Well schitt - sometimes I hate being right. I came back to this thread just now because I thought about after that post that I had better go back and put it "I LIGHT HEARTEDLY take offense..." because I was worried someone would take me too literally.

Too late I guess! Ya beat me to it before I could edit my post. I was ATTEMPTING TO, and blatantly failed to, bring a bit of humor back to this thread, which has gotten more traffic in the last month than in about a decade of Ed's posts.

It really has always seemed silly to me that we haven't redrawn our geographical defining lines in ~200yrs. Whether geographically, demographically, industrially, or economically, the lines showing Chicago as the heart of the Midwest, or St. Louis as the Gateway to the West just don't make sense, so I've always thought - as someone that lives mid-central to the U.S. geographically - that it just doesn't make sense that somewhere east of center could be the gateway to the west, or somewhere else east of center could be the heart of the Midwest. It's just silly.

We've bought 20+ more states, tripled, maybe quadrupled, the area of our country, moved our capital, crossed another mountain range and found the farthest ocean... But we still divide the U.S. by the Mississippi!!

It'd be a lot funnier if I was a comedian instead of an engineer. Maybe that's my problem.