Wouldn’t chairs and foe fur: Yard Sale gems Volume 6
In Southern California, water and fire can be a lethal combination. Just ask anyone who fled before December’s Thomas inferno only to evacuate again when rains slammed down on the burn areas, triggering deadly mudslides.
For those whose houses were incinerated or flooded out, the understandable impulse is to restore what has been lost. Given what these residents have been through, no city or county would stand in their way. And government officials won’t block reconstruction for another reason as well: They are directly complicit in the construction of countless developments that have penetrated deep into Southern California’s dangerous fire-and-slide prone urban-wildland interface.
Yet if city officials and county supervisors, and related zoning commissions and planning boards, continue to permit construction in what CalFire describes bluntly as Fire Hazard Severity Zones, even more homes will be at risk for fire first, and then the slides and floods that follow. The pattern will keep repeating itself as this region, already suffering from a fire-fueling seven-year drought, becomes hotter and more arid in response to a changing climate. To break from this repetitive and dangerous cycle, to act in advance of the next firestorm, requires public officials to question two presumptions that most of them have been loath to critique: All growth is good growth, and voters never choose to pay more in taxes.
A few jurisdictions have ignored those axioms, and if their example were followed region-wide, it could help Southland communities develop more resilient and defensible landscapes.
Monrovia offers one such model. In the late 1990s, development threatened to overrun its foothills, with an estimated 120 building sites up for grabs. Residents went door-to-door to build support for a slow-growth policy. To their surprise, many respondents favored instead a no-growth strategy — fewer homes, more open space, and regulations that would maintain Monrovia’s small-town character.
Because the city’s hillside acreage was both publicly and privately owned, the City Council decided to seek voter approval for two measures. The first designated city-owned foothill land as wilderness or recreational space and limited development on the private property. The other was a $10-million bond, the revenues from which would be used to purchase building sites from willing sellers. Both passed by a wide margin. In the end, Monrovia spent $24 million for 1,416 acres, paying off the bonds with parcel taxes and gaining an added benefit: a deeper urban-wildland buffer. Expanding such a protective zone was the explicit goal of Proposition 405, which Flagstaff, Arizona, brought before voters in 2013. A pair of damaging 2010 fires burned homes and torched the Rio de Flag watershed, devastation that was amplified when post-fire flooding scoured portions of the city. In response, residents passed Proposition 405, a $10-million bond, by a wide margin. The money generated by the Flagstaff Watershed Protection Project has been spent on thinning upwards of 11,000 acres in the Coconino National Forest that surrounds Flagstaff. This has provided an important measure of fire protection along the wildlandurban interface, a reduction in urban flooding and in sediment that clogs local reservoirs. As Coconino County Supervisor Art Babbott declared when the thinning began: “The risks of doing nothing are just too great. (We are well past) a ‘hope for the best’ strategy due to climate, drought and unhealthy forest conditions.”
These policies were smart and proactive individual actions, but to be even more effective, greater investment and greater coverage are required. The Thomas fire’s furious run across Ventura and Santa Barbara counties testifies as to why we should develop a robust, multijurisdictional response. One such possibility for Southern California is the creation of linked county-by-county “fire-and-flood control” bonds, framed to tackle the intertwined damage on a regional basis.
The resulting revenues would purchase two kinds of property: as-yet-unbuilt sites within CalFire’s Fire Hazard Severity Zones (focusing on those sectors that have not burned in decades) and, on a willing-seller basis, residences that wildland fires have damaged or destroyed. Taxing ourselves to create more open space in the foothills will not stop fires from erupting or rain from falling. It will give city and county planners a powerful tool by which to restrain growth, offer burned-out homeowners a safer option than rebuilding in fire zones, and give those living downhill in the path of the slides some much-needed breathing room. t’s been a while since I scoured the local online yard sale pages for treasures. But I’m not looking for a car or for clothes or antiques. I like to read the listings and the comments and see the funny things people say.
We all make mistakes — I surely do — but some are downright hilarious. And when it’s on a public forum such as the Rome and Floyd County Yard Sale Facebook page, then it’s seen by thousands of people and if it’s something really funny it’ll spread like wildfire.
So often times I don’t even have to look for these little gems of grammar or spelling. They come to me. People have been emailing and texting me listings from local and area yard sale pages.
I have been sitting on a few that I’d like to share with you now. These are all real listings that I have seen. As I usually do, I’ll write them just the way they were listed online and then I may comment after. Some of these are local (Rome and Floyd County), but some are from area pages.
And I always make sure to say that some of these are simply typing errors. But the best ones are the words, phrases and expressions that we say all the time without realizing it’s wrong. Like when people say Chester Drawers instead of chest of drawers. Or when my friend Brandy says “bounce to you” instead of “unbeknownst to you.” We all have those things that we didn’t realize we’ve been saying incorrectly all our lives.
And then there are things we spell just like we say it. Like “lawnmore” instead of “lawn mower.”
Anyhow, here are the latest ones I’ve collected:
(Rome), ga bulldogs memerbila, $20 — I’ll cut this person some slack. MEMORABILIA is a tough word to spell. (Woodstock) Black wouldn’t chairs, $50 This is probably a case where the person wanted to spell WOODEN, but spelled it just like he or she says it. Or maybe they were doing it by voice text and the phone chose the wrong word. Either way, the word WOULDN’T appeared in the listing title AND in the description of the items.
(Floyd County) Several winner dog puppies, must go. cannot keep them.
FIRST OF ALL, I doubt this seller means he or she has champion dogs. I’m guessing they mean WEINER dogs. Also, this is what happens when you don’t have your pet spayed or neutered. You might end up with puppies that you may not want.
(Calhoun) Womens patter gonia jacket XL, $35
Even though there should be an apostrophe in the word “women’s,” I’ll let that go and move right on to the bigger problem. How can you own a jacket that HAS THE BRAND CLEARLY WRITTEN ON IT and still misspell it so terribly? Patter gonia? Really? (Trion) Scrap medal, free I’m picturing a junk yard full of discarded 5K and half marathon medals strewn about, rusty and damaged. He means scrap METAL.
(Rome) Girls boots with foe fur, $15, nothing wrong with them just don’t fit my daughter any more. very warm. Was the fur provided by an enemy? Again, I’ll cut this person a little slack. It’s not every day you have to spell or even see the word FAUX. And in their defense, you don’t even know the X is there if you don’t see it written. But it doesn’t make it any less funny.
I’d also like to comment on a few terms that are rampant on the yard sale Facebook pages:
Sale vs. Sell: I come back to this one over and over again. An item is for SALE. You’re having a yard SALE. You would like to SELL this car. Please let me know if you have a bike to SELL me.
Need Gone: This is yard sale lingo for “I don’t want this and even though I’ve listed a price I’ll take anything you give me if you’ll get it off my front porch today.” Need gone is written after a lot of items. It lets buyers know that this person needs the money TODAY.
Runs Good: This is also yard sale lingo. People will usually use it when referring to the 1997 Nissan Altima with the windows that can’t roll down, the mysterious stains on the back seat and the cigarette burn marks on the passenger seat upholstery. The listing will read “title in hand, AC works. Runs good.” Essentially, it’s yard sale insurance. When you buy the car and it works for approximately 24 hours and then doesn’t work and you take it back to them saying it was listed as “runs good,” they’ll tell you it didn’t say “runs GREAT.” SEVERO AVILA Jim Powell of Young Harris