Frig Magnets

At a garage sale a few weeks ago, I bought some souvenir magnets, the state-shaped magnets for refrigerators. Ten cents each, a lot cheaper than at a tourist junk shop, so I bought most of them -- but only those places that I'd been to at one time or another (otherwise it would be cheating).

Most of them are what you'd expect, trading on a state's iconography, or less charitably, state cliches. Kentucky has a racehorse on it, Indiana has a couple of racetrack flags, and Wyoming has room for a cowboy, Old Faithful and Devil's Tower. There are the standard nicknames too: Land of 10,000 Lakes of Minnesota and the Hoosier State for Indiana, for instance.

The oddest of the lot is Arizona, though the images aren't that strange. It has a cowboy, too, plus some Indian pottery and some mountains. But then there's the motto -- ARIZONA If You Knew It. If you knew it what? If you knew it, you'd stay the hell away, especially when it's 110 in the shade?