Most Miserable Cities in the US: Forbes' Misery Measure

[CaptainQuasar]

Yes, it's a gelatinous loaf with parts from the pig's head, Andrew Zimmenr was chowing down on it the other night on Bizzarre Foods.

There's also a particularly gross How It's Made that covers all kinds of lunch meats (which is where I saw head cheese made.) Salami was interesting; it doesn't involve the application of heat at all, it's essentially cooked chemically by various kinds of mold.

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[Evo]

Salami was interesting; it doesn't involve the application of heat at all, it's essentially cooked chemically by various kinds of mold.

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I didn't need to know that.

 

[Moonbear]

I grew up near Youngstown, Ohio, and drove through the city on my way north while traveling last summer. It was a very depressing experience. It looked like about half the buildings had been torn down along the main street heading into downtown, and an area that once contained steel mills was a big open field.

I was in Youngstown last year (I think it was last year). Definitely miserable. A friend was trapped there for business for a week (mostly twiddling his fingers waiting for a paranoid client to let him see the documents he traveled there to see ), and since I live a reasonable drive to there, I visited to keep him company.

My primary impression of the town was "OMG! There isn't a fast food or chain restaurant they don't have!" Really, we tried really hard to think of one we couldn't find, and a drive in one direction or another would turn it up. And that's ALL they seemed to have. We asked at the hotel if there were any restaurants that weren't chains. There were two they recommended. The one was decent, nothing special (probably would have been better if they weren't obviously cutting corners on food quality to remain competitive with cheap chain restaurants), and the other I didn't go to, but my friend reported back when he went another night that it seemed to be a chain in the making...the menu was written up like all the chain menus were, like they were getting ready to start franchising it, and said the food was terrible. But, hey, they had a mall and a movie theater.

 

[CaptainQuasar]

Yeah, Youngstown is miserable. No wonder the Mound People couldn't bring themselves to do much more than http://www.mysteriousworld.com/Journal/2003/Spring/SerpentMound/" .

I found Detroit to be quite miserable. The one time I was there during the winter, 2004 I think, the city evidently didn't have enough money to plow the sidewalks in the downtown, so everybody just walked over filthy mounds of snow and ice. The pristine and pastoral Canadian farm country just across the border has constant smog warnings and billboards advertising casinos up all over the place because they're too close to Detroit. A great one a Detroiter told me is,

“Detroit was founded by New Yorkers who said to themselves, ‘Gee, I'm enjoying all the crime and poverty but it's really not cold enough.’”​

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