A bike-share name only a Bostonian - or a Milwaukeean - could love

It's not just cheese. From Wikipedia:

Wisconsin is the leading producer of cranberries, with over half of U.S. production. Massachusetts is the second largest U.S. producer.

"Bubbelr'" sends a rickshaw around to take your grandmother to the store.

One of my few gripes about Hubway is that the "basket", while clever-looking, is often not useful to carry the items I want to carry. This basket looks better.

I can definitely confirm use of the term "bubbler." I went East for college and south for grad school and had to unlearn the term in favor of "drinking fountain," which always sounded odd to me (like I shooed away some pigeons and knelt down to take a drink in a public park's fountain). When I eventually settled in the Boston area some dozen years ago, I was thrilled to use "bubbler" again, though some folks probably think I'm just being cute rather than using the term I grew up with.

The connection between the Milwaukee area and New England is an old one. Most of the earliest settlers of Wisconsin were Yankees, and it's those early settlers who mingled with more recently arrived German liberals (expelled after the failed revolutions of 1848) to make Wisconsin a hotbed of abolitionism, the underground railroad, and Free Soil politics. I myself can trace part of my family tree from the landing of one ancestor at Boston in 1635 to farmers in pre-statehood Wisconsin. The area's Yankee backbone led directly to the founding of the Republican Party (in its more benign, early incarnation--LOL) in Wisconsin in 1854, which proved to be as popular in New England as it was in its native Midwest.

Story time! A year before Southern secession, Wisconsin itself was contemplating armed resistance against the pro-Southern Buchanan administration. The Federal government attempted to strong-arm Wisconsin into enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act (which obligated states to render assistance to slave masters attempting to recapture runaways) but Wisconsin refused, taking a "come here and make us" stance against Buchanan. As the threat of armed conflict loomed, Governor Randall concluded that the Union Guards (Milwaukee's Democratic-leaning, Irish American militia company) couldn't be trusted, so he had their muskets confiscated. Incensed at the slight, the Union Guards decided to charter a steamer called the Lady Elgin, chug on down to pick up some allies in Chicago, and hold a floating kegger/fundraiser to support the purchase of replacement weapons. Unfortunately, visibility wasn't good, and tragedy struck when a schooner accidentally rammed into the Lady Elgin. It became the most famous shipwreck in Great Lakes history. Many influential Milwaukee Irish were on board that night, and their loss permanently changed the entire political dynamic of the young city--it was the reason why Milwaukee never developed a permanent class of Irish politicians and civil servants the way so many other Northern cities did.