OAKLAND -- OK, fun lovers! Try to take a break from your fun-filled day, out there having a ball, giddy with glee and downrighttap-dancing on your desks what with all that fun, fun, fun.
Because you are, if you are reading this in Oakland, in one of thefunnest cities in these United States! Didn't you know?
Well, it's TRUE! A study, sponsored by the folks who make theboard game Cranium, says so. They did it for no particular reasonother than it was fun to do. Plus, it was a good reason to do a studyand get every newspaper in every city named in the study to write astory about it.
To find the fun, Cranium wisely hired famous fun-finder BertSperling, creator of Money magazine's annual 'Best Places to Live'list. He did a bunch of research, figuring in such things as thenumber of sports teams, toy stores and restaurants in various cities,and came up with a topsy-turvy world in which Oakland is No. 8 out of50 major cities!
He has Minneapolis-St. Paul coming in first (well, let's see, theartist currently known as Prince lives there ...), San Francisco at12th, Las Vegas at 25th and NewOrleans as dead last.
We caught up with Sperling on the phone at his Portland, Ore.,office Thursday, where he obligingly went through reams ofspreadsheets at numerous reporters' requests, but thought it wasreally fun doing it, so you have to wonder about him just from that.
So, Bert, have you beento Oakland?
'Yes, and it's a wild and crazy place,' he said.
Yes, but is it fun? Are you sure you didn't print the list upsidedown?
Hang on, hang on now. Make no mistake. We like Oakland. We reallylike it!It's got some great and truly fun stuff, like the Chabotobservatory, the Oakland Zoo, artists, musicians, great culturalheritage and beautiful Lake Merritt (although you might want to askthe Berkeley High School women's crew team if rowing into a dead bodyon the lake during practice Wednesday counts as 'fun').
'Fun?' asked Mayor Jerry Brown, who was off to a very fun meetingThursday. 'Every time I walk out of my loft I start laughing,' hesaid. Fun in Oakland for the mayor is 'between Van Kleef's bar andCity Council meetings,' although he rarely goes to the latter. 'Hey,I went the other night,' he said.
We do have lots of professional sports teams. (Although the A'shaven't been able to get past the fifth game of the playoffs ninetimes in a row, the Raiders lost the Super Bowl, and the Warriorswill probably lose tonight whether they're playing or not.)
Toy stores? We don't even have any shopping malls, for crying outloud. (Clearly this was a man's version of fun.)
But we do always have eclectic opportunities to riot. And heck,don't forget the very fun Oakland Tribune, which is an especially funplace to be anytime exclamation points outnumber words per story!!!
So, Bert, how do you define 'fun?'
'For this study, we're looking at family-oriented fun. Things youdo on the weekends and weeknights. Not nightclubs and things likethat,' he said.
That explains why Vegas didn't rate too high, since it recentlyditched its attempt at family fun. (To be sure, decades of showgirlsand gambling cannot a few roller-coasters compensate.)
Sperling and his team got their data from a firm that providesmarketing information to businesses, which got it from random-sampling consumer-expenditure surveys that the U.S. Census bureaudoes every year. And apparently by throwing darts.
Anyway, it mostly goes by how much individual households spend onvarious activities. So here's what makes Oakland fun:
- Lots of dog parks.
- Lots of theater-goers. (Not necessarily that they're going tothe theater inOakland, unless you're talking about sideshows.)
- People spending lots of money on sporting events.
- People spending lots of money playing sports -- anything frombowling (yeah, there's a lot of that going around) to softballleagues and so on.
- People going to the movies and spending money on clubmemberships, camping or boating.
Figures, schmigures. But fun? C'mon, Bert. Vegas? What aboutVegas?
How can you measure the fun of getting married in a booze-soakedtoga by Elvis Presley himself? Surely that's gotta beat out going toa dog park.
After more rummaging through spread sheets, Sperling discoveredthe survey covers 'metropolitan Oakland,' which actually includes twocounties-- Alameda and Contra Costa!
So if you factor in the theater, the university, the parks and thegeneral spunk of Berkeley, then calculate the zero crime, shoppingcenters and new Tiffany store in Walnut Creek, why then, sure --Oakland is TOTALLY fun!
Well, even though the list may be distorted like Meg Ryan's newlips, the important thing to note here is that ... we beat SanFrancisco!!! Did we mention we beat San Francisco? Oh, and by the way... we beat San Francisco!
