little town of Tower had just one day of 60 degrees below zero one time. And just because in winter we can freeze a banana so hard we can use it to hammer a nail into a board or just because we can create a little snowstorm by throwing a cup of boiling water into the air doesn’t mean we can’t live here.

(With the oven preheated to 300 degrees)
Bullhead City, AZ resident wife: Honey why is your head in the oven?
Bullhead City, AZ resident husband: Don’t bother me! I’m trying to cool off!

5. You have to wear asbestos oven mitts and asbestos shorts when you go to start your car in the summer lest you become a victim of spontaneous combustion. (“Oh hi Harriet, whose ashes are those in the urn?” “Oh hi Sally, those are Bob’s, he tried to start the car without wearing his asbestos underwear.”) We on the other hand can run out to the garage in our PJ’s even when its 20 below, start the car, and run back in and not be on fire!

6. In baseball, you have the Diamondbacks and we have the Minnesota Twins. Now doesn’t “Twins” just sound so much nicer? Don’t believe me? Well just listen to these two sentences:
“Oh honey, did you hear that the Andersons had TWINS! Isn’t that WONDERFUL?”
or
“Oh honey, did you hear that the Andersons had SNAKES ON THEIR PLANE! Isn’t that horrible?”

7. And speaking of snakes, you have poisonous ones; we just have little green garter snakes. But maybe we do have a couple of venomous snakes, I’m not sure. There might be some Water Moccasins in Little Cormorant Lake where my mom lives. I think one was chasing me one time when I was waterskiing as a kid. And you guys even have a website dedicated to snakes called www.snakesofarizona.com (whereas we don’t have one dedicated to lutefisk).

8. You speak a funny language called English; everyone in Minnesota has a strong Norwegian brogue and punctuates every sentence with “Uff Dah!” (According to Wikipedia “Uff Dah” is an all-purpose expression and is often used as a term for sensory overload. For example you often hear this expression when you are walking down the street in Ulen or Hitterdahl, “Uff Dah! Luftputefartøyet mitt er fullt av ål! (which means, “I have sensory overload because my hovercraft is full of eels!”)

9. We have grass…you have sand. And we mow our grass…you paint yours.

10. You have scorpions that hide in your shoes and wait to bite you; we used to have Scorpion Snowmobiles.


This is a picture of my brother fighting a scorpion in his backyard this past June before they could have a barbecue.


11. You have dust storms, we have snowstorms. (Newsflash – snow melts, dirt doesn’t!)





12. We can build a snowman in the winter (which is like September through June); you can build what? A sandcastle on the beach of one your “intermittent lakes?”

13. You have cactus…we have trees. You can’t build houses out of cacti...or is it cactusseses?

14. We have iron ore – lots of it; you just have gold and silver and copper and cactus. Ok, I’ll give you that one.

15. We have icy roads in the winter, you have….non-icy roads in the winter. Ok, so that one goes to you also. But you haven’t really lived until you’ve had the opportunity to slide down the highway backwards so that you can see where you’ve been.

16. You have lots of swimming pools that you have to chlorinate and clean, we have lots of swimming holes that God keeps clean for us.

17. You have snowbirds that live in little metal containers lined up in neat little rows; we have robins and blue birds and geese and ducks and eagles and blackbirds and pelicans and herons ….need I say more?

18. You have Superstition Mountain, we have….well ok let’s skip this one. Although in Duluth we have Spirit Mountain and Spirit Valley! But it’s really more like Spirit Bump and Spirit Dip, but don’t tell anyone.

19. We have “Minnesota Nice.” You have “Gila MONSTERS!!!” (That just gives me the heebeegeebees.)


20. And finally, we have HOTDISH ON A STICK! (It’s held together with Lutefisk Super Glue.) You don’t have ANYTHING that even compares to that, not even tacos and burritos. (Although I might rethink that one)


Ok Arizona, here’s your chance to reply to this. Just email me or post to this blog and I’ll put your replies on here. Unless of course you come up with good reasons why Arizona is better than Minnesota, then I’ll just ignore them :>)

(By the way Arizona…you really do have a wonderful state with beautiful desert scenery)

Dan Vander Ark
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