...and the winner is...

The Harris Poll announced that New York City is the most popular city that people want to live in or near.  San Diego, which bills itself as "America's Finest City", finished second to "The Big Apple."  Ironically, New York City also finished first in the least desirable city poll as well. 

These ubiquitous city polls always seem a bit strange to me.  Healthiest city, greenest city, you pick it.  From Outside to Money, everyone has a different yardstick.

As my mates in Glasgow would say, "What a load of bollocks!" or perhaps, "At's a load of shite!"

People ask me my favorite river for fly-fishing, and I answer, "I haven't found it yet."  When asked what his favorite wine was, a friend of mine answered, "The one that's in my hand."

This lusting after what we don't have is almost as pernicious as the pomposity of actually basking in these spurious polls, as if you had something to do with it.

I have many "favorite" cities:

• San Diego...I live here, the weather is great (well it used to be great, we've had a challenging few months), there's a decent Little Italy, many of my friends also live here, and it happens to be the place where I earn a living.
• San Francisco...former haunt, current mailing addresses for the Tenuto heir and heiress, who are following their artistic dreams in the People's Republic.
• Chicago...city of broad shoulders, hometown, the Bulls (last professional sports team I can muster any interest for), wonderful restaurants, and The Hawk, a wind so fierce that it takes the breath away.
• New York City...swagger, strut, the best Little Italy (Mario Battali has superceded Umberto's Clam House where Joey Gallo had some lead with his dinner), teams you love to hate, and parking rates that take your breath away faster than the aforementioned Hawk.
• London...gentile, historic, so pukka.
• Glasgow...Scotland's version of Chicago, the blue-collar city teeming with hospitality, pubs, culture, and a number of great names for rain.  If the Eskimos have scores of nuances for snow, Glaswegians have a similar number to describe the rain.  Like smirr.

To quote Gandhi, "Wherever you are, be there."  That's the point of this exercise.  Why have a favorite when there are so many wonderful places in the world?  Learn to enjoy where you are.

OK, maybe not Detroit.

Footnotes...

Yesterday I heard Mayor Jerry Sanders, Eddie Osterland, (America's First Master Sommelier), and Russ T. Nailz, politically incorrect comic, all within the space of three hours.  This is a real feat of mental legerdemain.  The wine certainly helped.

Midweek I had lunch with my good friend, Alan Russell.  Alan is the tallest mystery writer in America, and maybe the best writer you don't know about.  He is the mystery writer other mystery writers read.  Check out his award-winning Mortal Wounds.

Wall Street My Money Slept and other pop offs on pop culture

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, the sequel to the Michael Douglas-Charlie Sheen-Oliver Stone Academy Award Winning 1987 movie, maybe one of the worst movies of all time.  An instant Razzie candidate.   Where to start?  Michael Douglas sleepwalks through the part, he's more a mannequin for really beautiful suits and ties.  Shia LeBeouf?  I don't get Shia LeBeouf...at all.  Carrie Mulligan cries throughout the entire movie.  Charlie Sheen makes a gratuitous cameo, with two women on his arm, perhaps some cross marketing for his tasteless television show.  The movie's only redeeming quality is Josh Brolin, who plays an amoral banker.  He got his moral compass the same place Carrie Mulligan's character got her wedding ring, out of a Cracker Jack box.  The plot is predictable, the only surprise being that the tickets cost $13.00 each. 

Let's just say that the weekly box office is dropping faster than the Dow Jones Industrial Average did in 2008.  Look for this one in Blockbuster Video...what, they filed for bankruptcy?  OK, Netflix...add this to your Netflix queue.  The wait won't be long.

As a recovering Wall Streeter myself (I left in 1996), and a fan of the previous movie, I felt somewhat obligated to go, despite the suspicion that the movie was going to be a dog.  I based that on the not very scientific observation that every third commercial was the trailer for the movie. 

The trailer was interspersed between Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman ads.  I'm including political ads in the pantheon of pop culture.  These two are vying for the governor's mansion in Sacramento.  If Brown wins he may symbolically close it down to live in his Jesuitical austerity in an apartment, or maybe an ashram.  If Meg Whitman wins she may symbolically close it down to live in something with a bit more square footage.  With a population larger than Western Europe you'd think that the state of California could produce two better candidates than this lot.

Redemption of the arts came in the form of a book.  Each year I am fortunate enough to stumble upon a sleeper, totally unexpected.  A couple of years back it was The Cellist of Sarajevo, Steven Galloway's fictional take on a true incident from the siege of Sarjevo.  A big tip o' the hat to John Hamilton, that irrepressible Kiwi, for loaning me a copy of this year's sleeper, The Amateurs, penned by John Niven.  The funniest book I have ever read.  Since I read most of the book armed with a cigar and a Guinness in my backyard, I am somewhat surprised that my neighbors didn't call the police to report a cackling madman running amok on my property.  Laugh out loud funny...or LOL, I guess for you emoticons.  (Though, parenthetically, emoticons are preferable to neocons.)

The premise of The Amateurs: a golfing hackmeister in a dead-end job and a loveless marriage, connects with the purest golf shot he has ever hit, at the same time he is felled by a errant drive, denting his skull and sending him to hospital and a long coma.  When he recovers his senses he lives with three aftermaths: he cannot hit a poor golf shot, he has a wicked case of Tourette's syndrome, and another malady that results in his never needing any Viagra, a priapism of palpating proportions.  He wins his way into the British Open.  The book is set in a small town in Scotland and peppered with colorful Glaswegian phrases.  Caveat emptor:  There are any number of books with the same title.  Look for the cover with a bloody golf ball.