Category: Commentary

I was surfing the web yesterday, and just happened to stumble upon this photograph:

This was a parking lot near Georgia State University in Atlanta. It was a bit of a hike from campus, but it was always less crowded than the official university lots, and cheaper than private lots closer to the school. I parked there pretty much every weekday from 1993 to 1995.

The lot is gone now – replaced by GSU’s “Freshman Hall” – but back then the lot’s spaces were numbered, and there was a steel collection box with numbered slots (which you can see next to the tree on the left). You pulled into a space, noted your number, then put $3 in quarters or bills into the corresponding slot in the box. Simple, right?

Well, the parking company had a guy who would drive around and issue “tickets” to cars that hadn’t paid the fee. It wasn’t a real parking ticket, obviously, but it nevertheless demanded a “fine” of something like $5, in addition to the regular $3 fee. Since students needed to park there regularly, most folks would just pay the $8 and be done with it.

Every so often, though, the parking guy would go on a tear and issue “tickets” to cars whether they’d paid for parking or not. Every day for a week or so I’d walk to the lot after class and find a student cursing or crying, having gotten a ticket but insisting that they’d paid their $3. Like my lower back pain, I often thought about doing something about it… but by the time I did, the problem was gone: parking guy would stop issuing rogue tickets for a month or two.

But then the bastard gave me a ticket. Not only had I paid to park, I’d stopped at QuikTrip on the way in to get a Dr Pepper and break a $5 bill into dollar bills. Let me repeat that: I made a SPECIAL STOP to get change to pay for the parking I was now accused of not paying. I was pissed. I looked over at a cute blonde girl who was also mad that she’d also gotten a fake ticket. So I decided to do something about it.

I thought about it for a second, then opened the trunk of my car. There I found a full can of WD-40, complete with the little straw. I walked over to the collection box, and sprayed a generous squirt into each and every money slot… and there were like, 40 of them! I went back to my car and grabbed a notebook. I wrote a quick note, something like “Dear Parking Guy: Sorry about the collection box, but if you keep ripping off students, I’m going to do this every day until you stop”. For some reason, I had a roll of cellophane tape in my backpack, so I taped that sucker to the box… with, like, 30 strips of tape. That thing wasn’t going anywhere until Parking Guy came around again.

As far as I know, Parking Guy did stop… at least for the rest of my time at GSU. I never again heard a complaint about those bullshit “tickets”. It’s hard to believe one can of WD-40 could stop an illicit money-making scheme, but it appears to have worked.

Charlotte has been lucky in that their regional department store, Belk, still exists. If anything, Belk is as strong now as it’s been in years. Other cities weren’t so lucky. Chicago, for example, had its heart ripped out when it lost Marshall Field’s, and Atlanta lost its favorite department store, Rich’s, too.

For decades, Atlanta had two department stores: Davison’s and Rich’s. Davison’s was founded in 1891, and the thing I remember most is their weird, half-height charge cards:

The story back in the 80s was that Macy’s bought Davison’s and converted the stores over to the Macy’s brand. The truth was a little more complicated:  the store’s three owners sold out to R.H. Macy & Co. all the way back in 1925. So Atlantans were pretty much shopping at Macy’s the entire time. But in the early 80s, Macy’s decided to consolidate many of their regional brands under the Macy’s name. In 1984, Davison’s iconic logo was changed to mimic that of Macy’s:

And, in 1985, Davison’s and all of Macy’s midwest brands were combined into one division, Macy’s Atlanta. In 1986, all Davison’s stores were rebranded to Macy’s.

While all this was going on, Rich’s thrived. The store was an Atlanta institution. Ever heard about the time Nordstrom took back a set of tires from a customer, even though the store has never sold tires? Yeah, Rich’s had tales like that too. There were so many, in fact, that Atlanta Constitution columnist Celestine Sibley was able to write an entire book – Dear Store: An Affectionate Portrait of Rich’s – about it. I remember my dad telling me a story about a child once losing a beloved stuffed animal, and the father called Rich’s in a panic. Problem was, the doll was several years old and had been discontinued. Rich’s staff nevertheless called all over the United States until a new one was found; the stuffed animal was put on a Rich’s truck and delivered to the customer… at no charge. Its’ stuff like this, combined with the Great Tree (a Christmas tree placed atop the downtown store, the lighting of which was a city tradition) and the Pink Pig (a tiny monorail hung from the ceiling of the toy department that thousands of Atlanta kids looked forward to riding every holiday season) that really wove the store into the fabric of the city.

Continue reading “The Return of Rich’s… and Hydrox?”

So long, old friend.

From the BBC:

British comedian and actor Rik Mayall has died aged 56, according to his management team.

He played the obnoxious, poetry-writing anarchist Rick in The Young Ones alongside his friend Adrian Edmondson before the duo later went on to star in their sitcom Bottom.

Mayall also appeared in shows including Blackadder and The New Statesman.

He died at home in London. The Metropolitan Police said the death was not believed to be suspicious.

They said they were called to reports of a sudden death of a man in his 50s at 13:19 BST on Monday, in Barnes in south west London.

In this recent post I talked about the “Irish” word craic, and how very recent the word is to the Irish (and English!) language. So now I’d like to poke a little fun at “foodies”.

Most of us probably have that one friend who always insists on getting “authentic” cuisine. Run of the mill Chinese, Mexican or Thai just isn’t good enough for this guy. He’s got to find the most obscure, back-alley restaurants that serve “authentic” cuisine, and where he’s the only white guy there.

See, what’s funny about that is that there’s really no such thing as “authentic” cuisine, at least not in the sense of centuries-old recipes. Sure, there are some basic dishes which haven’t changed for centuries: good ol’ meat-on-a-stick shish kabobs probably go back tens of thousands of years, as does roast beef. And there are some Chinese dishes where the basic preparation goes back a couple thousand years. After all, dumplings are dumplings, no matter what you’re putting in them, right?

But stop and think about most of the dishes you see in international restaurants. You probably think that southern Italian food has used tomatoes forever. But tomatoes were a New World food that didn’t arrive in Europe until after Christopher Columbus’ voyage of 1492. and they weren’t actually cultivated in Italy until 1548. So if you ever had some notion of Julius Ceasar sitting down to a plate of spaghetti and red sauce, you’re mistaken. Aloo mutter – an Indian dish made of potatoes and tomatoes – had to wait for Europeans to bring tomatoes and potatoes to Europe first, then export them to India; it wasn’t until the late 1700s that either was regularly cultivated in India. And pad thai, the national dish of Thailand? That has peanuts, also a New World crop, which didn’t reach Siam until the Spanish started exporting them from Mexico to the Philippines, where they made their way to southeast Asia. In fact, pad thai didn’t become a national phenomenon in Thailand until the 1930s.

I was thinking about this the other day as I looked at the menu for an Indian restaurant. I lamented the fact that it’s nearly impossible to find pork vindaloo in the United States… which is the meat of choice for the dish.

You see, vindaloo comes from the Goa region of India, and Goa was colonized by the Portuguese. At the time, the Portuguese made a dish called carne de vinha d’alhos, which was a stew made of pork simmered in wine with mild chilies. In fact, the dish was something of a national obsession with the Portuguese. So Goan chefs tried replicating the dish, but used vinegar instead of wine and spicy chilies instead of mild ones. And thus, vindaloo.

Goa remains the most Christian state in southern India, with around 26% of the population claiming to be Christian (Mizoram, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Manipur, all in northeast India, are significantly more Christian, but they either didn’t become part of India until the 1960s or didn’t become their own Indian states until around that same time). Thus, Goa is one of the few places in India where one can easily buy pork.

It’s just amusing that vindaloo, which so many Americans and Britons think of as a classic Indian dish, was actually an Indian rip-off of a popular Portuguese dish.

One thing I’ve always found mildly interesting is that certain spelling errors seem to come and go in waves. You might see a word like “lightning” (as in, the weather phenomenon) spelled as “lightening” a few times… then there’ll be a giant tidal wave of misspellings… then the misspellings recede, and the correct spelling begins to dominate again.

It would appear that we are in the midst of a “payed” tidal wave right now, as in “I can’t wait to get payed” or “I payed $30 for dinner”. Seeing this – instead of the proper “paid” – makes me all stabby, especially since people who use “payed” insist that it’s a perfectly acceptable spelling. After all, as I type this now, Firefox isn’t doing the red squiggly line thing to indicate that it’s misspelled… so it must be legit, right?

Not really. Payed actually is a legitimate word, but it doesn’t mean what you think it means. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there are two acceptable uses for payed, both nautical in nature:

“13. Naut. a. (trans.) To let out (a rope or chain) by slackening it, to allow or cause to run out. (Also in reference to something let out by the rope.) Now always with out or away. Also transf. 14. Naut. a. (trans.) To cause (a ship) to fall to leeward, or fall away from the wind. Now always with off.”

So… if you’re on a ship and move it away from the wind, or are letting a line run out, you can use payed. In all other situations – especially those involving financial transactions – the word is PAID… full stop, end of.

But if you DO wish to argue that “payed” is a legitimate word (outside nautical usage), then bring it on. In their 2011 book The History of English Spelling, authors Christopher Upwards and George Davidson say that “in medial positions Modern English generally prefers AI, EI, OI (paid, vein, join) to AY, etc., though exceptions are found (e.g. oyster)” and “since Middle English treated I and Y as interchangeable, alternation occurs between AI and AY, which left a legacy in Modern English of AY typically used word-finally (or syllable-finally), but often replaced by AI before suffixes; hence the variation between day/daily, gay/gaiety, mayhem/maim, lay/laid, pay/paid.”

Boom! [drops mike]