Is Kentucky So Bad For Love?

The Daily Beast has ranked 104 U.S. cities for the likelihood of finding love, and Louisville comes up short: number 92. Long Beach, CA is number one. Lexington is dead last.

Louisville scored a "C" for the ratio of singles, a "D" for social life (restaurants and over 21 spots), an "F" for emotional health (based on a Gallup happiness survey), an "F" for marriage, measured as the percentage of people who married in 2008 as a percentage of the overall marriage-aged population. The bright spot: Louisville scored a "B" for the divorce ratio.

So although Louisville may not be a great place to find a mate for life, it appears to be a good place to keep one, if you already have one.

Louisville's "romantic hot spot" is supposedly Lilly's. (Really? I would have guessed Porcini's. Plainly the Daily Beast did not ask Rick Pitino.)

Lexington fared even worse: last place, number 104. Lexington scored in "F" for singles, social life, emotional health and marriage. Yet Lexington scored an A+ for divorce. The Lexington hot spot is supposedly Arirang Garden.

Kentucky Residents # 20 in Looks

The Daily Beast has decreed that Kentucky ranks 20th in terms of the attractiveness of our residents. D.C. is supposedly number one.

Here's how they crunched the numbers:

First, we determined who had the most stunners-per-capita (allowing Connecticut and California an equal playing field), tallying the hometowns of more than 300 male and female fashion models, plus 125 men mentioned in 10 years' worth of People's "Sexiest Man Alive" issues. Then, we accounted for the results of the Miss America and Miss USA pageants for the past decade. Finally, in order to measure general attractiveness, we factored in health and fitness data for each state from 2006-2008, ranked by the Trust for America's Health. Each of those three criteria—models, pageant winners, fitness—was weighed equally, with any ties broken by which state performed best in the latter category.

Using that framework, Kentucky's model rating is 18th. Our pageant ranking is 8th. But what killed us is our fitness ranking: 45th.

Hit the gym, people!