Monthly Archives: October 2022

L.A.’s Hottest Wheels

I’m not much of a grocery store shopper, maybe because I’ve cooked a total of 10 meals in my life. Maybe.

But I’ve discovered something that’s shot to the top of my shopping list whenever I go to Ralph’s, Food 4 Less or any other grocery store in the San Fernando Valley: a shopping cart.

They used to be easy to find in the Valley. A couple of them used to live at the end of my block. I once commandeered a cart to bring home motorcycle gear walking from the shop.

But a pandemic, recession and rising homeless population have made shopping carts harder to find than an honest plumber.

Two weeks ago, I found an abandoned cart in an empty parking space of my Ralph’s (the outdoor corral and entire store were empty). Last week, I found a cart but left my wallet in the car. When I tried to walk the cart to my car, the front wheels locked when I passed the security sensor. Yesterday required a five-minute search-and-shop scour.

I asked the store manager what happened.

“It’s the homeless,” she sighed. ”They’re even asking for them when people are packing their cars.”

She said the store had begun alerting customers to not feel rushed into unpacking. ”That cart is theirs as long as there’s something in it.”

But once the cart is empty, she said, clerks have to rush to fetch them.

Even with the store mandate, ”We can’t keep up,” she confided, unaware that the customer was an old newspaperman. So, being one, I researched the problem when I got home. Jesus.

According to the Food Marketing Institute, 2 million grocery carts are stolen every year, costing individual stores $8,000-$10,000 annually. Supermarketnews.com estimates a cart is stolen every 90 seconds. And those studies were pre-pandemic, in the age of human contact and heavy metals.

Now, a lifted cart is serious larceny. I Googled the cost of roll cages, and they routinely run from $200 to $500 – without an anti-theft system.


The solution is obvious and impossible: a return to the days when a clerk would help you load the car. Those went the way of the full-service gas station, and corporate Darwinism all but guarantees their permanent extinction.

And L.A. is its own nation-state: If it is happening here, it is likely headed to the other 49 – if it’s not already there.

Covid has proved a seismic shaking of the tree. All assumptions of everyday life are on the table, from the jobs we’re willing to work to the people we’re willing to talk to. I guess shopping carts shouldn’t be a surprise casualty.

Still, I had big plans for my 11th meal.

Chomsky Was Right!

Evidentialism factslap: The word ”huh” is nearly universal.

“Huh” is a humble word, often a near-involuntary linguistic response, but behind this simple interrogatory palindrome is an extraordinary truth — it’s also universal. According to research conducted in 2013 by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, a version of the word can be found in nearly every language on Earth. Researchers analyzed 31 languages, including Spanish, Mandarin, Icelandic, and Indigenous tongues. What they found was that every one included a word similar in both sound and function to the English “huh.” For example, in Mandarin it’s “a?”, Spanish “e?”, Lao “a?”, and in Dutch “he?” No matter the language, the word includes a relaxed tongue, rising pitch, and if there’s a sound before the vowel, it’s an “h” or a glottal stop (a consonant sound made by closing the glottis, the space between the vocal folds). Although there is some variation in pronunciation, the word shows staggeringly little difference among languages compared to what might be expected.

This raises the question: Is “huh” even a word at all? Perhaps it’s an innate interjection like a scream or a sneeze, or a non-lexical conversational sound like “ummm” or “aaaah.” Yet the researchers noted several factors that point to “huh” being a full-fledged word. For one, it’s learned (as opposed to animal sounds like grunts), and children don’t use the word until they’ve started speaking. And even languages without an “h” sound still create a close approximation of the word “huh.” The researchers chock this linguistic similarity up to “convergent cultural evolution.” In the animal kingdom, convergent evolution occurs when two animals develop the same traits due to their similar environment (for example, how sharks and dolphins have a similar streamlined look). In a linguistic sense, convergent evolution occurs when pressures in human conversation — like a lack of information that necessitates a need for clarification — create a universal requirement for a word that is quick and easy to pronounce. In time, all languages naturally arrived at the more or less the same response to this need: “Huh?”