My grandfather (from WV for what it's worth) always ordered iced tea and then poured--I swear--6 full sugar packets into it. It always made me feel kinda gross to watch him.

Don't even get me started on the horror of chicken salad that contains dark meat.

Speaking of tea, a few years ago, I attended a convention at USC and fell in love with South Carolina! Over the course of the weekend, I know I drank my weight in tea. A colleague and I were so enamored with it that we asked the restaurant how they made it. They told us that they make simple syrup and use the syrup in the tea. I made it at home and it was just the same. The server told us that she adds lemon juice to the simple syrup at home to flavor it.

We always boil our water, add the sugar to the water, then add the tea bags. So I guess that's the same as making tea with simple syrup, but I never thought of it that way.

This Southerner cannot stand sweet tea. It's like maple syrup. I'll take unsweetened tea with a packet of sweet and low any day of the week.

I do not know how I missed all of this discussion! It is hilarious!

Miss AOPiAngel, we might have to take away your southern card! Loving sweet tea is like loving the baby Jesus!

LOL...my husband doesn't like it either. I grew up with sun tea made with Luzianne tea. Just made some today. No one in my family made it sweet or drank it sweet. Healthier anyway. :D

Ooh, another Southern/Northern difference I just thought of-collegiate sports versus professional sports. In the North, pro sports are the only sports as far as most people are concerned. I'm a die-hard Red Sox fan, but I could not care less what the local collegiate baseball team does or doesn't do, and I don't particularly care about Clemson's team either. Southerners are all about the college sports, even if they never went to that college-there were oodles of drunken fans at away football games who liked to harass the band that probably had never set foot on campus when it wasn't a Saturday.

This applies to high school sports too-I went to one football game in high school even though I love football, because in addition to our 0-32 losing streak that spanned three seasons it just wasn't important whether we won or lost on Friday when the Patriots were going to play that Sunday. I saw a Georgia high school playoff game being televised in a restaurant when I went out to dinner with my boyfriend and his family, and I was astounded that anyone would care enough to watch it. I'm sure it helps when your school team is mildly competitive at the least, but I have a feeling that a team with the same skill level (or lack thereof) down South wouldn't have gotten laughed at and booed at the homecoming pep rally every year.

I suspect several factors play into this one-a greater population density and number of big cities in the North that beget more professional sports franchises, colder weather that prevents teams from practicing as much or fans from attending as many games, culture differences that place more of an emphasis on sports being a ticket out of a small town, etc.-but I can only speculate.

I think it's definitely because a lot of southern states don't have professional sports teams, and some of the cities that do have teams don't have all of the major 4 sports covered.

Boston, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, etc. all cover 3 or 4 of the major leagues - NFL, NHL, MLB, and NBA. In some cases, they have two teams for just one sport. And then you look at an area like New England, where all of the Boston teams really "represent" and have fans from 6 different states.

Then you look at states like Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, etc. that don't have any professional teams across the entire state, or they have very few. And then there are some large cities that you would expect to have at least one team (Austin, TX, I'm looking at you!) that have none. College sporting events are the only ones to attend.

And yes, the focus on high school sports in the south is huge compared to the north. I must say, I had NO IDEA how big football was here in TX until I got here. I drove by a football stadium and asked my bf, "Which college is that?" He told me that it was, in fact, a high school stadium. And that's not the only one around here that's enormous.

Plus there are a lot more smaller liberal arts colleges up North where athletics is not a focus and not important, versus the South where you can have one or two large state schools that absolutely dominate the local culture and consequently the sports in-state, i.e. USC and Clemson. The number of colleges Massachusetts manages to cram into such a small state (and it's not even the whole state because there is no Massachusetts past Worcester:p) always astounds me.

The stadium that marching band practiced at before the bowl game this year was gigantic, and it was only a high school stadium as well! I was amazed that so much money would be devoted to a facility that only gets used for one season out of the year, but it's not my money to spend. Marching band is equally huge in the South-when I went to band camp this past summer and told people that I had never marched before because we had no marching band at my high school, I got looked at like I had three heads.

You find a lot of people into college football up here. Then again, our "pro" football team is crap and has been for a very long time. And marching band is huge here too.

I live in a pretty small suburb near Detroit and the high school football games are pretty much attended by the whole town. I said something to some band parents this year about missing going to football games and they said I should still come. It doesn't matter if I don't have a football player or a kid in the band- all kinds of people go who don't have kids on the field in some capacity. It was NOT like that where I grew up.

You need to leave Tennessee off that list. Nashville has the NFL and NHL. Memphis has the NBA.

You also need to leave Oklahoma off that list because they're in the Midwest.

And OKC has an NBA team...

But aren't those relatively recent additions?

The Tennessee Titans were established (moved from Houston) in 1997, I believe...I may or may not still be bitter about it. So, if you consider 15 years "relatively new", then yes.:p