All this discussion of California brings me at last to my observations on the West Coast mentality, a favourite topic from the past. Basically as far as I can tell, the East Coast just doesn't matter to people out here. It exists, but it's sort of like Europe or Asia, a faraway place where anything that happens doesn't really affect us much. In Minnesota, where the coasts are approximately the same distance away, they both feel like real places where important things happen. In Boston, California is far away, but still part of the same country in a way that doesn't seem to apply in reverse. This is probably a form of arrogance -- Californians feel that everything they could want is within their state's borders, so the rest of the country is kind of irrelevant. Bostonians realise there aren't very many cows in Massachusetts.