Talk:Lake Wobegon

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Contents 1 Whippets 2 First segment 3 Holdingford 3.1 Holdingford -vs Freeport 4 Merger, Mist County 5 NE Montana 6 Sections 7 The Lake Wobegon effect 8 Simpsons 9 Ralph's

[edit] Whippets

I recall the baseball team being the Lake Wobegon Whippets, not the Leonards (as currently in the article). However, I've been out of the US for a while and this is based on one of the old Comedy Theatre tabes. Anyone know for sure? --Dcclark 19:20, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yes, the team is the Whippets. I have a well-worn Whippets cap. LorenzoB 08:11, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] First segment

I'd be curious to know when the first "News from Lake Wobegon" segment aired, and roughly how many segments have aired since that first one. 70.109.78.99 03:37, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Holdingford

Does anyone know why Holdingford, MN is thought to be the real Lake Wobegon?

With 726 people and its geographic location, it's the right size and in the right place. There are a number of similar towns in the area that are candidates.

• This whole thing sounds like WP:OR to me, and so I've removed it. Is there any actual evidence that Keillor ever based Wobegon on Holingford?--Pharos 17:46, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Holdingford -vs Freeport

I'm going to remove the new paragraph which asserts that Lake Wobegon was based on Holdingford for a simple reason. Keillor has stated in print that Freeport was the model for Lake Wobegon. In the same article he said that Holdingford looks the most like LW, but he named Freeport as the inspiration and model for it. I'm sure that there's a way to integrate the Holdingford statement into the existing info that already exists. Spottacus 18:48, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merger, Mist County

Merger works for me. There are MANY towns in the upper midwest that could be, and are, the REAL Lake Wobegone. I grew up in one of them: Scobey, Montana. --Midnite Critic 12:08, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

As someone who has listened to GK's radio shows since the 1970s, I never heard of Mist County until I read about it here. It sounds like it might be a GK joke, but I've never heard it mentioned. Ive also never heard mention of a county courthouse or the numbers of lawyers supported by a county seat. Now, Balsam Lake, WI is a county seat town about the same size as the legendary Lake Wobegon, so its possible, but the idea that Lake Wobegone was a county seat raises its importance beyond what shy people could probably tolerate. I guess I'd like to see some documentation for the assertion that Keiller invented Mist County.BartBee

Nothing easier. Check out Keillor's book Lake Wobegon Days (New York, Viking, 1985), pages 8-9: "Lake Wobegon is the seat of tiny Mist County, the 'phantom county in the heart of the heartland' (Dibbley, My Minnesota, founded by Unitarian missionaries and Yankee promoters, then found by Norwegian Lutherans who straggled in from the west, headed first to Lake Agassiz in what is now North Dakota, a lake that turned out to be prehistoric, and by German Catholics, who, bound for Clay County, had stopped a little short, having misread their map, but refused to admit it." BPK 17:26, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Merge by all means. And I suggest that "Mist County" is just a homonym for "missed county" since, according to the book, the county was omitted by the initial survey of the state. J. Peterka 23:28, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] NE Montana

The area I am referring to is specifically the two northeastern-most counties in Montana, Daniels and Sheridan. These counties are characterized by the following: a)a large percentage of the population is of Norwegian extraction; b)Lutheranism and Roman Catholicism are the dominant faiths, with a smattering of others, including various types of fundamentalism; c)Farming is the major industry; d)All of the towns are "under 2,000", most of them closer to 500. My hometown, Scobey is just under 1,000; e)Winters are long and cold; f)"Hotdish" is a major component of everyone's diet. I could go on, but I think the point has been made, and this area was only settled in the early 20th century. Scobey was founded in 1913, again, Scobey IS "Lake Wobegon." --Midnite Critic 23:23, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

BTW, if any area is debateable here, it is eastern SD, which is much more heavily German than Norwegian. --Midnite Critic 23:26, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sections

I split the article into a few sections, but I'm not sure I managed to pick very good names for them. Any ideas? Sverre 10:32, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The Lake Wobegon effect

I have allowed myself, to point out in the article the relationship of this effect to the Confirmation bias. It would be nice, if someone could maybe write a few words about the way it is relationed to this and other biases treated in the scientifical literature but not yet in the Wikipedia, such as the "myside bias" (David Perkins) or the "self-serving bias" (Babcock and Loewenstein) etc etc. But I wonder, if the article should really list, as it does now, groups of people, which have such biases. There are being found meanwhile in studies more and more such groups, and so the article risks getting very very long. A better idea seems to me to list the few groups, in which these biases have NOT been found, namely scientists, which conduct these studies, and scientifical journalists, which write about them. Of interest would also be a few words about the etymology. How the uneducated lumped all the biases together under "wishful thinking", until in the middle of the last century the scientists started to bring order into the muddled minds. -- Hanno Kuntze (talk) 10:00, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Simpsons

Keillor's Lake Wobegon monologues are referenced in The Simpsons episode "Marge on the Lam"[1]. 203.17.70.161 (talk) 06:44, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Ralph's

If you can't find it at Ralph's, you can probably get along (pretty good)without it. (pretty good) in brackets as popular opinion (google search) has it as "get along without it". ^[1] Bogger (talk) 18:47, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

If you've heard it with the "pretty good" phrase, I'll take your word for it. GK evidently writes out the scripts for nearly everything on the show and then proceeds to ad lib at will -- even in the "News from LW" segments. It's just that the "pretty good without it" phrase sounds so unlike what I expect from GK -- even as an ad lib. BartBee (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 14:59, 6 June 2008 (UTC)