I was wasting time at work, and found this wonderful nugget on Lileks, here. I wish I had written this.. especially the last part about midwesterners:

Right before I woke up I dreamed I had an assignment: write a bad feature story in the style of the New York Times. When I woke I had the last sentence still in my head; I stumbled next door to the studio, woke up the Mac, and typed this sentence:

Over in the field, a hound was hunched over excreting a “striver,” the local’s term for the hard, elegantly tapered stools for which the wild dogs are renowned.

It has it all! It has a field, which is always a sign that the urban reporter is braving the flat & empty lands of America. It has a word known only to the locals, and the locals are always the real subject of the piece. Every East Coast story on Midwestern people feels like they’re writing about pygmies. Doesn’t matter if the story’s about clothing, or music, or nose-bones; beneath it all is the writer’s underlying inability to forget that these are pygmies, for God’s sake. And they’re so cute!

Yeah. And you should read Mr. Lileks' review of the Matrix Reloaded the previous day. Its funny.