So.
I was talking to my daughter one day recently and somehow we got on the topic of how each State in the United States has a bunch of officially-legislated State Symbols although a better moniker would probably be State Attributes. You know, things like the Official State Particle Accelerator, Official State STI, Official State Mustelid Including But Not Limited To The Weasel, The Stoat, The Fisher, The Marten, The Badger, The Polecat, The Wolverine And The Ferret.
Up here, north of the 49th parallel, each Province and Territory also has a handful of Symbols/Attributes but for the most part they’re pretty pedestrian: flowers, trees, fish, snow tires. That said, I noticed that a few more-sophisticated USA-type attributes have managed to inch their way into the portfolio of each Province or Territory. The technical name for this is Attribute Creep.
Somehow, the notion of all these Official Attributes waiting to be analyzed spoke to me and I wound up spending quite a few hours dissecting the Official USA State Symbols/Attributes site in considerable detail.
Maybe all this would have had something to do with my running out of OCD medication if I actually had OCD. But I don’t. Just saying.
Long story short, I wound up constructing an Excel sheet summarizing all 181 Official Primary Attributes spanning all the States in the USA. As luck would have it, about 60 of these Primary Attributes also had anywhere from one to 18 Sub-Attributes. This made for a grand total of 375 Attributes: give or take a few. That is a shit-ton of attributes if you ask me. But the USA is a pretty big country…
Keep reading to find out what I discovered about State Attributes
The Department of Lateral Thinking 