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).