Welcome to Muppetsville

You may be wondering what I'm currently doing for a job after I announced last year that the boss no longer needed me. Well, he found some more things for me to do, so I'm still there, for a while, though on greatly reduced hours. One of these things included a gloriously boring task copying and pasting data about neighbourhoods of American towns from Wikipedia. Of course I had to stop my mind wandering away from the job at hand, but I still absorbed a lot of extra info about the demographics of the USA, proving to me, as if it weren't already apparent, what a wonderfully diverse and historically interesting country it is; and of course my mind did wander, and I found myself compiling my own made-up data about my very own made-up American town:

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Muppetsville is a city in The United States of America, the third largest in New Berkshire, and the county seat of Muppet County.

The first inhabitants of the area were the Native American Sue tribe, who broke away from the Sioux nation after the Great Schism that followed the controversial 1674 Spelling Reform Act. Later, Dutch hunters arrived looking for beaver, but agents of the Hudson Bay Company, who were gaining control of the region, told them to stop it and go back home to their wives.

The origins of the town's name are disputed: it may be derived from the Sue word "Muȟpót", meaning "There's nothing here for you, Cheese-Breath!"; from the Dutch "Mupjet", meaning "Yeah, I see what you mean!"; or perhaps from Lord Muppet, a popular music-hall entertainer of the time who was mistakenly given the land rights to the place by the British House of Lords.

As of the census of 2005, the racial makeup of the city was 65.26% White, 29.29% African American, 3.84% Asian, 1.35% Native American, 0.23% Pacific Islander, and 0.02% from The Planet Aaamazzara (concentrated largely in Muppetsville "Pleasant Pastures" Maximum Security Home for the Highly Suggestable).

As at 2005 there were 65,648 households, 26.8% with children, 10.8% with a female householder and no husband present, 46.7% were “non-families”, 37.4% were highly disfunctional, and 28.3% have probably been on Jerry Springer*. The average household size was 2.40 and the average family size was 3.14. You do the math.

85% of the population speak English as their first language, 11% Spanish, 3% Chinese, 0.5% Sue, 0.3% Hindi, and 0.2% Klingon. Klingon speakers are not uncommon in this region of America, but the high incidence of those speaking it as their first language is a result of the first ever "Trekkies" convention, held in Muppetsville in 1972.

The city has had its share of sporting success: the Muppetsville Muskies have been NAIVE** champions for 37 out of the last 39 years, putting the town well and truly on the global sporting map.

Famous Muppetsvillians include Dude, where's my baseball cap? actor Jerry Brad, serial killer Cletus "Muesli Man" Muncie, and WWF wrestler The Lump.

The city is represented in the Senate by Muff Watney and in the House of Representatives by Tagg Bigley, scions of the famous Watney-Bigley urinal deodorizer block manufacturing empire.

Today, the town's chief exports are corn, pith, and homespun philosophy, perhaps the most famous example being "If it looks like a Muppet and it smells like a Muppet, it's a Muppet".

* Stick to the facts! (Wikipedia moderater: drivelmeister)
** North American Ice Volleyball Event


AN APPEAL FROM WIKIPEDIA FOUNDER JIMMY WALES: Please don't copy and paste this crap into any data repository that might be taken seriously. It's written by insomiacs, drones and dodos. Frankly I wish I'd never started it.