Paris on Ponce

Ponce de Leon Avenue is one of the swankiest streets in Atlanta. It is home to trendy coffee shops, traditional southern tea rooms, sad snowman murals, majestic diners, funky neon signs, art deco movie houses, stunning trees, ATL scooters, seedy motels, Krispy Kreme doughnut shops, Our lady of the Kudzu, over the top store signs, the fabulous Fox Theatre, dogs on motorcycles, the Zesto lunchroom, the coolest Grolsch billboard, and the Paris on Ponce store.

Paris on Ponce is a three building orange colored warehouse filled with 18th century antique to new designer furniture. We passed it yesterday, on our way to another furniture store: Gado Gado where we bought an Indonesian wall mirror framed in carved teak wood.

Today, there was another kind of Paris on Ponce de Leon when the Tour de Georgia finished in midtown Atlanta. The previous tours finished in Alpharetta, at less than two miles from our home. This year, the tour finished with six laps through Atlanta. Greg had a soccer match, so we could not go to cheer on the cyclists. Maybe one day, we'll cheer them on in the real Paris.

Fast growing cities

One of my favorite website is the one published by the US Census Bureau. They release interesting statistics on a continuous basis. This week, they released growth figures for metro areas.

The Atlanta metro area gained 890,000 residents from April 1, 2000, to July 1, 2006, the largest numerical gain of the nation’s 361 metro areas. Atlanta passed Boston and Detroit and is now the 9th largest city with 5.1 million residents.

Dallas-Fort Worth had the second largest numeric increase at 842,000, and totaled about 6 million people. Houston (with an increase of 825,000), Phoenix (787,000) and Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, Calif. (771,000) rounded out the top five metro area gainers over the time period.

The ten largest cities in the US are now (population in millions):

1. New York -- 18.8

2. Los Angeles -- 12.9

3. Chicago -- 9.5

4. Dallas - Fort Worth -- 6.0

5. Philadelphia -- 5.8

6. Houston -- 5.5

7. Miami - Fort Lauderdale -- 5.5

8. Washington -- 5.3

9. Atlanta -- 5.1

10. Detroit -- 4.5

van Kaas

What do cheese and painters have in common? Just like for windmills, tulips and liberal drug laws, Holland is known for both cheese and painters. So it should come as no surprise that Dutch cheese exporter K.H. de Jong is succesfully selling a line of cheeses named after famous painters: Rembrandt, Vincent, Mondrian. Even da Vinci has a cheese named after him, even though he's not Dutch. I guess the success of the da Vinci code proved too much for K.H. de Jong to ignore.

While the cheeses are quite tasty, I find the association with famous painters rather cheesy. Atlanta Foods International came up with a more creative blend of Dutch cheese and painting. They are marketing a line of Gouda cheeses under a brandname called "van Kaas". That's classic. Bordewijk or Elsschot could have come up with such a name. The label shows a windmill painted in a van Goghian style against a starry night sky.

Each museum should keep this cheese in their fridge.