Thursday, October 27, 2011
Memory
Another indication today that mine is becoming unreliable. Which is a pain: one cannot hold forth in the boozer confident that one's fascinating factlet is indeed a factlet. Something I have hitherto felt to be OK; so we have a crisis of confidence.
The indication arose from yesterday's cigar hunt. Clearly being a touch bored, or perhaps just showing an IT person's obsession with facts on the ground which don't quite fit in with preconceived ideas and which might be the tip of some unpleasant iceberg, thought I would do a bit of checking, when I find that I was poking around for cigar stores in Kingston VA, when I should have been poking around for cigar stores in Bristol WV. And the one in question appears to exist after all, at least there is an entry in a business directory for 122 E Main St, Bristol, West Virginia, 26426.
Muddling up VA and WV is one thing, but how did I get from Bristol to Kingston? What on earth is the connection? They are both old towns with plenty of heritage; Bristol might be bigger but Kingston is probably older. They are both on an important river, the sort of thing that Vikings might have rowed up. They are both protected by being in the corner made by the junction of a tributary river with the main river. But this is true of lots of places.
And then I remember the store being in State Street, Bristol being on the state line, not Main Street. Presumably huge penalties for carrying Cuban cigars across the state line. Squared if you are also carrying limey whisky, in brown paper bag or not, opened or not.
So I then ask Google maps to show me where the Main Street place is and it turns out to be in somewhere called Salem. Presumably the zip code for Salem overrides the misprint for Bristol. Refine the various searches to include State Street and eventually find my way to 527 State Street, Bristol, VA 24201 which does indeed look like the right place. In VA rather than WV after all. I should have stopped there, but pushing on, I find another business directory which says that the place in question is actually 523A State Street etc. What a muddle.
Which all goes to show one needs to be careful with facts from either yours truly or google. Caveat emptor and all that. Would you buy a used car off of someone so careless with their entries in business directories?
# posted by Jim @ 8:53 AM 
