More Lists, More Rants

Thunderdome

If you haven't gotten your fill of useless lists, Cities Journal provides you with one that's so bad it doesn't even bother to assign an author. It reads like a recent grad's rant. Someone who just received the first few rejection letters via CareerBuilder after five years at Bennington and decided to take it out on the few cities that didn't want him.

It would be annoying if it wasn't so comically ridiculous.

For one, there are no apparent qualifiers for the cities in the list of fifteen. Major cities like Chicago sidle up to small towns like Paterson, NJ. He even includes East Los Angeles, a part of Los Angeles County which isn't even a city.

And of course when it comes to his knowledge of the cities he's critiqued, Philadelphia is all cheesesteaks and Rocky, and Detroit is Journey because of one lyric in America's top karaoke song.

In what would make a pretty decent Onion article, the inaccuracies are too numerable to mention. No word on Miami's forest of vacant skyscrapers, that's apparently Chicago. And of course Philadelphia is a wasteland of unemployed boxers scrapping to make ends meet lorded over by a fuzzy green mascot.

But Portland? America's go to locale for unemployed hipsters? Well, that's the author's Xandu. Sure, he'll find work...under the Burnside Bridge.