This week I must be thinking about numbers an awful lot...

The top ten reasons for living in Indiana:

10) It's refreshing to be around a group of people who'd rather raise a billiion dollars for a pro football team's new stadium (actually, IHMO, bring the [SuperBowl] ring, we'll build you a thing, but until then, make do with your house) than dilute all that usable currency for education

9) You can go to a hog roast and buy apple butter, cracklins, salsa and roasted corn from the same vendor

8) A two-wheel drive pickup with 16" rims qualifies as a low rider

7) Potholes and hacked-up pavement keep the aftermarket automotive plants in business, (mostly, well, at least wherever it is they actually operate from nowadays, not the rusting remnants of plants that dot our scenic landscape like massive starships that crashed to the grond when the occupants discovered that the enemy was using the deadly secret weapon - Administratium-tipped dum dum bullets)

6) Your high school has a practice gym so that the basketball team doesn't have to wear out their 'game day' hoops (practice gyms really do exist, though it's probably because they don't want to harm the teams' hearing with the echoes that result from practicing in a gym that's only halfway filled to its 25,000 seat capacity...)

5) Indianapolis gives you a taste of Detroit and Saint Louis, all in one, without a losing football team or tourism interests, respectively

4) We have a place where, inside, they drive faster than you can believe and turn left, and outside, nobody moves at all, turning right only for elections.

3) Our state has just enough of Kentucky to be countrified, just enough of Ohio to be fiercely loyal to universities we never attended, just enough of Illinois to love cheesy fries and just enough of Michigan to never use a turn signal (it's true - I went to college for a time up there, and y'all don't use them!)

2) We like to control our population growth - we geld our stallions, steer up our bulls, neuter our dogs - shoot, we even detassel our corn!

1) We give parents a powerful deterrent to bad behavior by supplying a place for the threat, "Cut it out or we'll move there!"

All kidding aside, this is a pretty good place to live. I love sports, but I satirize them a lot to try to draw attention to the very real need to live in the now with regard to sports. Our state has a tremendous brain drain because of such powerful emphasis within the school systems on athletes, and they don't prepare the kids for that fateful day when the knee blows out, or when they find out that a 5'-11" guard really isn't that spectacular of a find in the NCAA. We need to maintain our technological base, and the only way to do that is to get folks out of the long-term paradigm that worked well in the 70's when the auto plants and a high-school education were all you needed to be fat, dumb and happy and to realize that our best resource is our people themselves, motivated properly, not the activities that only a select few participate in (in case you're wondering if this is a case of sour grapes, I was a three-sport varsity athlete, where I got to see how both sides of the field work, and also got to get A's on tests given in a coach's class because I and the other players sat in the back row and studied our playbooks - true story!).