I decided on Monday that there were several reasons why it was necessary for me to leave town for a few days. The water was going to be off all over my apartment complex, I have a promising interview later this week which might make future trips more difficult, and I just sort of felt like it.
So I went to Atlanta.
I just got home. I’m beat so I’m not going to tell any exiting stories about the trip tonight. OK, there weren’t really any REALLY exciting stories anyway, but still…
Funny, funny op-ed piece from my hometown paper:
he zoning laws are very strict concerning the naming of new residential communities. If you are well-funded and have the right lawyer, you can pretty much drop houses out of the sky wherever you please, but the name must be generated from the grid below by choosing one word from each of the columns, (e.g., “Hootenanny Hills Holler” or “Deer Droppings Down”).
…
I live in northwest Greensboro, which is zoned “HT-3,” meaning it is mandatory that a Harris-Teeter be located every three miles or else. Under municipal ordinances, if it is ever found that there is a greater than three mile distance between any two northwest Harris-Teeters, the city is empowered to build a deli and/or bakery in your residence until a new store can be constructed. Until they opened up the new Harris-Teeter on New Garden Road last month, my mom was forced to hang rotisserie chickens from her porch, and it caused a serious animal problem.
While driving around looking at houses with the hubby, I also like to come up with new subdivision and street names. Some of my favorites include numerous variants on “The ___ at ___ ____” and cute, little multi-word street names. Forget “The Shops at Peppercorn Point” or whatever. How about some of these?
And in the vein of street names like “Timid Deer Lane” and “Spotted Oak Trail”, may I suggest the following:
I stand corrected, and by a member of the family at that. Apparently, “gift” actually is a verb common in legal documents for several centuries. Of course, legal terminology is somewhat unrelated to plain English anyway (by design, maybe?), but I apologize for my error. I will, however, continue not to use “gift” as a verb myself, because I find it just a little repulsive. As I’ve said before, the fact that you can do something doesn’t mean that you necessarily should.
Only two more days until we lose the giant fans in our office. Thursday night, just as we were leaving to go to dinner, the toilet tank in the office bathroom overflowed and didn’t shut off. In about five minutes, all the carpet within five feet of the bathroom (including the media closet) was soaked. I’m glad we caught it before it could do any more damage.
Fortunately, maintenance managed to get someone out here with an extractor that night, and we now have big fans blowing above and beneath the carpet to get it good and dry. I’m sure it will also get cleaned afterward, but I fear we’ll never have that “new apartment smell” again. It’s a good thing we’re planning to vacate pretty soon. All the same, I’ll miss this place. After thirteen years in a dingy San Francisco hovel with a cigar-smoking lunatic downstairs, it’s been really nice living someplace with appliances, plumbing that (usually) works, climate control, and a relatively pleasant aroma.
Anyway, we left the noisy fans behind and went to Winston-Salem on Friday and Saturday. We might have stayed the whole weekend and done more, ummm, shopping, but Mark had to be on a plane back to The City of Doom this morning.
After looking at numerous real estate listings in recent weeks, I’ve come to the conclusion that more North Carolina houses were built in in 1963 than in any other year before or since. I assume it must be that the developers were anxiously anticipating my arrival the following year.
It’s sort of fun reading the early days of The Boondocks while Aaron McGruder is on “hiatus”. I can’t remember for sure if the Chronicle started running the strip from day one or not, although I think it did, since the earliest one I remember featured Riley sighing when he realized he lived on Timid Deer Lane…
You know what’s scary? Right now, my site is number one when you do a Google search on “Timid Deer Lane”, apparently thanks to this post which really had nothing much to do with the comic strip in question.
The big difference between The Boondocks, and even Doonesbury, versus token “conservative strip” Mallard Fillmore, is that the first two usually strike me as funny, even when I disgree with the politics. Mallard Fillmore, on the other hand, shows no subtlety, no characterization, and precious little humor. That’s the kicker: It’s just not funny. It’s a pity, because an actual well-done strip with a right-of-center slant might be interesting to read, even if I disagreed with its viewpoint much of the time.
Sad. They’re about to turn the cool high-rise fomer Howard Johnson’s hotel in my hometown into a bland and generic Doubletree. The restaurant closed years ago and eventually became a Hooters, but the hotel itself remained sublimely HoJo until it lost (or renounced) its franchise last year.
Another nearly-intact HoJo with restaurant was bulldozed in recent years for a freeway improvement project, something Greensboro seems to get way more than its share of.
I miss Howard Johnson’s restaurants. And I’m really mad at myself for not getting to the Times Square location before it closed last summer.
I’d forgotten that today was the opening day for the North Carolina state lottery. I really couldn’t give a damn about the morals of the whole thing; people can do whatever they want with their money, including throwing it out the windows of their cars or wiping their bums with it, for all I care.
As someone who lived in a state with a lottery for thirteen years, my biggest gripe with the lottery is that, as of today, no conveniece store in North Carolina will ever be convenient again. Every time I walk into one hoping to grab a quick soda or candy bar, I’ll be forced to stand behind some moron spending ten minutes trying to sort out his fucking lottery tickets and Powerball scan sheets.
I’m glad I don’t smoke anymore; that at least cuts down somewhat on how much this will affect me personally.
Yer Humble Host, twenty-five years ago this week. I was mopping the floor at the now-departed McDonald’s in Greensboro’s Four Seasons Mall. I’m very happy that the words “McDonald’s” and “mall” are pretty much no longer in my vocabulary, and that “mopping” is only a peripheral part, at best.
What the photo doesn’t show is that I’m about to hit the little brat over the head with my mop handle for walking across my just-mopped floor. I’m also very happy that the words “hit the little brat over the head” are still very much a part of my vocabulary.
One size no longer fits all. I was thinking of this while posting to a message board I frequent from time to time. My post was specifically about supermarkets, and my assertion was that there basically is no such thing as a “one size fits all” supermarket chain anymore. This turns out to be true for many other aspects of pop culture today too.
When I was a kid, there were certain aspects of popular culture that almost everyone shared, among them shopping, entertainment, and phone service. The segregation that lingered into the 1960s was over, at least in theory, and the stifling conformity of the 1950s Tea and Sympathy era had been somewhat minimized (the subject of yet another rant I’m working on), but some things were still dang nigh universal.
As late as the 1980s, the vast majority of people in the vast majority of places shopped at one of two or three largely indistinguishable chain supermarkets. Each of them served more or less the same demographic, that being shoppers who needed groceries. There were some mild variations in selection and price, but nothing that really set one apart from the other. You could get what you wanted at any of them, and it would all end up costing, smelling, and tasting pretty much the same.
That era of grocery retailing is over. Now, we have high-end chains like Whole Foods (and numerous regional variants) and low-end chains like Wal-Mart Supercenter. In between are any number of steps specializing in produce, meat, prepared food, or whatever. There are ethnic-oriented supermarket chains and small retailers like Dean and Delucca. Going to the store has taken on extraordinary layers of complexity.
The trend has carried through to other retail as well. The large regional malls of my youth were sort of one-stop shopping centers, where people could purchase most of their necessities. There was invariably at least one supermarket on the periphery, and the mall itself always contained a drug store and a dime store in addition to the department and specialty stores. All bases were covered.
That’s not how malls work anymore. The large regional centers which have survived (many haven’t) are almost exclusively focused on “upscale” boutiques now. There is nothing mass-market, like a cafeteria or a drugstore. It’s all high-end clothing, with the occasional high-end housewares or gadget store thrown in. Malls are no longer places where the daily necessities of life are acquired, and they are no longer places where you see a cross-section of society. Customers tend to be younger and well-heeled; the only old folks you see are the ones who come there to walk before the stores open.
I talked about the irrelevance of the big three networks’ evening news shows recently. You could pretty much extend that classification to the big three networks’ programming in general. No one cares anymore; I couldn’t tell you what comes on what night anymore except for the Fox animation block on Sunday nights. Those three or four networks just don’t stand out very much in world of 200-channels plus video-on-demand.
Narrowcasting with respect to music is even more severe. There once was something called top 40 Radio in America. It wasn’t what everyone liked. It may not have been what anyone liked. But everyone was familiar with its contents. Through the 1970s, the top 40 was so ubiquitous that almost no one, young, old, black, white, or brown wasn’t at least familiar with a large proportion of it.
That’s not the case anymore either. Sometime in the mid-1980s, things started getting almost obsessively genre-specific, most likely as a result of the increasing portability of non-radio music devices. There’s still a top 40 and I’m sure a few people still care, but it’s a very specific demographic based on marketing now rather than a merging of multiple genres and demographics based on overall popularity. Most radio stations now spend more on-air time defining their formats (“KZAZ, Z-100. Always seven songs in a row, all upbeat lite rock, with no rap, heavy metal, or songs written by people from Arizona, Maryland, or Georgia.”) than actually playing music.
There’s no more Life Magazine that everyone from hippies to grandmothers reads. AT&T is no longer a universal annoyance. Our automotive choices are no longer limited to GM, Chrysler, and Ford. And a “Congressional consensus” on anything is an oxymoron.
I’m not complaining about all this choice, mind you. I think it’s a good thing, and I’d be hard-pressed to live my life without it. I like not having to listen to crappy music just to get to one good song. I prefer not having to watch “American Idol”. I like that there are carnicerias and other assorted tiendas latinas nearby. And I like my Wal-Mart Supercenter, by god.
A sociology text I read a couple of years ago suggested that increased options and choice, particularly in the form of mobility, had been responsible for many of the ills of urban America in the past fifty years, not to mention our “loss of community”. I think that’s hogwash. I’m all about individualism and I have little use for the term “community”, particularly as it’s generally (ab)used. Choice generally is good, even if it’s sometimes exhausting.
I wonder sometimes, though, how much more fractured our society will ultimately become, and if there are any ill effects involved. As much as I prefer to avoid it myself, people do have to relate on occasion, and a little common ground can be helpful.