Enlightenment at the Wall Street Journal

This morning's Apple News includes a Wall Street Journal piece about the massive mobs of Halloween tourists that jam into Salem, MA, in October every year (it's here if you can get here), which story reports as follows: 

Cellphone data shows visitors coming from as far away as Ohio, Texas and California.

Imagine.

Aside from its moderately disturbing reference to monitoring cellphone data, this sentence reveals a significant step forward in New York's view of the hinterlands.

In the middle years of a previous Century when I lived in NYC there was (maybe still is) a huge Post Office on 14th Street that had (maybe still has) three big brass mail drops — you know, those slots you stuff envelopes into when you want to get them mailed — in its lobby. One was labeled Manhattan. The second was labeled Bronx. And the third was labeled Everywhere Else.

(OK, really the third was labeled Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Out of Town, and Foreign. Which means Everywhere Else, doesn't it?)

So "Ohio, Texas and California" really fleshes things out.

Good work, WSJ.

Now do Nebraska.

(And Happy Halloween, by the way.)