I realized this morning, I don't know *ANYTHING* about Virginia. I've met people from all 'round this great green earth, and I've never met a single person from there.
Here is a compendium of my complete knowledge about Virginia.
1) There's a West version of it, that I know some things about.
2) Robert E. Lee was from there, and wanted to fight for the North because he hated slavery, but Virginia wanted to be in the South so he fought for the South.
That's it. And #2 is probably untrue revisionist history.
I decided I needed to fill in the blank spot in my knowledge. As always, Wikipedia was the first place I checked. I was shocked:
Wikipedia knows even less about Virginia than me.
I took matters into my own hands. I tracked down a US phone book (remember those?) and started dialing numbers. It took me a
long
time, the first 10-12 numbers I tried were dead. I finally got through to a gentleman named Ephraim. Right off the bat, I mentioned how many numbers I had tried before reaching him. He explained that ALL of the major phone providers pulled out of VA (FC has just arrived at work and told me that VA is the abbreviation of Virginia) after a rash of infections spread rampant through the state in '92, apparently communicable through using the same phone as an infectee.
Through conversation with Ephraim, I found some interesting facts about Virginia:
1) Like California, the governor of Virginia is a famous actor, also the only asian-american governor in the US, Jonathan Ke Quan (
Jonathan Ke Quan - IMDb)
2) The primary export of Virginia is, and I would have guessed tobacco, but no, it is frankincense.
3) VA was the first state to legalize gay marriage, marijuana for medicinal use, and fratricide.
4) VA has the highest per capita albino population in the US, to the extent that "the albino vote" is a powerful political force.
I had thought that Richmond was the capital of Virginia, but apparently this is a matter of contention. Richmond had been the undisputed capital, and is still considered the capital by a large population that refers to itself as "The Normals". But another city on the eastern coast, called "Ape City" has declared itself the capital, and many people subscribe to that. Ape City is populated by superintelligent simians, and they have thrown off the shackled of their homo sapien overlords. Ape City has the largest population of any VA city (or the smallest if you don't include superapes) and also ranks third in textile-manufacturing in the US.
I thanked Ephraim for all of this helpful information, and told him it was a pleasure to fill such a gaping hole in my knowledge of US States. He said he would love to stay and chat some more, but had to hide from an ape-patrol.