Anything You Ever Wanted to Know

Fridays on KERA, the NPR station that tells me I live in the geographical region of "North Texas," Jeff Whittington hosts a program called Anything You Ever Wanted to Know. I know, from pledge drive banter, that Jeff inherited this program from the guy who started it, and I assume, from the general tenor of Jeff's voice, that maybe it's not a show he would have made.

The format involves people calling or emailing in questions and other people calling or emailing in answers. Where can I go salt water swimming in Dallas? Are ingredients listed in descending order of weight, or volume? I remember this much of a plot of a book, does anyone know its title? It's a motley garage sale of information and opinion, and I was starting to thing of it as Anything You Ever Wanted Someone Else to Google For You when I realized it has a finer point. I've grown a fondness for the questions people ask that don't fit neatly into a search engine—Hey, I saw some construction off Mockingbird, does anyone know what they're building? I'm a U.S. serviceman in Japan, does anyone know where I can resurface a nonstick pan?—the reminder that we are valuable to each other.

I was especially intrigued last month to discover the show goes on break and plays archived episodes, that somehow this is a thing you don't just hand over to a substitute host. It seemed a little like playing last year's news or reading the classified from six months ago. But I listened for a while, as I inevitably do, and heard my favorite question ever: How do you bake cookies on your dashboard? As I was waiting for someone to explain why this is a bad, bad idea for innumerable health code reasons, what I got was a flood of people adding their two cents. It would appear, and other local media confirm, that this is something we do in Dallas. Google suggests folks in Minnesota and Pennsylvania and Arizona do this, too, but still. We have to do something with million bajillion degree summers, and this, my friends, is our heat stroke inducing silver lining. I'm looking forward to a batch myself. Let me know how yours turn out.

The "Devil's Strip"

I learn on the radio:

In Ohio, the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb is called a "tree lawn." In other parts of the country, it is a "curb," a "devil’s strip," a "parkway," a "swale," or a "street lawn." More than a dozen names for this can be found in the Dictionary of American Regional English.

I don’t know what they call it here in Dallas, but the ones flanking Gaston--a four lane street plus medians and turn lanes--seem unnaturally thin, vestigial, nominal. I myself don’t have a name for them, wouldn’t know what to call them anywhere, but I suspect they are part of what makes it terrifying to walk anywhere from my apartment. They are simply too scant a barrier from the rush of trucks and SUVs going past. I am forever afraid that, if they don’t jump the curb and hit me outright, I will be clipped by a side mirror and thrown to the ground.

So instead I court side streets, tracing the main arteries as if by their capillaries until my path is inevitably intersected by another main road. And there are so many roads. This one to the grocery store. This one downtown. This to the freeway and that to the other freeway and another one over there to go to the airport.

But it helps to keep doing it. To keep finding reasons to leave the house. To keep finding new ways to get to those new places. And it helps to have a new word, a bounty of them actually, to talk about it.

Breakaway

"Texas is the only state to enter the union by treaty." This is the sort of superlative I now think of when I reflect on all the people I've talked to who know Dallas but have nothing nice to say about it--nothing. When it doubt, Dallas is part of Texas. And Texas, let's face it, is a pretty superlative kind of place. There's always something worth saying about Texas.

Texas, as you may well know, is second to California for population, second to Alaska for size. And while I always that thought that Chicago, as the Second City, really did embrace the Avis advertisement mentality “We’re #2, so we try harder,” I get the feeling Texas still takes itself as second to none.

Among its many firsts, Texas entered the union with the unique option to, at some future whim, break itself into up to four additional states. We still might. At any moment. Provided we don't decide instead to just break away altogether. Culture and politics aside, I always thought that just plain geographically it resembled India, a subcontinent of its own. The good people at NPR have done one better: as of today, they have liberated us. I'll let them explain the details.