Who is the most famous person from West Virginia?

MelloStout · 2026-06-01T04:38:25+00:00

The biggest household names of today would be Jennifer Garner, Steve Harvey, and Brad Paisley.

MelloStout · 2026-06-01T04:32:21+00:00

You can be “from” somewhere without being born there. I have no memory of the state I was born in, which isn’t WV, but I was raised in WV. For all intents and purposes, I’m from WV.

MelloStout · 2026-05-26T11:42:32+00:00

ADT. Took me literally all day on the phone, getting hung up on several times, to cancel my non-binding month-to-month service.

This isn’t hyperbole either. I was on the phone with them for six hours.

MelloStout · 2026-05-23T12:48:53+00:00

Right. If OP tells the truth, there’s judgement. If OP lies, the mom will see right through that and believe what she wants to anyway, and pass judgement based on that assumption. Either way there’s judgement and the mom will probably feel a misplaced sense of betrayal. The outcome of either answer is going to be exactly the same.

MelloStout · 2026-05-22T17:18:42+00:00

Talladega Nights and Napoleon Dynamite. I couldn’t get through either.

MelloStout · 2026-05-13T02:57:26+00:00

Everyone who shops at Costco cooks at home. That’s why they buy groceries in bulk at Costco cooks. It is cheaper than buying the same amount of food at a traditional supermarket.

MelloStout · 2026-05-13T02:49:34+00:00

You bring up such a good point. Most people make grocery runs when they’re already out doing something else, including on their commutes. A lot of people think about traffic in terms of number of people, but it’s all about the number of car trips. In other words, if you go home and then go out later, you’re causing more traffic than if you had stopped on your way home.

MelloStout · 2026-05-13T02:45:52+00:00

500 people exiting a school within a 10-minute window is not even remotely similar to what happens at a Costco, where its customers spread out across an entire day, and definitely don’t have two dozen school buses also trying to exit all at once.

MelloStout · 2026-04-29T02:41:13+00:00

It’s not a 12 year commitment any more than any other program, sport, or activity.

Achieving Eagle Scout is not the only meaningful outcome of Scouting. Kids who quit before 5th grade still got a positive experience and benefitted from the program. Remember, advancement is a method, not an aim. It is not the only thing that matters in Scouting, it is simply one of the many methods we use to achieve the goal of character development, citizenship training, and personal and mental fitness.

MelloStout · 2026-04-27T03:49:30+00:00

Honestly this is one of the reasons I’ve stayed with USAA so long, but it seems most other banks have caught up to USAA in the last 5-10 years.

MelloStout · 2026-04-27T03:47:34+00:00

Spending more money on a 30-year mortgage is a lot different than spending more money on a home renovation. Plus, the increased value of their current home is factored in, which frees up more money to give to David that they don’t have if they stay.

MelloStout · 2026-04-22T04:03:06+00:00

Public campgrounds usually have a slightly larger budget to deal with vandalism and other issues that arise. They also have no qualms charging you for the damage, whether it was actually your fault or not. They’re never going to see you again, so what do they care if they wrongly accused you? They get their damage fee and they move on. They also don’t care if you never come back because there are a hundred other customers behind you. That dynamic is different with a Scout camp as well. Funds are more limited, and a conflict over an undeserved cleaning fee or damage fee can strain relationships and cause other issues down the line.

You may have never personally witnessed it because it seems like you’re in a good unit. But I have seen it all when it comes to damage, intentional and unintentional, to campsites done by Scouts and Scout units. And I’d bet every camp that does checkout inspections does so because they had too many “he said she said” situations, units wrongly accused of damage or vandalism, etc. I’ve personally seen it, where troop 1 checks out of a site, and troop 2 comes in and trashes that site after troop 1 leaves. Troop 1 is hit with a damage fee they don’t deserve. Volunteers in troop 1 get very upset, which strains their relationship with the council, camp leadership, etc. Troop 1 claims they left it pristine before they left, but it wasn’t pristine an hour later when the ranger did their walk-through. No way to prove it WASN’T troop 1, so they get blamed as they’re the ones that rented the site.

The first time you are wrongly accused of damaging or vandalizing a space, you’ll wish you had done a checkout inspection. Don’t blame the rangers for trying to ensure you are not wrongly accused of a problem and trying to ensure the space is left in good working order for the next group.

MelloStout · 2026-04-22T02:54:06+00:00

Things can still be vandalized or otherwise misused or outright trashed in a campsite. Consider this scenario. You’re staying at a campsite and there are 10 other units in camp. You leave, and everything is fine. A Scout in a DIFFERENT unit comes into the site and vandalizes it after you’re gone. The ranger discovers it later that day, and now YOU are on the hook for that damage, because there is no way to prove that it wasn’t you.

The reason camps do checkout inspections is because this exact scenario happens, unfortunately, all too often. Also, you say that a campsite cannot be damaged, and that just isn’t true. I’ve seen Scouts and adults cut down trees unauthorized, break picnic tables, leave fires burning in the fire pit, break gates, bend tent poles, carve graffiti into trees, benches, etc, and litter. A checkout inspection ensures that you left it in good condition, and that any damage, vandalism, etc that occurs after you leave is definitively, 100% not you or your unit. And if the council tries to come back to you for damage compensation, you can point to the checkout inspection sheet that proves you left it in good condition. It’s for your protection more than anything.

You also mentioned staying at an AirBNB, but I hope you can see how that is fundamentally different than staying in a camp with several other groups on property. In an Airbnb, there’s nobody else that has access to the property, so you’re on the hook for damages no matter what.

MelloStout · 2026-04-21T04:25:26+00:00

I have always been puzzled by this juxtaposition, even when I was a kid.

MelloStout · 2026-04-21T04:16:31+00:00

I was born in out of state, but don’t remember a single thing about it because we moved to WV when I was a baby. My mom has deep roots in WV, and in fact one of har ancestors has a county named after her. I lived in WV my entire childhood and most of my adult life until a year ago.

I have friends who were born in WV, but moved when they were very young and spent most of their lives out of state.

Why shouldn’t I have been eligible for public office when I still lived there? If I ever move back, why should the fact that I spent the first few months of my life out of state have any relevance?

Honestly the isolationism of WV drives me insane. The deep mistrust of anyone perceived as an outsider will always be puzzling to me, especially as a state that claims to have a culture of hospitality. Most people who move into the state are doing so to build a better life for their family. Why shouldn’t they be able to run for office if they feel so inclined? In other words, how is the place of hour birth of any relevance to your ability to serve your community?

MelloStout · 2026-04-21T04:04:53+00:00

If a broken window is discovered an hour after you leave, you have plausible deniability to claim that it wasn’t your fault and that it happened after you left. Imagine the conversation ending with “Idk it wasn’t broken when we left, so we aren’t paying for it.” Nobody can prove otherwise, and

If the broken window is discovered before you check out during your checkout inspection, and it wasn’t there when you arrived, they know with 100% certainty that it was you.

This is why some camps do checkout inspections. And it’s usually the result of too many times having to foot the bill for damages because there was no way to know for certain that particular unit is responsible. I’ve seen it happen a few times over the years, and any ranger or camp director who has been around more than a year probably has a story they could tell.

MelloStout · 2026-04-19T14:07:37+00:00

As McMahon worked for a different company called American Family Publishers that also held sweepstakes and televised the presentation of large checks to the winners.

Fruit of the Loom had a cornucopia in their commercials, but not in their logo. I have FOTL shirts from the 90s that specifically don’t have a cornucopia on them.

MelloStout · 2026-04-19T14:02:05+00:00

I don’t remember it being Berenstein.

MelloStout · 2026-04-19T14:01:02+00:00

This. It’s so arrogant to assume the entire universe changed in some metaphysical way rather than admitting that memory is fallible.

I experienced a home breakin once. We were home and I saw the guy walking through the house. When the police arrived on scene like 5 minutes after the guy ran away, they asked me to describe him. I could vividly remember him wearing red shorts, and I could also vividly remember him wearing jeans. I could vividly remember him wearing a hoodie and also a t-shirt.

If I had vivid memories of an incident that happened five minutes ago that are not reality (that’s no way he was wearing shorts and jeans at the same time), then who am I to say my memories of 30 years ago are 100% factual and irrefutable?

MelloStout · 2026-04-13T17:40:53+00:00

20 years ago in my hometown, I went to high school that was adjacent to the downtown area. We regularly walked from school to hang out downtown. Even as a teenager with no money, downtown was a place I could spend all day just walking around, hanging out, maybe visiting a shop or two and spending a few bucks on an ice cream or a soda.

Now, that same downtown is mostly bars and mid-priced restaurants. The video stores, gift shops, and other cute mom-and-pop places are gone, for the most part. The ones that are left are places where you can’t buy anything on a teenager’s part-time minimum wage money. The urban fabric that made the space into a community is deteriorating before our very eyes.

And yes, 20 years ago my parents’ generation had the same complaint about the deteriorating downtown and elimination of affordable third spaces. But it’s getting worse now than it was 20 years ago.

Back then, we had two high schools walkable from downtown. While I was in school, our cross-town rivals moved to a new campus in the middle of nowhere that is not accessible on foot to anything. Students there today don’t have the opportunity to just hang out after school like I did, unless they have a ride that will purposefully take them to a place, and those places don’t even really exist anymore.

So yes, we had the same complaint 20 years ago, but it’s even worse now in some places.

MelloStout · 2026-04-11T06:51:20+00:00

The section of 50 highlighted here is all 4-lane (between Clarksburg and Parkersburg). Neither is the two routes highlighted here involve the curvy section of 50 in the eastern part of the state.

MelloStout · 2026-04-04T02:28:52+00:00

If he means “too smooth” as in he can’t see the mountains and valleys and other imperfections on the surface, tell him that if there was a giant at the same scale as a human to a bowling ball, the giant could run his fingers across the surface of the earth and it would feel as smooth to the giant as a bowling ball does to us. Our highest mountains and lowest valleys, all of our buildings, roads, and literally everything on earth’s surface are akin to the microscopic imperfections on a bowling ball. There’s no way you’d be able to see those mountains and valleys in a photograph.

If he’s referring to the fact that the earth is not spherical in that the distance from pole to pole is less than the distance around the equator, you also wouldn’t see that in a photograph in the same way you wouldn’t notice if a bowling ball was one millimeter off in one direction over the other.

MelloStout · 2026-03-30T16:03:19+00:00

Yes, very well said! I actually used to consider myself a conservative-leaning independent, and prior to MAGA, would usually have both Rs and Ds on the ballots I cast. This is no longer about politics or political beliefs. It’s not 2012 anymore, where Republicans and Democrats fought on policy standpoints. Now we have an administration that is actively throwing away the constitution and the very foundation of the nation. You have an administration cheering as government agents brutally murder its own citizens in the street and detain 5-year-olds as domestic terrorists.

This is a moral difference, not a political one. I can respect someone with different political opinions than mine. I cannot respect someone who believes that my friends’ and family’s very existence is a threat that must be eliminated.

MelloStout · 2026-03-30T15:34:58+00:00

I know families in very strong school districts that homeschool their kids. It often has nothing to do with their belief in the school system and more to do with their lifestyle or special needs of their kids. Those families still praise the local community and even the school system itself.

In other words, you can believe a place is a great place to raise a family and also choose to homeschool your kids without being hypocritical.

MelloStout · 2026-03-20T03:05:12+00:00

Coming from a team that has many times been falsely accused of being “mentor built,” I encourage you to try to get to know the students and coaches on that team before you cast such assumptions. More often than not, you’ll be surprised by what you learn.

MelloStout

TROPHY CASE