America apparently has not visited Klyde Warren Park.

Public Policy Polling is a new but fairly well-respected outfit that churns out an impressive quantity of high-quality snapshots of public opinion on political races and the important issues of our time.

But PPP doesn't let that stop them from putting out equally authoritative figures on the percentage of Americans who think Osama bin Laden is alive (6 percent); that the moon landing was faked (7 percent); and that a "secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government, or New World Order (28 percent).

It's in the same attention-generating spirit that the organization today released the results of a national poll revealing how favorably respondents feel about a selection of the country's major cities.

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DISD

Irma Rangel Young Women's Leadership School

It's tradition by now. Every year, Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews crunches the numbers and comes up with a list of the country's top public schools, and every year Dallas ISD's cohabitating School of Science and Engineering and TAG Magnet are near the top.

This year is no different. Mathews unveiled his 2013 list over the weekend, and there are DISD's flagship magnets once again, with Science/Engineering coming in at No. 2, TAG at No. 3. They are topped only by Oakland's American Indian Public Charter School, which happens to be in danger of shutting down over allegations that its founder misused public funds.

But not everything on this year's list is a repeat. Almost reaching the top this year is the Irma Rangel Young Women's Leadership School, which clocks in at No. 5. Which means that, by the Washington Post's count, DISD has three of the top five high schools in the country.

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Justin Terveen

Five months ago, Dallas didn't even register on Forbes rundown of U.S. metro areas with the rosiest employment prospects, losing out to San Jose and Austin but also to Birmingham, Charleston, and Lakeland, Florida.

That was a prediction based on a survey of employers' hiring predictions. Now that the magazine has crunched actual employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (via Moody's Analytics) and threw out cities adding lots of menial workers, Dallas emerged victorious.

Dallas is joined on Forbes' "Best Cities for Good Jobs" list by Houston (No. 2), Austin (No. 3), Fort Worth (No. 4), and San Antonio (No. 6), which, if you're keeping count, means that Texas cities make up the top half of the magazine's top 10 list.

From the introduction to the list:

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Justin Terveen

Every year, Forbes puts out a list. More accurately, the magazine puts out about a gazillion lists with varying degrees of credibility, one of which ranks the fastest growing cities in the nation.

This year's results are in, and Texas managed to nab gold, silver and bronze, sweeping the top three spots (Austin, Dallas and Houston). The magazine was not particularly surprised by this revelation, given that census figures had already revealed that the state welcomed 427,000 new residents between August 2011 and July 2012.

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Imagine for a second that there were no more lists. Nothing to say that a certain city has the best pectoral muscles or the worst selection of vuvuzelas. We obviously would have no idea that Dallas is full of lardassed squares who don't take showers but nevertheless have great career prospects.
But more fundamentally, in a tree-falls-in-the-forest type way, would Dallas -- could Dallas -- continue to exist without its existence being affirmed through lists?

The answer, of course, is that the question doesn't matter because media outlets count page views and thus will never stop churning out lists. Take Bloomberg, for instance. Just today, it released one if its own. But rather than rank cities based on a single attribute, it lists them in order, from worst to best. Dismiss the poll as unscientific at your own risk, because, as Bloomberg explains, the rankings were compiled using a little something called mathematics.

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Says Playboy, the Idle Rich Pub is SMU's "campus hot spot that best describes the student body."

At first blush, it would appear that Playboy's annual ranking of the country's best party schools is completely arbitrary. How else to explain the appearance of the University of Western Ontario in last year's top 10 or Plymouth State the year before?

But no, this is science. "Our methodology?" Playboy explains. "We took America's top 100 colleges and ranked them across 900 data points in three categories: sex, sports, and nightlife." Throw them in a blender and, voila, you have a list of party schools that is 100-percent unassailable.

See also: What an SMU Sorority Party Playlist Looks Like

So when SMU comes in first in the magazine's nightlife rankings, as it did this year, you can be sure it's the gospel truth. The blurb accompanying the ranking says it all:

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Patrick Michels

Travel & Leisure doesnt' know what they're talking about. Dallas is squeaky clean.

Quantifying a the cleanliness of an entire city seems like it would pose a challenge. Do you count the number of discarded Taco Bell cups? Analyze shower head sales? Perform a census of head lice? There are countless factored to be considered if you are to get a solid grasp of how tidy a city is.

Somehow, the wizard's at Travel & Leisureundoubtedly peer-reviewed list of the country's 20 dirtiest cities.

The magazine writes, by way of introduction:

The cities that scraped the bottom of the cleanliness category may show signs of grit, grime, or muck, but they all have some basic features in common: they're big, and most have a bustling nightlife. Partiers tend to be on the younger side -- and that may add to the disarray. "Studies have consistently found that youths and young adults are the most prone, or willing, to litter," says Steve Spacek, author of the "American State Litter Scorecard," which has highlighted the less-than-pristine conditions in such top 20 cities as New Orleans, Chicago, and Las Vegas.

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Obligatory picture of anonymous fat people.

Quick: What day is it today? If you answered Tuesday or September 18, you're technically right but you're actually very, tragically wrong, because it's National Cheeseburger Day which a) exists and b) is a great opportunity to check out a new burger joint. It's also, perhaps, time to reflect on the consequences of living in a country where every day is Cheeseburger Day.

The Trust For America's Health just released a report titled "F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America's Future 2012," which, as you may be able to tell, is not exactly celebration of our nation's expanding waistline. The Star-Telegram reported the story with the headline that Texas is the 10th fattest state in the country, but the report's not about how fat we already are; it's about how fat we're going to be.

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dallascowboys.com

With the start of the NFL season this week, Forbes has been in something of a football-list-making frenzy. We were reminded, for example, that Drew Brees is the league's highest-paid player and that you're very own Dallas Cowboys is the most valuable team in football. This afternoon, Forbes gave America's team another superlative: We have the best fans.

Of course we do, but how, other than listening to unhealthy amounts of sports radio, does one gauge the quality of a team's fans? We'll let Forbes explain:

Our ranking is based on five criteria: stadium attendance (a combination of consecutive sell-outs and average season stadium capacity), television ratings (as provided by Nielsen), merchandise sales (per NFLShop.com), social media reach (a combination of Facebook likes and Twitter followers based on the team's metro area population), and fan club presence (based on the active number found online). To prevent bandwagon fans and frontrunners from skewing the results, two years worth of data were used for stadium attendance, TV ratings, and merchandise sales.

Throw all that in a blender, and the Cowboys come out on top. The Packers and Steelers are tied for second, followed by the Patriots, Colts, and Saints. And those alleged Giants whose asses we just kicked? They don't even make the top 10.

It seems that a lot of electric vehicle charging stations have been popping up in Dallas of late -- at gas stations, grocery stores, possibly soon at City Hall -- and now we know that yes, there are a lot.

Xatori, an app-maker, released a list yesterday of the cities with the most EV charging stations for every 100,000 residents. Portland, as you might assume, comes out on top, but No. 2 is something of a shocker: Dallas. A bit further down the list, coming in at No. 6, is Austin.

That's means Dallas is ready for the electric car boom. A glance at traffic is enough to tell it hasn't come yet. Maybe once there's an oil crisis and we develop technology to make the stations obsolete.