Started the day on the bike, as per usual. Made it 14.5 miles. It was warm and bright and sunny, but that wasn’t the problem. There’s a cramping pain in my shoulder that would not allow me to look behind me to the left. This is important, you know, to monitor traffic, so I figured I should call it an early day.

Which is very interesting. At 20 miles I feel as if I can at least say I’ve had a little exercise. Thirty miles seems to be where I can say is a good place to park the bike, clean up and still have a marginally useful day. Higher than that and the bike ride becomes the day, physically speaking. Thirty isn’t a plateau, but you can see it from there. Fifteen? Why bother?

I pedaled around most of the bypass, hooked a left through the airport’s neighborhood and decided to shut down from there. I took the downhill express route home, and found The Yankee already back inside. She’d bailed, too, blaming the sun.

So we had a day of Court TV. Casey Anthony not guilty! I’m shocked! Appalled! I don’t know why, but the media is telling me I should be! And the media is full of talented litigators.

This sort of news holds little sway with me anywhere. It’s terrible on the personal level and cheap and facile from the news media’s perspective. No doubt it is very important to those involved, and I understand how bystanders can become invested in it. We’ve all been there on some type of story or another. This particular one just isn’t for me.

This is what I know of the entire story, which has been going on for years now: a child is dead, a mother is the suspect and she probably won’t win any Mother of the Year awards. So, naturally, I’m shocked. SHOCKED!

Because the newspapers tomorrow will tell me I should be; just like the talking heads have told me I should be all day. Except for that one lady on CNN, who suggested a lynch mob was on the verge of forming at the courthouse.

Really?

They set up for a jury press conference. Those wishing to take part could stand before the media and give an oration dissimilar to the fiery stuff that came out of one of the defense counselor’s head. The jury demurred. And that’s where the entire thing got boring.

I’m only writing this for the search engines. Casey Anthony! Mother of the Year! Guilty! Not guilty!

Shameful, isn’t it? And that’s what cable news has been doing for months. Or, in the case of some of the Headline News wags, years.

In my fun reading today I stumbled across a site called Dead Malls. This is a subject of little interest to me, but I appreciate the labor of love that goes into it. There’s a generation of culture built into the trappings and successes and failures of the mall culture. And you have to know, beginning a site like this, that your audience is extremely narrow. Who wants to read about a mall in Peoria except for the good people of Peoria?

Here are three I skimmed from Alabama: Eastwood, Century Plaza and Montgomery. The first two I’d actually visited at one point or another.

I’ll admit it. I was a teen in the right time for malls. They were a great place to meet with friends, play video games, catch a movie, buy things and play with the gadgets at Brookstone. Visiting one now does seem a bit different. Maybe it is timing, or age or the economy, but the vibrance seems gone.

Of course, I’ve been in a dead mall, too. I suddenly remembered. Only those people hadn’t covered it. To the Googles!

Another mall blog — there are several, it turns out — chronicles the sad demise and the odd current stasis that inhabits Westlake Mall.

The guy that runs that site is in his early-30s. He’s from Atlanta. And, despite clearly being uncomfortable cruising around the place he has the history pretty well figured out. The comments are wonderfully insightful. I left one, too, because one good comment deserves another and another. And it all harkens back to a changing of the retail guard, names I can recall in locations I would know better under different fonts and signage. But still. What was Woolworth became a Walmart, until they moved and that is now a Big Lots and a Fred’s. What used to be Zayre morphed into Kmart which was in a perpetual slide, but is now a thrift store. What was once Westlake Mall went through two iterations of anchor stores. (I remember the Consumer Warehouse Foods, where you wrote your own prices so they didn’t have to employ extra help, thereby keeping prices down. I recall Ronnie Marchant Furniture which was going out of business for 20 years, but is even still open today just a few blocks away from the mall. I recall Goody’s, in what used to be Loveman’s, have the faintest recollection of Sears and a Handy electronics place where no one ever seemed to buy anything.) The mall finally died after years on life support around the turn of the century and is now owned by a car salesman (who’s sons I knew in elementary school) who hopes to turn it into a giant flea market. Maybe.

Retail is always changing, but it seems to have changed a lot in my youth.

I began looking at other malls on his site. Here’s the Galleria, the local mall of choice in my youth, which was fabulous and then became generic, but is still rather impressive to see, especially through other people’s eyes.

I wrote of this in an Email to a friend, suggesting he give it a look because there would be a few names he recognized. I said this is another in a long list of “I love the Internet” moments. He wrote back that that is sort of sad.

Not sure if he meant the dead malls or what I found interesting today.

One final interesting thing: All of this somehow led me to an old column one of the local writers had on the fabled Bessemer Super Highway. He once ruffled some feathers by asking what was so super about it. (The corridor has seen better economic days. And that’s being kind.) Also, he said, it isn’t precisely a highway.

This, of course, prompted a reply and a terrific picture. Most importantly he received a little written history from a former DOT official that explained the road:

By the mid-1930’s, the State Highway Department began serious consideration of (a) new route to connect Jefferson County’s two major cities.

State engineers were aware of the revolutionary freeway system, the Autobahn, being developed in Germany and acquired a set of design plans from the Europeans. They then applied the design to a new highway … Unfortunately, the economic constraints resulting from the Great Depression caused the State to eliminate plans for a complete freeway facility.

[…]

However, the completed product was magnificent and resulted in the State’s first completely new multi-lane highway with roadways separated by a grassed median. The State Highway Department intended to simply call the highway the Birmingham-Bessemer Boulevard, but the public was so enamored with the facility, they dubbed it the “Bessemer Super Highway” and the designation was ultimately officially adopted. In 1940, a lighting system was installed along the route and, for a time, the Super Highway was the longest whiteway east of the Rocky Mountains.

[…]

Had the State been able to carry through with the original plans, the Super Highway would have pre-dated Connecticut’s Merritt Parkway and the Pennsylvania Turnpike as the first freeway in America.

I grew up alongside what was almost the first freeway in the country. The Yankee grew up alongside the Merritt, which was the first.

That’s an M.P. Wolcott shot of the Merritt Parkway (via the Library of Congress), in July 1941 Connecticut, months before people knew what Pearl Harbor was. This was 70 years ago, perhaps to the day. What do you think they were listening to on their car radios?