Stone Soup by Jan Eliot for April 19, 2010

Wisconsin? Even better!

Yep, you can’t get any better than us Badgers!

uh isn’t that statistic - secondmarriageafter_divorce, not after your first husband/wife dies?

Ah yes, Wisconsin. I once lived there, but the residents said I wasn’t cheesy enough!

Val, marry Wally!!

Interesting, Ghostkeeper. Where did you get your info?

Sometimes it’s the Mr. Iowas or Mr. Wisconsins that make the best husbands. Yay for Wally!

I think Phil would make a great husband for Val, but I wonder if she really loves him enough. He seems to like the kids, in spite of their bratty attitudes; he has a good job, and he’s not self-absorbed (very Important..I speak from experience ;-] ). One thing, though, he hasn’t asked her…hehehe

I and my husband have been married only once to each other and we are getting ready for 29 years. Yesterday we where evan commenting while celebrating our mom’s 85 birthday that hollywood marriages never last that long. Exception Dolly Parton is still married and her husband smartly stayes out of the limelight.

Whenever anyone wants to create a character that’s a wimp, a rube or a simpleton, they always use Wisconsin.

My wife and I have been married only once to each other and are getting ready for 40th anniversary.

…and, lucky me, she looks like Yanny!

Jascat, I agree with you. Someone who is truly in love doesn’t need to be talked into it by so many other people. Phil might be a good husband for Val, but I wonder what kind of wife she’d be for him, if she only marries him because everyone else says she should. The way this strip has been written so far, that’s what it appears she’d be doing.

Runar, I think that rubes and simpletons come from further South, like Indiana (i.e. Woody on “Cheers”). Pop-culture Wisconsonites are boring (or “stable”, if you prefer; even “dependable”), and while they might be naive they’re rarely backward.

Hey, Wisconsin features in the Sheldon storyline today as well! (sheldoncomics.com)

I was thinking of Woody Hoyt from Crossing Jordan (played by Jerry O’Connell) or Dave Nelson from News Radio. The rubes and simpletons from the South are usually crackers. The rubes and simpletons from the Midwest are naive.

Dave on News Radio was neither a rube nor a simpleton, though. He was one of the examples I was going to use against you, except that I thought that at one point late in the series it turned out he used the story of Wisconsin roots to mask that he was actually Canadian anyway (I could be wrong aboot that). Anyway, Dave often turned out to be the sharpest guy in the room.

Also, Caroline from Caroline in the City I think was from Wisconsin. Again, naive, maybe a rube (depending on how you’d define the term), but not a simpleton. Midwesterners of any sort are generally played as lacking the “edge” of other regionals, but for the most part they aren’t particularly or laughably dumb. “Simple” as in “plain, unpretentious”, but not “simple” as in stupid.

(Of course, if it turns out that a character actually grew up on a farm, that’s as much as to say “fresh off the turnip truck.”)

Hey fritzoid! I grew up on a farm and if you think farmers are dumb let’s see you make decisions NOW that will affect your earnings AND life for DECADES!

Biggest mistake I ever made was leaving.

dakrebs, I wasn’t expressing my own notions about farmers, just those bits of shorthand that are used on TV (mostly sitcoms). Again, the prime example is Woody on Cheers, but another, more current, example is Kenneth the Page on 30 Rock. Even on shows that are set in small towns rather than big cities, characters who actually live on farms are often depicted as even more isolated and backwards.

I can certainly understand that the “ignorant rustic” stereotype is both unjustified and offensive, but it’s been around for thousands of years. The “City Mouse/Country Mouse” opposition goes back at least to Aesop, I think. And of course that knife cuts both ways; fast-talking, “sophisticated” city folks get their share of comeuppance at the hands of country folk, but those types of stories don’t get told often by TV writers…

@ghostkeeper, it could be even worse. When you ask how much each man earns, the assumption is that they all earn the same. But four of them could earn $1 each, and the fifth one could earn $249,996, and it would still come out right according to the numbers.

In fact, I can’t help thinking that that’s how it works in poor countries!

You know the expression, “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure”?

Watch out for numbers!

According to this site (http://divorcerate.org/), 50% of all first marriages end in divorce. For second marriages, it’s 67%, and for 3rd marriages it’s 74%. It doesn’t give information on whether the numbers for 2nd marriages are significantly different depending on whether the 1st marriage ended by death as opposed to divorce, and of course it would only be a second marriage for Val. As far as we know, Phil has never been married before, right?

Again, no hard numbers are given for this, but when a couple is childless the chances of divorce rise (the site seems to imply that childlessness at least partially leads to divorce, whereas I think it probably just makes the decision that much easier to reach). Although once again it doesn’t differentiate between children from prior marriages and new children.

But Val (frankly, EVERYBODY) should bear in mind that, given a large enough data pool, probability is very good at predicting the general but remarkably poor at predicting the particular. If 2/3 of second marriages end in divorce, that means that 1/3 of those who have a bad 1st marriage under their belts get it right on the 2nd try.

fitz, I always got the idea from News Radio that everybody else on the show underestimated him because of his roots.

I once ran into someone who was surprised to hear that Wisconsin has more than one area code.

That’s true, runar, but that’s actually a subversion of the stereotype. They assumed he was naive, but that wasn’t the case.

Also: According to Wikipedia, Dave was raised in Wisconsin but did in fact turn out to have been born in Canada. Whether or not that was a surprise to him, I can’t recall. I remember him as having treated his Canadian origin as a secret, but my memory might be faulty…

FYI, although I was born in Illinois and all my memories are from Illinois, I lived in Wisconsin (Two Rivers) from the age of 12 months to 30 months. My brother and sister remember it, but I don’t.

Illinois seems exempt from the other Great Lakes stereotypes, for some reason. TV characters from Illinois are generally from Chicago or the Chicago suburbs, which carries a different image. The only sitcom character I can think of from anywhere near where I grew up was Henry Blake from MASH, who hailed from Bloomington (IL, not IN).

Wally is both cheesy and corny – he could easily qualify for both Mr. Wisconsin and Mr. Iowa!