Dear Ma Bell,

I have two words for you, and they aren’t “happy birthday”. I have one word for you: sustainability.

This is a picture of my doorstep Monday night.

See those book thingies? They’re from you. It was really thoughtful of you to drop them off, but um…I didn’t ask for them. I don’t want them. I don’t need them. You wasted the “good surprise” on me. More over, I’m willing to wager the same sentiment is true for the hundreds of other people in my complex you assaulted with your paper wares.

Let’s do some quick math, shall we? Say my complex has 200 units. Yes, I’m being conservative, humor me. Say there are 43 such complexes within 5 miles of the city center (which there are, according to ApartmentGuide.com), and you leave two of these doorstops at each welcome mat. That’s 17,200 phone books, which makes you eligible for the reckless disregard for peoples wishes and the environment award of 2008.

Congratulations.

To write some big diatribe against the NY Sun’s Bloomberg’s piece on Atlanta transplants from New York would miss the point.

Are there things about Atlanta that pale in comparison to NYC? Absolutely.

Are they fundamentally different than some of the things my Midwestern parents complained about in 1988, the first full year we lived in Marietta. Not really.

Are you really surprised that there’s “culture shock” at work here? Certainly not.

My take: so long as we can agree on moving Atlanta forward toward some uniqe vision (ie NOT NYC-South) then I’m OK with any “progress” the displaced are willing to help affect.

Other than that, I really don’t care how they did it in New York.  (Sorry for paraphrasing a bumper sticker).

I’m all for more water near downtown, but I think we’re too late (and too far south) for TVA assistance and the drought might but a cramp in our style.

This one’s being debated everywhere, but I got the meme from Lori, per usual.

A fairly small and quiet contingent of a dozen or so anti-abortion/right-to-life activists were on the Georgia Tech side of the 10th Street bridge this morning.  They had graphic signs and red shirts (I didn’t catch the denominational affiliation or specific church).

They disbanded at about 9:30 or so as my wife and I were returning from daycare on our way to work.

Thankfully our 5-year-old didn’t see them on the way over the bridge.

As much as I disagree with their views AND support their right to express them, I’m fairly certain my wife would have jumped out of a moving car to beat one of them had her little girl seen the aborted fetus on their signs.

I’m just sayin’.

If you’ve got a picture or your own recollection, share a comment.

Tired of driving around to every AT&T store in the metro area or waiting in line at the Apple Store for your new iPhone 3g?

Sure. We all are.

At least you can rest easy knowing that your Atlanta-area Starbucks aren’t going anywhere any time soon, at least not according to this map, despite the company’s recent store closings.

[Via Lori]

So, good news, if you’re into that sorta “stuff”, coffee and Apple products alike.

Here’s hoping you’re sipping a latte, reading this on your new iPhone now.

Random Atlanta has the details on the unintentionally ironic Marta bus ad.

[Via Rusty]

Is this a thing that happens? While walking through East Atlanta Village on a Saturday night, my wife and I got shot by paintballs. It was a drive-by by a dark SUV, not two blocks from a cop parked at the Earl. They shot us in the back.

Back in the day, I played paintball a few times, so I already had a pretty good idea what it feels like to be hit: no big deal if you’re dressed for it. That night, we weren’t. I had a red, bruise-colored ring, beaded like it was sweating blood, where I took my hits. My wife took two to the torso, with no lasting damage beyond goopy pink splatters on both of us. No big deal, injury-wise, but what if we’d taken one to the head? The face?

“Get the license plate?” you’re asking. No, we didn’t. It took us a second to realize what had happened. We heard the shots, and the raucous verbal static of a carload of schmucks, but we figured we were hearing a can tossed out of the car, to our bad luck. Or maybe they’d run over something. Then we realized: “Hey… ow. What the hell?”

Truth be told, we couldn’t get that mad. Helplessness, I guess, diffused that. I don’t understand what makes someone think it’s okay to do that, though, so I can’t shake the lingering confusion. I mean, what the hell? Right?

Just how lousy and cowardly is it to drive around popping strangers, you know? How small a person do you have to be?

Oh, yes. In prison.

Via Extra Mustard, who have the money quote:

What are the chances of ESPN televising one of these games? We’d bet it’d get better ratings than Arena Foootball.

Should I just stop mentioning Vick?

What’s the problem over at WABE? It seems like every other day they screw up their timing, cut short a show, or lay out a span of dead air. This morning, after accidentally cutting short an interview with an Atlanta Magazine writer, they put out close to a solid minute of dead air. That’s pretty bad.

In recent months they’ve stopped airings of This American Life after twenty minutes and begun them again. They start shows late. They play their own promos simultaneously with material coming in from the national feed, creating an overlapping jumble of sound.

These are amateurish mistakes. My high-school radio station (where I got my FCC license) was smoother-produced than this. Is this somehow related to the usual NPR station funding problems or what?

Am I the only one bothered by this?

You know since Jane & Ted divorced (and Ted’s been less involved with the Braves, CNN, TBS & AOL/Time Warner) we’ve really missed an Atlantan spouting off and saying something kooky on national television.

But then Jane Fonda was on the Today Show yesterday and gave the world of viral video this gift:

As one commenter suggested, “pimping” is apparently more offensive than “cunt”. I’ll leave that differentiation to you, gentle reader.

this came into us via suggest-a-story and i thought i would put it out there for you. according to archinect, the buckhead branch library may be razed. the building was designed by mack sogin merril elam and is considered something of a marvel in architectural communities.

not all are impressed though. in an ajc article about the potential razing of the library, aaron rents founder and arbiter of all things classy in buckhead, “first class” charlie loudermilk is quoted as saying:

“I see it from my window. I think it’s ugly,” Loudermilk said. “I like brick and limestone, stuff that looks like quality”

(prehaps charlie has something like the black gloss entertainment center from aaron rents in mind. screams quality)

anyway if the library does go, it will be replaced by, you guessed it, a parking garage.

atlanta’s car addiction strikes again.

p.s. - hat tip to the first person to get the author and quote that the title of this post is from