Tuesday Top 5: Reasons Austin, TX is better than the Jersey Shore

I had a great time on trip to Austin, discounting time spent in various airports. I learned a lot about Austin that I didn't know before, and I figured I had to do a list praising the wonderful time I had there.

Top 5 Reasons Austin is Better than the Jersey Shore


5.Protests/Rallies
I was there only eight days and I still attended an excited rally over something happening half way across the globe. Even the opinion column in my newspaper is just people complaining about local traffic.


More important to New Jerseyans than Freeing Iran.

THe fact of the matter is, people around here complain about politics a lot, and most of the time they're uninformed, but most importantly they don't DO anything.

4. Live Music
There's live music everywhere and it's awesome as well as often cheap or free. We have free live music in New Jersey, and it's two kids playing the same four chords in the back of the Spencer's in the mall. You either overpay for a good concert or you get in cheap to hear some young highschooler do his best Fall Out Boy impression.

Speaking of Fall Out Boy, we generally have awful bands come from New Jersey. Bon Jovi and the Jonas Brothers to name two others. Austin has greats like Willie Nelson and Robert Earl Keen. Think of rock music as chicken, and country as beef. I prefer chicken, but I'll take the filet minion country over the beak, feet, and feathers of rock. And yes, the Jonas Brothers are the feathers.

3. Independent Bookstores, Movie Theatres, and Everything
Kimya posted a nice recommendation for "Food Inc." I'm actually really looking forward to seeing it, except the nearest theatre playing it is in Skillman, NJ. Where the hell is Skillman? According to Google Maps its an hour plus away from me. There's at least ten theatres within half an hour of me, but they're too busy playing a wide variety of intelligent movies. Or, The three theatres within twenty minutes of me are showing, collectively, ON THIS DAY ALONE, 25 showings of G-Force, about talking (and probably farting) rodents, and 23 showings of The Ugly Truth. That's almost fifty movie showings today that they have showing instead of Food Inc., and I haven't even counted Aliens in the Attic.
Austin solves this problem because everything there isn't a damned chain business, in fact there are no national chains in their airport. I can't really think of anything cool that is exclusively Brick. Also, in Austin there's a great independent bookstore called "Book People", where I got an Allen Ginsberg t-shirt, pictured below:

[This photo does not appear because it is too awesome for your screen to handle]

Our bookstore is Barnes and Noble, which is mostly populated by people waiting for their table at Applebees. Yay Corporations!

2. "Keep Austin Weird"
I love this motto, mostly because if I was around when they were trying to pick it, I would have gone with something more verbose and beat poetic, when the simplicity of this motto is far better and more poetic than anything I could have thought of. And it isn't "Keep Austin Culturally Significant" or "Keep Austin Interesting", they just want to be weird. They, of course, mean cool-weird, but they're so cool they're not going to acknowledge that they want to be cool. We don't have cool Jersey Shore motto, but if I'm allowed to nominate I'm gonna go with "We NEED to make a Wawa run, RIGHT NOW!" Paint that on our signs.

1. Kimya
... duh!

Shout out also to Kimya's mom but was super-nice to me when I came to visit. Also, the rest of the family, but I don't think they read the blog.

-Zach