Whatever, Moron

I'm a little late in picking this one up, but I can't resist smacking this idiot. I'll start with some personal background. I grew up in the DC metropolitan area. I went to high school in Fairfax County, a block away from a DC Metro station. After I got out of the Army, I went to George Mason University for a year and a half. I have some passing familiarity with the area.

The idea that anybody who writes for the Washington Post is making shitty remarks about another city is ludicrous. If you write for the Post, you live in one of three places: DC, suburban Virginia, or suburban Maryland. If you actually live in the most ineptly run municipality in the country, (aka DC proper), you get to make rude comments about other cities about the time hell freezes over. Quit electing crackheads to run the city and make the damn city work before you go talking smack, okay?

If you live in either set of suburbs, you're not in a position to make comments like "devoid of personality". Well, unless you consider "ruinously expensive" to be personality, since that's all the Maryland or Virginia suburbs have going for them: inflated property values. They are no nicer or worse than the 'burbs everywhere else in the country. Claiming proximity to the cultural mecca wasteland that is DC does you no good, since most suburban residents rarely ever go in to the city.

I wouldn't mind this piece so much if he wasn't such an annoying asshat. If you don't like Houston, fine. Say it and move on with your life. Trying to dress up your personal dislike for the place with some grand (poorly) sarcastic diatribe is neither particularly enlightening or amusing.

I think I can boil Mr. Achenbach's comments down to the bare essence. Houston is flat. Houston is big and he gets lost because he doesn't know where anything is. He can't find any good restaurants so he ends up eating at crappy chain restaurants because they're all he can recognize. Oh, yeah, Thrifty raped him for a rental car and he's mad.