I am ending my New York Times subscription. Also, my Audible, Apple Music, and other recurring billers. I’ll miss the NYT the most, but they want to double my subscription to almost $50 AUD a month!
Yeah no.
So I’m enjoying it while it lasts.
I’ve always liked the column, for example, that challenges you to guess which of three shithole properties a featured couple ended up buying in Manhattan. I always get it wrong. You gotta be kiding with those prices?! Seems only young and pretty (and rich) live in New York City.
I will also miss my opinionated columnists — Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Bret Stephens, Farhad Manjoo, so many others — because they’re smart and honest and funny. So good at wordsmithing that they can make a living from it!
Imagine that!!
I’ll also miss the quirky articles, like today’s quiz that identifies where in America you should live. On the basis of an alarmingly small set of criteria, it’s fascinating to see where I would fit if by some catastrophe I woke up in the body of a 53-year old white American male.
Apparently, it’s Hanover in New Hampshire.
Restaurants score 4/10, but transgender rights are 8/10 so phew, right? Apparently there are no gay bars (0/10) or live music (0/10) in Hanover, sadly, but the air quality is 10/10 so there’s your trade-off.
I searched real estate listings and found a charming home only a quick, terrifying 6.5 mile midnight sprint from ‘downtown’ Hanover for $390,000 USD. Half a million AUD? Pshaw. Plenty left over to actually finish the building, buy a large dog, and pay for the exorcism.
Next I went on Wikipedia to see all the cool things you can do in Hanover. The entry was perplexingly short.
I guess you make your own fun in New Hampshire. Like yoga lessons in a tent at PorcFest, the annual “porcupine freedom festival” or, um, ah… no, I thinks that’s it.
I would of course be a Wildcats fan, but only if I live long enough to get through the Wildcat Cheer:
Cheer leader: Give me a “W”!
Crowd: “W”!
Cheer leader: Give me an “I”!
Crowd: “I”
(etc throughout the letters of the word WILDCATS)
Cheer leader: What have you got?
All: “WILDCATS”!!
Fun fact: in 2014 a Wildcats V Bears match almost set the world record for having the most people in one place wearing flannel.
On the whole, Hanover is starting to sound like a perfect match!
My one reservation is the 4/10 for dining out. After a little research, I discovered a plethora of gastronomic experiences to maintain my beloved and I at the level of epicurean bliss to which we’ve become accustomed.
Voila! Bite Me Cupcakez!
It’s a bakery AND a cafe! Wish we had those in ‘straya!
This was starting to sound so good that I half expected somebody to throw in a set of steak-knives. You just don’t get this sort of value in Oz. Everything in America is bigger and, dare I say it, better! Because it’s bigger! AND better!
Alas and alack, though, it is not to be.
Like ships in the night, my wife and I must forgo Hanover to maunder through this antipodean half-life, and dream of what might have been. Perhaps it’s good that my New York times subscription is at an end. Who was the asshole that said, “’tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”?
Anyway, goodbye New York Times.