I was never much of a football girl. I grew up with a vague notion of hating aggies (whatever those were) and as a toddler would hook ‘em horns on command, but the actual football part never caught my eye. In college I always thought I had better things to do than cheer on my tiny college football team with 1,000 other people in an empty, echoey Super Dome.

Evidence. Actually enjoying myself at a football game.

In grad school I was lured to a tailgate with promises of sun, friends, BBQ, and beer on a pretty Saturday afternoon. I grudgingly went. We are not sports people. I don’t paint my face and support the team. Please. That day – who knew? I enjoyed a few sweetwaters, good company and a gorgeous Saturday afternoon. Well, huh! Football is awesome! I eventually even made it to a game! And, slowly, grew to be a Georgia Tech football fan.

And now, Bobby Dodd Stadium at Historic Grant Field is where I spend my home-game Saturdays. We sit in the back row of the east stands, where you can see the entire field and still catch a breeze wafting off the connector, where a group of friends congregates and stomps and cheers and sings and toasts the Yellow Jackets. It’s completely different from the typical small-town college football experience, as we are smack dab in the center of midtown Atlanta. Over my left shoulder towers the Bank of America building, and to my right, the midtown skyline. Night games are gorgeous, and if we’ve had too much to drink, we’ll walk a few blocks down Peachtree and catch a cab home. (more…)

Thanks CL ATL for the photo from Critical Mass a few months ago.

A friend of mine, Jim, posted yesterday about the endless bike versus car debates, sparked by the latest “SUV plows through group of cyclists” news story, this time in Augusta. (Okay, so actually that’s the first time I see a story just like this one, but in fairness, you do read about SUVs hitting single cyclists all the time).

The size of Atlanta’s cycling community apparently jumped 111% in 2009, and according to my personal anecdotal evidence, there are a lot more bikes out there than there ever were.  I see a lot more inexperienced riders flying down the sidewalks or not positioning themselves to be visible to traffic, but I also see a lot more visible, safe, cautious commuters and people just going places.  It’s an exciting time, I think, especially as the weather gets to be a more reasonable temperature for biking and people rediscover how frigging fun just running errands can be.

Jim’s concern (and honestly, the concern of anyone in the country who bikes with any regularity), is the disconnect between humans in automobiles and humans on bicycles. Both are viable means of transportation, but we tend to separate into groups and then villianize each other. As Jake the commenter in Jim’s blog points out, each side sees the worst and most egregious member of the other side as representative. The vegan jerks who blow through red lights and swerve around moving cars, with their Toms shoes and clouds of smug – those are the people I assume everyone’s up in arms about. Oh, them, or the roving bands of goo-eating spandex clad men with their clippy shoes and smooth legs. (To my friends who vaguely fit in one or the other of these categories… sorry, but you know it’s true).  And on the other hand, when I’m on a bike, just to be on the safe side, I assume that every SUV is driven by someone who is late, angry about it, drinking coffee, on the phone, and putting on makeup/shaving, all very small things that put my life in serious danger. What’s really fun is that since these are the representatives that leave comments on every news story, generally the flame wars are loud, angry, stupid, and long-lasting.

I think it’s pretty obvious that people need to show more respect to each other, but I don’t see an obvious solution to Atlanta’s (or the country’s) car-bike faceoff. I assumed it was a simple need for infrastructure – and I do still think dedicated bike lanes would encourage more people to bike, which would create more hybrid bike-car users who recognize both sides of the issues on the streets, but it clearly doesn’t stop there. What else can help?

A list of the country’s 25 most dangerous neighborhoods includes FOUR in Atlanta??  Oh my god, Marietta Street between Georgia Tech and Philips Arena is going to have 307 violent crimes! In some unspecified time period. My chances of becoming a victim here are one in nine?! Maybe I should think about moving to the suburbs – you know, we can get so much more house for the price… Oooh, but this area is more hip and trendy than 99% of U.S. neighborhoods. I should probably turn to a realtor for help.

What scary stuff is lurking behind this innocuous, 100-year-old condo building and design studio a few blocks down from the aquarium?

This is the vital information that’s been making the rounds from what seems to be some bunk real estate website and its “exclusive crime data.” It says they use algorithms, though, so it’s probably legit.

The Atlanta PD issued a response that I thought was pretty decent – City Councilman Kwanza Hall posted it here). They point out that no one can tell what methodology is used, that their numbers don’t match up with APD stats, that the study doesn’t seem to take into account the fact that the area in question includes major venues that host hundreds of thousands of people every year, and that the author is unresponsive to inquiries.

Do you think APD is hiding crime stats behind their skepticism? Is this report just sensationalism and jerrymandering in the pursuit of wrapping things up into a top-25 list? Is my chance of becoming a victim here in one year really one in nine? Ought I be panicking?

SW at Hartsfield?

Southwest Airlines, known in motivational and marketing seminars worldwide as a poster child for innovation and creativity, announced today that it’s buying out AirTran for $1.4 billion. I’m cautiously optimistic for the impact this will have on Atlanta. I like Southwest’s approach – it’s seriously no-frills, low-cost, for real. As a kid, my family would drive to Birmingham to fly Southwest. And my Atlanta allegiance, probably due to good marketing and the Skymiles program, lies much more with Delta than AirTran.

What think you guys? Optimistic about fares going down with more competition? Concerned about losing your AirTran rewards? Not a fan of waiting in line at the gate or the seat stampede? Couldn’t care less?

Though I sometimes question my qualifications for this sort of thing, I volunteer as a mentor for a program that works with Atlanta Public School high schoolers. The program, called 21^st Century Atlanta Scholars, requires that students endure a rigorous application process to the program itself, then endure the rigorous college application process itself, and finally, if they are admitted to and decide to attend one of the program’s “partner” universities, they get a full ride to college. Yep. A full ride. Partner universities include about a dozen schools, including Amherst, Bowdoin, Holy Cross, Middlebury and Wellesley.

I got involved with the program a year ago, after I spent some time grumping about how 18-year-old Abby would have liked a full ride to one of the “Little Ivies” and put on my big-girl pants.

21^st Century Scholars is a relatively new program—their first class of high school seniors graduated from college this spring.  It came about because a few teachers and administrators got together with Beverly Hall, superintendent for APS, to discuss the fact that their highest-performing and highest-potential students were not going any farther than Atlanta, maybe Athens. The program was created to help these students realize how widely varied their college options could be.

The kids aren’t limited just in terms of coming up with tuition – most of them have a lot more going on. They might have to take care of siblings while single parents work long hours. They might be juggling work and school themselves. They don’t generally have the resources to visit a campus. There are also often psychological issues at hand, both on the part of the parents and the students. College is kind of intimidating, frankly, without throwing in the fact that they could be going from a school full of black kids in the south to a school full of white kids in the north. They have to think of the academic pressures that will be present at Tufts that are just not there at Carver. These kids also may not all have the support of their parents, who picture their child going off to college and leaving them behind.

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Ah, crap, I’m a little last-minute on this, but this one’s it’s worth ten minutes of your time!  As reported earlier, the transportation legislation this year has divided the state up into 12 regions, and each region will vote (yea or nay) on a list of transportation projects and their accompanying 1% sales tax. TODAY is the last day to submit your comments to the Atlanta Regional Commission, who has developed the first bit of the first bit of this list. See details here, and the criteria for the list here (PDF).

My concern, which is cited more eloquently and with more detail at the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition here and here, is that they’ve set aside a whopping 0-5% to use on non-motorized projects.

Record numbers of Atlantans are hopping on bikes.  25% of our trips are made within a mile of the home and 40% are made within two miles – these are distances that, barring extreme temperatures, we should almost always bike. Or at least they are distances for which we should have the option to safely and comfortably bike.  Each of the 25 or so bicycles locked up outside my office represents one less car, less wear and tear on the roads, less pollution, more vibrant communities, healthier citizens, and less sprawl. I cannot imagine not encouraging this sort of transportation.

The culture is changing, and we need our infrastructure to keep up! All this to say that a 0-5% allocation for bike and ped programs is not acceptable for the Atlanta region to do so. Other cities (with which we are competing for jobs and investment) are adding bike lanes, installing bike racks, and encouraging alternative means of getting to work, and I worry that Georgia is stuck in a paradigm of an unsustainable, auto-focused transportation network. I ask you to check out the criteria the ARC has posted, and consider sending off a quick email to let them know how you feel about the future of transportation in Atlanta.

(I recognize that this may be as simple as “Don’t tax us anymore!”, which is another correct opinion. Make your voice heard!)

Labor Day weekend in Atlanta – once again, too many things going on to enjoy them all! Definitely not the worst problem to have. We’ve got the Georgia Tech season opener, Dragon*Con all weekend (with the parade just before kickoff, I might add), Decatur Book Festival, Trailer Vic’s Beach Party at the EARL, and LSU and UNC at the Dome. Ah, one of the ubiquitous restaurant weeks is starting, too!

I plan to check out the Dragon Con parade, the GT game, and hopefully a bit of the book festival. All on bikes (parking downtown and in midtown, I assume, will be pretty miserable with two football games going on), and some neighborhood park-grilling may be in my near future, too. What am I missing? What will you guys be up to?

One of my absolute all-time favorite books is A Confederacy of Dunces. I laugh aloud at Ignatius. It’s an amazing thing to me for a book to actually make someone laugh aloud, to the point of eye rolling by others in the room. (Which may or may not have happened repeatedly the last time I read it). For those who haven’t read it, the book is a first novel, written by John Kennedy Toole and published posthumously, about a great blasphemous child-man who knows that he is simply too smart for his own good, but isn’t really. Him and his momma, and a seedy bar, and a pants factory. And it’s set in New Orleans, in the 60’s, with characters that are despicable and pitiful or conniving and hilarious, or all four.

I was thrilled to see that a stage adaptation of Confederacy is running right now at um, Theatrical Outfit, a group that I’m ashamed to say I had never heard of.  Even though they have been on Luckie Street in downtown since 2004, and has been running since 1974. Information on the show is here – warning, video automatically starts streaming, and CL review is here.  They’ve extended their run to September 12^th. I plan on attending that last weekend – has anyone seen the show? Planning on it?

Most mornings I sit down in front of a computer screen and have an entirely unproductive 20 minutes while the coffee is steeping and getting cold. Then the day is peppered with emails and tweets and newsflashes and blog checkings, all of which are definitely 100% work-related. Still, though, I’m surely missing something – I’m just curious to see if there’s a good source of information for Atlanta culture and goings on.  What blogs should I be paying more attention to?  Is there a google calendar someone put together floating around out there? Does your friend have a hilarious weekly email that he sends to 30 people?  Where do you guys get your Atlanta-based intel? I’ll go first.

I love Scoutmob, like Thrillist (as a stingy female I’m not their primary demographic), and read Creative Loafing blogs and features pretty religiously for things to do/buy and cheap places to eat.  I read CL’s Omnivore blog (love Cliff) and actually go to the AJC for John Kessler’s food column.  For business news I turn to the Atlanta Business Chronicle and Global Atlanta, for Georgia politics I skim Peach Pundit, and I click through Paste Magazine for music and various culture (not Atlanta-specific but based here and such an awesome publication). For neighborhood news I’m on a listserv or two (I think most of the intown neighborhoods have these) and look to the EAV Buzz as well.

What say you guys?

Today’s the primary runoff, guys, a day where voters decide the players in major races but traditionally sees less than half the turnout of regular primaries and a fraction of regular elections.

Just a reminder, if you voted in the primary you must choose the same party ballot today. If you DIDN’T vote last month, you can choose either party today. That’s not binding – you aren’t declaring yourself a registered party member by voting or anything dramatic like that.

Today’s major race is the runoff between Republican candidates Karen Handel and Nathan Deal, but there are a few other statewide races (and congressional ones) still up for grabs in both parties. Take 15 minutes and inform yourself this morning – I’ve used the AJC’s voter guide, as it has candidate responses, but does anyone have any other (non-biased, please) suggestions?

And one last reminder, though you ought to already know where it is, you can find your polling place here through the Secretary of State’s office. Happy responsible citizening!