And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Ribs: Deep South Road Trip Report

Brunswick, Ga., March 7; photo by Mary Bakija; click to enlarge

“Hey,” said the Tugboat Captain about two months ago, “JetBlue is having a crazy sale. Let’s go somewhere!”

And that’s how we found ourselves flying to Savannah, Ga., on the morning of March 1 (only $49 each way!) and then embarking on a 1600ish-mile road trip that took us to New Orleans, where we spent a weekend with two old friends of mine, and then back to Savannah, where we caught a flight home on the evening of March 7.

Here’s a pretty close approximation of our route. The line shown in blue is how we got from Savannah to New Orleans, and the red line is how we drove back. The daily indicators in green — Day 1, Day 2, etc. — show where we ended up at the end of each day of the trip (click to enlarge):

In retrospect — well, even in foresight — it was too much ground to cover in too little time, plus there was a logistical hiccup on the next-to-last day that threw a monkey wrench into our schedule. Still, we saw some great sights, ate some damn good food (and also some mediocre food — I’ll get to that), discovered a watering hole for the ages, and spent time with two of my favorite people on the planet. Not bad. Here’s how it went. (The photos that follow are a mix — some taken by me, some by the Captain. In general, if a photo is really good, you can assume it was hers, not mine. All can be clicked to enlarge.)

Day 1 — Wednesday, March 1: We caught a morning flight to Savannah, rented a car, and headed straight to lunch at Mrs. Wilkes’ Dining Room, a former boarding house that now serves world-class traditional Southern food. The seating is family-style — 10 people to a table, so you’re basically forced to make chitchat with strangers, which is a good thing — and the food is all-you-can-(over)eat.

When we sat down, the table was already groaning with more than a dozen different dishes, and at least 10 more came out soon after that. I can’t remember all of them, but they included fried chicken, meat loaf, beef stew, pork barbecue, red rice with sausage, mac and cheese, cornbread, biscuits, corn dressing, and a lot of vegetables — succotash, cucumbers, mashed sweet potatoes, butter beans, baked beans, green beans, rutabaga, creamed corn, squash, collard greens, black-eyed peas, and definitely a few I’m forgetting. It was insane. The price — $22/head — seemed like a bargain.

After lunch, we walked through Savannah’s biggest park and then headed off to Tybee Island, where we went for our first beach walk of 2017. It was a warm day but breezy down at the water — perfect.

At one point the Captain looked down and spotted a sand dollar. But when she picked it up, it was still alive! It had all these little tendrils on the bottom that were wriggling about. Live sand dollars may be common for some of you folks, but we’d never seen a live one before — so cool! I shot some footage of its underside, but what you mostly see is the sun sparkling off of it, which makes it hard to make out the movement of the tendrils. But trust me, they were moving!

A bit later, on our way to our motel, we spotted something odd in somebody’s backyard: a giant globe, with the name of a local mortgage company. It seemed like something worth investigating, so we pulled over to have a closer look. The globe was was fenced off, but we managed to get some decent pics:

We drove around the corner to the other side of the house to get another view of the globe and found that the house’s mailbox was painted like the moon.

We later learned that the globe had originally been a natural gas storage tank.

We crashed for a bit at our motel, then went out for dinner (just salads, because we were still recovering from the mega-lunch), and then went to check out downtown Savannah, where there was one landmark in particular that I wanted to see: the Lucas Theater. It had such a great marquee that I could almost forgive the spelling:

Day 2 — Thursday, March 2: This morning we bade farewell to Savannah and headed west. Our first stop was at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, which is home to an unusual attraction: the U.S. National Tick Collection, which is technically an arm — or perhaps a segmented leg — of the Smithsonian Institution and is billed as the largest curated tick collection in the world.

The collection is in the basement of the school’s math and science building. It’s open for public tours, but only during certain hours — which, unfortunately, did not coincide with our visit. But they have a “permanent collection” on display, which is basically a hallway with a few museum-style placards and a few creepy-crawly specimens. Here are some pics (if you can’t see the slideshow below, click here):

Looking at blood-sucking bugs can bring on a powerful appetite, so we headed over to Vandy’s Bar-B-Q, which showed all the signs of being a top-notch ’cuery: It’s been in business since 1929, it claims to have one of only six open-pit smokehouses in the state, it’s a nondescript cinderblock building with a rusty sign, the locals pile in at lunchtime, and the waitress is a hoot. We ordered a chopped pork sandwich and a chicken platter and couldn’t wait to dive in.

Just one problem: The meat wasn’t the least bit smoky. Like, zero smokiness. It tasted like it could have been cooked in an oven instead of a smoker, which defeats the whole point of barbecue. Very disappointing. The weird thing is, we snuck around back to check out the smokehouse after we were done eating, and it definitely smelled smoky. But none of that flavor or aroma was imparted to the food (or at least not to our food).

This wasn’t the first time I’ve encountered this problem (nor would it be the last time we encountered it on this trip), and it leads to something worth discussing: Barbecue is super-popular, and there’s this big lore and mystique surrounding it, but the reality is that a lot of barbecue — most barbecue, really — is mediocre at best. That’s part of why there’s a mystique around it, because it’s hard to do well. I know all of that, and yet I still have the urge to pull over and sample the fare at every single roadside barbecue joint I see, even though I know the experience will usually be disappointing. I can’t let go of the fantasy that this will be the place with the mind-blowing ’cue. And occasionally that fantasy becomes reality. Much like the nibble on the end of the line that keeps the fisherman down at the lake all day, those occasional top-notch barbecue experiences are enough to keep me seeking out the next one. But man, I wish there weren’t so many disappointments along the way, like the smokeless ’cue we had at Vandy’s.

We tried to salvage things by going off in search of pie for dessert. But not just any pie — Mennonite pie. I associate Mennonites with Pennsylvania and no idea they had sects or communities in the Deep South, but the Captain’s travel research had uncovered a Mennonite pie shop in the Georgia town of Montezuma. Sure enough, they had shoofly pie, just like the Mennonites in Pennsylvania. But we were in Georgia, so we decided to get pecan pie. They were only selling whole pies, not slices, so we got one for ourselves and sampled it in the car. Deeee-lish! A good corrective to the disappointing lunch. (Oh, and the Mennonites also had some goats. Since we were feeding ourselves, we fed the goats as well.)

Our next stop was a bit more somber: Andersonville National Historic Site. It was here that the Confederacy built one of the Civil War’s largest and most hellishly overcrowded military prisons. At one point 45,000 Union soldiers were held here as prisoners of war, and 13,000 of them died (mostly from scurvy, diarrhea, and dysentery), making Andersonville the war’s single deadliest spot. Think about that: More people died in a prison than in any battle. The commander was eventually hanged for war crimes.

The entire prison was later razed, and the only things currently on the grounds are a re-creation of a small portion of the stockade fence that once encircled the 26-acre facility, a correspondingly small re-created portion of the “deadline” (an inner fence that prisoners were forbidden to cross, or else sentries situated in crow’s nests along the stockade had orders to shoot them), and some tents and shanties like the ones the prisoners had lived in. It probably doesn’t look like much in the photos I’m about to show you, but we had read a bit about Andersonville before arriving, and the visitor’s center had some excellent displays that helped us visualize what the prison had been like, so that small portion of the stockade was enough — we could extrapolate what the rest of the scene had been like, and the overall effect was really powerful. A very strong piece of interpretive museum work.

Off to the side were memorial monuments from the various Union states whose soldiers died at the prison. Most were of modest size, but Wisconsin’s was enormous. It was odd to see these Union monuments in the heart of the Confederacy — again, powerful stuff.

But Andersonville’s most affecting sight came at the end of our visit, when we visited the facility’s military cemetery. Those 13,000 dead prisoners are all buried here, and the sheer number of small tombstones hit like a punch to the gut. Again, these images don’t come close to conveying the scope and impact of what we saw.

We would have lingered longer, but the site was about to close, so we hit the road again and pushed on to Columbus, Ga., where we had hoped to get a drink at a place called the Sputnik Bar, which looked like our kinda place. Unfortunately, when we showed up we found that the bar was closed and the building had a “For Sale” sign. But after some quick internet research, we found an excellent substitute: the Pop-A-Top Lounge, which looked even more like our kinda place. Here’s how it looked when we walked in, and a bit later after we walked out:

Does that look like sheer perfection or what? And what we found inside absolutely delivered on that promise — a surreal scene of near-Lynchian proportions. Among the topics that were discussed: the obvious fakery/conspiracy of the supposed “moon landings” and the fact that Mexico is “a paradise” (“I mean, I haven’t been there, but I know it is. Who wouldn’t want to get deported there?”). Another highlight was the guy who walked in with a big wooden box and promptly sold it to another guy by convincing him that it would be “great for your grenades.” Sorry, no photos (definitely not the kind of place for that), but trust me when I say that this was one of the highlights of the trip, and probably one of the top 10 bar experiences of my life.

Soon it was time for dinner. We had our eye on a soul food place just across the river in Phenix City, Ala., and that brought up a problem: Georgia is in the Eastern Time Zone, but Alabama is on Central Time. We figured the restaurant, being in ’Bama, would observe Central Time, and we had planned accordingly. But when we arrived, we found they were getting ready to close. Turns out some businesses on the ’Bama side of the river, including this one, run on Eastern Time, even though they’re technically in the Central Time Zone, just so the larger Columbus-based community can all be running on the same system. It was all very interesting (I’ve never lived near a time zone border, so I’d never thought too much about this issue), but it left us scrambling to find a new dinner venue.

We eventually settled for a barbecue place in a strip mall back in Georgia. The food was okay — certainly better than our flavorless lunch had been — but nothing special. Plus it was, you know, in a strip mall. Pfeh.

Then we found a motel where we could crash for the night. Our room featured an amusing detail: I’ve seen plenty of cigarette burns in motel sheets before, but I’d never seen an iron burn on the rug.

Day Three — Friday, March 3: Our day began with breakfast at a Columbus spot called Ruth Ann’s. My pancakes were excellent, but what I really liked was the building’s architecture. As a friend remarked when I posted a photo on Facebook, the place looks like an insect that could shake loose from its moorings and walk away:

Before leaving Columbus, we stopped at a gas station to get ice for our cooler. The station’s convenience store included something I hadn’t seen before: a rack of “fully explicit” porno DVDs, all in no-frills packaging and organized by race. The one Asian entry was yellow — classy!

From there we headed west into Alabama. Our first stop: the Museum of Wonder, an unusual folk art installation housed in a series of repurposed shipping containers in the town of Seale. The museum is one of several projects spearheaded by a local eccentric named Butch Anthony. We had read about him and were hoping to meet up with him, but he didn’t respond to our emails — dang.

Still, the museum was really interesting and fun. We enjoyed walking around and snapping pics (if you can’t see the slideshow below, click here):

From there we headed west, because there was another museum we wanted to see (more on that in a sec). Along the way, we passed through the town of Union Springs, where we saw a sign that said, “Bird Dog Statue,” along with an arrow. That seemed worth investigating, so we followed the arrow and found a statue of a hunting dog right in the middle of a busy downtown intersection. The statue proclaims that Union Springs is the “Field Trial Capital of the World” and also features a list of people enshrined in the Bird Dog Field Trial Hall of Fame. (I confess that I’d never heard of a field trial before, but Wikipedia quickly informed me that it’s “a competitive event at which hunting dogs compete against one another.”) A handsome mural on the wall of an adjacent building showed a scene with hunting dogs flushing out some game birds.

It was all very interesting, but the positioning of the statue smack in the middle of the intersection seemed like a traffic hazard. (Granted, the fact that I was standing in the street and taking photos probably didn’t help the traffic flow either.)

Eventually we made our way to Georgiana, site of the Hank Williams Boyhood Home Museum. This is where Williams lived from age 7 to 11, and where he got his first guitar. It’s mostly an endearingly amateurish hodgepodge of memorabilia, most of which has nothing to do with the home itself or with Hank’s boyhood, nicely epitomized by this fork:

Note that the placard doesn’t say Williams used the fork, or that it was from his room, or that it was used in the hotel on the same night or even in the same decade as the final night of Williams’s life. It’s simply from the same hotel. It’s hilarious — I laughed out loud when I saw it.

”¨Still, there were some legitimate highlights, most notably an amazing quilt made by a fan. It too has nothing to do with the home or Williams’s childhood, but it’s a spectacular piece of work and was pretty much worth the price of admission all by itself. Great chain-stitching, too (if you can’t see the slideshow below, click here):

There was some other worthwhile stuff — royalty statements, scrapbooks, records, and some amazing curtains. Also, in an unexpected uni-related twist, there was a photo of Williams wearing a baseball cap. Anyone know which team this might have been for?

After this, we hopped on the Interstate (something I usually try to avoid during road trips, but we wanted to make up some time) and headed to Mobile, where we stopped for a late-afternoon snack: oysters.

I like oysters a lot, and I actually have something of an oystering pedigree (my Long Island hometown, Blue Point, is the namesake for the bluepoint oyster), but it had been a long time since I’d eaten Gulf oysters, and I’d forgotten how mild they can be, with none of the briny mineral complexity of cold-water oysters. Not awful, but not fully satisfying either.

We had plans to eat crawfish for dinner in Biloxi, Miss., so we returned to the road. But just outside of Mobile we passed a VFW Hall. VFWs are almost always interesting places, and this one was open to the public, so we pulled over and stopped in for a drink.

This led to a conundrum. As you can see on the sign, it was Steak Night. The post’s commander was grilling ribeyes in a shed adjacent to the hall, and it smelled soooooo good. We sat down at the bar and were quickly informed that we could get a full steak dinner, including salad and sides, for $14 — extremely tempting! But you can eat steak anywhere; crawfish, not so much. So we stayed for a round of drinks, chatted with one extremely friendly veteran at the bar, and then reluctantly said our good-byes and pushed on.

We eventually arrived in Biloxi, where we headed to Taranto’s, an old-fashioned ramshackle crawfish house. I love crawfish and have eaten them many times, but this was the Captain’s first experience with them. She dove in like a champ.

No iron burn on the rug at our motel this time around. But there was this:

Days Four and Five — Saturday and Sunday, March 4 and 5: One of the many nice things about buying a Mennonite pecan pie during a road trip is that you’re likely to have several days’ worth of leftover pie. And if you happen to be in a town with a beach — like, say, Biloxi — that makes for a perfect breakfast:

While we ate pie, I googled something I’d been curious about: As we’d driven toward and around Biloxi, we’d noticed that every traffic intersection on US-90 included a little round sign featuring a numbered shrimp, with the numbers running in sequence:

Were these part of shrimp driving tour? A shellfish tour? Turns out they were installed by the local tourism board as a guide to local eateries and attractions. Interesting.

We needed to get to New Orleans, so we hit the road again, but we made one more stop in Mississippi: the INFINITY Science Center, which is a NASA facility. It has all sorts of cool-sounding exhibits and tours, but we didn’t have time for that. We just wanted to see the massive first stage of the Saturn V rocket that they keep in the parking lot. This rocket was supposed to blast off toward the moon as part of the Apollo 19 mission in 1973, but that mission was cancelled, so now the rocket has become a kitschy roadside attraction. Here’s the Captain trying to look like she has the Right Stuff:

Onward! We soon arrived in New Orleans, where we would be staying for the weekend at the home my longtime friends Rob Walker (a great writer) and his wife, Ellen Susan (a great photographer). I somehow neglected to get a photo of them during our stay, which is a shame, because they’re such a cool-looking couple. They were also incredibly gracious hosts. Hanging out with them was the highlight of our trip. At least we got a shot of their excellent dog, Russell.

Our New Orleans weekend was a whirlwind of eating and attractions. Here are a few of the highlights:

Lafayette Cemetery No. 1: New Orleans cemeteries are fascinating places. Most of the city is below sea level, making burials impossible, so people are entombed in above-ground crypts, many of which are in very poor repair, resulting in a very spooky, surreal atmosphere. Some cemeteries offer guided tours, which provide lots of historical background, but we decided to take a self-guided walk through Lafayette No. 1 (if you can’t see the slideshow below, click here):

Pharmacy Museum: Louisiana was the first state to require pharmacists to be licensed, and the first pharmacist to be issued such a license was in New Orleans. The New Orleans Pharmacy Museum honors this history with a huge collection of 19th- and early 20th-century materials — potions, elixirs, pills, instruments, and a lot more. Fascinating and entertaining (if you can’t see the slideshow below, click here):

Jazz Museum: The U.S. Mint used to have a branch in New Orleans, and that building is now the site of the New Orleans Jazz Museum. The first floor is devoted to the history of the mint itself, with lots of old coins — very cool (sorry, no photos). The second floor currently has an excellent exhibition about Louis Armstrong, which we enjoyed very much. I only took one photo, but I think you’ll like it: It’s a portrait of the baseball team that Armstrong sponsored in 1931. The accompanying placard says that Armstrong “made sure that his semiprofessional New Orleans team had the finest, whitest uniforms in town. He later joked that his players were so proud of their uniforms that they didn’t like to slide.” That’s Satchmo in the suit at far-right:

Food: We ate food. A lot of it. Such as:

•  Shrimp po boys with a side of gumbo: One of those things that you pretty much have to eat if you’re in New Orleans, right? Right.

•  Beignets: Another New Orleans staple. Fried dough dusted with powdered sugar. The most popular place to get them, Cafe Du Monde, was mobbed, so we got them at Morning Call instead. Just as good. Probably the single best thing we ate in the city.

•  Crawfish étoufée and seafood gumbo: At one point we had dinner at Mandina’s, a great neighborhood spot I’d been to many years earlier. We wanted étoufée and also wanted gumbo, so we ordered both and shared. The funny thing is that both dishes are essentially seafood-laden brown glop served with rice — one in a bowl, one on a plate. Honestly, these two versions tasted pretty similar too, although that’s not such a bad thing, because they were both quite good.

•  Grilled oysters: Back in Mobile, where we had those bland Gulf oysters, the menu had also included grilled oysters, which featured a topping of breadcrumbs, cheese, and butter. We didn’t order them in Mobile, but the same thing was available at a New Orleans oyster house that we visited, so we decided to try it. Pretty good — sort of the oyster equivalent of baked clams.

•  A really weird steak. At one point we had dinner with Rob and Ellen at a fancy new-ish restaurant and shared a bunch of food, including a dry-aged steak served with a big-ass marrowbone and — get this — a scattering of escargot. Stange but delicious.

One other New Orleans note: While walking around the French Quarter, I spotted a guy unloading a delivery of ice cubes that will presumably be of interest to Uni Watch readers.

Day Six — Monday, March 6: We had two days to scurry back to Savannah for our flight home, so we left New Orleans pretty early in the morning. Our plan was to drive to Dauphin Island, just south of Mobile, and take a 40-minute car ferry ride across Mobile Bay (our idea of fun, because we love car ferries).

But when we arrived at the ferry, we learned that service had been suspended due to high winds. This was a drag (no more car ferry!) and also a major inconvenience, because now we’d have to drive around Mobile Bay, which would take a lot more time — and time was something we didn’t have in great supply. It was all very frustrating, and a lunch stop for a plate of what turned out to be overcooked, overpriced shrimp didn’t help matters. Things weren’t working out, and we were cranky. This was the worst part of the trip.

We pushed on along the Alabama coast and crossed the border into the Florida panhandle, where we made two stops. The first was in Pensacola, where we took photos of the “Futuro House,” a house that looks like a UFO (lots of additional info here and here):

Just east of Pensacola we went for a walk on a beautiful beach. The surf was extremely choppy and dramatic-looking, the sun was starting to set, and everything felt magical. But again, we were pressed for time, so we were only able to stay for about half an hour.

Soon it was time for dinner. I probably should have known better by this point, but I found a well-reviewed barbecue joint and insisted that we go there. My ribs and hot links looked great on the plate, but again — not a hint of smokiness. Let me repeat that: zero smoke. What the fuck? The Captain was smarter — she ordered rice and beans.

It had been an unsatisfying day, and it was about to get worse: In order to keep up our schedule, we had to drive a three-hour late-night haul to get to Tallahassee, which is sort of like paying someone to kick you in the shins. A stop at a good donut shop helped, but just barely. Overall, not a good day.

Day Seven — Tuesday, March 7: Scattered around the country are a handful of Johnny Appleseed statues. One is at an apple orchard, another is in front of a defunct restaurant, and one has been repurposed as “Johnny Donutseed,” which shows Johnny eating a donut and drinking coffee, instead of holding an apple (further info here). That statue is at a truck stop in the Florida town of Lloyd, so we went there to eat donuts for breakfast — a fun way to start the day.

Our plan for the day was to head back to Georgia, make two key stops along the way, and then get back to the Savannah airport in time for our 7pm flight. As usual, though, we encountered interesting things that we hadn’t counted upon, most notably a series of very evocative abandoned businesses. The first one was outside of the Florida town of Yulee, just south of the Georgia state line, where we found a decaying motel and its accompanying gift shop. It was all deserted, overgrown, perfect.

If you can’t see slideshow of the gift shop below, click here.

A few miles after we crossed into Georgia, in the town of Woodbine, we came across another ruin, this time for a barbecue joint called Moody’s (further info here). Bonus pathos points for the “Open” sign, still swinging in the breeze. I accidentally had one of my camera’s filters turned on, but maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing:

Just a few miles ahead was yet another wreck: the Georgia Girl Drive-In. Imagine how great this sign must have looked in its neon-illuminated heyday:

This stuff was all great, but we were on a tight schedule, so we pushed on and made our way to Jekyll Island, a spot along the Georgia Coast. You have to pay a $6 parking fee just to enter the island, which is kind of ridiculous, but it was worth it for what we were there to see: Driftwood Beach, which lives up to its name and then some. It’s a beach filled with uprooted trees and tree limbs, all left to petrify — absolutely spectacular. We walked around, had a few beers while perched on a tree that was laying in the shallow surf, and generally felt transported to another world (if you can’t see the slideshow below, click here).

We had one more stop to make before heading to the airport: Gary Lee’s Market — yet another barbecue joint. I know, I know, but two friends of ours had personally recommended this one, so our confidence level was pretty high. And it delivered! Excellent ribs and sausage, and decent chicken wings, all nicely smoky. The sausage was so good, in fact, that I bought some extra links to bring home. (Had to put it on ice, which I thought might cause problems with the TSA folks at the airport, but they had no problem with it.)

That was our final stop before heading to the airport. By 10:30pm, we were back home in our apartments in Brooklyn.

Three post-trip notes:

1. I spent a fair amount of time driving around the rural Deep South from 1989 through 2002 but hadn’t road-tripped in that region since then. One big change: There were fewer Confederate flags on display this time around. Like, a lot fewer (and not a single stars/bars bumper sticker). I count that as progress.

2. The use of “y’all” seems to have increased exponentially. I mean, it’s always been a common Southern-ism, but now it seems like it shows up almost every other word. Or maybe I just noticed it more this time around.

3. A few days before the trip, I mentioned here on Uni Watch that I’d be vacationing through the South. Several of you who live in the South sent me emails asking to meet up with me, offering to buy me a beer (or even buy me dinner), that sort of thing. Those invitations were extremely generous — really, I appreciate each and every one of them — and I’m sorry I ultimately decided to turn them all down. Part of it is that, as I mentioned throughout this travelogue, we were pressed for time. And part of it is that I want my vacations to be, you know, vacations — I don’t want to be thinking about Uni Watch or engaging in uni-related chatter. I also don’t want to subject the Captain to any more uni-related chatter than she normally endures on a regular basis. Thanks for understanding, and thanks again for the very kind offers.

That’s it. We’ll get back to regular uni-related content tomorrow. My thanks, as always, for your indulgence with these travelogues.

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Culinary Corner: Over the weekend, the Tugboat Captain and I made a big recipe that included, among many other things, cutting up a duck and roasting it. Ducks are fatty, so there were lots of lobes of fat and wattles of skin that I removed as I did the butchering. The Captain then took those scraps and cooked them in a pot, rendering out the fat, which we needed for a later step in the recipe. (I’ll tell you about that larger project at a later date.)

After the fat was rendered out, we were left with a small amount of duck skin crackilins. The Captain tossed them with some paprika, cayenne, salt, and pepper, which made for a perfect mid-afternoon snack (click to enlarge):

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Essential reading: Adam Rubin, who until recently covered the Mets for ESPN.com (he’s now the SID for a small NYC-area school), is the best MLB beat reporter I’ve ever encountered, and probably the best there’s ever been. He recently did an interview with The -30-, and it should absolutely be required reading for anyone interested in a career in sportswriting, anyone who’s interested in knowing what it’s like to be an MLB beat reporter, and anyone who’s interested in the Mets. Some of it is inspiring, some is depressing, but all of it is fascinating. Highly, highly recommended.

That site, incidentally, has lots of good interviews with sportswriters. So if you like the Rubin interview, you may want to delve into the archives.

(My thanks to Mets Police for tipping me wise to the Rubin interview.)

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Pill design: For years I’ve taken a daily prescription pill to help control my allergies and asthma. The pill used to be a brand name, and then a generic version became available, but the pill’s shape remained the same: square with rounded corners.

The other day I refilled the prescription and was surprised to find that the pills were round. Had the pharmacist mistakenly given me the wrong drug? I went back to the drug store and asked him.

He said, “Oh, didn’t I put a green label on the bottle? We have these labels that say, ‘This is the right medication, even though it looks different.’ I should have included that — my bad.” Then he showed me his big bottle of pills, just to confirm that I’d gotten the right drug. Apparently this happens all the times with generics, although I don’t think it’s happened before to me.

Round pills are so boring. I like the old version better.

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Signal Flare: If you’re a sneakerhead and a size 9, drop me a line. Thanks.

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The Ticker
By Alex Hider

Baseball News:  Robinson Canó has been wearing a captain’s “C” for the Dominican Republic’s WBC team (from Zach Leosi). … Jonathon Lucroy has been wearing a stars-and-stripes chest protector (also from Zach Leosi). … Phil mentioned in yesterday’s Ticker that the Cubs’ David Berg is wearing No. 00. But yesterday, pinch runner  Elliott Soto stepped onto the field  also wearing No. 00 (from Tom Esktrand). … Tom V.  sent along a photo of Dennis DeYoung of Styx wearing a Cubs jersey in the video for “Come Sail Away.” …  Boston and Philly went  red-on-red in spring training action yesterday. …  The Akron RubberDucks will wear  Canton-Akron Indians throwbacks in July (from Andrew J).

Football News:  WR Alshon Jeffrey wore No. 17 with  the Bears, but he won’t wear the number with his new team, the Eagles. … Martellus Bennett let Packers fans pick his new number. Looks like he’ll be wearing No. 80 … This Steelers fan has built  more than 100 helmets  from various eras (from  Dell Michaels). … Florida State will wear padded helmet covers during spring ball.

Hockey News:  The Ducks warmed up in ’07 jerseys yesterday to commemorate the 10th anniversary of their Stanley Cup title (from Louis). … Kings goalie Ben Bishop has a  new mask  (from  Bizbo). …  The Manitoba Moose wore  retro unis yesterday, which included this awesome shoulder patch (from  Patrick Thomas  and  Alexander Kinkopf).

NBA News:  According to this story, the Thunder have had the most success this season when wearing their orange jerseys. … This might be the strangest Frankenjersey we’ve ever seen:  LeBron James and James Harden? (From  Stros Bros.) …  Zach Loesi  sent along a few notes regarding Saturday’s NBA action: The Warriors and Spurs went color-on-gray, and the  Cavs and Magic, the Hornets and Pelicans  went color-on-color. … Also from Zach: On Sunday the Knicks wore white on the road agains the Nets; the Suns and Blazers went orange vs. black; and the Heat and Pacers went black vs. yellow.

College Hoops News:  Cincinnati wore their red unis in the AAC Championship yesterday (from Tom Gelehrter). … Good shot of the changing of the floor at UD Arena in Dayton, where the First Four will be played Tuesday and Wednesday (from Kurt Sutton). …  Lots of logo mixups on ESPN yesterday: They mistook  Kansas State for Kansas yesterday morning, they were  still using North Dakota’s old Fighting Sioux logo, and they didn’t have a logo on file for Northern Kentucky (from Greg Davey  and  Josh Claywell). … Check out the unis for the 1977 Vermont women’s basketball team. Sleeves and skirts! (From  David Bailey.)

Grab Bag:  NASCAR driver Danica Patrick recently appeared in a Coca-Cola ad wearing a suit bearing the name of her sponsor, Nature’s Bakery. The problem is, Patrick’s team is currently suing Nature’s Bakery, so they had to edit out the company’s name (from David Firestone). …  Golfer Adam Hadwin’s scorebook almost acts as a NOB (from Petunia). …  North Carolina’s gymnastics team has leotards with argyle trim (from James Gilbert). …  Lathrop High School in Fairbanks, Alaska, wears  Lakers-inspired uniforms  (from  Aaron Walling).

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What Paul did last night on Friday night: On Friday night the Tugboat Captain and I were sharing burgers and beers in the West Village when she surprised me with an early birthday present: tickets for that night to see Exhibitionism, the big museum-style Rolling Stones installation that was located just a few blocks away from where we were sitting.

The Stones haven’t been relevant from a creative perspective in 35 years and have essentially been an oldies act for longer than they were an artistic force (or as New Yorker editor David Remnick has written, they’ve become the world’s greatest Rolling Stones cover band), but I’m still a big fan, and I loved Exhibitionism. I had worried that it might be a half-assed amalgam of memorabilia all thrown together without much rhyme or reason, but it was a lot more professional and sophisticated than that, with lots of storytelling, interactive displays (I particularly liked the consoles where we could remix certain Stones songs or isolate certain instruments within the mix), original notebooks and sketchbooks, and a very amusing re-creation of the London apartment where Mick, Keith, and Brian lived in 1962. They depicted the kitchen as a wreck filled with dirty dishes, open bottles of milk left out, and so on (along with a very nice linoleum pattern on the floor; click to enlarge):

I was having too much fun to take more photos, but there was one quote from Keith that I thought would be of interest from a Uni Watch perspective. Here (click to enlarge):

Exhibitionism’s final day in New York was yesterday (hence the pre-birthday timing of the gift), but it’s opening in Chicago in April. The ticket prices are sort of ridiculous (if you have a super-sweet girlfriend who’ll treat you, that’s a good way to go), but I’d still recommend it for Stones fans.

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I realize that today’s entry was (a) really long and (b) a lot more Paul-centric than uni-centric. Thanks for sticking with it.