I have been to the Costco on Wendover Avenue in Greensboro many, many times. What happens there? You know, Costco things. You snag cheap rotisserie chickens. You order pizza or a hot dog to go. You stroke your chin while perusing the Kirkland-brand wine like a sommelier in a sweatshirt. Costco is great, but nothing amazing ever happens in a Costco.

Until last week, apparently:

Frank Reich, you’ll remember, is a longtime football coach who was fired just 11 games into his first season with the Carolina Panthers. That was in November 2023. Andrew Luck, Stanford’s general manager, made Reich the temporary coach of the Cardinal while that program begins to dig itself out of the hole that it dug itself into. So, what’s Frank Reich been doing for the last 16 months? Not coaching football, that’s what. The man is 63. He’s signed several multi-million dollar contracts over the course of his life. He could afford some time off.

Still, what was he doing at a Costco in Greensboro? SB Nation’s James Dator, who knows first-hand what it’s like to pop up in unexpected places, went to the warehouse to find out. Did he find Frank Reich? No! Did he leave with a story anyway? Yes! That, along with a chicken bake and 28 hot dogs.

So, again, why was Frank Reich in Greensboro? Here’s the answer:

He lives here.

According to property records, Reich and his wife Linda bought a newly-built home in the northern suburb of Summerfield in April 2024. It’s not as random as you might think. His daughters live in Charlotte and Greensboro, and his sister is from Greensboro as well. The Stanford job won’t take him away from his new house for very long. It’s an interim position and will only last a year. Even so, a temporary move from North Carolina to California means Reich won’t even have to leave ACC country! What a world!

One small note: When I was in Charlotte, a city of nearly a million people, I would still be in awe of bumping into a famous person. I once saw Ron Rivera eating a small bowl of oatmeal at a Starbucks in SouthPark and thought: Wow! What’s he doing here?! I mean, he was coach of the Panthers at the time. But still, it made sense that well-known folks would have some sort of business in North Carolina’s largest city. Greensboro, however, is a third of the size of Charlotte, so when folks of the same prominence end up here, it turns into a genuine head-scratcher.

Which is to say: If you can tell me why Flavor Flav was in this town in 2015, I would appreciate your insight.

In other Greensboro news, I noticed a small but significant change at the top of the tallest building in town. Here’s a picture. See if you can spot it:

Figure it out? It’s in the display at the very top of the building. If it looks old, that’s because it is: That light board at the top has been up and running ever since the skyscraper opened in 1990. Back then, it was known as the Jefferson-Pilot Building, and in addition to displaying the time and temperature, it would also flash the letters “JP.” At least, it did until 2007, when it merged with the much larger Lincoln Financial Group. The new company swapped the letters out. “JP” became “LFG.”

If you’re chuckling a little, just know that LFG really didn’t mean anything significant at the time. The abbreviation has been used by gamers for more than 20 years as shorthand for “Looking For Group,” and a web comic with the same name ran from 2006 until 2023. LFG as a search term peaked about ten years ago, according to Google Trends, seemingly because the new Destiny online first-person shooter game came out in 2014, and people wanted to find others to play with (There’s a whole DestinyLFG subreddit dedicated to this purpose, and it’s been running for a decade now).

At some point LFG changed from “Looking For Group” to a shorthand version of “Lets Fucking Go!” It also, plausibly, could stand for “Lets Freaking Go,” but Google Trends show FAR fewer people using that version. I can’t really say for sure, but people really started saying LFG as a rallying cry during the pandemic, and it’s still in heavy use today.

All of which is to say that the Lincoln Financial Building has largely stayed the same over its 35 years of existence. The rest of the world changed. So through no fault of its own, the initials of a skyscraper’s biggest tenant turned into some accidental inspiration for the meme generation.

Of course, large corporations are not chill and have no sense of humor. So at some point in the fairly recent past, someone who works in the building undoubtedly told their boss what “LFG” stands for these days, and the boss told somebody else to remove the G. So today, the “LFG” is merely “LF.” Which, I’m sorry, is hella lame. In this life, you don’t often get the chance to get hyped-up by a time-and-temperature sign. Cherish every moment. Appreciate every potty-mouthed skyscraper.

The White Lotus is over and (spoiler alert) nothing gruesome happened while the Durham-accented Timothy Ratliff character was wearing a Duke t-shirt! Even so, the show’s penultimate episode gave us a bit where Victoria Ratliff, a UNC grad played by Parker Posey, is asking a young woman with an older boyfriend why so many younger women around her are with so many “middle-aged weirdos.” She then urges the young woman to come to North Carolina, where she can get hooked up with rich but “respectable” men.

Anyhow, Rabbit Hole reader and internet-fluent pastor Solomon Missouri clipped the relevant part for your general memery purposes:

On a lesser note, NC State’s new basketball coach, Will Wade, is hiring a bunch of assistants, and the Wolfpack social team created a graphic for one of them. I’m so sorry, but when I see it, I can only see a man laughing hysterically at an off-screen child, or Ray Liotta in “Goodfellas.”