Bong Picture
A football player from Chamblee GA took a trip to Oregon.
@DavinBellamy17 Oregon trip going better than I thought 12:46 AM – 3 Feb 13
He posed for an embarrassing picture. The internet never forgets.
Christian comments: “The UGA chapter of the KKK is not gonna like this.”
Summer Rental
Ellis Sullivan is in a world of trouble. She loses her job. The plan to rent a beach house with life long friends is intact, and Elly Belly drives down to Nags Head in the middle of the night. She arrives early, and goes to check out the house. It is not ready for the girls, and won’t be for a few hours. Ellis goes for a walk on the beach, and sees a man standing on the porch of a garage apartment. The man takes a leak. It is the first exposed man Ellis has seen in eleven years.
(Spoiler Paragraph) Romance story veterans should not be surprised at what happens four hundred pages later. The garage dude begs Ellis to move in with him. After a gunfight, the story concludes. With a couple of exceptions, most people in the story have happy endings.
This is the world of Summer Rental. by Mary Kay Andrews. If nothing else, Summer Rental is a delightful waste of time. There was a surge of excitement when PG found a new Mary Kay Andrews book at the Chamblee library.
Summer Rental does have a few flaws in logic. Ellis and her bf only have a handful of dates before he decides it is true love. There is a subplot, involving a New Jersey lady on the lam from her killer husband. Dorie, one of the lifelong pals, invites Jersey girl to stay at the house. Julia, the third lifelong pal, is suspicious, and breaks into Jersey girl’s room. While Julia is in the room, she discovers a cash stash, and a pistol. Julia takes the pistol. Jersey girl does not miss the pistol, until killer hubby comes looking for her. This does not add up.
Mary Kay Andrews always seems to have a gay man in her books. He is usually an antique dealer, with flawless taste. In Summer Rental, Dorie is married to Stephen. It turns out that Stephen left Dorie for Matthew. The new bf has a fabulous house. Dorie,the discarded wife, has a baby on the way.
Despite the holes in the plot, Summer Rental is tons of fun. Most of the one star people at Amazon talk about wasting money by buying the book. The library copy is just as good as a bought copy, and they will find a place to keep it when you are through. Buying a book is always a waste of money, especially at retail price.
Mary Kay Andrews is in good shape, and should be producing fun books for at least twenty more years. The same cannot be said for Ferrol Sams. Sambo met his maker Tuesday, at the age of ninety.
Dr. Sams grew up on a farm in Fayette county, and went to Emory Medical School. He took a break in his education for World War II. Sambo finished his Doctor training, took a wife, and practiced medicine in Fayetteville for many years. After having four children, Sambo had an emergency vasectomy.
When he was in his fifties, Sambo decided to start writing books. A trilogy followed. Run With The Horsemen is about growing up on the farm. The Whisper Of The River is about college at Mercer University. When All The World Was Young is about World War II.
The earth does not own people like Ferrol Sams. Humanity rented him for a month in the summertime. Pictures today are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”.
The movie is courtesy of The Atlantic. This was written like James Joyce.
The Great Speckled Bird
One day in the eighth grade, PG had a sore spot in his eye. They called it a stye. One afternoon, he got out of school, walked to Lenox Square, saw a doctor, and got some drops to put in his eye.
When he left the doctor’s office, there was a man, standing in front of Rich’s on the sidewalk, selling a newspaper. He had dirty blond hair down past his shoulders. PG asked what the newspaper was. Mostly politics, the man said. PG gave him fifteen cents for a copy of “The Great Speckled Bird”.
The Bird was an underground newspaper. It was so bad, it needed to be buried. If you are under fifty, you have probably never seen one. These papers flourished for a while. The Bird was published from 1968 to 1976. The April 26, 1968 edition was volume one, number four. This was what PG bought that day.
The Georgia State University Library has a digital collection. Included in it are copies of The Great Speckled Bird. Included in this collection is edition Number Four . PG went looking for that first copy. He needed to be patient, for the GSU server took it’s time. Finally, the copy he asked for came up. It was mostly politics.
When PG saw page four, he knew it was the edition from forty four years ago. “Sergeant Pepper’s Vietnam Report” was the story of a young man sent to Nam. It had a paragraph that impressed young PG, and is reproduced here. The rest of the article is not that great, which is typical of most underground newspaper writing.
A couple of years later, PG spent the summer working at the Lenox Square Theater. The number two screen was a long skinny room. If you stood in the right place, you could hear the electric door openers of the Colonial Grocery store upstairs. The Bird salesmen were a feature at the mall that summer, which not everyone appreciated. This was the year of the second, and last, Atlanta Pop Festival. PG was not quite hip enough to make it. He was back in the city, taking tickets for “Fellini Satyricon”. The Bird was printing 26 pages an issue, with lots of ads, pictures, and the distinctive graphics of the era.
Stories about hippies, and the Bird, can be found at The Strip Project.
Pictures are from ” The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library” .
This is a repost, written like H.P. Lovecraft.
Open Letter About The New Stadium Project
This is a message for Scott Holcomb. He represents the 81st district in the Georgia House of Representatives. This body is going to be asked to allow The Georgia World Congress Center Authority to raise the limit on money they can borrow. If the Legislature does not pass this, the stadium will not be built under the present plan. In my opinion, it would be best for the citizens of Georgia to not pass this enabling legislation.
I have looked over the Memorandum of Understanding between the GWCCA and the Atlanta Falcons. I am a slack blogger, and not a lawyer, and my comprehension of this document is limited. There is language enabling both the Falcons, and the GWCCA, to back out of the deal if either party does not live up to their obligations.
What I could not find is whether the GWCCA is responsible to finish building the New Stadium Project (NSP), if the Falcons fall short on their end of the financing. I have not seen a plan for the Falcons to finance their part of the deal. This is an estimated $700 million. If the State is going to participate in this scheme, then we need to know how the Falcons plan to come up with $700 million.
The GWCCA portion of the NSP budget is estimated to be $300 million. It is assured that there will be much more money needed for infrastructure improvements. Some say the government part of the tab will be half a billion dollars. This is at a time when State, City, and County governments are having financial problems.
This brings us to another reason to not use tax revenue to finance the NSP. It is about our basic values as a society. At this time schools, roads, MARTA, water and sewer systems are out of money, and need basic maintenance. If we cannot provide people with a basic standard of living, then we have no business using public money to build a football stadium.
Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”.
Leg Cramp
Pain in the right thigh.
Take a leg cramp pill.
Go for a walk.
This usually works.
No rain.
Warm for january.
The pain leaves.
It is a new beginning.
This is life.
From The Heart Of Atlanta To Tyler Perry
There is an old saying, what goes around comes around. When you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind. The thing is, it is not always obvious what is payback for what. Moreton Rolleston Jr. filed a lawsuit to have the Civil Rights Act declared unconstitutional.Forty years later, a Black man, built a mansion on the site of Mr. Rolleston’s home. The fact that this Black man earned his money by playing Black women, in movies, is icing on the cake.
When the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, Moreton Rolleston, Jr., owned the Heart of Atlanta Motel. He filed a lawsuit, trying to have the law overturned by the courts. The case went to the Supreme Court, which upheld the law.
The legal justification of the Civil Rights Act was a law giving the U.S. Government the right to regulate interstate commerce. Mr. Rolleston argued that this use of the commerce clause went too far. “‘The argument that this law was passed to relieve a burden on interstate commerce is so much hogwash. It was intended to regulate the acts of individuals.’ If the commerce clause can be stretched that far, declared Rolleston, ‘Congress can regulate every facet of life.'” (PG supports all citizens having the right to housing, education, etc. He also wonders if we are on a slippery slope. The government keeps taking more and more freedom away.)
In 1969, Tyler Perry was born. From humble beginnings, he has been incredibly successful. His signature character is a woman named Madea.
In 1985, Mr. Rolleston was involved in a real estate deal that went sour. He was sued. In 2003, Mr. Rolleston was evicted from his Buckhead home. (Go here for details). In 2005, the propery was sold to Tyler Perry. When the source story was written in 2007, Mr. Rolleston had sued Mr. Perry several times, claiming that it was still his property.
Apparently, Mr. Rolleston , who was disbarred in 2007, is still alive.
HT Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub.. Pictures from The Library of Congress. This is a repost.
Big Hair
This monday morning post is written in response to the Trifecta Writing Challenge. The mission for today: “This weekend we’re asking you to write 33 words that will make us laugh or smile. Even a chuckle will do. We look forward to the communal spirit lifting. Good luck!”
Before thinking of what to say, PG put the pictures together. They are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”. The 33 words are about one of the pictures.
Buck Owens looked at the woman with big, black hair. She held onto her pocketbook with both hands. You don’t mean that. The man in the checkered suit looked ahead, but saw nothing.
L5P Sunday Afternoon
PG and Uzi went to Little Five Points Sunday afternoon. The afternoon got off to an early start, with the days getting shorter and colder. The drive down Clairmont Road centered on epistemic closure, epistemic circularity, palindromes,and the uroboru. This is not to say that anyone knew what those words meant, or how to pronounce them.
The wisdom of going to L5P was confirmed when a parking spot appeared just off McClendon Avenue. There were no signs warning against parking in this spot, and there seemed to be enough room for cars to turn onto the road. After getting out into the warm afternoon, PG left a shirt layer in the vehicle.
One goal of this trip was to see what happened to some old tv sets. Uzi had donated some non functioning boob tubes to the Variety Playhouse. The two went in back of the theater, and saw where the tv sets were no longer on the pallet behind the venue. Some resident black cats were not amused.
At some point, Uzi went into Junkman’s Daughter, while PG stayed outside to take pictures. A man was panhandling in the alley, and talking the ears off a young couple going to dinner with their young children. The street person said he never had children, which the family man said was a blessing.
The Vortex was discussed as a dinner alternative, but PG was concerned about the no idiot policy. A decision was made to go to the Piccadilly in Tucker. Since the Peachtree Industrial cafeteria closed, PG has been considering the alternatives. Uzi had concerns about the Tucker facility, but was persuaded to give it a try. There was a family in line ahead of PG/Uzi, ordering meals to go. They took a long time deciding what they wanted. After a while, they paid for their meals.
Turkey Dead Head
New Yorker has a long article this week, Deadhead The afterlife. It is about the tape archive of the Grateful Dead. There is no liberal media bias.
PG has known about the Dead since reading a Saturday Evening Post article about up and coming musical acts. This would have been in 67 or 68, when PG did not get it. There was a show in Piedmont Park in 1969, and a Veteran’s Day show at the Atlanta Municipal Auditorium in 1971. A friend of PG, Hampton, went to the Auditorium show, and was born again. PG heard about every note of that show. Finally, in December 1973, PG saw the Grateful Dead at the Omni. It did not live up to expectations.
Here is something from a previous chamblee54 post. At page 213 , the Dead have just played the seminal concert at the Atlanta Municipal Auditorium. The Auditorium was a sturdy old building, with a marble statue of Enrico Caruso in the lobby. Before the Fox was liberated from movie shows and the Civic Center civilized, the Auditorium was the only place in town to play. The bottom floor was horseshoe shaped, lit by naked light bulbs sticking out of the wall at a ninety degree angle. The base of these bulbs was blacked out to create an ersatz shade.
Soon after that show, 1971 became 1972, the dead went to europe, and america set out to re elect the president. Mr. Nixon had such an odious name, his own re election committee did not utter it. Meanwhile, Jerry and the boys went to Europe, recorded an album, did not get arrested, and were introduced to an opiate called Persian White. The latter would dominate the life of the fabled Garcia in the years to come.
About a year before that Omni show, another friend, Clam, had a Buford Hiway apartment to himself for a couple of weeks, and a new stereo. He had a copy of “Europe 72″, a three record set of the Dead playing in Europe. This has degenerated to this:”A whole section of the vault housed the sixteen-track fourteen-inch reels from the Dead’s tour of Europe in 1972. Last year, the Dead released the entire tour: a seventy-three-disk boxed set containing all twenty-two concerts and more than seventy hours of music. It came in a small steamer trunk and cost four hundred and fifty dollars. A run of twelve thousand two hundred sold out in four days. It is a pinnacle of completism, by the standards of any genre, and even a diehard might find it a test of patience to work through twenty-one versions of “Sugar Magnolia.” I got bogged down somewhere around Luxembourg.”
The NY article is written by another longtime fan. “The first memory I have of the Grateful Dead is of a classmate in sixth grade telling me he’d gone to see them with his older sister. He reported that the band consisted of a bunch of hairy old guys in baggy clothes sitting on a stage eating spaghetti. It occurred to me later that he might have made this up, or that his sister had perhaps said something about “noodling… I’ve never found anything in the literature regarding spaghetti.”
The article spends time discussing a show at the Fox Theater November 30, 1980. By this time, PG had done the vagabond thing, gone home, and was working at Davison’s downtown. He was totally out of the deadhead thing. The band soldiered on through the eighties. Jerry’s drug issues got worse and worse, and in 1986 he went into a diabetic coma and almost died.
At some point after that, the band became a floating party. The deadheads would take over the parking lot at the omni when they played here, and the community was a welcome lunch hour break from reality. On Mardi Gras day in 1992, PG said happymardigras to a girl, and she gave him a string of beads. Somehow, PG got to see omni shows in 1990 and 1991, and his life was not changed.
The pictures today are from The Library of Congress. This was written like Arthur Clarke. The pictures have a thanksgiving theme. When November 1 is on thursday, turkey day is November 22. Forty nine years ago, John Kennedy went to Dallas, with unfortunate results. Millions of turkeys empathize.
“I used to work for a company that produced annual reports. One year, I was sent on this huge cross country trip to art direct a series of shots for a food processing mega-company, and one of the stops involved a turkey farm. Okay, so you have to understand that turkeys are extremely skittish birds. The slightest thing will set them off, so the farmer kept them in a large, basically dark barn just to keep them under some semblance of control. So we go in, and the photographer sets up the lights, which he gradually turned on so the birds (and me, for that matter) could get used to it. Everything’s going fine. We have the farmer in front of his (literally) hundreds of free-range turkeys. The photographer clicks off the shot… and in doing so sets off a flash he forgot he had triggered. Immediate chaos: birds running everywhere.At least a dozen fainted and died right on the spot. Farmer was none too happy.”
William S. Burroughs met his maker a while back. The hypocrisy accountants like to point out the moolah corporate amerika is making by picking the bones of his literary carcass. Those companies are mostly owned by Germans now. The profits are being loaned to Greece, at usurious rates that insure their poverty for the next millenia.
There are two Burroughs famous for writing. The other is Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote the Tarzan books. A hippie is someone who dresses like Tarzan, wears his hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah. There is the Burroughs office equipment company, whose success fueled the decadent lifestyle of William Seward Burroughs.
Maybe The Cheetah is the place to be on this turkey day. In compliance with United States Code, Title 18, Section 2257, all models, actors, actresses and other persons that appear in any visual depiction of actual sexually explicit conduct, simulated sexual content or otherwise, displayed on our Website, were at least eighteen (18) years of age at the time such depictions were created. Records required to be maintained pursuant to United States Code, Title 18, Section 2257, are kept by the custodian of records at:thecheetah.com | Jack Braglia, VP, Operations | Cheetah Lounge | 887 Spring Street, NW | Atlanta, GA 30308.
Back to Willie Burroughs. The comments at his video give lie to the thought that intelligence is transmitted in a linear fashion. Like the humanoid who opined “William S. Burroughs was nearly jailed for obscenity for his words half a century ago. Now you can find his thanksgiving prayer on youtube, framed by Vevo artist Rhianna, pre-empted by a commercial for Ford Trucks. The revolution will be televised to sell Nike sneakers.” And whoever said that the occupation movement is really about consumerism run amok? “wow! buying stuff is almost as fun as creating something, but only requires the cognitive skills of a counting german shepherd. consumerism IS better than thinking.”
So, maybe this has gone on long enough. Today is the day for eating too much, watching overpaid steroid fiends bash each other in the gut, and maybe go to the store for the first round of shopping. But don’t forget to remember…”The neo-liberal is about as liberal as Archie Bunker. They are doctrinaire, intolerant of dissent and essentially unable to think outside of the talking points they get at the Daily Pus and Mania Matters. impressionable. gullible and driven by a deep seated hatred of western civilization, nee Christianity. That may be why they identify with Muslims, Castro and every other species of arrogant ideologue and totalitarian. Neo-Liberalism is a dangerous auto-immune disease.” “Your literary style isn’t effective. It is needlessly flowery and pretentious. Bravo.”
The Burning Of Atlanta
Around this time 147 years ago, Atlanta was on fire. General Sherman was preparing for his March to the sea, and wanted to destroy anything of value in the city. The fire is reported as being on 11-15 of November, depending on what source you use.
The November fire was the second great fire in Atlanta that year. On September 2, the city was conquered by the Union Army. The fleeing Confederates blew up a munitions depot, and set a large part of the city on fire. This is the fire the Scarlet O’Hara flees in “Gone With The Wind”.
After a series of bloody battles, the city was shelled by Yankee forces for forty days. There were many civilian casualties. General Sherman was tired of the war, angry at Atlanta, and ready for action. This is despite the fact that many in Atlanta were opposed to secession.
Click here to hear a lecture by Marc Wortman at the Atlanta History Center. Mr Wortman is the author of “The Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta”. The hour of talk is fascinating. The pictures, with one exception, are from Shorpy. (Shorpy got them from The Library of Congress ) The 1864 map is from a collection of images at Georgia State University. This is a repost.
Esoteric and Pedantic
The following feature presentation is a repost. Pictures are from ” The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”
Obviously,there is something to be said for wanting to speak up, but not having anything to say. To prove that, I am going to talk about a word…esoteric. According to Wiktionary , esoteric is :”1. Having to do with concepts that are highly theoretical and without obvious practical application.//2. Understood only by a chosen few or an inner circle.//3. Confidential; private.”
The “E word” plays a role in a story from 10th grade English. We were discussing a story, “The Rocking Horse Winner”, by D.H. Lawrence. The story was, well, boring and obscure, just like most of what I have seen by Mr. Lawrence.
The summer after 10th grade I worked in a movie theater. The ushers wore ghastly yellow uniforms, and saw the movies over and over. When I started, the Lenox Square 2 theater was showing “Women in Love”, based on a novel my D.H. Lawrence. Glenda Jackson copped an oscar for her portrayal of Gudrun Brangwen, and young Larry Kramer was one of the screenwriters. It did not improve my opinion of D.H. Lawrence. If the censors had not touched “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” D.H. Lawrence would be forgotten today.
Back to 10th grade english. We were discussing this wretched story, and a girl raised her hand. Why would any author would write something so esoteric. The teacher had never heard of this word before, and was amazed to hear it.
The Lenox Square 2 theater was a long, slender thing with a small screen. This was in 1970, when the concept of the multiplex had not evolved yet. LS2 was under a grocery store, and when the automatic door openers performed their duty, you could hear the motors in the theater below. The movies the rest of the summer were Fellini Satyricon, The Christine Jorgenson Story, and The Landlord.
Back to esoteric…or did I ever go away? Before you can understand esoteric, you must plumb the depths of pedantic …”1. Like a pedant, overly concerned with formal rules and trivial points of learning.// 2. Being showy of one’s knowledge, often in a boring manner.//3. Often used to describe a person who emphasizes his/her knowledge through the use of vocabulary; ostentatious in one’s learning.//4. Being finicky or picky with language.” Pedantic is an adjective that describes itself.
Letter To Fourteen Year Old PG
WordPress has this feature, the Daily Post. The idea is to get people to post more to their blog. PG already puts up material almost every day, but is generally open to new ideas. Today, the “daily prompt” is “Write a letter to your 14-year-old self.” It doesn’t say what part of your fifteenth year this should be, so PG is going for the weekend before the Presidential election. Yes, Forty Four years ago PG was fourteen. This will be written in first person.
Hey. It was suggested that I write a letter to myself when I was fourteen. The idea was to get people to write more. The thing is, I am already writing all the time. I post something to my “blog” every day. This can be suggestion number one… you don’t have to be part of a group effort to achieve something. Sometimes, you can do very well on your own. For a socially retarded person like me/you, that is not always an option.
December 31, 1988, was my last day as a beer drinker. Growing up in a teetotaling Baptist household, I never learned how to drink in good taste. When I did pick up the habit, I drank more than I should. After a while, I decided it was time to quit. I did it on my own, without going to AA. I never made a promise not to drink, I just did. That may be the one thing I have gotten right in my life. If I had not quit drinking when I did, there is a good chance I would not be here today.
I mentioned writing a blog. This is a one man operation, putting up stories and pictures in a magazine format. People look at it on machines that run through phone lines. There is more to it than that, but you will see this in about thirty years.
The 1968 Presidential election is on tuesday. This was between Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace. People said it was the worst choice they could remember. You will hear that phrase every four years, and it is always the truth. It is more truth than either candidate says. Every four years, the choices get worse. This year, the incumbent President was half white, half African, and that the Republican challenger is a Mormon. Neither one is very impressive.
There was a state senator running for Governor two years ago named Jimmy Carter. You voted for him in the seventh grade straw poll. Well, smiling Jimmy was elected Governor in 1970. When his four years was over, he ran for President, and won.
You are in ninth grade now, and it is a bit better than eighth. Cross Keys is a stinky, dangerous place. They closed down Lynwood Park High before you were in the eighth grade, and the first year was wild. This is the first time you have to deal with Black people, but it will not be the last. Sometimes you get along with them, and sometimes you don’t. It is a part of life.
Puberty has not kicked in yet, and you are wondering if it ever will. Eventually, your body will grow some hair, but not nearly as much as most other men. After a while, you will learn to enjoy your body.
It is difficult to make and keep friends. It was true in 1968, and it is true forty four years later. After a while, you get used to being by yourself, but do wish you could have more close relationships. Well, it is better than having no friends at all, and there are people in that boat.
There is a war going on, and you think it is going to go on until you are old enough to fight. The good news is that the troops will come home from Vietnam in 1973. President Nixon dragged the war out as long as he could, and finally made a deal with the communists.
Advice from an old person is usually ignored by the young, so I will not even try. Even with all the disappointments, it is good to be alive in 2012. There were a few close calls. I somehow wonder how, and why, I made it this far. Some would not be happy with this life, and there are days when I am not. This is the only choice. There is speculation about other lives, but this is the only one to be certain of. Even though it might not be what some would want, this is a good life.
One more thing about living and dying before we go. You are still going to church. That lasts a couple of more years, and then you have the rest of your life. Don’t worry about the stuff they teach at church about life after death. It isn’t the truth. People will use religion as another reason to hate you. Deal with it as best you can. Just try to make yourself happier, don’t hurt anyone unless you have to, and things will be either all right, or not all right.
Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”.
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