Today’s example (seen during my morning commute): Commercial Refrigeration Gasket Replacement Company Inspector Gasket versus DIC’s animated syndicated superhero Inspector Gadget.
Inspector Gasket:
Inspector Gadget:
Have an example of local appropriation of a licensed character, trademark or copyright? Suggest a story or leave a comment.
Seen on a bumpersticker on the way to work this morning: “Put that anta back in Atlanta”.
Opposition to airport codes, a dig at ATL Open/Brand Atlanta or subtle race-baiting in the local music scene?
Maybe everyone is just down on The ATL?
SI.com has a new feature article/report on fan experiences at MLB stadiums and Turner Field, home of the Braves, ranks 19th out of 30 venues.
I’ve never been a huge fan of “The Ted” but I don’t dislike it either. It just seems to lack some of the character of an older stadium, the neighborhood feel of some of those same stadiums and it comes off a bit vanilla.
Don’t get me wrong. The old Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium was as cookie cutter as they come, but isn’t “The Ted” just a newer version, following a different trend.
Sure, this trend is better, but it just lacks character.
Of course, cheap ticket prices and a winning tradition make any experience above average, but on the whole, I think ranking solidly in the middle seems about right to me.
What about you? How does “The Ted” stack up against other ballparks in your mind?
For the record, I like Wrigley Field, but I have roots in the Midwest and I saw my first game their at age 6. I also watched a game at the old Comiskey Park in it’s last season, but was unimpressed.
When the weather gets like this—warm but not hot, sunny but not humid—I think about dashing out to small towns in the country and looking for farmer’s markets. I think about driving around rustic roads with the windows down and the music up. I think about jarred honey and vegetables with dirt still on them.
In the Midwest, I have a good idea how to run out and find those places. Out here, I’ve only done it once, but to great success. Last autumn, the wife and I spent a weekend perusing old houses and buying fresh food in Washington, Georgia, and I’m pretty sure we’ll be driving back this spring to do it again. (See what I wrote back then.) It’s a good distance—away but not far—and a pretty drive, depending on how you do it.
When we were out there last fall, we decided to spring for a night in a local B&B, which I’ve actually never done before in the States. (I think of B&Bs as Something You Do In Europe and New England.) My advice? Do it. Go forth and spend even just one night in a small town this spring.
The B&B we chose was the Washington Plantation (pictured here), and we will absolutely go again. Just having the nice weather here has me thinking about it. The place is charming, but both big and cozy. You get rooms with fireplaces, but also cable, for the best of both worlds. Plus, it’s got a three-legged cat, which is always good.
I don’t have a fireplace or cable at my house, so that’s almost reason enough to seek out a night away right there. But, of course, a B&B is half bed and half breakfast. Our bedroom was a claw-foot-tub and candies-on-the-pillows kind of place, good for the history buff in me, but good also for the guy who wants to sit around and watch a Dirty Jobs marathon for two hours. Breakfast, I recall, was awfully good, with fresh fruit and French toast, but aside from the grits (terrific, but I’m neither Southern nor a purist, so my opinion may not be worth much), what I really remember is the conversation.
In my opinion, the hidden reason to stay at a B&B—and what makes it a trip in its own right—is the chance to chat with new people over breakfast. Every time I’ve done it, in the UK or the US, I’ve thought “it’s going to be awkward,” but it never is for long. At the Washington Plantation we talked politics with strangers and it wasn’t tense or vitriolic or fake. It was pleasant, thoughtful, reorienting. It was an exchange of ideas, like you read about. Even as somebody addicted to the Internet for it’s supposed ability to facilitate communication, I pine for happy conversations with strangers. You know, in person.
It said a lot about the place, to me, that it was the pinnacle of a long search for the perfect B&B-worthy home. The funny and welcoming Yankee couple that runs the Washington Plantation, Tom and Barb, drove up and down the old Colonies looking for a spot to live out the dream of running a B&B, and they landed here. It’s easy to see why. The house seems built for slowing down, for sipping at Saturdays, for breathing deep, for sweet tea and sunshine. By the end of breakfast, and maybe some kind of crazy-delicious sausage grits I can’t forget, you’ll probably start thinking about moving outside the Perimeter and opening a B&B, too.
Of course, you won’t go through with it. But that’s the point, right? We don’t have to. We can go and live inside somebody else’s dream house for a weekend, drink wine on a wraparound porch, chase a three-legged cat, and browse the local real estate, without giving up our lives ITP. We can get away, and come back. Good deal.
Next week, why Birmingham, Alabama’s Sloss Furnaces are a great photographer’s daytrip.
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.
What is it about Variety Playhouse? It’s right there. It’s a terrifically relaxed venue. Yet I almost never go. Except last night I did.
There was a time—not a long time, but a time—when I was bothered by the little scraps of light from cell phones and digital cameras held up from the standing room in front of the stage. It made me think of jack-necks with microphones and two-bit mini-disc devices held together with electrical tape, secretly recording shows back in Chicago. These weren’t keepsake bootlegs or peer-to-peer consolation prizes for folks who couldn’t make the show, back then. They were like clandestine surveillance experts looking for secret messages in the lyrics and, failing to find them, selling off the harmless recordings under the table. These guys were resellers, smuggling in mics and smuggling out contraband—bootleggers of the old-school variety, more Capone than Robin Hood.
Keeping Midtown dimly lit (if at all) since this morning.
[Via Amber on Twitter]
Anyone else thinking of that commercial where the squirrel causes the traffic accident or, perhaps, the farting squirrel ad?
I need to get out more often.
A customer at Parkgrounds said that there were signs going up in Cabbagetown. These signs read things like What’re You Looking At? and Thanks for Gawking. None of these signs appeared in any news reports I saw, despite all the coverage of the Cabbagetown damages.
Saturday morning, the Ides of March, the day after the tornado, the streets were dotted with people with cameras. Little amateur cameras, big digital SLRs, cameras with long lenses, cameras aimed out car windows, cameras in cell phones. Some folks drove around, popped open their car doors, snapped a shot, and moved on. Some walked from East Atlanta Village, where trees were laid across a handful of streets and an empty lot had become a graveyard for worn-out trunks, to Cabbagetown, where houses had become timbers and cars had been crumpled. They captured the honesty, the hurt, the shock, the confusion, the startling vulnerability of our homes and lives, the brutal unpredictability of the world’s impact on our illusory invulnerability.
It’s my feeling that un-doctored photography is, on some level, honest. It captures and reproduces; it doesn’t translate or imitate. It doesn’t render. It’s not a shameful thing to take a picture of someone else’s woe. It’s not crass to capture suffering on camera, because suffering is genuine and real and thus fair game for an honest medium. It happens, and so it can be recorded.
Saturday morning, I thought maybe I’ve been wrong. Maybe it’s more than awkward or un-neighborly to photographed a smashed home. Maybe it’s worse than rude. I’m still undecided.
What do you think?
(Photo by Elemess)
all of you have hopefully read my myriad of posts now about taking public transportation.
as a quick recap, a little more than three weeks ago i got ultimately fed up with atlanta traffic and decided i would try to make my commute on marta. after discovering that it really wasn’t so bad, i bought a thirty day pass and haven’t driven to work since. i also discovered that i could pick up a bus outside of my house, eliminating the need for a car completely on my commute.
and of course, last saturday, my gf and i discovered we could have a full, fun afternoon moving in atlanta relying solely on buses, trains and our feet. over the last few weeks i have sought to eliminate more and more of my trips that i would have taken by car.
now, i know we can have some pretty heated debates on global warming and dependence on foreign oil, but most of us would agree on the proposition that there are too many cars on atlanta’s streets.
so here is a challenge to those of us in the metroblogging community in atlanta, writers, readers and commenters. let’s see if we can do our part to reduce the number of cars on atlanta’s streets.
here is what i am proposing - all of you think hard about the trips you will take in your car starting tomorrow morning through next saturday and ask yourself, is there ONE trip i can make using alternate transportation - walking, biking, public transport - and then do it.
yes i am challenging all of you to eliminate one car trip over the next seven days. report back in the comments on this post or email me and we’ll post a recap next week.
i’ve put my time and effort where my mouth is and if i can do it, honestly anyone can. so let’s get at it. we have a lot of readers on this site, i’ll bet we can make a dent.
p.s. - bti, d.ortiz and rashid muhammad are totally exempt from this challenge as i know that all three have already taken its intent well to heart.
UPDATE - carla wrote in to remind me to tell you guys you can use cfpt’s new atrain transit mapping tool to plan your car free trip. i am about to head out on mine this morning.
the day after the story of atlanta-based rapper t.i.’s arrest on federal gun charges broke i was listening to the a-team on hot 107.9 (yes, don’t be so surprised, i have some pretty broad tastes.) anyway, they had an entertaiment lawyer on who was basically speculating that t.i. was probably set-up and he was probably set-up because white america doesn’t like the music he was selling to their kids.
so the question of whether t.i. was set-up or not is a factual one that will eventually be determined by a jury. if t.i. really did attempt to purchase machine guns and silencers as a convicted felon there is no doubt he is in violation of federal law. and if half the facts in the complain affidavit are true than he is certainly guilty. for example the complaint says that the atf has t.i. on tape asking for change from the $12K he gave his bodyguard to procure the guns.
the move to stand-up for t.i., or speculate about whether he was set-up, reminds me of a post i made a while back linking to a story about vick and his defenders. the story explained why there are many in the black community who rally almost instinctively to the defense of a black man accused of a crime.
and i get it. i understand that if the justice system has been used for decades to systematically ‘keep you in your place,’ you would be distrustful of it. i appreciate that if you image of law enforcement includes bull connor and his dogs, you might be reticent about a black man being taken down in a parking lot on piedmont and north.
i guess my real question is, is t.i. worth the defense though?
at what point is reflexively defending people like t.i. and mike vick doing a disservice to people who may really be the victims of inequality in the justice system.
cynthia tucker makes many of these points in her ajc editorial today, saying:
Last year, T.I. attended the funeral of Philant Johnson, 26, his best friend and personal assistant, who was shot dead in a gun battle among moving cars on I-75 near Cincinnati. Police said the gunfire followed an argument involving unidentified locals and T.I.’s entourage at a Cincinnati nightclub. If Harris had regrets about Johnson’s death, they apparently didn’t manifest as pacifism. He kept a small arsenal at his College Park home, according to police.
The criminal justice system — notorious for grinding black men down — gave the young rapper T.I. a second chance after he was convicted for selling cocaine. Not only has he launched a highly successful music career, but he has also won notice as an actor. He has a role in the new movie, “American Gangster,” starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe.
But given that second chance, what did Harris do? If he had machine guns, as police say, at whom did he intend to point them?
Homicide is the leading cause of death among black men between the ages of 15 and 30. And it is a fratricidal enterprise. Young black men are killed by other young black men.
If white entertainers were making millions singing about the slaughter of black men and mistreatment of black women, city streets would clog with protesters. Demonstrators would pack the halls of Congress. Commerce would grind to a halt as black activists demanded boycotts. But somehow, the violence and misogyny of T.I., 50 Cent and Nelly are less inflammatory.
Yes, a lot of their music is purchased by white consumers, as a lot of it is marketed by white executives. But blaming The Man seems shallow and irresponsible when black Americans are abetting their own destruction.
add to that that t.i. will be able to afford the best lawyers in the country, that he has the resources to mount as effective a defense as anyone else, and the question becomes, again, is rallying around him doing the cause of greater equality in the justice system really a disservice?
i don’t know the answer, but it’s sure worth asking.
(oh and i am betting we will not get universal agreement in the comments either)
