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.

Alright so this is semi-stale bread. Get over it.

After The Great Err Affair, my belief that Bostonites were as dumb as an empty soup can were cemented - nea- ironized (my paragraph, my jibberish!). Apparently that wasn’t good enough for them, and they had to make sure they went down in the record books (not just the Hello Kitty one I keep under my pillow) as off-the-charts ignorant.

Police Blow Up Suspicious Device In Boston

(WBZ) BOSTON There were some tense moments in Boston’s financial district Wednesday morning as police were forced to blow up a suspicious device.

The bomb squad shut down busy Devonshire Street after someone spotted a green box chained to a no parking sign.

The box turned out to be some kind of traffic counting device and was completely harmless.

The question I want answered is this: does this mean Turner gets their $1m back?

Source: WBZTV

so the title of this post might need a little explaining. for those of you who don’t know what pandora is, it is an internet music site that is an outgrowth of the music genome project. pandora seeks to connect listeners with music that they will like but don’t know yet. it handles this daunting task much different from other recommendation sites though. most sites like last.fm or amazon.com use the listener’s rating of music or listening habits and churn it through an algorithm that compares it with people of similar taste to find recommendations.

pandora works much different. an actual human being listens to every piece of music submitted to the system for more than a half an hour and categorizes it along 400 different musical categories. the end user can then pick a song or an artist and pandora looks for other songs or artists that have been categorized similarly. thus the name “music genome” since that is what the categories strive to create; the genome of a song. listening to pandora helped me discover the now defunct folk-rock combo neutral milk hotel, which has been a staple of my ipod ever since.

well what does this have to do with atlanta you ask? stick around after the jump and i’ll tell you.
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okay so this time it looks like it’s for real*.

the national weather service has issued a winter storm warning for most of north georgia, including the city of atlanta. ice and freezing rain are expected to begin aroun 3:00 am and last through most of the morning.

need i remind anyone about how this city deals with ice storms?

it’a almost enough to make one yearn for the dog days of january…oh wait.

seriously, be safe. telecommute or call in sick if you can.

has anybody been to the grocery store yet? i haven’t but i would imagine that you would be hard pressed to find those items in any surplus. oh yes, ever since the ajc sent its news email out this morning with the title sleet, freezing rain tonight? you can be assured the rush was on for those items.

it appears our weird brush with spring in winter might finally be coming to close. the national weather service has issued the above hazardous weather statement calling for potential freezing rain over parts of the metro area tonight.

seriously, if you need toilet paper, go get it, because the panic buy has to be on….

Separately considered, of course. This past weekend I had occasion to go to Eclipse di Sol. It’s the first time I’ve been to that site since it was Rue de Paris (it was Muse also). I loved it. I had the cheese plate appetizer, because I love cheese and can never resist even though nobody ever brings you enough bread with the cheese, and a hamburger with bleu cheese and salsa on it. Very good. Now that the evenings are getting cooler and you won’t be swarmed by mosquitoes it’s actually nice sitting outside and watching the traffic go by as you enjoy your meal.

Intermezzo, the one in Buckhead, is always a two-edged sword for me. On the one hand, I really do like their desserts. On the other hand, there is no place in the city that I consistently have the worst service with. Now only are they slow beyond belief even when there is no one else in the place, but the wait staff tend to be snooty and stand-off-ish and you always get the sense that they feel like they are deigning to serve you - as if you ought to be honored that they are choosing to accept your money for their service.

I hadn’t been back there since they started charging for parking, but I really wanted beignets from Huey’s and it was closed. Seriously, when did that start happening? Huey’s, according to its website, isn’t open for dinner? It must have been two years ago when I was there for an after dinner dessert last AND I know I was there for a late dessert and coffee with friends when the Diamondbacks won the World Series (that’s 2001 if you don’t care to look it up - over the Yankees in 7 games - the second most exciting WS of all time - 1991 is the most). Maybe I’ve been here too long.

Strangely, even though it was closed (no lights on inside), I could’ve have gone in the Huey’s building. In fact, someone was in there, sitting at a booth with her laptop all alone. Using the free wifi, I assume.

I am tired of Georgia’s politicians apologizing and backpedaling. When are we going to start holding politicians accountable for their words and actions? Last week, Andrew Young made disparaging remarks about Jews, Koreans, and Arabs:

. . .they ran the ‘mom and pop’ stores out of my neighborhood,” the Sentinel, a newspaper serving the African-American community, reported. “But you see, those are the people who have been overcharging us — selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs; very few black people own these stores.

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My children and I attended story time at the Carter Center this morning. The stories are read in the “Book Nook” area, a corner of the main lobby equipped with bean bags and some chairs for parents. The leader read three books to the group, and then another woman took us on a nature walk around the grounds. The paths were easy to follow for both toddlers and strollers. We saw a couple of ponds, a Japanese garden, and the kids were given bread to feed to the ducks. The children were shown a list of pictures of things found on the ground and received a sticker when they spotted each item. (Items included cattails, ducks, fish, and a few different types of trees.) The nature walk leader fed the fish, which evidently have been getting picked off by overzealous birds. After that, we all headed to another part of the grounds to see the rose garden. Interesting fact that I didn’t know about the Carter Center? It is legal to fish the ponds there!

All in all, it was an enjoyable morning, although I would highly recommend bug spray and sunscreen to attendees. The grounds are open to the public, and there are plenty of spots for picnics, too.

Monday Book Nook and Garden Safari
August 7, 14, 21, and 31, 2006 at 10:00 a.m.
Free and Open to the Public

not to long ago i posted about this place lottafrutta that i had seen being worked on for quite some time right there at the corner of auburn and randolph (590 auburn ave, if you are feeling the urge to map it.)

well this morning after verifying that they had, indeed, opened (even if it is just day two for them) i took a look inside to see what they were offering.

pretty cool stuff. the shop specializes in all things fruit. they offer fruit cups made from fresh cut fruit and all the fruit is bought at local farmer’s markets. their specialty is fruit milkshakes all made, again, with fresh-cut fruit (yes the fresh-cut thing is a theme) with some pretty wild flavors including ‘mora,’ which is a south american blackberry, ‘maracuya,’ or passion fruit, and the specialty, ‘guanabana,’ which is a south american fruit as well.

there’s a pretty sweet assortment of fresh fruit popsicles and some to-go fruit cups too, if you don’t want to wait for it to be cut.
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For much of my life, I knew trolls to be little hairy dudes that hung out under bridges, and stopped people from crossing. But in Age of the Internet, everyone knows about the new trolls that have emerged–the lurking creatures that live for the cheap thrill of commenting negatively on anything and everything.
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