I’ve written before how we’re #1 in various ways. This time, it’s just as good to have been named #11… Brattleboro is on a list of 20 best small towns picked out by Smithsonian Magazine. Cool enough, but even cooler is that when I went to go find that link just now, the 20 best small towns article showed up as “most popular” on Smithsonian’s travel page… even more popular than “Nudity, Art, Sex and Death – Tasmania Awaits You” so I guess that really says something!

And by the way? That Tasmania article is really interesting…

A couple weeks ago, I thought about the idea of this tiny little state being Number 1 on whatever index… we are Number 1 from time to time.

But yesterday, we got the big accolade… first in the physical symptoms associated with being in love…

Naturellement!

To ring in 2012, the Brattleboro Reformer sort of of sleazed its way into becoming a 5-issue-per-week paper instead of a 6-issue-per-week paper. They introduced a very bogus new “Friday Edition” that doesn’t include any real reporting, just puff-piece features and ads. Unfortunately, like a week later, one of the biggest stories of the year broke on Thursday afternoon when a Federal judge ruled that the State of Vermont can’t enforce shut down the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. So, on Friday morning when lots of the same people who write Letters to the Editor really wanted to read about that topic, they woke up instead to a pretty unimpressive pablum of small-town feature writing. Ouch…

Yesterday’s Friday front-pager was about some report that found Vermont to be #1 in the nation in pedestrian safety. I guess that’s something to be proud of, although I’m not sure it rises to front page status. Back in December, we were noted as the healthiest state, as well. It got me wondering… what else are we best at? Hats with earflaps? Scruffy beards? Bhutan-esque happiness? A quick Google search dug up that we also were found best on some education survey in 2010… that’s pretty cool.

I’m sure there a lot of things we rank #1 on as a state… most Vermonters per capita, just as a for-instance. For me, though, in our new downtown life, and after all the hullabaloo about jaywalking, I’m quite happy to be on the championship pedestrian safety team.