Mr California

I have decided to start a new series within my blog I am calling ‘Crazy Cruisers’, people I have met on my cruises who for one reason or another come across as being a little weird, strange, or otherwise unusual! Case studies into the stupidity and cruelty of the world we now live in and being propagated from Dumb Central (aka Washington DC).

Today’s story is about a guy I met at the bar from a small town somewhere near Chico, CA. It started when I enquired about here he lived. He asked me if I knew anything about California. I lived there for 18 years, so I replied ‘I know a moderate amount’, without letting on residency there. He then proceeded to tell me how he has spent much of the cruise so far educating Europeans, who he claimed didn’t understand at all about how big and important California was. I had a general idea of where Chico was. He said it was north of Sacramento, so I responded, ‘oh so somewhere NE of Nappa Valley’, just to let him know I knew a little about California geography. His response was, no, Chico was East of Nappa. That made no sense, but I let it slide. After all, he is the expert educating the Europeans about California. I just might have been mistake (I wasn’t).

Next he told me Europeans don’t realize how big California is. That it is 1,600 miles long and 400 miles wide. Wow, I thought. That’s about twice as big as I thought it was. And yes, the facts are that if you get in a car in San Diego (on the Mexico border) and drive North for 1,400 miles – you would be in Vancouver, Canada. According to Mr California, I would still be in California! I bit my lip and let him continue. Perhaps he was confusing my Australian accent with a British one and felt I needed more education.

He then proceeded to inform me that there were 48 million people living in the Bay area alone. By now I have decided I have had enough of his BS. I knew Southern California had more people than Northern California. If Mr California was correct then California would have over 30% of America’s population, which it doesn’t. I told him he was mistaken, but he tried to double down by giving me a rundown of the major cities in the area and their population. I pulled out my phone and googled California’s population. When I showed him that the total population of California was 40 million he seemed to lose interest in educating me on how big and important California was.

I knew when he first told me he lived near Chico California that he was likely to be a low information MAGA voter. That it was likely we were not going to agree on a lot. I have been to his part of California and experienced first hand how woefully ignorant and uninformed people i that area are. Here was a living case in point. Facts meant little. He was intent on making numbers up to prove how important his state was. He didn’t need to. The real numbers for California are pretty impressive. What really got to me was, uninformed as he was, he still felt he needed to go out into the world and educate others about his own distorted knowledge of the world.

This is part of what has happened in America. A culture has been allowed to develop in which there are things known as ‘alternate facts’. When Ashley was in grade 2 she had a social studies exam in which a multiple-choice question asked what started the civil war. One of the answers was ‘b. Slavery’. But you would be mistaken if you thought that was the right answer. In Georgia (which was part of the Confederacy), the correct answer is ‘d. States Rights’. It is often difficult to reach consensus when the facts are agreed to. When you live in a society where you can make up your own facts, it becomes almost impossible.

The Facts

• California is the third largest state in the US with an area of 164,000 sq. miles (423,000 sq. km).
• California is 760 miles (1,220 km) long and 250 miles (400 km wide).
• In 2024 California had a population of 39.4 million.
• Chico is North (and a little East) of Napa Valley. Definitely not East.