I’ve finally tried to sit down and figure out the possibilities of how many times you can use the same street name without repeating. Every once in a while I’ll see some strange street name and I’ll begin to think about it and by the time I’m done driving, I’ve stopped thinking about it. So, the designations I can come up with so far are;
Avenue, Boulevard, Circle, Court, Drive, Highway, Lane, Park, Parkway, Path, Place, Plaza, Road, Square, Terrace, Trail, View and Way.
Figuring you can use N, E, S, W, NE, NW, SE, SW for pre, post AND in combination (example; NE Peachtree St. N), we should have 81 possibilities per designation;
1x x
8x nx, wx, ex, sx, nwx, swx, nex, sex
8x xn, xw, xe, xs, xnw, xsw, xne, sew
8x nxn, nxs, nxe, nxw, nxne, nxnw, nxse, nxsw
8x sxn…..
8x exn…..
8x wxn…..
8x nexn…..
8x nwxn…..
8x sexn…..
8x swxn…..
With 19 names so far, that totals to 1539 possible names for each street.
To help look some of these up, I pulled up my map program and typed in Peachtree, Atlanta. Surprisingly few entries were in there. Only 25 or so compared to the millions it feels like while driving around up there. Everywhere you look is a Peachtree Street or Peachtree Avenue. Kind of like Jacksonville, everyone you meet is named or related to someone named Van Zandt. Some actually are, most are just looking for attention. It’s amazing how many people try to claim association with a mediocre country-rock band.
OK, I guess I should just shut up now. So much for this week’s rant. Signing off, I’m Chris Hendrix.
Oh, I didn’t tell you about that did I? Yeah, my cousin’s babysitter’s best friend’s brother-in-law’s uncle knew a guy that was the back-up roadie-in-training’s little sister’s boyfriend and somehow in the middle of all that, I’m now related to Jimi Hendrix. Doesn’t that make me cool somehow? No. No it doesn’t and claiming a distant relation to Lynyrd Skynyrd is even weaker than that. Why can’t these people be someone on their own and not have to lay claim to something someone else did to make themselves feel better? To my knowledge, I’m not related to anyone famous. I have a great-grandfather named Benjamin Franklin, but he’s not the famous one.
I went to school with a girl that was the daughter of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s piano player. I never even knew it until years later when I met her younger brother in a tech class. It only came up then because we were talking about music and how at every live show, some drunken redneck holds up a lighter and yells, “Play Freebird!!!” From there I went on my oh-so-predictable rant about how much I hate Southern Rock because of the sub-humans that are associated with it. This guy just smiled while his friend informed me of my faux pas. But, up to that point, neither one of them made a big deal of being related so why do these “distant relative wannabe’s” make sure it’s one of the first things I know about them?
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