500. Or Is It Five-Hundred?

The good people at WordPress have let me know that as of last week, I have completed 500 posts. Unless it is Five-Hundred posts. In either case, it might have been nice to know in advance that last week’s effort would be the Big Five-Oh-Oh. (Which sounds like an error in police work, according to certain slang, but I digress.) So what do I write about for such a momentous occasion? This is a problem.

On one hand, I could do a retrospective of my very favorite posts of all time. Although I have kind of done that on multiple end-of-year wrap-ups. With that many, it is hard to choose. They are kind of like children, although I only labor for a week on each one (more or less) instead of twenty-some years. If pressed, my favorites have been deep dives into fairly arcane subjects like Technicolor in the movies, the development of the recording industry from wax cylinders through stereo multi-track tape systems, and (of course) some favored and increasingly obscure food products. If pressed, a chance happening on an obscure stereo recording from the 1930’s led to what remains one of my very favorite topics.

Another idea is to look at other things that have achieved 500 (or Five-Hundred) somethings. There is the Indianapolis 500 – a race run since 1911 named for the number of miles covered by 200 laps around a 2.5 mile banked oval track. Then there was the fascination for that number by the U.S. auto industry of my youth.

The Ford Galaxie Five Hundred, the Dodge Coronet 500, the hot Dodge D-500 engine option of the late 1950’s, and even the cheapskate special Chevrolet Corvair 500 of the 1960’s. Across the pond there was the diminutive Fiat 500.

Aside from cars, 500 found other ways into weaving itself into my life. You could be attired in style by Botany 500. They seemed to attire the stars of all the black & white TV shows I used to watch, though I don’t recall ever owning anything they made. I am sure there are plenty more 500s (or five-hundreds) for consumer products that are slipping my increasingly porous mind, but you get the idea.

We are five-hundred years out from the year 1525, so there are lots of happenings from that year that we could commemmorate (despite 1525 seeming like pre-history for those not accustomed to paying attention to things that happened before any living relatives were born.) That year marked the birth of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, composer of some of the most beautiful vocal music ever created, as well as the death of Cuauhtemoch, the final dynastic ruler of the Aztec empire, at the hands of Cortez.

And, of course the Protestant Reformation was cracking apart already, with Martin Luther arguing with everyone who was anyone and the anabaptists saying “a pox on all of your houses and starting their own thing. Which would have been a tasteless figure of speech, given that the bubonic plague was spreading all over France at the time. Thinking it over, 1525 was a pretty grim time, so perhaps we should not spend any more time on it.

I guess the only choice is to trudge ahead to the big 501, which is the actual number of this post, and not the 500 I had intended to celebrate. Maybe this is this nature’s way of telling me “enough with the patting yourself on the back, get back to work!” And so I shall, when I come back next week for post No. 502. At least once I figure out what I will be writing about.

29 thoughts on “500. Or Is It Five-Hundred?”

  3. I recently completed 100 Curbside Classic articles (I started in 2018). I couldn’t believe I had created that many! But in your case if you’re doing 1 post a week for J.P.’s Blog and the years go by . . . well, you can do the math.

    Speaking of 500, I wish the U.S. government would start printing $500 bills again. Our highest denomination bill in circulation now is $100, which because of recent hyperinflation isn’t worth that much anymore. $100 today buys you what about $2 bought you back in the 1920s.

    America also had the most beautiful paper currency in the world prior to the recent re-designs. And our currency was backed by gold! (But that’s another story).

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    • Oooh, I wish I had remembered the $500 bill! You are right, that could be useful now, despite the government and the credit card industry doing all it can to discourage cash transactions. Oh well, as least we have the 500 cent bill with Lincoln’s portrait on it. 🙂

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  4. Congrats! My Dad awarded me a $500 bill in 1979. I hung on to it as long as possible but that was my monthly mortgage payment and I did not want that much money hanging around the house. So maybe about five years later I cashed it in (had some difficulty doing that at the bank). I wish I had taken a picture of me holding it because in 2019 I won a $100 bill for winning a Hearts tournament at the 60th birthday of my youngest sister. I wanted to frame a picture of the bill in the same frame as a photo of the contestants. Again I didn’t want an actual $100 bill hanging on the wall. But when I went to Kinko’s to make a copy, I discovered that their machine produced a defaced copy. I would have hung around and try and find a workaround but I was worried that all this new technology had already alerted the police!

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  5. I remember those Botany 500 suits, on sale at our local downtown Bonds men’s store. The height of Mad Men era sophistication. By the time I was fingering the material on medium to high level suits, they were long gone, and Hart, Shaffer and Marx were in the cue, as well as Bill Blass, Nino Cerutti, and Henry Weitz.

    Lovely $500 dollar bill, and by the way, according to my banker, still legal tender, as well as the $1000. They may not have made them for a while, but my banker said it wasn’t that hard to get a thou if I really wanted it! Early In my lifetime, the highly paid blue collar union workers rarely bought a car “on time”, and would usually trade in their three year old Impala for a new one, and pay the difference with $1000 bills! A late 60’s Impala usually around $2800. I remember going with a pal and his Dad to pick up their new car sometime in the late 60’s, and him peeling a few thousand dollar bills off to pay cash! BTW, lest you think the high cost of everything should bring big bills back, it’s almost impossible to even use a $50! I’ve been on photo shoots where I’ve started entirely with $50’s to pay things like location caterers who demand payment in cash, and so I didn’t have a big wad in my pocket, and no one would take them, not even cab drivers with steep tabs! Maximum $20. Please!

    Here’s some number weirdness. As I remember, it’s always been correct in prose to actually “spell out” a number instead of use a figure: as in five-hundred dollars, instead of $500.00. Over the last ten years or so, I’ve converted to actually using numerals for every number I’m writing about! For some reason, it seems like the millennial crowd seems to “gloss over” and miss written numerals, and I seem to run across less comprehension problems if I just write 10 years instead of ten-years, and ditto with $500. Instead of five-hundred dollars.

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    • That’s a great point: despite a $20 buying what a $5 bought not all that long ago, nobody wants to take a $20 anymore, let alone a $50 or a $100.

      Somehow I have gotten completely out of the habit of writing out numbers.

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  8. Congratulations!

    501? You could go buy yourself a new pair of Levi’s jeans. It seems rather fitting.

    As for 500, there is some song about walking 500 miles for…something. It’s one of those songs whose tune is more memorable than the lyrics. Don’t know if those artists made the Fortune 500 list or not…

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  9. Congrats on 500! I found another interesting 500 thing: Travel editor, Jeremy Atiyah, wrote a 500 word sentence. It is a superb sentence. I’d like to try writing one like it… someday… The key would be deciding the theme, something I do not seem capable of doing these days.

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  11. Well pat yourself on the back for reaching 500 posts JP! I like how you showed us other notable items in the “500” category. Since you’re from Indiana, writing about the Indy 500 was a shoo-in in that 500 category, My “blogiversary” is coming up on February 11th, so I’m planning to write about my favorite posts through the years, just four of them, in the last 12 years.

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  12. I wonder if we didn’t start blogging about the same time, J P (I’m right at my ten-year anniversary). When I started out I wasn’t as consistent with my weekly posts so there are gaps. Accordingly I’ll hit the big 5-0-0 sometime this summer. My photo filing system keeps track of the total, so let’s see if WordPress agrees with my count when the time comes. The $500 bill is very cool, though I’d be in a quandary (unlike the $2 bill displayed in my home office) about letting that much money lie around without spending it!

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  13. What a major achievement!

    If 500 was a year, we would be debating whether your next century started at 500 or 501. Like we did at the juncture of why two kay. (The acronym for this may have tripped up the spam filter on word press).

    I encourage you to solicit (see what I did there?) a commendation from your high school (or university) English teacher.

    Grats!

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