New and Old #254
A highway walk, the struggle of running a small business, a drive-in theater beats the odds, and when ChaCha was ChatGPT
This is just a whole bunch of close-up photos from an old but slowly urbanizing commercial strip in Arlington. I wish I’d taken this walk and snapped these pictures! When you look slowly and up close and with attention to detail, you see so much. It’s like the resolution of the place increases. But of course, it isn’t getting more interesting; you’re paying closer attention.
I suspect we confuse the direction of this sort of thing quite a bit.
Unfiltered Confessions of a Small-Town Restaurant Owner, Prairie Philosophy, Jill Winger, January 20, 2026
There’s a lot in here that you wouldn’t necessarily think about as a customer, and it’s good to see the business-owner perspective.
This in particular stuck out to me, because I see this in my own hometown, and I’ve always seen these spotty weird hours as informal and kind of amateur. I think of it the church-lady thrift-shop hours model: open Tuesdays and Thursday from 12pm-3pm, and every other Wednesday from 10am-2pm. That sort of thing.
Our hours aren’t short because we’re lazy.
(And they’re not short because we’re “going under,” despite what the local Facebook rumor mill likes to speculate...)
They’re short because it’s not profitable to be open ten hours a day in a town of 200 people.
It’s math, y’all.
As much as I love our winter breakfast crowd, serving three breakfasts over the course of three hours doesn’t pay the bills.
In a tiny town, you don’t have the luxury of “staying open and hoping it picks up,” because hope doesn’t pay payroll taxes. So yes—I know it’s inconvenient sometimes, and I feel bad about that. But longer hours would only feel more convenient right up until we’re out of business.
This also kind of drives home how little I really have experience with genuine small-town, everyone-knows-everyone life. The place I grew up/right outside was a “small town” of about 5,000 people. So there’s a level of urbanity and anonymity and a sort of abstraction and distance there already that there isn’t in a town of a few hundred. Interesting to be made aware of things you have no experience with.
Family Drive-In Theatre getting a new lease on life, Winchester Star, Jack Parry, January 28, 2026
I wrote about this when its likely closure was announced awhile back, and wrote about memory and nostalgia and how things change and all that. But that was premature!
While listing the property for sale didn’t necessarily mean the end of the Family Drive-In, Manuel said in August that the owner wasn’t expressly looking to sell the site to someone interested in keeping it open. The land is zoned General Business District (B2), which has numerous allowable uses in Frederick County, such as gas stations and storage facilities.
William Dalke Jr. first opened the Family Drive-In Theatre in 1956. It’s one of only six drive-in movie theaters in Virginia and the closest drive-in to Washington, D.C.
When it looked like the drive-in might close for good, several community members tried to raise money to save it, but their efforts proved unsuccessful.
Basically, a rich guy bought it and is interested in keeping it in operation, which is nice. I don’t think nostalgic businesses that have had their moment need to be kept around—and more than that, I don’t see any mechanism to make that happen, if the economics of the business just don’t add up anymore—but I do like it when something old survives like this.
Does anyone remember texting ChaCha at 242242?, Reddit
This was before I had a smartphone, but one of my friends had one and we used to text ChaCha once in awhile with random questions. It was a service staffed by actual people who would rapid-answer questions by basically knowing a general area of interest plus googling and condensing the results into a brief answer. In a way, it was a lot like AI responses, and probably just as prone to error. But it was fun.
But someone points out an important difference: “iirc they always had relatively short answers that were complete. Really speaks to the difference between humans and machine learning. ChatGPT is always asking questions like it’s trying too hard.”
It apparently shut down in 2016, which is later than I would have guessed—we were using it several years earlier.
There’s this fun answer in the thread too: “I answered questions for them! I forget how I got into it, but I was a massive Lady Gaga fan at the time so I answered questions about her for ChaCha back in like 2010-2011ish. I was only in high school at the time.”
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