Lou Pickney's Online Commentary
Skim The Rim
Thursday
August 25, 2005
(UPDATE! My bro Matt sent me a pic of the Skim The Rim dunk... and the rest of the dunk menu. Click here to check it out.)
Tonight Hurricane Katrina is playing Skim The Rim (a name of one of the dunks from the old Jordan vs. Bird one-on-one basketball game for the IBM PC, circa 1988) on the south edge of the state of Florida, bothering Miami/Dade County with high wind and rain. The track shows it going around the tip of the peninsula (think about the spelling on that one for a minute), rolling out into the Gulf of Mexico, building strength, and then really smacking the panhandle on Sunday night or Monday morning. We'll probably feel some residual effects here in Tampa, with some wind and rain, but nothing like what a typical hurricane brings. It all depends on how far offshore Katrina is when it passes the Tampa area, but we should be fine.
*KNOCK ON WOOD*
I have a correction to make from yesterday: the World's Shadiest Amaco has NOT closed. I made the assumption based on the fact that so many gas stations (and roads, for that matter) along I-275 and I-4 had to close to make room for interstate expansion and that the Amaco sign was gone from the top of the giant tower, which is all I could see of the place from the I-4 exit ramp the other day. But when I drove past it today, I saw that it had simply been turned into a BP (since BP and Amaco have joined forced, much like Mobil and Exxon). Keep those mergers in mind the next time you wonder why gas prices are so high, by the way. Now I can't necessarily call that the World's Shadiest BP, since the old BP that used to be on the other side of I-4 (where the on-ramp to the interstate now resides) was shadier, and there is a particular BP somewhere in Ohio on the path between Huntington and Cleveland where my old friend Doc and I thought we were going to get jumped by a couple of hoodlums in 2000. Anyway, Rich Karg can rest assured that he still has a place from where he can hitch a ride to the airport if necessary (inside joke).
Speaking of Amaco, the irony of the BP/Amaco merger is that in the 1970s gas crisis, it was Gulf (which was bought out in the south U.S. by BP in the late 80s) that cut off its non-O&O stations, screwing over all the mom and pop spots that sold Gulf gasoline. One of those was Pickney Store, my Grandma and Grandpa Pickney's general store/gas station out on River Road in Nashville. The fallout from that was that my grandparents, and many of the other independent outlets, switched affiliations. In the case of Pickney Store, they flipped to Amaco, which they remained with through the closure of the store in 1984.
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