(Remember, while I really don't like the place that much, it's all harmless fun. And it reflects the oceans of free time I have.)
Anyway:
1. The school only has Pepsi, which insults the taste buds.
2. Fresno has homeless people like big cities do, but none of the fun things big cities have.
3. Dry heat is awful. East Coasters, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
4. The band sits 3 miles from the student section at football games.
5. The students don’t care about football.
6. There is racial diversity, but everyone sticks only to their own race, meaning there is absolutely no sense of community.
7. Everyone you meet from a different race will talk your ear off expecting you to want to learn eeeeeeeeeeeeverything about their particular culture. Not only will they not listen to you talk about your local culture, they don’t even realize you have one.
9. They charge you double what you’d pay in the south to live in places where you have to wait half an hour to play a YouTube video.
10. The Pacific Time Zone is easily man’s worst invention of all time (Ding!). You have to set your alarm clock to see the first football game of the day, and the last one ends at 9pm, which is WAY too early to pass out while watching a west-coast game.
11. All the frat guys are nerds.
(These are freaking Sigma Chi's!)
12. I have never seen a single sorority girl on campus that would make it into ANY sorority at a decent University.
(She's a freaking Phi Mu!! Ahahahahahahaha!!!!!111!!!1!!!
13. They don’t have Zaxby’s.
14. There are no bars within walking distance of campus.
15. The campus looks like NOLA after Katrina… with no FEMA.
16. They move you into "student apartments" with middle-aged drug dealers who dropped out of high school.
17. There are lots of homicides, many of which involve aging high school drop-out drug dealers (Sorry, no links. I'm still a little TRAUMATIZED from that one).
18. When you try to get out of your lease after being traumatized by one of these homicides, the manager looks you straight in the face and says, “This is Fresno”, which means you apparently should expect this sort of thing to happen here… yea, she actually said that.
19. When I realized that whoever killed my first random roommate would never be caught I started wondering if I could get away with putting a similar move on my second random roommate.
20. Southern women blow the pants off of anything I’ve seen there, which also sucks because you don’t want to see these girls with no pants.
21. Local culture? Paging local culture! Yea, you’ll never find it.
22. Hookah bars will severely overcharge you, tell your friend from San Diego that it would cost more there (which it wouldn’t), not let you change the channel even though you are the only people in the place, refuse to give you water without charge until you basically threaten them, then give you a shot glass full of room-temperature tap water and tell you, “We don’t do that here”, and send an ugly waitress to your table every 30 seconds to ask if you want to buy shots. (Yes, it’s all true)
23. Regular bars will interrogate your party with flashlights before letting you in, and when they find out some people are not yet 21 they will yell at you about how you will get arrested if they catch any underage person taking a sip of alcohol. Once inside they will order various employees to pace back and forth past your table to ensure that no-one is doing so, and remind you about it every time you visit the bar. (Yes, it’s all true)
24. On a clear day you can see beautiful mountains in the distance. I’ve seen two of these days so far.
25. At the airport they greet you with a huge “Welcome to Fresno” sign and a panorama-- of Yosemite National Park an hour’s drive away.
26. They don’t have Yuengling.
27. They tell you all your fees are covered-- and then send you a tuition bill for 2,500 dollars 2 weeks before school starts. (Yes, it’s all true).
28. No-one knows the fight song, many don’t know a fight song exists.
29. The football team sucks every year but coach Pat Hill is still regarded as some kind of local hero.
30. A local radio show asked the question: "How does a person's past affect relationships? Should people ditch someone because of their past?" The best response? "Come on now people. You know if your man use to sleep with tons of people in his past that he's probably got something now. This is Fresno people, everyone here is recycled!" Groooooooooooooss!
31. I arrived thinking I would finally be in the company of a lot of Democrats. I found out during the first week that I was in the one red patch of the whole state. You can’t make this stuff up!
32. I have two wonderful memories of my first semester- I took a trip to LA one weekend, and another weekend I took a trip to San Francisco.
33. Anyone who lives in Fresno will tell you Fresno sucks.
34. Anyone who does not live in Fresno will tell you Fresno sucks.
35. By virtue of # 33 and #34, anyone who does not live in Fresno is automatically smarter than anyone who does.
36. Fast Food restaurants charge you for refills (although I usually got around this one).
37. Thursday nights are always dead, which is still hard for me to believe.
38. There are no pine trees to block the setting sun.
39. The local nickname for Fresno is “The No.” ‘Nuff said.
40. In most places there's a chance someone will steal your bike, which inconveniences you and makes that person money. In Fresno they steal the front tire off of your bike, which inconveniences you and wastes time for the perpetrator. Why?....... I dunno, it’s Fresno.
(Enjoy your seatless unicycle, F-No Bastards!)
41. They said the Library would be done in January, it wasn’t. When it finally was done they still couldn’t open it- they didn’t have enough money to pay for the furniture. (Which cost $ 10 million). Rumor has it they are going to fill it with hundreds of bean bag chairs…
42. The school gym doesn’t play music, which leads to the most awkward workouts in the world.
43. There are three celebrities from Fresno: Kevin Federline, Cher, and Scott Peterson. Not sure which one makes me want to kill myself the most…
44. Jeffrey Dahmer’s mom lives in Fresno. Yay!
45. In 2006, 10 Fresno City College football players were questioned for the rape an 11-year-old girl. These weren’t bad guys, they were just stuck in Fresno too long!
46. In a similar vein, Scott Petersen wasn’t really crazy… too much time in Fresno will do that to you.
47. Fresno has one recognized national historic site: the Fresno Sanitary Landfill, which closed in 1987. Yes, I’m serious.
48. It smells like shit at night and in the morning. (Not satisfied, Fresno State decided to plant trees that smell like even more shit. )
49. They decided to have spring break the last week you could possibly have spring break, meaning we had 10 straight weeks of school to start the spring semester. The administration goes out of its way to make things suck!
50. A Fresno State basketball player was jailed, a professor was arrested for soliciting to a minor, and Fresno police were arrested on auto theft charges… all on the same day (Jan. 30, 2009).
51. The fans at basketball games stand up at the beginning of every half until the team scores, which seems like the opposite of what you should do. They should extend this tradition to football, everybody stands and cheers excitedly until the team scores a touchdown!... Only in Fresno.
"The F-No Faithful are going wild! If they're lucky, we won't score the whole damn game!!"
52. My buddy TNJ found a solution for his two years in Fresno: He smoked weed every day to forget where he was.
53. My buddy Joe found another solution for his two years in Fresno: He drove to San Diego literally every single freaking weekend.
54. There is a regional disease called valley fever (Yes, I’m serious). People miss months of work because of this disease... I've had it for the last two years.
55. They cut men’s soccer and wrestling. They replaced it with men’s cross country and women’s lacrosse.
56. You ever been to a cross country meet? How about a lacrosse match? ...Apparently people in Fresno like these.
57. In the spring of 2009 Fresno State gave 10 full-ride lacrosse scholarships to girls who had NEVER played lacrosse, and no high school in the whole valley has women’s lacrosse.
58. Says TNJ: Too many girls here saving it for marriage. No comment from Fresnomore.
59. The 2009 Forbes list of America’s 10 most miserable cities included two from the valley: Stockton and Modesto… they couldn’t bear to go any farther.
60. Fresno State football fans are passionate enough to get in fights at every single game I've been to… with other Fresno State fans.
61. There was a fatal shooting in 2007 between Fresno State students… over a Playstation (Yes, it’s all true).
62. You would think Fresno residents could at least stick to traditional Playstation violence... oh wait, they do that too.
63. Marcus Wesson is from Fresno... Click the link at your own peril.
64. Fresno State hired Jerry Tarkanian knowing he was a crook. He filled the team with thugs and made them good for a few years… then got the school in tons of legal trouble that they to date have not recovered from.
65. 4 different athletic coaches have sued the school for sexual discrimination. All four won. One offered a buyout for 400,000. Fresno State said no and went to trial and were ordered to pay her 9 million. Collectively they have awarded over 25 million dollars to female sports employees. Smart!
(The official FSU adviser on the role of women)
66. The school president is John Welty. He has been here since 1991 and all of this has happened under his watch, yet he’s still here (see the theme!?). I met him once. 3 words: short, extremely awkward.
67. CBS made a parody of the TV shows Dallas and Dynasty called Fresno… It was perfect, any city or dynasty would be embarrassed to be compared to Fresno. (Best line from the show: "You call these grapes!? They taste like Fresno!")
68. A new apartment complex called Campus Pointe should open later this year… half the space is allotted for college students, the other half is for senior citizens. I can’t believe I’m typing this.
69. F-No has the highest rate of Diabetes in California. That’s cuz Everybody’s fat!!
70. Noisy jets fly over constantly and you can hear them for what feels like a solid 3 or 4 minutes before they dissipate… then another flies over a few minutes later.
71. Having lived in 6+ apartment complexes, only the one in Fresno has cut off the water for several hours “for routine maintenance.” They do this about once a month.
72. The Taco Bell runs out of beef. (2/28/09)
73. A San Jose State football player named Ellis T. Jones III got caught using Craigslist to lure people to his house so he could rob them. "But that's Nor Cal!" you say. Don't be fooled, a crime this creative and f&#@ed up can only mean one thing, he's from the valley.
74. Local youth take great pride in the Fresno State athletic logo... they love it so much they made it a gang logo!
75. Which means that local kids can't wear Fresno State stuff to school. And don't you dare say "Go 'Dogs!" or yeeeeeeeeeer outta here!!!!
76. Even the Japanese know how much Fresno sucks. They compare it to a low-budget tourist stop... or a ghost town.
77. Local news anchors get off on pulling womens' hair! Who needs the death of traditional media when you've got Fresno!?
78. They put Boy Scouts of America advertisements in club bathrooms.
79. The year after the baseball team won the national championship, the PA system went out in the middle of a game. It was no fluke, the speakers were known to be outdated for years.
(Here is the PA guy announcing player-of-the-tournament honors via Bullhorn.)
80. The local hockey team folds mid-season, and then screws little kids out of money.
81. The other local nickname is, "The armpit of California." 'Nuff said.
82. Local cable has no preview channel. Who doesn't have a preview channel!?!?
83. Fresno is the butt of jokes in Thelma & Louise, Con Air, EDtv, The Johnny Carson show, and Monsters vs. Aliens. Don't worry though, the actors from Monsters vs. Aliens apologized, sort of.
Fresno Sucks, Do not Move to Fresno
