Barry Crimmins was often asked where he was from. "I'm from the Midwest," he once replied. Where exactly? "Upstate New York." And the name of the town in which he grew up? "Skaneateles," he explained. "It's an Indian word that means... 'beautiful lake surrounded by fascists.'"

[Crimmins, a left-leaning political satirist who hailed from "a town that is basically a permanent staging area for the Republican convention," once lamented that "the USA has moved so far to the right that the next New Hampshire Primary will be held in the Atlantic Ocean." Of Florida, he once joked, "I have a problem with any state where the electric chair only goes to 'medium high.'" And the environment? "It is screwed up but you can still have fun," he once declared. "I'm going brown-water rafting this summer..."]

[New Hampshire was the last state to accept Martin Luther King Day as an official holiday. The state's motto -- "Live Free or Die" -- appears on license plates fashioned, ironically enough, by inmates in the state's prisons.]