dear georgia republican party,

f you.

i am about the last guy you could have afforded to piss off. well maybe not exactly, but i am an rnc donor, volunteered for mccain, voted for sonny and casey a few years ago.

i believe in limited government and lower taxes. i believe charity is best left to private sector. i believe that government ought to stick to functions where there is a societal need and the market isn’t capable of providing a competing service. in short, i am your voter.

let’s go back to that last piece though. one of the places where it has been proven, over and over again, that government is needed is municipal mass transit. a strong mass transit system relies on government funding and is necessary to a good urban quality of life. and yet, despite this , the jokers in the georgia republican party that run this state decided to say fu to public transport.

so as a marta commuter, i say fu right back.

the funny thing is marta wasn’t even asking for new money. all they were asking for was to be able to use all of the money that is collected through sales tax in fulton and dekalb for operations. read that, not a state sales tax, a sales tax in two counties.

for those of you who don’t know about this, marta is forced by it’s absurd enabling law to put aside 50 percent of it’s sales tax regulation into a captial fund. no other transit system has to do this. just marta. why you ask? simple, the legislators at the time wanted to keep marta poor so it couldn’t offer free rides. that’s it. no other reason.

and despite all that, you couldn’t find a way to release this money so marta can keep operating. i ride marta every day. how many members of the martoc, including it’s inept chairwoman, jill chambers, can say the same? i ride it and more than 100,000 other people depend on it to get to work. and you are letting it starve.

why? i really don’t know. i don’t understand the legislative chicanery that led to this, but i know that there should have been a way to get it done. and you failed.

there is no telling what marta is going to have to do now. close bathrooms, eliminate weekend service, cut back bus routes? who knows. you could had prevented it, and you didn’t.

so screw you.

in my opinion you have no proven that you are completely incompetent to run this state. i will continue to vote for republicans at the national level, but next time i see a georgia office i am voting for the libertarian.

hope you got a few votes out of butts county out of this, because you lost one in fulton.

sincerely,

james hervey

Driving in Atlanta is a harrowing ordeal, long commutes for some, bumper to bumper traffic and loads of accidents every day.  Yes all of that is bad but a more stealth danger has haunted me during my stay here.  That is the hit and run dent on your car while parked and flying rocks.

I’ve never been able to keep a car nice, new and dent free in this town.  That hasn’t been my fault. Once while parked at The Stacks visiting a friend, I walked to my car and noticed the hood of my Dodge Stratus was dented and scratched with white paint. It looked as if a white truck backed up and ran over the top of the hood. I asked around and no one saw anything.

The next incident happened right in front of my house. I sold the Stratus to Carmax and drive a Toyota now. I have a driveway at the house but one day I had to park in the street. I walked to my car to leave and couldn’t get the door to open. I looked down and saw that a car had backed into the door leaving a football sized dent. I yanked and got the door open. There was no note, nothing.

One day while driving the connector north, I was behind a cement truck. I was a safe distance from the truck. A small rock fell from out of the truck and cracked my windshield. I was unable to get the plates of the truck. The crack started small but eventually spread costing me $260 for a new windshield.

So I ask you readers, have you had similar experiences driving in Atlanta? Am I alone in meeting bad parkers and flying rocks? Is it possible to keep your car dent free in this city?

I was eating breakfast at Carroll Street Cafe in Cabbagetown with a friend Sunday morning, when in quick succession I notice the following:

• the table next to us had two nice middle aged couples
• a 30-something woman in a lime green fuzzy running/sweat suit came into the restaurant
• as we were leaving a couple comes in with two young children in tow
• a woman was walking her Sheltie as we walked to the car

Trying to be green in Atlanta might be new to you since you watched An Inconvenient Truth last year and it scared the wee out of you, but it’s not new for a lot of in-towners. In fact, I think it’s is one of the many common values that ties us together as a community.

To that end, what’s been chapping me for years and keeping Vaseline in business is this: why is it such a pain in the tuckus to be green in our fair and otherwise ironically green city?

As an example of our brownness, I pose the question: does your local/favorite bar recycle?

If you guesstimate the bars in the ViHi, L5P, EAV, Inman Park areas alone to be in numbers close to 150, and you figure each of them sells an average of 50 bottles of beer a night (not counting restaurants and their wine/beer consumption) we’re at 7500 bottles a day being [presumably] thrown into a dumpster and not into a recycling bin.

Don’t get me started on local business and their paper consumption. I worked for a firm just after Y2K that didn’t recycle because they couldn’t find anyone that would come pick it up, and they were one of three dozen tenants in a Buckhead office building. Is this still the case today?

If you find yourself flitting about anywhere in North Carolina (some of the best hiking and river paddling is just two and a half hours away) and looking out at the landscape from the passenger seat, you’ll notice recycling centers are abundant and tucked off on the sides of roadways.

In Atlanta, we have few options, and they’re well kept secrets. Most apartment and condo compounds don’t have bins, and many curbside pick ups claim to be recycling your goods but I have my doubts.

So with that, and with the new year and Al Gores and God bless him and the interwebs, I bring you what little bits of greenie I have under my
beanie:

First (and with a HT to MetBlog alum Lori aka mingaling), there’s the ole drop and dash behind Whole Foods on Ponce. Here you can drop your dirties without sorting and scurry back around to the civilization side of the building, making you feel like a convict in the making – even if there is a big sign tell you it’s okay.

Reportedly, you can also drop your bits at Sevanunda, the Dekalb Farmers Market and IKEA though I’d try the two former before the latter.

For your nastier more complex electronic pieces parts after you go Office Space / PC load letter on ‘em, you can go to Grady High School every third Saturday of the month. Accepted items include: A/V equipment, cell phones, computer components, coax cables, walkmans, mice, computers, copiers, digital cameras, wire, DVD players, fax machines, batteries, wireless devices, keyboards, microwaves, misc. computer peripherals, monitors, mp3 players, pagers, Palm Pilots, power cables, power supplies, printers, projectors, scanners, server cabinets, speakers, steel and alloy rims (!?), steel scrap, stereo equipment, telephone equipment, toner cartridges, TV’s, vacuum cleaners, VCRs and video game systems.

I have my own doubts about where the city itself does its recycling and how that goes down. Maybe I’ll do a little investigative piece on it, but in the meantime I’ll continue to drop my goods where I know they’ll be taken care of. For many in Atlanta it isn’t even a consideration, if you don’t own a home (ie you rent an apartment that doesn’t offer recycling) you’re SOL and have no choice but to be an uber earth Samaritan and ironically increase your carbon footprint while trying to do good for the earth. Oy.

To this end, and to out myself as the trippy dippy hippie I am at heart, I’ll tell you I recently went out to the website for Barack Obama where you can submit your thoughts to him (more accurately, his staff) about what you’d like to see changed. My submission said something like this, as inspired by a twitter convo with @lauter and @carl (see also: I can haz twitter?):

The post office is a government operation. As such, you could and should enforce recycling in their centers by offering bins for paper next to mailboxes, where thousands of paper bits are disposed of every day.

Additionally, to hold a liquor license in this country you should be held to a high standard for recycling glass. Those caught disposing of recyclables in “regular” bins should have fines levied.

If you’re as into it as I am, take five minutes and submit a note, it certainly can’t hurt and you don’t even have to print/mail it. Win win!

Now that I’ve done all that rambling I do want to give props to Decatur, where it’s a different story: you “pay as you throw” and recycling is free, so you’re better off recycling every little bit you can.

One last thing, because this seems to be the post that never ends and I’m giving myself carpal tunnel: November 17th is Atlanta Recycles Day. I shittith thee not.

Recycling drop off behind Whole Foods on Ponce. The sign lists items you can drop: glass, newspapers, magazines, office paper, all plastic containers and bags, aluminum and steel, and also indicates no sorting is needed.

I’ve been in Atlanta fourteen years and I can count on my hands the number of people I’ve met who didn’t say “hey! I’ve never met anyone from Alaska!”. Two years ago I met another defector – my SO’s physician, who is now my physician. It’s only been in the last few months have I even run into another ex-Alaskan. And that? That’s because someone in the room brought up Palin.

I wasn’t embarrassed of her enough, so she has to come here and compound it by supporting Saxby? I know her visit all about me and getting under my skin. Go away already. I don’t want you or need you here in Atlanta. I don’t want people associating me with you. It was bad enough when it was just Jewel people associated with Alaska, and she’s not exactly high on my list after lying publicly and repeatedly about going straight her grandfathers homestead to Big City, California when she went to high school with me in Anchorage. I just love it when people leave out key details.

I feel so strongly about Palins visit I had half a mind to rally together the aforementioned escapees to rally in shirts with snappy jabbing slogans, but I’m too busy with other bits. Like planning ATL Tweet-Ups. WHAT? You don’t know? Tsk tsk. Search for ATL Tweeters on facebook and join in the fun.

The only rule is you can’t mention Palin when you meet me.

Okay, I might not…but I’ll think about it, and shame on you for making me.

You know who you are. You pack of people who piled out of the MARTA station at Lenox like ants from a hill that had been kicked. You who followed the young woman in the red high heeled boots, trailing her by 15 paces out into the intersection when the flaming hot hand on the digital pedestrian sign screamed DO NOT WALK at you with its solid illuminated signal. You who stood in front of my truck when I had the green light, then waffled about what to do like a squirrel on a country road causing me and the cars behind me to miss it entirely. And specifically YOU, schlubby wannabe rebel boy with your shaggy hair, horrible posture and 70’s sunglasses, who smacked the hood of my truck with a fist and yelled “pedestrians!” at me.

You give us a bad name.

I’m a pedestrian. I love walking around this city, I love that I get to live in a place that affords us mobility options (in some neighborhoods, anyway), and I love that we have the right of way. That does *not* mean you should abuse it by hiding behind the law (that you’ve conveniently misinterpreted) and it does not mean that given the chance, I won’t pull over and Nancy Kerrigan your ass with a tire iron.

I won’t, but you shouldn’t put it past me.

Seriously, thanks, to all you negligent pedestrians for giving us all a bad name, and for giving the people at organizations like PEDS one more hurdle to jump. I really appreciate it.

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.