Houston

I used to think that Houston was a pretty good city - it has a lot of world class museums, great independent restaurants, and is cosmopolitan in ethnic make up and world view. Then I got this job working with a bunch of people grading standardized tests, and it turns out I am the only person working there who lives inside the Loop (the center of the city, still pretty large), a place everybody else apparently considers to be a hub of crime and liberal gluttony. Seriously, when we talk about our favorite restaurants at work, everybody debates the merits of Cheddar's vs. Chili's, one person actually saying that with chain restaurants at least you know you'll always get a "good meal." I mentioned the Menil to somebody at work and he had never heard of it, and when describing Memorial Park to another person who lamented the lack of parks in Houston, she said she wouldn't go to a park inside the Loop for fear of being murdered by a homeless person (opposite). As somebody who spent much of his life growing up in the ass crack of nowhere, I can't imagine living next to a hub of culture and ignoring it, but I guess why go to a museum or ball game when there's a Dave & Buster's a mile away?

RATING: 35%

Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex

The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is a bunch of cities that are right next to each other, but hold your horses they're not that next to each other. Like you might want to go to a museum in Fort Worth although you're staying in Dallas, but it takes like an hour to get there with practically no traffic so surprise surprise. Anyway, I like the way these places look. Fort Worth is especially pretty, although there are a lot of rolling grassy hills, knolls even, throughout all of DFW. They are weird though. Like they call Randall's Tom Thumb, and Hardee's Carl's Jr., and there's this weird flashing yellow arrow for yielding left turns that doesn't exist anywhere else. In Conclusion, from my day and a half in the DFW Metroplex I can safely claim that it's a pretty good city/cities, even though the drivers there are the biggest assholes of any city's drivers. That's never been said before, I know.

RATING: 71%

Nashville

In case you didn't know, Nashville is a city in the United States. It is the supposed capital of country music (debatable), and also home of Pancake Pantry. It's a very pretty city, full of hills and wildlife and such, but one bad thing is that almost everybody there is really unfriendly. Every time we went to some store or restaurant we got the evil eye like we were about to make impossible demands of the people who worked there. Also, if you sing karaoke in Nashville get ready because everybody will be good and actually will get offended if you get up to the stage and are bad. In conclusion, Nashville, much like Austin, would be cooler if it wasn't for the Nashvillains, as I like to refer to them.

RATING: 57%

New York City

New York City is a place some of us may remember from such Hollywood hits as I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry or Friday The 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan (briefly). It's a pretty cool city except that it's extremely large so if you go there you're likely to spend at least a third of your time on a train or a bus. There's also tons of great food in "The Big Apple" as the locals call it, likely because the Algonquin word "Manhattan" means "Applesauce." One thing I don't like so much about New York City is that while it is very diverse, which I like, it's also extremely segregated by ethnic group, which makes me uncomfortable, because one second there might be a ton of white people trying to figure out just what kind of race I am and the next second there might be a ton of Asian people trying to figure out just what kind of race I am. I'm just saying that in Houston we don't make all our hipsters stay in one area of town although maybe we should.

RATING: 71%

Buildings

Sometimes you can perhaps go in a building, which can be a good thing if it is way hot outside, and sometimes a cop or a pretend cop can say "Hey, don't go in here you're not authorized!" Most of us live in buildings, and some of us might live in a cool city with lots of tall buildings. Sometimes maybe a building burns or falls down, to which I say "Yo, building, shape up or ship out! Your job is to stay standing and hold people!" Mainly though tall buildings are cool to look at and admire even if everybody knows you're a tourist and says "Fuck you buddy, this is NewYork," but they say it in one of those movie accents.

RATING: 88%