What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?

[Rev. Rye]

Reading John Hodgman’s Vacationland, I discovered something that makes Alice’s Restaurant make a lot more sense:





If you ever wondered why Alice and Ray decided it would be a good idea to just devote an entire floor of their home to garbage storage and not just take it out like normal people, well, if you thought it was just out of some spite to the for,er church they lived in, you’d be wrong.

Apparently, in Western Massachusetts, there is no organized trash pickup like in most normal places. You had to take the trash to your local dump. And judging from the way Hodgman describes it, there may or may not have been some weirdly Byzantine laws about which dump you had to throw your trash into.

The specific example he gives is that his father made him toss the garbage into a neighboring town’s dump because it was closer than the actual town dump. However, this was apparently illegal, but if he claimed he was staying with a family friend in that town, it was okay. Except once he finally has a chance to give this convoluted alibi, he’s told it actually is okay after all.

Neither I nor Hodgman know whether the law was always like that, or if it changed sometime in the interim 30+ years (or worse, that it was one of those laws that was still on the books, but was never enforced,) but I can only assume that if they had laws against one town’s garbage going into another town’s dump, it only stands to reason that Officer Obie didn’t take kindly to Arlo just dumping it off a cliff.

Then again, he apparently spent “a very disagreeable two hours” looking for any sign of the culprits, so I guess he didn’t have much to do on Thanksgiving Weekend 1965.