Stop it, Ohio.

This sign welcomes you when you cross the border from New York into Pennsylvania on I-90. Just to remind you that there are places that are crazier than where you live.  

I was on vacation last week, so I got to spend a whole seven days being annoyed with another state. I’m pretty sure we had the only Rhode Island license plates many Ohioans had ever seen, and to all the kids who won a game of license plate bingo after seeing our car, let me just say: you’re welcome, you poor, bored suckers. We chose a bleak little coal port on Lake Erie solely for its geographical distance from both Rhode Island and Minnesota, where a lot of my family lives, and the fact that it’s on a body of water you can’t see across, so I could pretend it was the ocean. The little farmhouse we rented was right on the water and adorable, much more so when you ignored the strip club up the street and the massive inorganic chemical plants that surround it.

Here’s one way Rhode Island differs from Ohio: in RI, if you’re at a stop light, intending to go straight through it, and the car coming in the opposite direction has its blinker on to turn left, you let that car turn left before you go straight. It is an unspoken social contract, and if you don’t do it, you’ll get an angry honk, an angry yell, an obscene gesture, or some creative combination thereof. Sure, people cut each other off all the time, refuse to use their turn signals at all other times, and generally act like total dicks to each other on the road, but woe unto you if you don’t let that other guy turn left before you go. If you do that in Ohio, however, you just confuse everyone. The guy turning left doesn’t understand why you’re letting him go first, and everyone behind you starts honking until you just go, already.

Also, in Rhode Island, we eat clam cakes, which is how we ruin perfectly good hush puppies. In northeast Ohio and northwest Pennsylvania, they eat pepperoni balls, a foodstuff with which absolutely nothing is wrong. NOTHING.

None of it matters, though, because while I was gone, this happened. And while it goes without saying, I’ll say it anyway: it’ll be a cold day in hell before I accept that Thylacinus cynocephalus was more cat than dog. Team More Dog Than Cat forever!