Maybe it’s the hordes of students — those rat bastards who under the guise of higher learning descend upon this town every fall, traveling in groups of 15, rendering stupefying lines at every ATM machine, making parking a car an even more horrifying experience and getting in the way of everything — who have put Bostonians in such a foul mood. Perhaps it’s the fact that the transition between scorching-hot summer and bone-chilling winter lasts about three days (it’s a wonderful 72 hours, though). Or maybe no one’s over The Curse, the fate of a city that traded Babe Ruth, ensuring that the Red Sox would never again win a World Series and that all Bostonians would forever remain bitter, spiteful codgers.

In Boston I get the feeling that no one wants to be bothered with a newbie like me, yet somehow returning locals can effortlessly bounce around town making conversation, whether they’re chewing the fat with the chi-chi Newbury Street poseurs or the down-to-earth jeans-and-flannel crowd of Jamaica Plain. I think the problem is one of language. Besides the fact that I don’t come equipped with a dreadful accent that makes any word with an “a” in it indecipherable, I just haven’t learned how to speak to these people yet. San Francisco, where I spent the last six years, runs on the language of reinvention: Who do you want to be and where are you going next? Boston’s linguistic code is one of history and lineage: Who are you now and where do you come from?

My friend Chris, who’s lived in Boston for five years, says it takes five years for a newcomer to be accepted by the locals. Having arrived from a city that greets every college dropout at the gate with a latte and a job in a video store, I can respect the ethos: Make ‘em earn it. It’s a sensibility based on certain standards. And a society without standards is one with boring politics and bad pizza. Boston, to its credit, has neither.

And so, with less patience than is perhaps needed for this expedition and a good four and a half years away from getting so much as a hello from the regulars at the local cafe I frequent every day, I set out to find a little warmth in a city that calls itself the Hub. I did it the only way I know how: by frequenting the drinking and eating establishments of a place that likes to eat and drink. Besides, I just got here; I’m in no mood to cook.

A brief word about the Hub. The phrase refers to “The Hub of the universe,” which a long time ago a proper Bostonian dubbed this city. That may have been true during the Revolutionary War, but it’s laughable that any place could call itself the Hub without irony in 1997 and not offer at least one 24-hour falafel joint. We’ll leave it at that.

Regardless, my quest for a little friendliness in Boston led me to Little Steve’s House of Pizza, located on Boylston Street just off the low-rent end of Newbury Street (the side that features the famously unfancy record store Newbury Comics, not the Talbot’s end). We had heard that the portions were large, but these slices were so big that Cheryl, my partner in ‘za, requested hers be cut in three.

When one of the gooey troughs of sauce-covered dough slipped off her plate, I scooped it off the floor, to which Cheryl offered, “Leave it there, I couldn’t have finished all this pizza anyway.” But Little Steve would have none of it. He summoned me to the counter, where he proceeded to send me back with another, un-floor-fallen piece for Cheryl. (He clearly comes from the “fallen ice cream cone” school of restaurateurism.) Steve’s slices are so big and so bad it’s a wonder he remains in business. But as all college kids know, a slice is a terrible thing to waste, and this house of pizza is spitting distance from Berklee College of Music, Simmons, Emerson and Northeastern. My theory: Though he may be the nicest person in this city, I still think Steve is trying to kill all of Boston’s students with his artery-clogging pizza. It’s a nice thought at least.

Make no mistake, if Boston is the Hub of anything, it is the Hub of students, whom, if you’re coming to town between the months of September and June, you’ll want to avoid. Fortunately, two of the most student-free zones are two of the best, the North and South ends.

Like much of Boston, the North End is old, unchanging and impossible to park in. But the difference between this End and everywhere else is that it’s ruled by Italians, people who are comfortable with the concept of a lot of people showing up for dinner and then leaving. And I think that’s why the North End is more inviting than most of Boston: North Enders know that whether you grew up in New Jersey or in Natick, you are eventually going to finish your dinner and go away. It follows then that they don’t mind being nice to you.

Much like the entire country of Italy, it’s tough to get a bad meal in the North End. Hanover Street is wall-to-wall fish, pasta and cannolis — the three most important parts of any Bostonian’s diet, especially since he’s going to be spending half the year hidden under a wool sweater anyway. Personally, I swear by Pomodoro, a down-home-but-not-cheap spot that puts new meaning into fried calamari with homemade red dipping sauce as comfort food. (Note about the North End color scheme: Red rules. Red wine. Red sauce. Red lipstick. Red heels. It’s all red.)

The key to the North End is not eating your dessert where you eat dinner. You’ve got to move around a little, let all that salami and white clam sauce wiggle around a bit in your belly as you troll Hanover and neighboring Fleet Street in search of something sweet, which, if not a cannoli, means an ice cream cone. As with the burrito wars of San Francisco and the pizza fights in New York, people in Boston take their ice cream quite seriously and quite personally. New Englanders eat more ice cream than anyone else in the country, and for good reason: From the gelato of the North End to the shakes of J.P. Licks across town, Boston packs the greatest ice cream in the world. The best in town? Emack & Bolio’s — or at least that’s what my girlfriend says. She’s from Boston, so there’s little use in arguing.

If you can make your way out of the North End and past the Big Dig — some sort of convoluted construction project costing billions of dollars and wreaking complete havoc on traffic, all in the name of connecting the city so places like the North End can be even more impossible to park in — you will find the quaint South End. While the North End remains red, the South End has turned increasingly white as it’s become the adresse de rigueur for young gay men in the last 10 years. The most racially mixed area of the city, this rapidly gentrifying area has yielded a new community health center (whose groundbreaking was attended by Al Gore and Bill Weld) and a lot of seared ahi in its many new trendy cafes and restaurants. Depending on whom you ask, both of these developments can be viewed as progress.

Lest you shockingly misdirect your cabbie on the way there, it’s also important to note that the South End should not be confused with South Boston, aka Southie, which is old and white and Irish and would like to stay that way. The good folks of South Boston are probably some of the least excited people to meet someone new to their precious Boston; thus I am not very excited to meet them.

Not that the South End is all that inclusive. The many Caribbean families that have been in the area for 30 years pretty much keep to themselves, though they seem to be having the most fun of anyone around. And then there’s the South End Gay Boy Mafia, usually seen in packs of threes and fours, wearing tight white T-shirts and looking tastefully annoyed.

You can see them at spots like To Go, a cafe that brews the coffee in the neighborhood, and Metropolis, a tiny bistro that does such good things with fresh fish and vegetables that I accidentally decided to move to Boston after eating there. Then there’s the surprising Anchovies, a restaurant and bar that at first glance seems like it should have been tucked away in some alley in North End but landed on South End’s historic Columbus Avenue. When I’m sitting at the bar at Anchovies, eating mushroom rigatoni, salad and a glass of red (all for about $10), chatting with the bartender (who’s actually quite friendly) and watching the Sox lose yet again, somehow the realization that five feet of snow will be dumped on this town any minute now just doesn’t seem so bad.

Anchovies’ neighbor, Charlie’s Sandwich Shoppe, shares its local flavor and the friendly confidence of a spot that knows it’s going to be there long after everyone else is gone. Charlie’s has been serving its delicious french toast and heart-attack-on-a-plate omelets since 1927. And while an institution, it has never become a caricature of itself: Charlie’s refuses to turn into a museum-version of the real thing.

Like so much of Boston, Charlie’s is very old and not very hip. That’s one of the nicest things about this city. It’s got nothing to prove, which means Bostonians walk around with a confidence that is hard to understand, exuding a look that says, “I have no need for you, Mackdaddy.” And after a while, the rudeness kind of grows on you.

There are, of course, exceptions. The Delux Cafe, tucked away on a sleepy South End corner, is where you’ll find the folks who really meant to live in the East Village, but have somehow lost their way. Delux seems to have a huge magnet on its roof pulling every pierced and dyed young thing in New England to its Elvis-kitsched walls and deceptively creative food (who knew mac and cheese could be this good?). Like any hipster worth his weight in henna, Delux’s menu reinvents itself every few months. The mouth-watering homemade chips and salsa, however, never go anywhere. Ultimately, as the young and the restless continue to find themselves outpriced in Boston’s Beacon Hill area and out-yuppified by the Back Bay, the face of the South End should continue to look more and more like Delux. The second-best place in Boston, Delux represents a South End in transition.

But Wally’s — the finest joint in all of Boston — does not want to change. And one hopes it never will. Located on Massachusetts Avenue (that’s Mass. Ave. to you) along the Roxbury border (a largely black part of Boston that for some reason isn’t actually allowed to be in Boston itself), Wally’s is a bit on the edge for most Bostonians. Thus, no matter how many times this funky old dive wins Boston magazine’s best back-room jazz bar award, it cannot be overrun by masses of folks looking for blues from a cookie cutter. There are a few truths that Wally’s holds self-evident: Jazz and blues should be heard every night; there should be no cover to get in; and the beer should be ice cold. Old black guys from the neighborhood drink with awkward white kids from the nearby Berklee College of Music as Jose Ramos, “Boston’s best Latino blues singer,” belts out deep covers of James Brown and Bobby Bland.

A few months ago, when the bartender finally handed me the Rolling Rock I had been waiting and waiting for at 1 a.m. on a hot summer Monday, he looked me in the eye and said, “Son, it’s on the house. No man should have to wait that long for a beer.” When the beer hit my lips, cold as anything I’ve ever encountered in Boston, I was beset by a warm glow. Either I was getting a quick beer buzz or, perhaps, in a frosty town as tight-lipped as a country club, it was possible to thaw the place out a little. After almost six months, Boston and I are still getting to know each other. Maybe there will be a second date after all — and who knows, Boston might even respect me in the morning.

Now appearing as a two-page insert in two Bay Area weeklies, with unconfirmed plans to expand to others across the country, Lucky Strike cigarette’s Circuit Breaker may be the most expensive zine in the country — paid for one pack at a time. But for its readers, surprisingly enough, it’s worth every one of those Lucky dimes. Irreverent, daring, goofy and sublime, CB is frequently a better read than the papers that house it. While a good chunk of CB is picks and plugs for Lucky-sponsored concerts and events, you’ll also find profiles of underground artists and filmmakers, along with quirky ruminations on everyday things like thermoses and paprika (the spice, not the band, if there is one).

How did Lucky get so edgy? This advertisa-zine is written by local alternative writers who have found better pay (albeit not much better) than they would have earned by writing for the weekly itself and a hands-off approach that’s much to their liking. “I’ve had more autonomy than I’ve ever had working for weekly newspapers,” offers one frequent contributor to CB. “I’ve never had a better relationship with a publication.”

The folks at Slant, a sort of mega-zine put out by the hip clothing chain Urban Outfitters, have a similarly blasi reaction to the idea of working for The Man. In any case, managing editor Caroline Karlen says the corporate folks keep a respectful distance. “No one sees (Slant) before it goes to press,” she reports, matter of factly. “The company says ‘Just do it’ — no one really asks us what’s in it.” Like the best zines, Slant is a byproduct of hard work and serendipity — though it certainly doesn’t hurt that the editors don’t have to sneak into the office late at night to Xerox off the press run. When art director Howard Brown arrived at Urban Outfitters in 1994, fresh from the Seattle music scene, where he’d been making posters for bands to wheat-paste all over town, he wanted to find a way to employ that arty, oversized format into its ad plan.

The result was a wild-looking something that could easily be mistaken for an underground paper from the ’60s if it weren’t for a pastiche of contributors like zine stars John Marr (Murder Can Be Fun) and Al Hoff (Thrift Score), as well as bigger name writers like Luc Santi and Kenneth Anger. And the proceedings are enhanced considerably by bold two- and three-color graphics spiced with the work of a host of alternative cartoonists. (“Like many of life’s simple splendors,” the editors explain, Slant’s comics are “best enjoyed when spread wide on the floor.”) Slant organizes its issues by theme (Punk Rock, the Paranormal, Sin City); a recent issue on Las Vegas saw Dishwasher Pete’s reflections on scrubbing dirties in a Vegas dive running alongside author Nick Tosches’ appreciation of Dino. Everyone gets paid the same $250 for their efforts. This isn’t a publication that’s likely to run an exposi of third-world sweatshops any time soon, but at least that poor sap waiting for his girlfriend has something to read when he’s done thumbing through Details.

Oddly enough, the ads for Urban Outfitters don’t exactly overwhelm the zine. “We figured that everyone already knows that there’s an Urban Outfitters on Walnut Street,” explains Karlen, referring to the store in Philadelphia. “This way our customers get to take something home and we get to do something we’re more interested in.”

The grandfather of the corporate alternative magazine is, of course, Benetton’s much-maligned Colors, which remains (despite the critics) one of the most consistently good reads on the market. A bilingual bimonthly that offers a fishbowl-like peek at various global matters (food, race, AIDS, animals) each issue, Colors neither spends much time confirming nor denying its relationship to its publisher, a company that earns its keep selling sweaters to 18-year-old girls. And so what? Just like all but a handful of nonprofit-on-purpose publications, Benetton is in the business of making a buck. That they dump some of their loose change into a slightly subversive rag is a good thing. And where else but in Colors can you read a comprehensive guide to animal droppings, printed in English, Spanish, French, Italian and German?

In this shameless world of corporate alternative, no one is really kidding anyone. Colors may not flaunt its connection to the massive clothes company in its pages, but most readers know exactly who The Man Behind The Man is — or they simply don’t care. Lucky’s “by the way, in case you hadn’t noticed, this little section of the paper is actually an advertisement” disclaimer may be in minuscule type, but the cigarette company’s logo and ads are all over the place. And Slant’s tag line seems designed to stop potential critics in their tracks: “We are not an alternative publication,” the paper proudly proclaims. Thank God — because otherwise it might be tempted to sell out.

My friend Nicole was another Vogue fashion victim. Nicole’s what you call “low maintenance,” so I was a little surprised to see her, dressed casually in a blue sweatshirt (Champion) and ripped jeans (Gap), with the Vogue on her person. She caught my wandering eye, and, before I could comment, explained: “Look, I never buy the magazine, but you gotta buy the fall issue. You just gotta.” Before we took the conversation further, her eyes fluttered and rolled and she collapsed in my arms. She had fainted, wiped out from carrying Vogue around all morning.

As an American, I had to ask: Where will the madness stop? What options do we have in the face of such a menace? The answer occurred to me almost immediately. Rather than fight it — which would be futile, admit it — it’s best to embrace Vogue’s encyclopedia of fall fashion. Let’s say yes to Vogue, and count our blessings, as well as the many things we can do with a 708-page magazine.

We could:

Send it to Iraq: With the President trying to ban chemical weapons, Vogue is the perfect pulp-and-paper antidote to chemical warfare. When the frontline troops march over to enemy territory carrying the popular fashion issue, the opposition will think the sharing of the fall line is a peace offering. Then — swack! — we break open the pages and fume those rat bastards with 708 scented pages — take some CK1, Saddam! — made in the US of A. They’ll never know what hit them.

Get the free panties: As the ad and perforated insert explain on page 409, the Barely There seamless panty is not only “barely there,” but almost free. Who can pass up free panties? All you need to do is send $1.50 to Connecticut and a very nice man will send you a nice pair of panties. The buck and a half covers postage and (heh, heh, heh) handling. Like the September issue of Vogue, one presumes the panties come wrapped in protective plastic.

Count the puppies: On the cover, models Kate Moss and Amber Valletta are holding three very nice puppies, with two more in the frame once you open up the cover flap. That makes five. How many puppies are there in the September issue of Vogue? It would be a lot of fun to try to count them all.

Do the math: With 708 pages to work with, you could write one Russian novel and still have room enough left over to squeeze in the adapted screenplay; pen “Pride and Prejudice” twice and squeeze in a long interview with Alicia Silverstone; fit in “Backlash” with room for 156 one-page op-eds on female cadets.

Do some more math: This one, at $3.50, cost just 50 cents more than the regular $3 Vogue. That’s two pages for each penny. The August issue had just 288 pages — more than a penny a page. That’s a lousy deal. And there were no puppies!

Weigh it: At about four pounds, 1 1/4″ high, it takes 30 Vogues to make one Kirsty Hume (page 656), 120 pounds, 5′ 11.”

Read it: Anna Wintour’s “Letter from the Editor” — which we don’t encounter, thanks to the sea of ads, until page 38 — portends that fall will bring more fur coats, which “have made a comeback for fall and winter — but not the heavy, bulky mink your mother used to wear.” As if.

Read the ads: On page 586, I found out from the always prescient Gianni Versace that “Being sexy today doesn’t mean exposing a lot of skin. You can be sexy in long sleeves and a turtleneck if it is cut right.” Fellas take note: That’s not just good copy, it’s an organizing principle.

The final lesson in 708 or less easy to read pages? It’s one we knew all along: size matters.