The Houston Chronicle tried yesterday afternoon to prove that Houston is better, or at least sucks less, than Dallas. Tried and failed. Sorry to piss on your parade, Alyson Ward, but that debate has been settled: Houston blows way harder than we do.

Ward says that Houston has a better skyline, an argument she bases not on aesthetic grounds, which H-Town would lose, but in building height. Then there's Houston's 2004 Super Bowl, which admittedly came off better than Dallas' ice-coated effort. The Bayou City also has more Fortune 500 companies, a bigger megachurch and NASA, not to mention a superior Galleria.

Houston's bigger, older and, thanks to "Apollo 13," linked to the most overused cliché in American pop culture. Dallas is more glitzy, more gaudy and, thanks to "Dallas," stuck with an international image based on '80s TV.

From here, Ward leaps to the conclusion that -- spoiler alert -- Houston wins.

But wait. Those are pretty measly criteria to make such a sweeping judgment. Why not give points for not pooping in alt weekly parking lots, or give some cred to Alan Peppard for not taking his clothes off?

More to the point, Ms. Ward fails to take into consideration that Houston is the asshole of the universe, or at least of Texas, where Dallas' collective flatulence and waste (which, by the way, probably improves the smell) eventually finally settles. And doesn't it say something that you feel so insecure that you have to write a self-congratulatory article in your hometown newspaper about how awesome you are?

Sure, Dallas has its flaws. The sprawl, for one. The myopic focus on the big and bold at the expense of the expense of the wise and practical, for another. A general disregard for history can be frustrating, as can our strange desire to pave over anything green and moist. But the great thing about living in Dallas, the thing that helps the city overcome all these flaws, is that if you live in Dallas, that means, almost definitively, that you don't live in Houston.