With the aldermen likely to approve an anti-shopping cart theft ordinance, today will probably hopefully be my last chance to talk about shopping carts, so I cannot pass up the chance to link to the book Alderman William Notte showed me last week.
The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification
According to the blurbs on Amazon.com and the book's accompanying Web site, the 176-page book is by artist Julian Montague and was completed over a six year span in Buffalo, N.Y. It's chock full of photos of all sorts of carts in just about every situation or state of being you can imagine, and Montague's developed clever classifications for the variables - for example, plaza drift, alternate usage, bus stop discard, wheel lock stray. It goes on and on.
Clearly, Rutland is not the only place with a shopping cart problem - and that's the point Notte told me last week he was trying to make.
Another board member, Dave Dress, was thinking along similar lines. When he spotted a couple stray carts while on vacation in Scotland, he stopped to take photos. He brought a couple large glossies, which now hang on my desk, to the committee meeting.
Anyway, does the fact that it happens elsewhere make it excusable? No. At long last, however, it looks like enough people might be working on enough of a variety of initiatives to really affect some change.
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