POP FEMINIST PERBLOG

opendrawer:

what if I just listened to the Suicide Machines all night

IMPORTANT MICHIGAN THINGS

Diamond REO Truck Division by michigandriveins

A produce update:

This year was one of the worst in recent history for my state’s fruit crops. Remember in March when I was whining about how it was 90 degrees? And how it snowed right after that? It ruined everything. Farmers are calling it a natural disaster. It’s really upsetting, actually, and probably going to make a lot of landowners vulnerable to the banks. So I won’t be able to bring y’all cherries (no cherries in Michigan this year), nectarines (no nectarines in Michigan this year), apples (no apples in Michigan this year, even if they’d be ready by then). Another scurvy summer for my city friends.

We’ll be snagging all the Indiana corn, though. Do you guys have good corn in New York? I mean, I know corn is the most ubiquitous crop on the planet, but, you know, do you have good corn?

Get ready for a new thing to be sick of at rgr-pop.tumblr.com.

Other things I like about the University of Michigan: George Jewett.

travelcoat said:

Oh my god, pretty much. Although I sort of feel like “CRC/Amway white supremacists” would be more fitting around GRap/West MI than “urban white supremacists’

Way fair. Full disclosure, here’s what I know about that part of the state:

• my best friend lives down the street from some weird house with a Jesus light-up sign that’s always on
• christian straight-edge tweepunks
• Wyoming
• Calder/Gerald Ford
• migrant stream Guatemalan grocery stores
• furniture
• my friend was in Newaygo County Jail
• fluoride
• no abortions
  

By “urban white supremacists” I mean “why dear God are there only white people/overpriced Bar & Grilles in these fucking city limits.” Amway is so apt to describe that shit tho.

Once my mom was watching some movie set in Michigan, maybe it was that Edward Norton movie. Someone in the film used the phrase “Upstate Michigan” and my mother turned it off because that’s bullshit and anyone who has ever set foot in this state knows that no one in this state would ever say that.

maybe this will help?

History of the Michigan Finnish Pasty

are pastys (pasties?) a michigan thing? i had one once and it was fucking awesome but i’ve never been able to find them out here.

Yes! They are! They originate from the Finnish mining immigrants who live in the Upper Peninsula, but they’re also often associated with Michigan Poles. I did a little more reading, and apparently the Michigan Finns picked up the tradition from Cornish immigrants who originally came to mine in Northern Wisconsin.

From what I understand, other Central, Northern, and Eastern European immigrants adopted them in Northern and Central Michigan, which is why they are such a big deal in Flint but not as common in the metro-Detroit area. Flint’s full of Poles and ex-Yugoslavs, most of whom are Catholic. I think the Catholicism is what connected these communities (although I’m not sure if U.P. Finns were primarily Catholic, all the ones I have known were).

The woman who makes pasties for Lucas’s family is actually Jewish, probably of Polish or Hungarian origin, and like 90 years old. I think they’re gross because she makes them with ground beef.

Here’s a link to the history of some of the miner labor organizing among the Finns in Upper Peninsula, there was a strike and a massacre in 1913.