Tag: Home Depot

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International Park(ing) Day

(Credit: MidtownMemphis.org)

If you drive past Midtown’s Cash Saver on Friday, you might be tempted to rubber-neck at an unusual spectacle in the street parking spaces, since, in honor of International Park(ing) Day, those spots will be converted into tiny parks. 

Park(ing) Day is a global, public, participatory art project, explains Emily Bishop, board member of MidtownMemphis.org, the organization spearheading the event in Memphis. “That’s a mouthful,” she says, “but it’s where you temporarily repurpose street parking spaces into places for art, play, and activism. What we’re trying to do is get people to reimagine that area of Midtown.”

When the area around Cash Saver, Pho Binh, Crumpy’s Hot Wings, and the like was restriped to add bike lanes, the city added parking lanes, too. “Nobody uses them,” Bishop says. “They kinda get used as an inappropriate passing lane or turning lane. I mean, I see it all the time going to Home Depot.”

As such, safety is one of the points of awareness for this Park(ing) Day Project, the other point being to bring greenery to the space. The plan, Bishop says, is to plant black gum and maple trees along the sidewalk that runs east of Cash Saver on Angelus. “The sidewalk is 10-feet wide, and it has no power lines overhead, so it’s the perfect place for street trees,” she says, adding that under a tree’s shade it can be 10-15 degrees cooler, a much needed benefit during Memphis’ hot summer months. “We’re already working with Cash Saver and the City Engineer’s Office, and if all goes well, we hope to plant those trees in early November.”

Rendering of plans for tree-planting along Angelus (Credit: MidtownMemphis.org)

In the meantime, Friday will be MidtownMemphis.org’s second Park(ing) Day in front of Cash Saver. This year, the group has partnered with Memphis City Beautiful, Clean Memphis, Evergreen, Central Gardens, Neighborhood Preservation Inc. (NPI), The Works Inc., and The Home Depot. 

“We’ll have some green carpet out there to make it feel like grass,” Bishop says. “There’ll be some games. We’ll have plants and bushes that’ll give you a feel of what that would be like. We’ll just see what the creativity of each of our partners is and what they do with their spaces.”

Giveaways and free snow cones will also be available, and attendees will have a chance to meet with the various groups to learn about upcoming projects and ways to volunteer. 

Already, MidtownMemphis.org has planted native trees, bushes, and flowering plants on Avalon, behind Murphy’s and next to Crumpy’s. 

“We were really inspired by the Medical District, the improvements they made, and, of course, Overton Square is so beautiful now,” Bishop says. “We just want this area in between to continue the good work and spread it on down. Everybody travels up and down that section of Madison.”

International Park(ing) Day, Madison Avenue in front of Cash Saver, Friday, September 16th, 3-7 pm. 

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Farewell to the “Risk-Takers”

The big, bald, white guy standing in line at Midtown Home Depot is laughing loudly, sharing a joke with a couple of co-workers, or maybe employees. They look Hispanic and they are wearing masks, so I can’t tell if they’re laughing. In fact, everyone within eyesight in Home Depot is wearing a mask except the big, loud guy.

Maybe he’s one of the DeSoto County Sheriff’s Department deputies who don’t wear masks because, as their boss says, “they’re risk-takers.” Yeah, that’s probably it. The guy in Home Depot is a risk-taker, a macho dude who needs to let everyone know that he don’t need no stinking mask, ’cause he ain’t skeered of the ‘rona.

What can you do when you encounter selfish idiots like that? Not much, except stay away, move to another line, let him check out before moving forward. You can’t expect Home Depot workers to put their own health and safety at risk confronting someone who is probably hoping someone confronts him, so he can proclaim masks don’t help and they infringe on his freedom and what are you gonna do about it, punk?

There were some similar sentiments vociferously offered at Monday’s Shelby County Commission meeting, mostly coming from folks in the restaurant community, which has arguably suffered more damage from the pandemic than almost any other business sector. One Germantown restaurant owner proclaimed that in regards to actual deaths from COVID, “There are no hard numbers showing anything.” I know of 260,000 dead Americans who might differ with that assessment. And the numbers showing that masks, social distancing, and other health measures save lives are very hard, and undeniable.

But I get it: COVID is not just killing individuals; it’s killing jobs and businesses; it’s getting people evicted; it’s putting millions of Americans in food lines and on unemployment rolls. The entire economy is devastated. Movie theaters, music venues, bars, brick-and-mortar retail stores, and yes, restaurants are dying every day. In Memphis this week we learned that two of our cultural icons are in trouble: The P&H Cafe (The Beer Joint of Your Dreams) and Earnestine & Hazel’s (Home of the Soul Burger) are both precariously near extinction.

Here’s the deal, as President-elect Joe Biden might say: Health regulations aren’t what’s killing businesses. That’s like blaming seat belts for car accidents. COVID is killing businesses. And nothing gets better until we get this pandemic under control. And it doesn’t get under control until we have a coordinated national strategy to flatten the curve all over the country, one that gets masks on as many sentient beings as will wear them, that gets adequate amounts of PPE and other vital supplies to hospitals and healthcare workers, and that ramps up a strategy to deliver vaccines and cutting-edge remediation meds to those who need them most. And yes, one that will probably require continued social distancing in certain indoor spaces.

The U.S. is like a tornado-ravaged village. The damage is everywhere. Except maybe on certain golf courses. It’s time to begin to start the recovery process. We need a domestic Marshall Plan, including a comprehensive COVID relief package that puts real money in the hands of struggling business owners and real Americans — and soon.

And we need to accept reality.

A few shell-shocked Republicans are climbing out of their bunkers and finally, sorta, kinda saying maybe we ought to possibly consider — I mean, just spit-balling here — that Joe Biden may have, you know, theoretically speaking, won the presidency … Pleasedon’thurtmeMr.Trump!

This is what passes for political courage in the GOP these days. Lord knows they don’t want to rush to judgment and contradict the very plausible theory that millions of votes in several states were changed by a sneaky voting-machine program created by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (who died in 2013!) and used by Democrats and certain RINOs to steal the election from Fearless Leader.

This evil cabal was so fiendishly clever that its conspirators decided to allow Senator Mitch McConnell to be re-elected, as well as pushing several toss-up Senate and House races to the Republicans.

This is pretty much the actual theory being pushed by the president’s crack legal team of Slapdash, Dipshit, and RunnyDye, because it makes perfect sense in the Bizarro World of QAnon, OAN, Breitbart, Newsmax, and Parler.

So yeah, it’s been a fun four years, America. But damn, it’s time to move on, time to take the bowl of nuts off the coffee table, time to say enough to the “risk-takers.” There’s a real mess to clean up.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Clean Butt Club

I woke up in the middle of the night last Friday. Something sounded odd in the bathroom — a trickle of running water and an occasional mini-flush. I dark-walked my way into the loo, where it became obvious that, yes, the toilet was running. I flipped the handle a couple times (as one does) to no avail. So, back to bed I went, resolving to fool with it the next day.

Saturday morning, I lifted the tank lid to see what lurked below — and it wasn’t pretty. There was a brick I’d put in there a couple years ago to reduce water consumption and forgotten about. It was covered in moss. At least, I hope it was moss. The bad news was that the flapper thing was soft, fleshy, and pink, and water was flowing around and under it, pretty much unimpeded. Meh.

This wasn’t my first flapper-replacement rodeo, so I shut off the water to the potty, removed the gross, slippery flap, and put it in a plastic bag. Then it was off to Home Depot to buy a replacement. I found a nice shiny red one the same size as mine in the toilet aisle and proceeded to self-checkout, where I scanned the item, swiped my debit card, then headed home.

Installing the new flapper took three minutes, and the water stopped running immediately. Very satisfying. Feeling like a boss, I went to the kitchen for a fresh cup of coffee and opened my laptop to check the Book of Face.

The very first thing that greeted me was an advertisement for something called Tushy, a bidet device of some sort. The ad urged me to install a Tushy and “Join the Clean Butt Club.” Wow.

In the 15 minutes since my trip to Home Depot, my flapper purchase had apparently put me in a special, cyber sub-group of “people who repair their own toilets,” and that information had been transmitted into the corporate maw of Big Toilet, which saw me as an excellent potential customer, since I so enjoyed messing about in potties.

It was sort of shocking, though I should be used to it by now — as we all should be. We are the consumers — and the product. Our information, our location, and our purchase data is being mined and sold in hundreds of ways. As we drive around, Google geo-fencing alerts marketers that we parked in front of, say, a furniture store. Then, when we next check social media — voila! — an ad for a dining room set appears.

Those giant smart TVs, which seem like such a bargain at $499, are constantly transmitting our viewing data — to be sold to marketers who are interested in knowing who’s watching The Rachel Maddow Show or The Big Bang Theory or Dr. Pimple Popper, so as to send us micro-targeted ad messages.

A recent article on the tech site Motherboard detailed how phone providers such as Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile are selling geo-location services to just about any company that wants to buy them, including bounty hunters and bill collectors. At least one company, called Microbilt, is selling phone geo-location services with little oversight to a spread of private industries ranging from car salesmen and property managers to bail bondsmen, according to company documents obtained by Motherboard.

It doesn’t stop there. Nearly every website we visit collects and sells information about our browsing habits, as do social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even those sites you’d prefer not to talk about. If you casually search on Amazon for sunglasses, be prepared to be besieged for the next few days by ads for sunglasses. Marketers want to get you while you’re in the mood to buy.

If you’ve got a smart phone, a smart TV, a smart car, or a computer hooked to the Internet, it’s best to proceed under the assumption that absolutely nothing you do is going unmonitored — including buying a flapper for your toilet.

Tempting as it was, I did not buy a Tushy or join the Clean Butt Club, but I researched it a little. The first rule of Clean Butt Club is, unsurprisingly, You Don’t Talk About Clean Butt Club. The second rule is There Is No Secret Handshake.