Is everyone in the South obese?

Don’t sell Pennsylvania short, either.

 

Correct. Collared shirt required, too. No ties, yet.
No shorts in any restaurants down to McDonalds.

 

Long pants have cleaner lines, are more slimming and are better suited for concealing the stick that’s up your butt.

 

I’ve worn shorts to work on a regular basis in the summer, though I’ve worked in a town that’s extremely casual in dress and almost always wear them with tennis shoes and a collared shirt. I’m not exactly hanging out in MLB press boxes.

 

Garth Hudson in the 2/5 of The Band still alive. He hasn't aged particularly well.

 

It's over 90 here from mid-May till mid-October. It's well over a hundred in any car you get in until the AC can beat it down. I'm going to wear shorts a good bit. Not out to nice places, but to beat around, doing errands, work in the yard, etc.

 

Ya gotta go north to find the south in Florida.

And to answer the OP?

Personally, I was eating my feelings because I was (still am) surrounded by right-wing assholes. Other people might be suffering from cultural disconnect due to the ambient Protestantism. I realized how badly the south sucked when I met a Canadian in the Predators press box who moved here because she was "a McCain girl who just loved her some Sarah Palin!" She managed to raise the median IQ of New Brunswick and Nashville by moving to Tennessee.

This native Nashvillian who grew up in Lubbock loves the musical history of both places but pretty much loathes everything and everyone else and has reached the point where she would take a bullet between the eyes before she would agree to keeping sweet.

Next question?

 

Or if they’re trying to impress strangers

 

I met a couple from New Brunswick last week. He's a potter and she's a painter.

 

I'm a little further south of Nashville, and our city is terrible for walking. I have to drive half a mile to find a sidewalk, and it only stretches for a couple of blocks. They built a new road connecting two parts of town a couple of years ago and included a nice sidewalk trail, but it's a few miles away and not near any residential zones. You have to make an extra effort to get there, not just step out the front door and walk somewhere. It's not like when I've lived in cities and the corner store was three blocks away, so it's easier to walk there than drive. Our nearest corner store is a mile and a half away and I'm risking my life walking there on busy two-lane roads without much shoulder.
Those setups are not unusual down here. Some recent projects seem to be correcting that, but it'll take years for them to be the norm.

And then there's the weather that limits "walking season" to about six weeks in spring and six more in the fall. If it's not oppressively hot in the late afternoon in summer, it's often raining or thunderstorms. You can plan to go and then be thwarted by a pop-up thunderstorm or two that are impossible to predict where and when they'll hit.
I know these sound like excuses, but they do make it hard to get into a routine for any length of time.

 

Years ago when Dan Jenkins was writing a sports column for Playboy he noted the reason soccer wasn't more popular in the US was because men didn't wear short pants outside except when swimming, playing tennis, washing the car or unexpectedly leaving the home of another man's wife