Wow, who knew people were so sensitive about the name of their airport? I, for one, had no idea. But apparently people are more passionate about their airport’s name than just about anything else.

I mean, suddenly everyone has an opinion on the best name for the airport. You ask people about President Trump these days and they are like, “Oh I don’t really have any strong feelings one way or the other about him – now ABOUT THAT AIRPORT NAME …”

If you haven’t been paying attention to the news at all – well, right before Christmas, the Piedmont Triad Airport Authority announced it was changing the airport’s name, as of Jan. 1, 2018, and the Greensboro airport we’ve come to know as “PTI” is now Central North Carolina International Airport (CNCIA.)

As soon as the announcement was made, it was Katie bar the door and the critics came out of the woodwork, with one of the most common complaints being that the new name was “boring” and “unimaginative.”

Anyway, the intense energy of the debate over the holidays has been kind of amazing to watch. My entire family got together for dinner over the Christmas holiday and – I’m not making this up – on Christmas Eve our main topic of conversation around the dinner table was about the change in the name of the airport.

After covering the story for the Rhino Times, I got so interested in the topic that I dug down deeper and I found out that, while the airport name got all the publicity after the Tuesday, Dec. 19 Airport Authority meeting where the renaming took place, it turns out that, at the very same December meeting, the Airport Authority also renamed all sorts of other things around Greensboro. (I was surprised to learn the Airport Authority has all these naming responsibilities, but apparently they do.)

For instance, the Greensboro Grasshoppers’ mascots in recent years have been dogs that were named after famous baseball players – Miss Babe Ruth, Master Yogi Berra, etc. – and they needed a name for the next mascot in the coming season, and apparently the Airport Authority has that naming responsibility as well.

The name the Airport Authority came up with and approved for the new mascot is “Baseball Dog.”

To me, I kind of prefer the more colorful names of great major league players, but I guess I’ll get used to “Baseball Dog.” I’m sure it will grow on all of us.

Interestingly, the authority also renamed, “Thirsty Thursdays” to “Beer Discount Night.” It lacks alliteration, sure, but I guess in a way it’s more descriptive and self-explanatory than the previous name, and I can see how the new name clears up some confusion because, when you think about it, how can a day of the week be thirsty? It doesn’t even have a mouth.

They also changed the name of Johnson Park to “Park at 598 Hammel Road” along with quite a few other name changes.

As for the airport name, no one asked me my advice but my view in most things is go big or go home: If we want the airport name to sound impressive and draw new business to the area, I would go with something like, “The Amazing Interstellar Central Earth Intergalactic Way Station.” Now, if you ask me, that catchy name really future-proofs the airport’s nomenclature, and what business wouldn’t want to be located there.

Anyway, as much as you all may want to just continue to talk about the airport name indefinitely (I can already feel you trying to make me spend my entire column on this topic), there are plenty of other places you can go to have that conversation: Facebook, Twitter, your local diner, etc. So go there if you need to because right now I’m moving on to other things …

 

I was watching NBC Nightly News right after New Year’s Day and they showed Kim Jong Un, aka “Little Rocket Man,” and Lester Holt said the North Korean leader had made his New Year’s resolutions and announced them in a speech. I heard that and I thought: “Well, that’s nice; you only ever think of him as an evil dictator and you never hear much else out of him, but it’s kind of nice to know that, just like the rest of us, he makes New Year’s resolutions. It kind of humanizes him to think that he has resolutions too.”

And I was thinking how refreshing that was and then Lester Holt said what Kim Jong Un’s resolution for 2018 was: “focusing more on mass producing nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles for operational deployment.”

I saw that, and I just put my head in my hands and shook my head. Really? That’s your resolution? More focus on nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles?

Come on, little man. Take a good long look in the mirror? Don’t any other ideas come to mind? Maybe a gym membership? Or, “Find a new barber”? A resolution to “Eat fewer pies” in 2018 perhaps?

There must be something a little less hostile to the entire planet and more positive for your New Year’s resolutions than resolving to promulgate a larger number of deadly weapons of mass destruction.

 

Kim Jung Un has his resolutions and I have mine. For 2018, one of my resolutions is to find out once and for all if there’s any rhyme or reason to when the City of Greensboro picks up recyclables, or if it’s just completely at random.

In the past, I feel like there has been a pattern, but I can never discern what it is. If I could just crack that code I would die a happy man. One technique I know people have used is watching their neighbors and just doing what they do. I was trying to do that for a while and then one day I asked my neighbor how he knew when to put his recycle out, and he said, “Oh, I just kind of watch you to see what you do and then I do that.”

And I was like, “You’re watching me? Wait a minute, How can that be? I’m watching you!”

And I was stunned. He’s been watching me? Well that’s just great. Because then we have both been on an infinite loop of never knowing anything.

I’ve been watching the city pick up recycling for years and years and I feel like there’s some sort of pattern to it – and like there’s some way to predict it – but I’m not absolutely positive. (After all, it may be like leaves: Put them by the side of the road and one day the city might feel like getting them before they blow away.)

Until I break the recycle code, here’s a work-around I found, since I clearly can’t rely on doing what my neighbor is doing.

Here’s the solution: I don’t worry about it. Instead, every time I put out the regular trash each week, I put out the recycling as well. If the recycle people come and get it, fine. If they don’t, fine. I never worry about it and it takes about one-hundredth of the effort and energy to take the can to the street and back then it does to continue trying to figure out when the recycling is supposed to go out on the street and when it isn’t.

It is like a weight has been lifted from me.

 

Like you, I had a bad case of the flu last week and I kept taking my temperature. It was about 101 much of the time, but then I started getting all sorts of other readings, and I realized my thermometer was broken. When I went online to look for a new one, I wanted to get a little mercury thermometer like we had in school growing up, but apparently they have been phasing those out for years.

I have no idea why they have stopped measuring temperature with glass sticks full of poisonous mercury that we stick into our kids’ mouths? What could have been the problem with that?

 

I had such a hard time finding eclipse glasses earlier this year that I have saved my eclipse glasses from the eclipse and stored them away neatly in a sealed envelope for the next eclipse. But the other day, I asked myself: Yost, why are you keeping those? The next time there’s a total eclipse will be in 2024 – way in the future. By then, we probably won’t even need eclipse glasses because by that time people will be doing things like flying to the moon and watching the eclipse from there, where there’s no atmosphere and I’m sure the view of the eclipse is fantastic.

 

I thought I was a working hard over the holidays because I was turning in stories up until 5 p.m. on Christmas Eve. (The Rhino Times deadline waits for no man, not even Santa Claus.) So I patted myself on the back for my dedication.

But then, Christmas morning, I got a lesson in being truly oblivious to the holidays.

I had gone out to the end of my driveway earlier that morning to get my newspaper, but, then, about 10 a.m., I looked back out and there was another plastic bag at the end of my driveway. It looked like another newspaper or something. Curious, I went out to pick it up and it was the new copy of the Yellow Pages phone directory. I don’t know why that is being delivered on Christmas morning but I imagine it is not a happy story.

Is there some Scrooge Yellow Pages boss yelling on Christmas morning at all the sad kids with soot-covered faces: “Bah Humbug! I don’t care if it is Christmas morning and 14 degrees outside! You kids will get each and every one of these phone books in every driveway today or they’ll be no porridge for you. It’s Christmas morning, the day people expect their new phone books, and everyone will be devastated if it isn’t in their driveway today.”

I hope that’s not the real backstory, but I will say that it just seems to me that there has to be a better day than Christmas to be out distributing phone books.

About 364 better days to be exact.