Some days even though I'm crazy busy at work, I also manage to spend too much time browsing useless* parts of the Internet. For example, for the past 15 minutes or so, I've been amazed at how much of rural Illinois is documented with the Google Maps Street View feature. Pretty soon, you'll be able to see all the corn fields and dirt roads of my youth, simply sitting on my ass in the Loop. What a wonderful time we live in.
Anyway, I also was playing with the "More" feature on Google Maps, which allows you to see YouTube videos from or Wikipedia articles about the locations you are viewing, which led me to the entry for Rio, Illinois -- a town that is 25% the size of my former hometown, and unlike all the other entries of the other nearby small towns, which only include the most basic geographic and population information, the entry for "Rio" has this special line:
Contrary to the spelling, locally Rio is pronounced Rye-Oh.
Even though the article is written with no actual bias, I know I bring my own prejudices and insecurities when I read that sentence with an implied "by the slack-jawed locales" at the end. Or maybe after the word "locally." Either way, it feels like its there.
* The word "useless" is soooo relative.
