Wednesday, April 02, 2008

I get dumber every day

I realized yesterday, and I'm at least 800 years old, that "Cape Girardeau" -- as in Cape Girardeau, Missouri -- is not someone's name. Yes, that's right, I thought the town was named for someone whose first name was "Cape" and whose second name was "Girardeau."

In my defense, a "cape" is a piece of land jutting into the sea. The nearest sea to Cape Girardeau is at least 500 miles (810 km) away.

My vacant lot juts out into the lake a little. Maybe I should have signs made that say "Cape Jim" -- but, the Lake Board has a rule against signs. Maybe I could get by with flags that say "Cape Jim" -- but we'd just end up back in court again, remember these are people who argued in court that a gazebo is not a building (that it's a unattached covered patio).

1 comment:

Samuel John Klein said...

I'd heard that the reason they call it Cape Girardeau is because there used to be a rock point (sort of an inland cape) that was removed to make way for the railroad.

Or maybe it's something "They" know about the land east of the Mississippi in the aftermath of the upcoming New Madrid superquake. But I certainly wouldn't! Not me, no boy, that's for sure!