REDUCE (TO ASHES), REUSE, RECYCLE
The battle left Atlanta smoldering, but the same force that had jump-started Terminus before the Civil War got the city going again: the railroads. By 1869 a new three-story depot stood at the Zero Mile Post. Banks, hotels, saloons, law offices, and a whiskey distillery soon popped up in the new depot district. By the turn of the 20th century, 15 railroad lines passed through the city, with more than 150 trains arriving every day. Then something even more powerful than a locomotive came along: the automobile.
World’s busiest airport: Atlanta International, serving over 90 million travelers per year.
By the 1920s, the railroad district had become so congested that city planners decided to build viaducts (elevated roads), sending auto traffic up and over the rail lines. Merchants followed, moving their operations upstairs to the new street level and abandoning the former shopfronts one level below. Atlanta’s first city center faded into the past—covered over, and then forgotten. The granite archways, ornate marble floors, cast-iron pilasters, and decorative brickwork of the once-thriving depot district now moldered below ground.
HISTORIC HOT SPOT
As in most American cities after World War II, the 1950s and ’60s brought racial unrest to Atlanta and “white flight” to the suburbs. Urban decay followed. Determined to preserve the city’s history and revitalize its downtown, Atlanta’s Board of Aldermen declared the five-block “city beneath the city” a historic site and joined with private industry to create a downtown hot spot. It took $142 million to bring the district back to life. “We’ve preserved a piece of working history,” said Jack Patterson, one of Underground Atlanta’s original developers. “It’s not a cold museum. It’s full of life, with money changing hands.”
For those who enjoy eyebrow braiding, psychic readings, and As-Seen-on-TV products, Underground Atlanta is the place to go. Some say it’s the city’s most over-hyped tourist trap. Others see beyond the hype to Atlanta’s historic beginnings. The upscale restaurant at the entrance to the district is the city’s oldest building—the 1869 railroad depot. The gas lamp outside the underground’s MARTA light rail station still has the dings in it from the Union shell that killed Sam Luckie. And tucked downstairs on the old depot’s first floor is a Georgia Building Authority office. According to the Historical Commission, “The door is normally locked, so knock (or wave to the lady at the desk) and someone will open it.” Why bother? Because beyond that door stands Atlanta’s oldest artifact, the stone terminus marker for the Western and Atlantic Railroad: the Zero Mile Post.
“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”
—Voltaire
On Arnold Schwarzenegger’s last day as California governor, he received a parking ticket.
ODD ECONOMIC
INDICATORS
Can’t make heads or tails of the Dow or the GNP? Fear not—there are lots of other economic “indicators” that tell us what the economy is doing.
• Nice Waiters/Waitresses. When the economy is down, business in restaurants is slow. Result: The waitstaff isn’t overworked, and the customers are less grumpy because their orders aren’t backed up behind half a dozen other orders. In addition, when jobs are hard to find, waiters and waitress may be less likely to snap at you, even if they are in a bad mood.
• Gorgeous Waiters/Waitresses. In cities like New York and Los Angeles, which are centers of fashion and the arts, waiters and waitresses can become better-looking in hard times, as would-be models, actors, and actresses have to take jobs waiting tables when their other, more glamorous gigs dry up.
• Belly Buttons. In the 1920s, an economist named George Taylor advanced the theory that women’s hemlines rise along with rising stock prices and fall when the stock market tanks, as an “expression of conservatism.” Now you can add bare midriffs to Taylor’s theory: When the economy is booming, halter tops and other revealing fashions are popular, but when it slows down, women become less willing to bare it all.
• Playboy Playmates. In their groundbreaking 2004 study “Playboy Playmate Curves: Changes in Facial and Body Feature Preferences Across Social and Economic Conditions,” Terry Pettijohn and Brian Jungeberg argue that the magazine’s Playmate of the Month selections vary according to the performance of the economy. “When social and economic conditions were difficult, older, heavier, taller Playboy Playmates of the Year with larger waists, smaller eyes, larger waist-to-hip ratios, smaller bust-to-waist ratios, and smaller body mass index values were selected.”
• Hit Songs. Five years after Pettijohn and Jungeberg wrote their Playboy Playmate article, Pettijohn published an analysis of #1 songs on the Billboard pop chart from 1955 to 2003. “When social and economic times were relatively threatening, songs that were longer in duration, more meaningful in content, more comforting, more romantic, and slower were most popular,” he wrote. Also: “Performers with more mature facial features, including smaller eyes, thinner faces, and larger chins, were popular during relatively threatening social and economic conditions.”
Can you spot it? One of the asteroids in the The Empire Strikes Back is actually a potato.
• Cemetery Plots for Sale on eBay and Craigslist. Like boats, airplanes, vacation homes, and other luxury items, cemetery plots are something you can live without if you must. People buy them when they’re flush with cash; many have to unload them when their money runs out.
• The Content of Military Recruitment TV Ads. In good times, when civilian jobs are plentiful, the military has to hustle to meet its recruiting numbers. In such times it runs TV ads that resemble action movies and video games, hoping to lure people into joining. In bad times, when jobs are scarce and the pool of potential recruits increases, the military can afford to be more picky: TV ads will show a more realistic picture of life in the armed forces, to discourage less-qualified candidates from applying.
• Mosquito Bites. When home owners can’t afford to pay a pool cleaning service—or, even worse, lose their homes—swimming pools go stagnant and become breeding grounds for mosquitoes.
• Shark Attacks. When the economy is bad enough, even man-eating sharks have trouble finding work. In 2008, for example, shark attacks in U.S. waters dropped to their lowest point since 2003. “If you have a reduction in the number of people in the water, you’re going to have a reduction in the opportunities for people and sharks to get together,” says George Burgess, who studies shark attacks at the University of Florida. “I can’t help but think that contributing to the reduction may have been the reticence of some people to take holidays and go to the beach for economic reasons. We noticed similar declines during the recession that followed the events of 2001.”
• Death. “People are physically healthier in a recession,” Christopher Ruhm, an economist at University of North Carolina, told the New York Times in 2008. “Death rates fall, people smoke less, drink less, and exercise more. People are healthier, but they’re not happier. Suicide rises, and mental health may deteriorate.”
Number of bird-airplane collisions in the U.S. per year: about 7,500.
MOVIE QUOTE QUIZ #2
Name the movies that launched these familiar quotations. One point for the film, and a bonus point if you know the year it was released. (Answers are on page 538.)
1. “We rob banks.”
2. “Fiddle-dee-dee, war war war.”
3. “Nobody calls me chicken.”
4. “I’m not a drinker—I’m a drunk.”
5. “Practically perfect in every way.”
6. “I don’t have to show you any stinking badges.”
7. “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”
8. “Klaatu barada nikto!”
9. “We can stay up late, swapping manly stories. And in the morning, I’m making waffles!”
10. “Would ya just watch the hair? Ya know, I work on my hair a long time.”
11. “It’s in the hole!”
12. “Every one of these l
etters is addressed to Santa Claus!”
13. “Attica! Attica!”
14. “I’m walking here!”
15. “I have a head for business and a bod for sin. Is there anything wrong with that?”
16. “Follow the money. Just follow the money.”
17. “Oh, he’s very popular, Ed. The sportos, the motor-heads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads—they all adore him. They think he’s a righteous dude.”
18. “I ain’t got time to bleed.”
19. “Ye’d best start believin’ in ghost stories, Miss Turner. Yer in one.”
20. “He got a real pretty mouth, ain’t he?”
21. “That was me seducing you. It needs to be the other way around.”
22. “I’m ready for my close-up.”
23. “You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
24. “I can see your dirty pillows!”
Every year, the U.S. produces enough plastic cling wrap to cover the state of Texas.
HOW TO MEASURE
DISTANCES BY “EYEBALL”
Once you get the hang of this simple trick, it’s easy. And if you verify your “guesstimate” with a tape measure, you’ll find that it’s surprisingly accurate.
WHAT YOU NEED
• Your Eyes. (It’s not called “eyeballing” for nothing.)
• Your Thumb. You’re going to hold it out in front of you, as if you were hitchhiking, except straight ahead.
WHAT TO DO
• To guesstimate the distance between you and a nearby building, hold your thumb out at arm’s length toward the building.
• Close your left eye, then place your thumb so that it is close to a feature on the building whose width is easy to judge. A standard doorway, for example, is about three feet wide. Place your thumb just to the right of such a doorway. (Let’s call it Point A.)
• Open your left eye and close your right eye. Don’t move your arm! Your thumb will appear to move to the right (to Point B).
• Compare the distance your thumb appeared to move with the width of the doorway. If the doorway is three feet wide, and your thumb appeared to move a distance equal to five times the width of the doorway, then it moved approximately 15 feet.
• Now visualize a triangle created by drawing lines between your two eyes and your thumb. This triangle is identical in shape to the triangle you could create by drawing lines between your thumb and Points A and B on the building. Only the size is different.
• The length of your outstretched arm is about 10 times the distance between your two eyes. Because both triangles are the same shape, the ratios are the same for the larger triangle.
• This means the distance between your thumb and the building is about 10 times the distance your thumb appeared to move from Point A to Point B. Since it appeared to move 15 feet, you’re about 150 feet (10 x 15) away from the building.
Switzerland’s sick are hospitalized longer than any other country’s: 9+ days, on average.
DOOMED BY
THE INTERNET
Thank goodness for Google and Wikipedia, or this article would have been a lot harder to research.
• PHONE BOOKS. Throughout the 20th century, a phone book was a household and office necessity—it listed the phone numbers of every home and business in town, which made it a vital resource. Generally issued by phone companies, phone books could be found in more than 90 percent of American homes. Today, though, nearly any phone number can easily be located on the Internet. So why lug out a huge, heavy phone book when you can just do a Google search? So few people are using phone books now that in 2010, Verizon announced it would no longer publish “white pages.” A 2011 poll by the online social network Yelp found that only 24 percent of people think phone books are still relevant...and those are people that use Yelp, which lists and categorizes local businesses... more or less a modern-day yellow pages.
• ALBUMS. Sales of whole music albums have declined from a high of 900 million in 1999 to just under 375 million in 2009. Chalk that up to the fact that there was really only one way to buy music in the ‘90s and early 2000s: an entire album, on a physical CD. The music industry had stopped selling singles, forcing consumers to buy music in the more expensive album format. But with the rise of the MP3 and Apple’s iTunes music store, singles sales have risen from roughly zero in 1999 to 1.2 billion in 2009—and nearly all of those are digital downloads, priced around $1.00 each. There’s no longer any need to buy full albums. A bad economy hasn’t helped either—a decade ago, a high-profile album by a big star would routinely sell a million copies in its first week (*NSYNC’s No Strings Attached sold more than 2 million in 2000). In 2011 an album by the band Cake debuted at #1 on the Billboard album chart after selling just 44,000 copies.
According to studies, babies who use pacifiers are more prone to earaches.
• ENCYCLOPEDIAS. The World Book, Grollier, and Encyclopedia Britannica were once the go-to references in millions of homes and libraries—the definitive sources for what seemed like all the knowledge in the world. Those three brands have kept up with changing technologies, issuing their annual, multi-volume editions on relatively affordable CD-ROMs since the mid-’90s ($1,000 for the book vs. $100 for the digital version). They appeared online not long after (an annual subscription to Britannica: $69). But the real competition is from free websites such as Wikipedia and Google. Wikipedia is constantly updated, and while its accuracy is sometimes questionable despite active maintenance by thousands of dedicated users, the fact that it’s digital makes its capacity virtually limitless—not subject to the physical limits of a printed encyclopedia.
• VIDEO STORES. Home video revolutionized entertainment in the early 1980s—it used to be that when a movie left the theater, you’d probably never see it again, unless it was re-released or showed up on TV. With video, consumers could buy a copy of their favorite movie and watch it as often as they liked. Blockbuster Video opened the first of its 5,000 video rental stores in 1985. At Blockbuster and hundreds of other video stores, customers picked out a VHS tape, rented it, watched it at home, and then returned it to the store. Changing technology made this model obsolete—Netflix and other web-based services offer mail-away rental as well as instant digitally delivered movies for a monthly fee. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010; during evening hours, Netflix now occupies 20 percent of all online bandwidth in the United States.
• PLAYBOY MAGAZINE. Once again, people don’t like to pay for something they can get for free online...especially if it’s something that’s embarrassing to purchase in a store, such as pictures of naked women. Interested parties can find plenty of free nudity (and hardcore pornography) on the Internet, which has rendered Playboy magazine’s soft-core photos passé. Playboy circulates 2.5 million issues a month, 11 times a year, down from the 7 million readers of 12 annual issues it enjoyed 20 years ago. Result: The company has had to divert its business to brand extensions, such as Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s reality TV show The Girls Next Door.
Cinderella is known as Rashin Coatie in Scotland, Zezolla in Italy, and Yeh-hsien in China.
WORKS OF ART
See? Even artists have a tough time explaining art.
“Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.”
—Andre Gide
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”
—Scott Adams
“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”
—Aristotle
“The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist knows how difficult it is.”
—Willa Cather
“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.”
—Pablo Picasso
“An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he—for some reason—thinks it would be a good idea to give them.�
�
—Andy Warhol
“Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.”
—Henry Miller
“Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.”
—Camille Pissarro
“Art is a kind of illness.”
—Giacomo Puccini
“When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God-made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.”
—Paul Cézanne
“Art is the signature of civilizations.”
—Beverly Sills
“An artist cannot talk about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.”
—Jean Cocteau
“If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.”
—Edward Hopper
Bananas are slightly radioactive due to their high concentration of potassium.
CALL ME MISTER
Here, ladies and gentlemen, are the stories behind some well-known products (and one character) who prefer to be addressed as “Mister.”
MR. COFFEE
In the 1968, Vincent Marotta and Sam Glazer, high-school friends who became partners in a small construction company, decided to start a coffee delivery service. Obsessed with finding a way for people to make better coffee at home, an idea came to Marotta while he was recuperating from brain surgery in 1970. His great idea: A self-contained unit that would heat the water to 200°F and drip it through the coffee grounds once, not over and over again, as was the standard “percolater” method at the time. He and Glazer then hired two ex-Westinghouse engineers to design the product, which he named Mr. Coffee. The product was a hit almost instantly, but Marotta wanted to go national. His other great idea: He hired his boyhood hero, Joe DiMaggio, as the company spokesman. It worked. Within three years, the company dominated the coffeemaker market, producing nearly 40,000 Mr. Coffees a day, with annual sales approaching $150 million. In 1987 Glazer and Marotta, who once referred to himself as “the Michaelango of coffee,” decided to sell the company, but the product—and Marotta’s big idea—still dominate.
Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® Page 34