BOSTON. Mayor Marty Walsh lashed out angrily today at a survey that ranked Boston the seventh-rudest city in America, saying “We take a back seat to no one when it comes to pissing people off.”
“You know what you can do with yer bleepin’ rudeness survey, pal!”
“That’s gotta be wrong,” Walsh said in a freewheeling press conference that touched on a variety of lifestyle issues. “People come here for the culture, but they stay for the rudeness.”
So many rings, so little time.
Bostonians’ rudeness has traditionally taken many forms, from the uplifted middle finger, signifying a act that is physically impossible except for conjoined twins, to more complex initiation rites such as the theft of vans filled with personal belongings of naive first-year college students. “Boston was once a smorgasbord of rudeness that ran the gamut from snobbish indifference on Beacon Hill to intentional acts of hostility by reckless drivers on dangerously quaint traffic ‘rotaries,’” says tourism director Angela Gomes. “The upraised middle finger is the state bird of Massachusetts, and residents would playfully invoke it when greeting tourists who say ‘milk shake’ instead of ‘frappe.’”
Fistfight at–I kid you not–the Boston Symphony.
The survey by Kristin Salaky for “thisisinsider.com” noted that Bostonians have lost their edge due to the recent success of their professional sports teams, and have now become almost as gracious as the St. Louis Cardinals fans who gave up their tickets in 2004 so that Red Sox fans could see the team’s first World Series win in 86 years. “I felt sorry for the guy,” said Dave Durham from Centralia, Illinois. “He’s begging for something but he’s got this awful accent so nobody can understand him.”
Psychologist Morton Adelman notes that “A Boston boy in his twenties today will have experienced three World Series wins by the Red Sox, five Super Bowl victories by the Patriots, a Stanley Cup for the Bruins, an NBA championship for the Celtics and something called a North American Super Liga by the Revolution, whoever they are. His apartment will typically be littered with foam ‘We’re #1!’ fingers, unless his girlfriend threw them out.”
Maggot Puke, winners of the 2017 Battle of the Obnoxious Bands
Walsh pointed to Allston-Brighton, Boston’s “student ghetto” whose youthful population uses loud music and drunken parties to endear themselves to permanent residents. “We may not be as rude as some of the great bands that preceded us,” said Tweeze, bassist for Maggot Puke, a local band that is one of the leading practitioners of the “Deliberately Annoying” sound. “On the other hand, there aren’t as many major record labels as there used to be, so there’s more competition.”
Walsh is a former state legislator who has been known to use his political power to retaliate against those who have crossed him. “You gonna write sumpin’ nice, right?” he asks as this reporter takes notes at the press conference. “You bettah, cause I know where you pahked your cah and I wouldn’t want nothin’ to happen to it.’”
see how nothing good happens when people say thank you.