Last week's suspicious survey: Minneapolis has been declared the Happiest Place to Raise a Family by the Sperling Group, your preferred Group when you need something good and truly sperled. The honors have been coming all year: Best Airport, Best Water, Best Place to Work, Best Place to Lose a Finger in the Winter (and find it in the Spring), and so on. We're perfect. Halos all around.
We're good, but this good? Perhaps people from big miserable, congested cities visit Lake Harriet, note the absence of gunfire and conclude they're in Valhalla. Our recent happy reality: the temps on Friday were 20 degrees below average, or that the Aquatennial Block Party had musicians playing with mittens, or that people who dared to say "Good sleeping weather" were immediately told no, this is good embalming weather. That city never seems to make the surveys.
If you're wondering how this works, there are two possibilities: some bright cheerful eccentric millionaire, no doubt wearing a red bowtie and twirling his cane as he walked to work, wondered which American city was the gosh-dang happiest on Earth, and set in motion a chain of events that turned the cynical big-city PR people he hired into sappy romantics who'd forgotten what America was really about. Or it has to do with the survey's sponsor: McDonald's, which is coincidentally celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Happy Meal.
Which means: if you're having a Happy Meal in Minneapolis, you are experiencing the apex of human satisfaction. Unless they forgot to hold the pickle and the toy is lame. In which case we're somewhere down below East. St. Louis.
jlileks@startribune.com • 612-673-7858
