I’m going to start tonight with a plea to the residents of Kansas and Missouri. Please, for all of our sakes, enough with the cutesy personalized license plates already. While driving to work today I was stuck behind a Chevy Malibu. It’s license plate? MYLABU. Seriously, WTF? It’s a Chevy Malibu, how proud of it can you be? Are you expecting passerby’s to think that you are witty? Is this what passes for wit out here? Just stop. Even the chimpanzees at the zoo are embarrassed about things like this.
As expected, a Voltron reference drew out a number of comments. And, though not as explicit, the fact that over the span of a few weeks I have made repeated Voltron and Transformers reference probably explains a few things about me. Super once mentioned to me that my blog has the potential to become my own Yahoo Personals ad (you know, the one that I’ve threatened to put together for a year and a half now). Of course, I figure that any woman who reads this for more than a few days would really think twice about the deal. I’d just like to state for the record that I do not spend all of my time thinking about cartoon robots that transform into lions or cars or cassette players. Just the majority of it.
(Why did the Ryan Adams lyric “I might as well just admit I’m going to die alone and blue” just enter my mind? Just kidding, my upbeat mood that I’ve been in since New Orleans is continuing and showing some benefits.)
On to a further analysis of the cities for singles list. First of all, Erik stop complaining, you live in Miami for crying out loud. You’ve got a lot better scenery than those of us in the upper and lower Midwest. Just get some bling and a J Lo record and that should do the trick. Second, I’d have to say that Milwaukee should be ranked higher than Kansas City just based on its location (being near Chicago and a lake). Not much higher (Indianapolis being between the two is fair) but higher. Having Miami in the same range as New Orleans is a little surprising, only because I thought both would be higher. San Francisco at number three surprises me just because of the cost of living. Might have a lot of young professionals out there but I thought the cost was a deal killer. For the most part, I think the list is pretty accurate. It catches places you might not think of (like the Twin Cities) and places them high on the list where they belong. Austin could have been a little higher, but otherwise, a pretty fair list.
The ranking did get mentioned on the local news though with more of a chuckle than of a “Oh my God, we ranked below Cleveland for crying out loud.” This town does have a lot of good things to offer. A pretty neat art scene, lots of activities conveniently located, some nice shopping, but there just really is no there here. As a newbie to a town where everyone went to the same three colleges it’s pretty tough to adjust. That can’t be a good thing for a city trying to grow.
1 comment:
Singles: The number of singles is based on the percentage of a metro's population above the age of 15 that has never been married. Data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Why 15? A lot of people in Milwaukee get married young, either straight out of high school, community college or trade school. Those that do get an undergraduate degree also tend to get married right away. Milwaukee's highest ranking was in Singles at #12. If the methodology were changed to pull the population over the age of 22 who has never been married, Milwaukee's ranking would fall dramatically.
Nightlife: Nightlife is based on the number of restaurants, bars and nightclubs in each standard metropolitan area. Data provided by Citysearch.
Milwaukee boasts over 1,600 taverns in the metropolitan area. I have heard it has one of the highest numbers of bars per capita in the US.
A large majority of these taverns are corner bars filled with old WWII veterans and people who came from their softabll or bowling league. If this number weere adjusted for bars that are typically frequented by people aged 21-35 it would also fall dramatically.
Cost of Living Alone: Our proprietary Cost of Living Alone index is determined by the average cost of a metro area's apartment rent, a Pizza Hut pizza, a movie ticket and a six-pack of Heineken. This year we factored in entry-level salary data as well. The majority of the raw data for the cost of living index was provided by Arlington, Va.-based ACCRA. Salary data provided by the New York-based Mercer Human Resource Consulting.
This ranking is skewed because of the wide range of rents paid for an apartment in Milwaukee. There is not a very centralized or symmetric distribution and there are a number of extreme outliers. Prices on the basket of goods that includes the Pizza Hut pizza, movie ticket and 6-pack of Heineken probably hover somewhere just north of the mean/median, but rent is by far a bigger component in determining the cost of living index under this methodology.
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