Nor do I easily believe that no one in Delaware is interested in ‘analingus.’ I’m not surprised, however, to learn that Nevada tops the nation in queries for ‘donkey punch.’
How do I know this? StateStats! This website, brought to me by Neatorama (a really wonderful little place, if you haven’t been there yet), segregates google data by state and lets you see who the filthiest bastards in the Union are. Simply enter a query, click a button, and poof!, there you are: a happy record of idle curiosities by region.
Not only will this simple, brilliant, specious research tool allow you to pair certain repugnant characteristics with states whose residents you revile, it also calculates a number of correlative metrics for your enjoyment. For example, not only can we discover that West Virginia sends forth more queries for ‘child porn’ than any other state, but that, on the whole, other states in which the search originates tend to abound with energy consumption, suicide, and obesity, giving these characteristics a positive correlation to the term. On the other hand, ‘incest’ (top producer: Arkansas) tends to have a strong negative correlation to Obama voters and same sex couples.
The website tries really hard to warn that in no way should one make causal inferences from the information available on it:
Be careful drawing conclusions from this data. For example, the fact that walmart shows a moderate correlation with “Obesity” does not imply that people who search for “walmart” are obese! It only means that states with a high obesity rate tend to have a high rate of users searching for walmart, and vice versa. You should not infer causality from this tool: In the walmart example, the high correlation is driven partly by the fact that both obesity and Walmart stores are prevalent in the southeastern U.S., and these two facts may have independent explanations.
Okay. That’s valid. But let’s be sensible about this; if you go to a Wal-Mart, you’re going to see a lot of fat people there. It may not be the case that fat people are cheap, or that Wal-Mart preys on them, or that it is even fat people who are googling ‘walmart’ — but there will be fat people at Wal-Mart.
And so I think it is safe to say that you should order your own drinks in Minnesota (rohypnol), wear earplugs in West Virginia (kenny chesney), and avoid Illinois altogether (hospital). And if you’re wondering why the high infant mortality rate in Tennessee. . . Perhaps all the Satanists are eating them!
