"I would encourage all Texans to move to California," jokes San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who was born in Jim Crow-era East Texas. "The wise ones leave."
Then why does Texas win this vote-of-the-feet?
Affordability is a huge factor. Texas has no state income tax and a lower cost of living. A 15-acre spread with a new 3-bedroom house in Frisco, Texas, just north of Dallas, sells for $229,000. The median home price in San Francisco -- $524,000 -- buys just 2 bedrooms on a postage-stamp lot.
While the prices are different, some Californians find the Texas swagger a lot like home.
"There's a benefit being around people who are really proud of their state," says Josh Silverman, who moved from Berkeley, Calif. in January to work in the Texas-Mexico border town of Laredo. "I don't want to be around some Massachusetts sissy."
Silverman doesn't find all Texas stereotypes so enchanting. It's a social desert, he says, when you don't enjoy local "absurdities" such as skeet shooting, deer hunting, and square dancing.
Other Californians in Texas chafe under stereotypes. Texans often dismiss them as quaintly quirky, says Hollywood-born Sarah Cotton Nelson, who left with her Volvo in 1998 and now works for the Dallas Women's Foundation.
"No matter what I said seriously, people would say, 'Oh, Sarah, you're so funny,"' says Nelson, whose mother grew up in the Texas Panhandle.
It's a mutual provocation society.
"It's always like they're talking to a little child," says Lee Sullivan, a Web content editor who is proud to be Texan and happy to have moved to San Francisco in 1996.
The patronizing comments and even hostility have gotten worse since California's energy crisis, Sullivan says -- so much for California's liberal tolerance.
He hangs a Texas flag in his home office -- but now draws the shade so it doesn't attract unwanted attention. And he's hardly amused at the anti-Texas commentary on the San Francisco Chronicle Web site, which allows users to "flip" a switch and send a blackout rolling over an image of the Austin skyline.
Indeed, seldom is heard an encouraging word as Californians send their energy dollars straight to the heart of Texas.
When the CEO of Houston-based Enron Corp., the nation's largest power wholesaler, slipped into the state for a speech last month, a San Francisco activist clipped his face with a sloppy berry pie.
It's a wonder that Enron sent anyone at all. Just before the visit, California's attorney general said he wanted to jail the company's chairman in "an 8 X 10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, 'Hi my name is Spike, honey."'
More often, though, Texans and Californians just live and let live.
That fact has frustrated Scott Russell, a recent graduate of Texas Christian University who saw his team lose its undefeated season in a game at San Jose State University last fall.
College football is an obsession in Texas, but can be a ho-hum affair in California.
"Nobody even talked trash to me," complains Russell, who signs his e-mails "Texan by the grace of God."
After two years in San Jose, Sullivan is moving back to Austin next month to get a master's in education -- again a traveler on the well-trod path between Texas and California.