No? I hear it's lovely this time of year. But only because it's the 57th-bestest, er, city in the whole danged country. Says so on New Geography's 2008 list, which may be a old news, dunno, but which I discovered this morning whilst reading the great Joel Kotkin's story about "The New Boom Towns," meaning cities more or less thriving during the oil and gas "crisis."

Kotkin, author of The City: A Global History, notes that "today’s energy crisis is creating new wealth and new jobs in a way not seen since, well, the energy crisis of the 1970s." Which is why, at the top of New Geography's best-city list culled from such info as "the robustness of a region's growth" and Bureau of Labor Statistics employment data, the top dog is ... Midland! The DPI Metro Div, ahem, merit the boom-town mention because of ExxonMobil's Irving HQ, of course. --Robert Wilonsky