I don’t know how this one slipped past me, but it appears that Syracuse in the #6 ranked drinking town in the US (in the top 100 Metro areas), with 7 bars per 10,000 households (in case you were wondering, New Orleans is easily #1 at 8.6). As for places to eat, San Francisco is #1, with 39.3 restaurants per 10,000 households (San Fran also comes in at #8 for places to drink). How they can afford to eat out there is beyond me, as the median price per square foot of homes for sale is $459. Ouch. Here, it’s a rather reasonable $86. In fact, if you look at the difference between eating towns and drinking towns, it’s clearly a lot cheaper to get your calories via booze (or at least cheaper to buy a home to go sleep it off in).

As I alluded to yesterday, today is the first day of the beginning of the end of summer, as the NYS Fair opened this morning. Opening day is Governor’s Day, so Governor Snotball is (or will be) here – being trailed by a legion of anti-fracking activists. The State Fair is always an exciting time because, um…well, I dunno. It doesn’t do much for me, to tell you the truth.

It was great when I was a kid (they had moon rocks, and a guy flying around on a jet pack, which was really nifty). And it was fun when I was old enough to stumble around drunk checking out the babes. But now that I’m old and miserable, it’s just a crowded pain in the ass with too damn many country music acts. So I steer clear of the area (other than to watch the attendance numbers, which for some reason seem to interest me).

Less than two weeks to Labor Day. Now that’s depressing.