WANTED: New hometown

New Orleans would work, if you're willing to skip Nos. 1, 2, 7 and 8. Seriously, it could use more people moving in, especially people who want to fight to make someplace better and actually have a real impact.

 

Don't forget Carytown. Best part of the city, if you ask me.

 

It's worth going to Tampa if only to eat at Berns Steakhouse. Don't skip the kitchen tour or the dessert room.

 

Amen to that suggestion. Don't skip the wine cellar tour or upstairs desert either.

 

If you're eating in Tampa, might I suggest the Columbia restaurant in Ybor City? Oldest spanish rest. in the state I believe. It has tile floors, a fountain in the middle, flaminco dancers and a cigar bar. Good times.

I've noticed a bit of hostility towards Atlanta. Why? I have been there several times and enjoyed it. Traffic may suck, but I think that is the case with a lot of southern (read sprawl) cities. There is a ton to do, housing is cheap for a big city and tons of young people. Don't know about the school system (not really a concern to me right now). I've seriously considered taking a job in the area.

 

Nothing wrong with Atlanta -- there's a reason it's been one of the biggest growing metro areas of the last two decades. Very cheap to live there, schools are fine, plenty to do and enough to keep you happy ... if your idea of happy is suburbia and strip malls and sprawl.

Atlanta has little sense of being. There's not much to suggest that Atlanta's a unique, interesting place to live. Nothing really stands out -- its universities are like any other universities, its museums are like any other museums, its restaurants are like any other restaurants; its airport is like any other airport; hell, its shitty public transit is just like any other shitty public transit. Yes, you've got the Varsity and Stone Mountain and Ted Turner, but you get my point.

Nothing wrong with all that, either. But it's not for me -- and based on what Jones is looking for, I doubt it's for him, either. Which is why it's not being considered seriously.

 

Jones, is your wife prepared for the quasi-celebrity she would become if ya'll moved to Oxford?
She would become the woman at the grocery story and by grocery store I mean the singular since Oxford has just one, not counting the giant Wal-Mart, but anyway she would become the woman known as that writer's wife. You know the one who did the article in [fill in the blank].
Once the ESPN articles started flowing, drunken college kids would pose with you for pictures at the bar, and wasted SEC beat writers would be passed out on your couch
I like Oxford, lots, but you and your entire family would become big fish in a very small pond.

 

Once spring arrives in Ottawa, Jones will develop the collective amnesia that's genetically encoded into Canadians--he'll forget the 10 feet of snow over the winter and realise that hey, this is a great place to live!

And summer will come and he'll be bitching about the mosquitos and say, "Boy, I can't wait for winter so I can take the kids skating on the Rideau" (Well, not maybe the youngest)

 

Sucky hockey team in the 'twa too. (Hey, we all knew the Leafs were shit! Nobody was expecting them to go the final again!)

 

Isn't he already a big fish in a small (and frozen) pond?

 

Isn't Wright Thompson living in Oxford? Maybe ESPN should move the whole magazine operation down there.

One cool/weird thing about Charlottesville is that it's the exact opposite in terms of celebrity. Dave Matthews walking on the Downtown Mall, eh big deal. Chris and Howie Long at Chipolte, I wish they would hurry up and order. I'm starving.

One time my wife and I were checking out in Barnes and Noble and she bought a book. The clerk told us Steve Carrell bought the same one (he was in town shooting a movie). I asked when and the clerk said "Oh, five or ten minutes ago." The dude was shopping in the same store and we had no idea because nobody acted like it was the least bit exciting.