America's Rudest City? F*#% You, It's Boston

We Americans sure do love to rank and categorize and make top ten lists of things, and no one seems to do more of it than the people at Travel & Leisure (T&L) magazine. Crankyjewishguy (CJG) was reminded of this when he stumbled upon T&L's twenty rudest cities in America list, a subject he takes very personally because people often confuse crankiness with rudeness. In fact, CJG is almost unfailingly polite which is probably one of the reasons he's so cranky all the time: so much pent up frustration! Though CJG is going to provide a link to the story here, he's going to save you the trouble of going to the T&L web site and list the top ten here. He's worried that if you navigate away from his blog you might not come back. CJG has moments of painful insecurity like this several times a day.

So, here goes, with the rudest city listed last: Dallas/Ft. Worth, Orlando, Las Vegas, Baltimore, Boston, Washington, D.C., Miami, Philadelphia, New York, and the No. 1 rudest city, Los Angeles.

CJG doesn't know about you, but he thinks this list has some really big surprises. For example, in Washington, D.C., members of congress interrupt the State of the Union address to call the President of the United States a liar and routinely say the most vile, hateful things about each other, but the nation's capital only comes in fifth. That really tells you something about the top four. And people in Dallas/Ft. Worth, who have to live constantly with that back slash (/) running through the middle of their city, only came in tenth. The other big surprise, at least to CJG, is how many cities with salutary weather are on this list. Bostonians often come across as rude for two reasons. First, they are rude. And second, for many months of the year it's so damned cold that any outdoor conversation has to be kept short and ends abruptly, leaving at least one party feeling mildly insulted. And you can understand why New Yorkers are so rude just by looking at this picture of theater goers on 42nd Street all trying to hail the same cab...

You'd be rude, too, if you had to spend every day competing with eight million other people for air. But what excuse do people in L.A., Miami and Orlando have? Is all that sunshine cooking their brains?

T&L claims to have surveyed some 60,000 people to arrive at their list, but do you know any of them? Yeah, neither does CJG. And he's suspicious about the scientific integrity of the process. You know how it is when you travel: you generalize about your own narrow experience then think you know the place inside and out. Got stuck in a huge traffic jam in Reno? Oy, such traffic in Reno. Ran into a spell of bad weather in Albuquerque? The weather there sucks. Got flipped off by a rude driver in New Haven? The people in New Haven are assholes. But, of course, you actually have no idea where the driver in New Haven was from, do you? No, but CJG does. He was almost certainly from Boston where they teach you how to flip off other drivers in driver ed class. As readers of CJG know, he lives in Boston and he can tell you right now that people here are going to be really ticked off they only came in sixth.

Milan Lucic of The Boston Bruins,
 Honorary Chairman of Mayor Thomas Menino's "Welcome to Boston" Hospitality Committee

P.S. Just hours after finishing this post, CJG came upon a story on msnbc.com that proves his point. Yesterday, a 63 year-old man named Michael Isabelle was on an American Airlines flight from Rio to New York when he repeatedly kicked and then knocked over a beverage cart that was blocking his path to the rest room. When a flight attendant grabbed Isabelle's arm, Isabelle punched the flight attendant in the stomach. So, what's the connection? Isabelle is from Framingham, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. CJG encourages everyone to visit Boston. The welcome may be cold, but the chowdah is hot!