I was about to write something very similar to what you have stated so elequently. I can be in mid-town Manhattan in 1.5 hours or I can be fishing in some of the best trout streams anywhere in the country in a matter of minutes by simply waking out my back-door, or driving 45 minutes east to the Housie or an hour west to the Esopus, Beaverkill, Willowemac, etc. And on the way, I will probably pass as many redneck homesteads (with outhouses and ornimental junk cars) as one would find in East TN or Alabama.
Getting a concealed carry permit is no big deal, and outside of NYC, I can probably carry a weapon into more places under New York Law than I can under Texas Law. And despite the restrictive gun laws in NYC or perhaps because of them, the crime rate is one of the lowest of any big city in the country. Indeed, I challenge anyone to name a big city south of the Mason-Dixon line, with a crime rate lower than NYC.
With the exception of New Orleans, I have yet to find a truely exceptional restaurant in the south. There are a lot of good restaurants and even pretty good restaurants, but not in the numbers you find in the northeast and nothing that rises to the level of exceptional or outstanding.
Although there are certainly places in the north where the summer starts on July 3rd and ends August 15th, in the Hudson Valley where I live, we generally have short sleave weather from mid-April until mid-October. And when we do have snow, we deal with it and keep going, unlike the people from the south who become "deer in a headlight" when they see that first flake (I have to laugh at the poster from Atlanta who doesn't know the difference between a dusting and a blizzard).
I don't know whether northerners or southerners are smarter or whether there is even a difference worthy of debate. I do know that when I went to college for a year down south, I didn't have to study all that hard to get A's and when I transferred to a real college in the north, I had to bust my butt to pull C's. I also note that most of the top colleges and universities, as ranked by various publications, are in the North and in California, not in the south, with a large number of the very best schools in NY, PA, MA, and ME.
And if southerners are so nice and friendly, why are there so many southern posts on this thread bashing northerners for no other reason than we talk funny?
Exactly. In terms of speaking funny, how may national newsmen do the news in a southern accent? :)
"If southerners are so nice and friendly, why are there so many southern posts on this thread bashing northerners for no other reason than we talk funny?"
It's not because you talk funny. It's experience with Northerners who come south intent on making the South into the North, mostly. If you can't like where you are for what it is, why would you move there? Far too often, damnYankees get where they wanna go then try to turn it into where they came from.
And as for the rest of your comments, who assesses the city crime and the educational institutions? The damnYankee bureaucrats. If the South's educational institutions' have a bad reputation, and reputation is part of those numbers--it is, btw--then the bias simply perpetuates itself. And as to city crime, such comparison is almost always about offenses known to the police. If Kitty Genovese didn't teach you that nobody reports a thing to NYC's cops, I'm wasting my time posting to you.
"And if southerners are so nice and friendly, why are there so many southern posts on this thread bashing northerners for no other reason than we talk funny?"
Yea, you're right. I tell southerners their pizza sucks, they need drivers ed....and the humidity is off the scale and they come unglued. Well, in fairness...there does seem to be a few "nice ones" here on this thread. ;)