It's more fun to live in Buffalo than any where I have ever lived. That's no small statement for someone who has lived in a dozen cities on three continents. But mine has just been one small voice over the past decade.

Now it's official. According a national study by WalletHub.com, out of 150 cities, Buffalo is ranked the 26th most fun city in America. This puts us in the top 17 percent nationwide. Click here to read the full article.

"To help Americans find the cities with the greatest number and variety of fun yet cost-effective options, WalletHub’s number crunchers compared the 150 largest U.S. cities based on 51 key metrics. They range from “number of fitness centers per capita” to “movie costs” to “average open hours of breweries.”

Affordability helped push Buffalo to the top of the list, from the cost of beer to the cost of a great meal. Buffalo has more restaurants per capita than 86 percent of the cities studied, keeping prices low and the wait to be seated short. In fact, Buffalo is the cheapest place in the nation to bowl. Strike!

Buffalo is more fun than Boston (73rd), Chicago (81) and New York City (121). I was surprised to find that Buffalo did not rank in the top five cities for festivals per capita. I think we need to check the definition of festival and where they got their data. It's hard to imagine a place with more festivals than Buffalo. Honolulu (1st)? Tampa (4th)? Doubt it.

Buffalo also failed to make the top five in the "Accesss to Bars" category. Really? Could Washington, DC (5th) possibly have more bars than Buffalo? Or St. Louis (2nd).

So how did Wallethub come up with these stats? They "compared the 150 most populated U.S. cities across three key categories: 1) Entertainment & Recreation, 2) Nightlife & Parties and 3) Costs. We evaluated these categories using 51 relevant metrics...Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with 100 indicating the greatest number and variety of fun and cost-effective options. We then calculated overall scores for each city using the weighted average across all metrics, which we then used to construct our final ranking."

Statistics are such a dry, boring way to measure fun. Fun needs to be experienced to be evaluated.

So I'm throwing down the gauntlet. Wallethub researchers, listen up. You are hereby invited to come to Buffalo to experience fun in Buffalo first hand. Once you've spent a morning in an Olmsted park, an afternoon on Canalside, an evening in any one of hundreds of fabulous restaurants, partied at one of our craft breweries or distilleries, attended a performance by one of our 21 professional theatre companies, stopped by the Albright-Knox or any of our dozens of museums and galleries, taken a sail on the Spirit of Buffalo or paddleboarded up the Buffalo River...well, you get the idea.

Buffalo may actually rank a heck of a lot higher than 26th.