Denver's abundance of sports teams, love of tools, and shunning of minivans and window treatments rank it among the country's five manliest cities, according to a study released this week by the makers of cheese-filled pretzels.
Combos, the delicious snack maker, and Bert Sterling, the professional bullshit city ranker, recently teamed up to decide which U.S. cities were worthy of hosting a log-rolling competition, and which would make good vacation spot for the Jonas Brothers. Nashville, despite its purveyance of sappy country songs and Vanderbilt football, ranked No. 1. It was followed by Charlotte, Oklahoma City, Cincinnati, and -- yes! -- Denver.
In a fascinating display of marketing ignorance, the pretzel guys placed pretty much every populous city in the country at the bottom of the list, including New York (50 of 50), L.A. (49), D.C. (45) and even Chicago (46), thus alienating many of the country's remaining employed people.
No Denverites have likely heard of this study, because they're too busy base-jumping and cattle-roping to read Scientific Pretzel, or wherever the hell the thing was published (besides here and in Nashville). But the guy I surveyed by the office urinal agreed that he sort of wishes people would stop ranking Denver so damn high in these things, because if all those New York pansies move here, we'll probably drop below Toledo in the next manly rankings. And no one wants to fall below Toledo.