Word: midwesternizing
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...face several daily battles to keep junk food out of my 3-year-old daughter's mouth, and she's not the only one I'm battling. The prevailing attitude, at least in my Midwestern community, seems to be that children cannot go longer than half an hour without eating. Everywhere my daughter goes, from preschool to library story time to gymnastics class, she is bombarded with sweets, snacks and "juice" boxes containing nothing but empty calories. When society at large makes it so difficult to limit unhealthy foods, it's no wonder that we are facing an epidemic. Kimberly...
Poor St. Louis. Everyone has a tear or two for gritty cities facing hard times - for the Detroits, the Clevelands, the Buffalos - but who spares a thought for the elegant dowager reduced to reusing tea bags? St. Louis was never a rude boomtown. It was the Midwestern city with an Athenian heart, valuing music and philosophy, nurturing a great university, birthing poets and hosting, in one incredible zenith year, both the World's Fair and the Summer Olympics...
...China. But all that food doesn't grow by itself. In 2006 U.S. farmers used more than 21 million tons of nitrogen, phosphorus and other fertilizers to boost their crops, and all those chemicals have consequences far beyond the immediate area. When the spring rains come, fertilizer from Midwestern farms drains into the Mississippi river system and down to Louisiana, where the agricultural sewage pours into the Gulf of Mexico. Just as fertilizer speeds the growth of plants on land, the chemicals enhance the rapid development of algae in the water. When the algae die and decompose, the process sucks...
...voters will scratch their heads sooner or later - and eventually you might too. George H.W. Bush seems to have entered his Veep wish list into one of those dating computers back in 1988. That year he stunned nearly all his advisers when he tapped someone whose Midwestern roots were an antidote to his privileged Kennebunkport background, who was young to his old, who could balance his moderation with a dose of conservatism, and came up with Dan Quayle. The ticket beat the Democrats that fall, but by 1992 even Bush was trying to nudge him off the ticket. The ploy...
...feet between Friday and Sunday. Volunteers filled sandbags, and by dawn Monday, the sun was shining. "We were in waiting mode, hoping to see the water go down," says Tom Diehl, general manager and co-owner of the Tommy Bartlett Show, a circus-like variety show popular with Midwestern families. But the water kept rising, saturating the land around the lake. Eventually, it collapsed, Diehl says, "right before our eyes." Diehl is hoping to reopen the show this weekend. But his worries are hardly over: storms are expected to batter the region in the coming days...