For those who recently took me to task for attacking Somerville, MA, it appears that I was indeed wrong. Massachusetts is the smartest state in the union. My own state, California, is 43rd on the list. In other words, we’re the seventh dumbest state in the union. Dumber than Oklahoma, Texas, and Tennessee. Far dumber than Ohio and South Carolina.

Of course, we also have a hell of a lot more people (33,871,648 of them in fact). So we you consider the law of means, it’s quite likely that, numerically speaking, we may have a larger cadre of smartypants to draw from. And we still have the world’s fifth largest economy and very nice weather. And where would you be without all the vapid movies coming from Hollywood? Resorting to low-budget Canadian films, no doubt. And as dumb as we are, we didn’t vote for Bush in the last two presidential elections.

If there’s any bright side to this, pun fully intended, this should put an end to the whole red-states-they-dumb, blue-states-we’re-enlightened argument. Intelligence, it seems, is entirely relative. Now pardon me while I try to white-out this grammatical mistake on my monitor.