… and, yes, we got a good chuckle out of it, just as many other Prairie people seem to have.
As “The Office” opened its ninth and final season last night, viewers of the sitcom were brought up to speed with a rundown of how the show’s characters spent their summers. As you can see in the video above (cued up to about 30 seconds before the Silicon Prairie mention), Ryan Howard (played by B.J. Novak) spent part of his summer relocating to Oxford, Ohio. Says Howard of the move:
“I’ve actually done a lot of market research, and it turns out that southwest Ohio is going to be the next Silicon Valley. They call it the Silicon Prairie.”
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The Silicon Prairie has received mention from such prominent outlets as CNN, Time and The Wall Street Journal, but very few of those mentions have generated the sort of social media buzz that last night’s one-liner did.
Now, Ohio’s about 500 miles east of any place that we here at SPN define as the Silicon Prairie. And, what’s more, the line was delivered with a wink and a nudge and was slightly — gasp! — disparaging toward the very notion of the Silicon Prairie.
But, as the old saying goes, if you can’t laugh at yourself … actually, I’m not sure that’s a saying. But the scene and episode were funny, so we’ll let this one slide. But only this once, “The Office.”