Thursday, July 3, 2008

A Couple of Items


On Monday I expressed my dislike for the amateur fireworks that are so popular in my neighborhood. On Tuesday I got a chance to see the negative consequences firsthand. I left my house in the early afternoon and saw black smoke billowing into the sky three blocks away. I went to take a closer look and found a house completely engulfed in flames, the houses on either side (only about eight feet from the house on fire) were also burning. The whole neighborhood was gathered around watching. I found out later from the news that the fire was started by a 6 year old boy lighting firecrackers in his bedroom. The Police arrested a man who had been selling fireworks in the area from his car.

I got a Google Alert that my name was mentioned in an article about Shopping Carts in the Orlando Sentinel, apparently the Orlando City Council is going to consider requiring stores to implement "cart retention systems." Anyway, they tacked on some shopping cart trivia at the end which included my book and website:

Did you know . . . ?
*The shopping cart was invented in the 1930s by Sylvan Nathan Goldman, owner of the Humpty-Dumpty grocery chain.

*In 2007, Arkansas passed the Health-Conscious Shopper Act, which encourages businesses to provide sanitation wipes for shopping cart handles.

*Julian Montague, author of The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification, developed a classification system for stray carts. There are false strays and true strays and 33 subtypes, such as bus-stop discard and transient impostor. Check out strayshoppingcart.com.

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