Connecting Awesomeness and Shame

Today’s post is inspired by Strange Maps, who broke away from a lengthy discussion of the role of the scary land octopii that dominate the landscape of many maps to feature two maps depicting what each U.S. state is best at and what each U.S. state is worst at!

First up, “The United States of Awesome”!

And now, hang your heads for “The United States of Shame”!

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to work out exactly how the two things for each state correspond to one another. For example, we see that Arizona is the sunniest U.S. state and also the state with the highest level of alcoholism. Clearly, Arizonans deal with all that sun by drinking a lot of fluids. Those fluids just happen to contain a lot of alcohol, which is how we can connect what makes Arizona awesome to what shames the state!

Meanwhile, Kentucky is the best armed state and also the state with the highest rate of cancer deaths. Clearly, that’s because Kentuckians haven’t figured out how to shoot cancer dead yet….

We’ll leave it as an exercise for our readers to work out the connections between the remaining states’ awesomeness and shame factors. Have a great weekend!

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