a long time ago, i wrote a post expressing incredulity that someone would consider the krog street bridge an eyesore.

you would think that people who aren’t in to that kind of thing probably wouldn’t want to live in cabbagetown, where purple houses, eclectic yard decorations and yes, graffiti, rule the day.

but apparently they do. today’s ajc contains an article about a man who actually sat in a tree and staked out the railroad fence along wylie avenue. apparently at around 2:00 am he caught some kids who were about to paint something, jumped out of his tree and assaulted them.

insane.

my favorite line in the article tho:

In front of police officers, Bowman asked the young men what they were doing out there so late at night, Jaeger said.

“You were in a tree at 2:30 in the morning,” they replied, according to Jaeger.

Bowman could not be reached for comment.

i really suggest that mr. bowman pack his bags and head to alpharetta.

photo courtesy of dbking

there is a great article in access atlanta today about the couple that bought and saved the plaza theater:

“It hit us: It’d be cool to try to keep that place open,” Jonathan said. “So we called and said, ‘How much you want for that place?’ I don’t know why. We just did it.”

They met with a broker, looked at the books, stopped by a bank.

Jonathan: “Finally we said, ‘Wow. I guess we can actually do this.’”

The joking stopped. Asking price for eveything but the leased building: $100,000

“I totally remember sitting at the dining room table going, ‘You want to do it? Are you sure we can do this? Maybe we shouldn’t do this,’ ” Gayle recalled.

Jonathan’s tie breaker: “It came down to, ‘I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. Let’s just do it.’”

So like a hipster remake of an old MGM musical, the Rejs did it. Almost two years later, they remain unlikely saviors of Atlanta’s oldest continuously operating movie house. For how much longer remains an open question.

the article goes on to discuss how the bread and butter of the plaza hasn’t been indie films like the owners thought, but rather special events like slasher flicks, grease sing-alongs and art shows in combination with films.

a quick check of the plaza’s web site shows some pretty neat stuff coming up including sideshow art combined with the movie killer klowns from outer space. who could beat that?

h/t to the atlmalcontent who says in his post, “the least cinephiles can do is help them break even by supporting the Plaza, real grass compared to the AstroTurf sameness of the multiplex.”

indeed.

Without a doubt, this year’s Presidential primary race has been heated, but Barack Obama has come out on top as the presumptive nominee for the Democratic party. His message of hope and change has caught on and is sweeping the country. People want a part of Obama. People want to be a part of this movement. People like Daniel Blackman, who’s running for State Representative for House District 61 (which covers East Point and Southwest Atlanta).

Mr. Blackman friended me on Twitter a few days ago, so I figured I’d check him out to see what he was all about, since he does cover my district. From his bio:

Daniel Blackman is a 28-year-old husband, father, and friend to many who lives, works and worships in Fulton County. He and his wife Jeanelle live in Southwest Atlanta with their 3 year old son, Anias and their 10 month old son, Zion. His commitment to family and community has fueled his passion to serve as an environmental consultant and community organizer, while his wife Jeanelle is a graphic designer and database administrator who has a passion for mentoring young women. Additionally, the couple co-owns an Atlanta-based graphic design firm called Visual Marketing International.

Nice to know…but does it explain why his website is a poorly blatant rip of Sen. Obama’s?

Ah, so many different ways to go with this one….

This post was not paid for by Daniel Blackman for House District 61.

I’d be surprised if his website was though.

Another fake doctor was exposed recently here in Atlanta — Eric Perteet. Maybe you’ve heard about him?

“He was a busy man, with a pager and cellphone always sounding. Parishioners at the church where he worshipped didn’t look twice when he came to services in his scrubs.

Nor did his wife, who’d slide over in the pew and smile when he joined her. Dr. Eric Perteet was saving lives, and adding a new dimension to hers, too.

That’s changed with the snap of handcuffs and the clang of a steel jail door.

Perteet is in the Fulton County Jail, charged with impersonating a physician. Officials at Piedmont Hospital, where police arrested him, deny that he ever worked in their emergency room or dealt with patients.

And his wife, Tammi Perteet?

She has a stack of documents that lay out a life built on lies. She has a scrub shirt from the hospital where she dropped her husband off for two months.

She has questions. [link]”

Honestly, I don’t think she should have too many questions. It just sounds like a case of her falling in love and not seeing the signs. How do you marry a doctor and not see his degree? See his office? We’d call that a “high-post brotha” ’round my way. She should’ve done like Teyana Taylor and Google him, baby!

Like I alluded to earlier, this isn’t the first fake doctor exposed here in the A — a few years back, you might remember Tiy-E Muhammad from TBS’ “The Real Gilligan’s Island” got exposed as being a fake doctor even though he was an associate professor at Clark-Atlanta University and running around dubbing himself a psychologist-relationship expert.

So what do you think of these Ph.Don’ts?

we have been having a rather spirited discussion across several blogs about the fate of downtown atlanta and what it might take to actually revitalize it and make it a place people would want to visit.

some of the best commentary i have read came from rashid muhammad in his post on the topic:

Anyhow, my Downtown Unification Theory has always been that if Five Points is going to be what it should - that would be a hub of downtown activity - connecting it to Centennial Park is the key. The problem with doing this via Marietta Street is that there are several buildings there that darken the path at night (State Bar, AJC, Telecom Tower, DFACS, HUD, etc) and offer little value to the visitor during the day. Luckie Street could also serve this purpose but at LEAST two of the parking lots there would have to be replaced by buildings that contain some sort of restaurants or entertainment. Right now the street lining is too perforated and not inviting enough for any tourist to really want to explore it much further than the Super 8 Motel. If the lot across from 123 Luckie were replaced with a nice development putting more stuff to do on the street that would be a big improvement.

ben k weighs in on his new atlanta real estate blog, terminal station:

Realistically, I think Five Points plaza will be the last place in Downtown to turn around. All the positive movement is happening on the peripherals - Castleberry Hill, the Allen Plaza and 12 Centennial stuff at the north side of downtown, Integral Group’s stuff on Auburn and even Capitol Gateway. That is a lot of housing to absorb, but if it can happen, then it will start bleeding into the real core of downtown, which has always been Five Points. I don’t think GSU will build their dorms at Underground any time soon, so these areas are going to have to be the driving forces that eventually squeeze Five Points and put enough pressure on things to force changes.

i have been falling in love with the architecture and the feel of downtown atlanta for months now; really since i started taking the bus to five points every day.

i would love so much to see it become the vibrant, integral community it could be. i am curious what you guys think. i don’t think it’s as easy as ‘get rid of the panhandlers.’

my suggestions include; an underground bus terminal, the revitlization of alabama street through tax incentives and finally figure out something to do with the railway gulch

please opine…..

on a bit of a lighter note form my last post, the insanely high-brow economist magazine is actually doing something here in our city. actually it’s funny i wrote that because i have been noticing a ton of ads for the economist popping up on marta buses, so i wonder if we are a focus city for them for some reason.

either way, the economist has teamed up with the performers from second city to present a riff on the art of political satire. the event will be hitting atlanta next monday, the 21st at the alliance theatre at 7:30 pm (details and a pretty funny video here) for the mere price of $15.

the event promises improv and live cartooning, which sounds absurdly interesting.

speaking of videos here is my favorite, a little riff on my chosen candidate :-)

I’m surprised they still let me post here at Metblogs. See, I spent the last month-plus living about two hours outside of Atlanta (that will have to be a whole ‘nother post) while we moved out of our East Atlanta home and waited to close on our new house in the burbs. I had no internet access at home. It was truly harrowing.

There. I said it. I can no longer say I live intown. I live in the burbs. OTP. Outside the fence.

I have written numerous times about my love for our old neighborhood. When it came down to it, though, I love my kids more. I just wasn’t ready to send my kid to a school with abysmal test scores and where he would be a less than one percent minority at that school. I know. Many parents send their kids to schools where their child is in that small a minority, but I wonder how many of them send them to a school where their child is in that small a minority and test scores are bottom of the barrel. My guess? Not many. I am thinking that parents might overlook the lack of diversity at a school if it meant a child would be surrounded by kids who are more successful.  We weighed the options and the issues, and it came down to the realization that sending my child to that school would simply serve the purpose of proving a point, rather than striving to give my child the best educational opportunities I can manage to give him.

When we made the decision not to send our children to the public elementary school in our neighborhood, we started looking at other options. Charter schools? Not an option for us in our area of unincorporated Dekalb. Private schools? Yikes. Even at the more affordable end they were going to cost us five to seven thousand dollars a year (and some of them cost much more than a year of public university tuitions!) Sure, we could swing $7000/year if I went back to work. Oh, wait - Our daughter will start school in four years. Then we’d be paying almost 15,000 dollars/year tuition. Not to mention the cost of after school childcare and for the summers, when they aren’t in school.

We searched for homes inside the perimeter in better school districts. (I dare anyone to start researching schools and not start going gray - It is as if someone didn’t want me to compare test scores and other information for schools in different areas and different school districts, much less for different states. Try to compare public and private schools and your head will explode.) We’d either be downsizing (and we already lived in a three BR), or paying so much for a house that, again, I would have to go back to work and then the daycare costs until both kids started elementary (and again, for summers) would barely make the back-to-work option worth it.

We slowly started discussing the possibility of moving outside the perimeter, at first laughingly, then in whispers, as it became a more real possibility, and finally we resigned ourselves to it. We started looking at homes in the school districts we had identified that had what we were looking for: Decent test scores, diversity, in a neighborhood we could afford, and not so far from town that the commute would suck my husband of any semblance of a meaningful life. We finally found an area we liked (ish), where houses are in our price range, the kids would have other kids to play with, and that we didn’t find too lacking in character. We bought a house here a few weeks ago.

When it came down to it, I cried when I left East Atlanta. I hated leaving the place where I met my husband, where I met friends and wonderful neighbors, and to which I brought two kids home from the hospital. I had been there long enough that I couldn’t go anywhere without at least seeing one person I knew from the neighborhood.
In the end, I know that it is for the best. The kids love the new house and neighborhood already, and my husband and I are laughingly giving in to a quieter way of life, and at the same time cracking up at what we have become. I do think, though, that we are not alone. I have already met four sets of neighbors with kids close in age to ours. They always ask where we moved from and then nod knowingly at our answer. Turns out they moved from Ormewood, Kirkwood, and East Atlanta themselves. As one girl told me, “We are city folk.”

I wonder how many people all over Atlanta have struggled with the same thing, forced by poverty, job location, housing prices or failing schools to make the same difficult decision that we made. Our decision is made, though, and we do not regret it. I just see it as an adventure, a challenge to find what is interesting and colorful, and special about the new area we live in. I’ve already been thinking a lot about it, and exploring this new frontier, and you can bet that you will see some Metblogs posts about it. I think that intown readers might be surprised at a few of my observations. I know I have already found a few things that surprised me.

well, as i write this it appears that another strong storm is bearing down on douglasville and moving due east.  okay, THIS STORM IS HEADED TO DOWNTOWN IN TWELVE MINUTES.  LARGE HAIL AND ROTATION.

it is official. the national weather service confirmed that vine city, downtown and cabbagetown were hit by an f2 tornado with max winds of 120 mph. i certainly wasn’t exaggerating in the post i wrote from my blackberry last night. all the areas i thought were hit were.

andisheh at clfreshloaf must have had access to power and his camera with him, because his post is much more extensive than mine. check it out, he also has links to several pages of flickr photos.

one thing i will say having driven down dekalb avenue a few times today is that the city and it’s citizens seem to have their act together.  the king marta station is getting picked up (several of the big floor to ceiling windows blew out) and the trains were running.  it looked like work was going on at the cotton mill loft.  the post office near lenny’s was already being worked on, and the southeast auto warehouse, whcih imploded, was being picked up.

i am going to write about my personal experience over on my personal blog when i can get around to it, but right now it looks like i may need to go hide again.

how did the rest of you survive the storm?

the ajc is reporting today that atlanta gas prices have reached an all-time high. citing the web site atlantagasprices.com the paper report that the average price for regular unleaded in the metro is $3.203.

i am curious, and i would love to hear from you solo commuters in the comments, how high is your threshold before you start considering other options.

for those of you already doing so, please feel free to use the comments section of this post to gloat….

p.s. - sorry for the f’ed up links. still learning our new publishing system.

A post title like that one is about as blindingly obvious as “Rain: Still Wet” but it isn’t often a gangly, bespectacled man with a nasal voice is beset by a crowd of people at Costco.

At least it isn’t during any of the times I’ve shopped there.

Still, this was about a week and a half ago and I didn’t have the nerve to ask whether he was running for Mayor. Most of the feedback he got was in regard to his radio show.

This was as the Cumberland Mall location, FWIW.

Good to know that the man practices what he <strike>cheaps</strike> preaches.