Today’s Domin­ion Post car­ries an insuf­fer­ably smug art­icle head­lined “The lonely misery of liv­ing in Auck­land”. Like all good journ­al­ism these days, this story is based almost entirely upon Google: in this case, the news that a Google Trends search for the word “misery” shows that Auck­landers search Google for this word more often than inhab­it­ants of any oth­er city.

While I agree that liv­ing in a sprawl­ing, dis­con­nec­ted agglom­er­a­tion of sub­urbs in search of a city would do any­one’s head in after a while, I tend towards anoth­er explan­a­tion. Per­haps it has some­thing to do with a cer­tain highly pop­u­lar artist and design­er who has a boutique in Auck­land? Of the top ten Google res­ults for a search on “misery” and “Auck­land”, eight of them refer to the artist, thus con­firm­ing my the­ory. On the oth­er hand, the remain­ing two refer to the Nation­al Party’s policy for Auck­land traffic, so per­haps the Dom­Post has a point. And unless there’s a hip new boutique in K Rd called “Lonely”, the pop­ular­ity of that par­tic­u­lar word among Auck­landers is harder to explain.

By the way, it looks like the Misery will be spread­ing to Wel­ling­ton soon, too. This week’s Arts­ville doco men­tioned in passing that a Wel­ling­ton Misery boutique is on the way, which will be excit­ing news for devotees of hip­ster pop-cul­ture dis­pens­ar­ies Popup and Eye­ball Kicks (you know who you are).