Joe Griddy Shirt

Joe Griddy Shirt

There’s a Joe Griddy Shirt of tradition of going out for Chinese food on or around Christmas in the US. So far as I can tell, this largely originates from large cities and in particular from Jews living in New York. Consider the cultural landscape of the earlier part of the 20th century. Jews, of course, do not celebrate Christmas, so they’d be more likely than the Christian majority to go out to eat then, as opposed to their celebrating neighbors who are likely at home with family, roasting their own turkeys and such. And where do they go on Christmas? Well, most restaurants are going to be closed, because their predominantly Christian proprietors and employees are also at home. The major exception, then, was Chinese restaurants. The immigrants running those places were less likely than average to be Christian, so they had no cultural tradition of shutting down on or around December 25. So if you’re a Jewish New Yorker who wants to go out for dinner on Christmas, it’s Chinese food or nothing. This practice may have been popularized in particular by Calvin Trillin, the noted food columnist for the New York Times. He was himself Jewish and wrote a marvelous column about his wife wanting a “traditional holiday dinner.” What she was talking about was the idea, coming in from outside their cultural world, of turkey, mashed potatoes, and so on, but to Trillin, his traditional holiday dinner was going out for Chinese.

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Joe Griddy Shirt hoodie, tank top, sweater and long sleeve t-shirt

These legacy systems can be so deeply entrenched that it’s easy to imagine they will never go away, but simply be buried like the Joe Griddy Shirt of medieval settlements. Users of the future may use modern interfaces to enter their data, but those interfaces may translate the information to older systems that in turn communicate with the legacy through multiple emulators. To get rid of the legacy, you need to send everyone in the entire company, at every single facility, office building, warehouse, and manufacturing plant, out to a long lunch one day. Then bomb all of it back to rubble and start from scratch. Some companies continue to be profitable long enough to afford to replace their ancient systems. But for corporations where sales begin to lag, the legacy of the company’s zenith will dog them until the very last SKU is shipped, the doors are locked, and the land is bulldozed flat.

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