jolomo

At least that would be funny! I was looking over the list of NCAA bowl games for this year and it's nice to see familiar names like Sugar, Rose and Orange but man the sponsorship names are getting lame! The Papajohns.com Bowl ... ah, catchy. How about GMAC Bowl ? Gheh. The MPC Computer Bowl has the double-whammy of sounding stupid and being tech-related. But my pick for stupidest sounding name is  http://www.meinekecarcarebowl.com/ in beautiful Charlotte, North Carolina. Geez

I think they finally went out of business but last year I was able to get an old 1910s-era Corona typewriter repaired in Decatur and they did a fantastic job. It was awesome that I caught them in time, but I wonder about a bunch of older-fashioned-type businesses that have been hurting the last 30 years or so. Lately with a new grill I've been severely dissatisfied with grocery meat: Whole Foods, Publix and Kroger are all hit or miss. So, I returned to an old Decatur Square stalwart that had to move to Emory Village a few years back: Shields. You pick your cut, you pick the thickness, you pick the size of some delicious aged beef plus they make their own sausages and meatloafs. Yeah, it's about 40% more expensive but damn good and, while it's four miles away, it's probably the only real butcher within 30 miles of the house.

An article by Seth Brown from two years ago had some interesting points about the high-tech industry, outsourcing and suburbia. He posits that places like Tyson's Corner and Alpharetta could quickly become Flint, Michigan. I.E. places where there's nothing to do since what was there happened to leave. I hear from people hiring in places like that who can't find folks who want to deal with the drive and avoid the gig -- no matter how cool it might be. To me this doesn't seem to be related to the death of suburbia but what do I know?

I've been trying to unload paper magazines for about 15 years now and some of the most beautiful artifacts I've had to part with are those old Omni mags from the 1980s. They did fiction (Gibson, Stirling, etc) and science tidbits and interviews with scientists and various other thinkers. In March 1985 was an interview with Edward de Bono who had an provacative suggestion: that "workers and unions, instead of retreating before robots, should take the initiative and get to own the robots, then lease them to the factory. I suggest a trinity concept betweeen finance companies, management and suppliers of labor or robots." Now this is a very bold idea which obviously never took hold: abstract the physical action applied to mass-produced sequences. But De Bono had another idea that can now be found in many a "wish it had happened thus" text, including for example Cradle to Cradle , where a factory's inputs should be downstream of its outputs and that lends t...

Caught a lecture tonight from Mayflower author, Nathaniel Philbrick at the Carter Center in the hopes of not needing to buy the book but frankly I was enthralled. The period from 1620 to 1675 was almost idyllic, sure plenty of intrigue but not much civ-threatening violence. Then all hell breaks loose with King Philip's War. The losses were stupendous! Of 70,000 total people in New England they lose a higher percentage than were lost in the American Civil War. The English settlers were more than "decimated", most villages burnt, and survived by the luck of Benjamin Church who had been living happily with the Indians in today's Rhode Island. Fascinating stuff and like Philbrick said, I didn't know much between "The First Thanksgiving" and 1776. So, anyways, I guess I'll have to get the book!

I don't get to look at blogs much anymore: funny how having everything blocked at the work desktop can change things :) So I happen to check Boing Boing today for the first time in months and what's at the top but a strange story about a back yard in Grant Park! http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/05/the_demon_fish_of_so.html Not sure what this means for the future, but hopefully it's not one of my old houses! [that post is long gone, here's a copy] Dr. Paul J. Camp at Spelman College's Department of Physics in Atlanta, wrote about a Fortean-style mystery involving fish that seemingly teleport in his ponds.  THE DEMON FISH OF SOUTH ATLANTA  By Paul J. Camp So we bought this 105 year old Victorian in Grant Park, and moved in December 2.5 years ago. It is a pretty awesome house, and the guys that owned it before were inveterate gardeners so the back yard is full of flowers. It also has two ponds, connected by a recirculating pump and a short creek-like thingy. Wh...

We didn't have all that great a time in Newahlins, it was February and cold and mostly rainy around St. Valentine's Day. Not all that impressed with Bourbon Street even with the Confederacy of Dunces ringing 'round my brain. The people seemed OK and we had a really short mass on Sunday with the back 2 pews full of sleeping bums.  I was hunting up bookshops and we ended up between Jackson Square & Esplanade on Decatur Street. I think the first thing we noticed were the drink rails at just the right hight on all the posts along that section. There was a Margarittaville which, although cheesy, had the best bathrooms thusfar, but across the street I had noticed a kind of dutch-door open bar called Molly's and after visiting Central Grocery we made it back there and spent a couple of days hanging out.  I remember sitting facing the street listening to the juke box and hearing a certain tune that just grabbed me -- Mary's from Jersey and I'm an 80's Springste...

To all the bookstores I've loved before Got a real scare at lunch today when I read Cliff Bostock's column in Creative Loafing about Teaspace taking over A Capella Books's storefront .Yikes! That's my neighborhood bookstore, sure there'd still be Charis but they have an extremely eccentric selection and I know there's supposed to be a Barnes & Noble at the Edgewood Retail District but A Capella was a special little place. Tonight I walked in and saw the tell-tale bargain discount shelves throughout the store but thankfully they're just moving. Over next door to the 5 Points Pharmacy on Moreland (down from Criminal Records and Junkman's Daughter). They're just selling the stuff they'd rather not move and plan to be open at the new location by next month. After all that mental anguish, I started thinking about our other lost bookstores. Most recently was Mark Steven's Science Fiction & Mystery Bookstore which closed last year af...

These folks called A Flock of Segers do clever visual puns on band names, movies, etc. This one's my favorite: Thelonius Monkees

Nice little essay called Useful Dead Technologies on kuro5hin.org. In particular I miss regular volume knobs in cars! Buttons are soooo annoying. Being the owner of a little postage stamp front yard, I use a push, cylinder-style mower which I love mainly for the quiet (I hate loud motors), the little bit of exercise I get and the looks I get (I live on a street with lots of pedestrians).

Downtown had 18,507 spaces of which 16,460 were off-street and 2,047 were curb of the offstreet spots, 11,609 were signle-level and 4,851 in structures of two or more levels estimated demand exceeding supply: 600 (I'll have to hunt down current numbers for comparison -- anybody got a clue where that could come from?)

Found this in some notes from a meeting with a bunch of old Atlanta Crackers players on 26 Aug 2003 at the Margaret Mitchell House Buck Riddle who used to play first base was talking about all the gamblers in Poncey Park out in the left field bleachers. Here are some of the odds that would be offered on a per-pitch basis Fly ball (caught) 2 to 1 Foul tipped 3 to 1 Anybody know more standard odds from those days? 1930s to the 50s One more funny story. This from lefty pitcher Dick Kelly (~1954). They were playing an exhibition game against inmates in the Atlanta Pen. He heard this from the crowd: Take your time, you've got 20 years to get this guy out

Nice distillation of Hayek 's ideas of how markets spontaneously form to solve problems from an interview with Bruce Caldwell , author of a 2003 biography of Hayek, in Reason magazine dated Jan 2005. Paris gets fed No one intentionally plans on feeding Paris, but millions upon millions of people get up every morning and get what they want for breakfast. How does that happen? Hayek's answer is that a market system ends up coordinating individual activity. Millions of people are out there pursuing their own interest, but the net result is a coordination of economic activities. And prices are the things that contain people's knowledge. While talking about socialism and fascism's tendency to attempt to conduct things from the top pretending to have "perfect knowledge" (which, of course, can't exist in a single place) ...or paving over Iraq. I think Iraq actually is a perfect example of this. You don't just come in and say, "Here are all the...

From an interview with Todd Rundgren for Linux Magazine (July 2004) I believe in the free software movement, open source, and all that other stuff, because basically I'd like to live in a world where everyone was rich to the point that they could just give away everything to anyone else: you see someone with a lack, and you have what they need, so you just give it to them, and that's life. That's not real, I understand, because as brilliant as we all are, we're still dominated by an animal [instinct] that causes us to reflexively protect what's ours. It's as if we're saying, "If you steal my television, I will die, so therefore I have the right to shoot you." Now, if I catch you stealing my television, my attitude is "I feel a little creeped out that you snuck into my house, but if you need the television so freakin' badly, take the damn thing. I can get another TV." I sort of have the same attitude about the file swapping and t...

Breakdown of the human body's 6.71 x 10 27 atoms. I have 2 x 10 19 gold atoms. Woo-hoo!!

140 years ago today. Just had to post this from Sherman's memoirs Along the railroad they were more successful. Sweeping over a small force with two guns, they reached our main line, broke through it, and got possession of De Gress's battery of four twenty-pound Parrotts, killing every horse, and turning the guns against us.... These combined forces drove the enemy into Atlanta, recovering the twenty-pound Parrott guns -- but one of them was found "bursted" while in the possession of the enemy. The two six-pounders farther in advance were, however, lost, and had been hauled back by the enemy into Atlanta. Poor Captain de Gress came to me in tears, lamenting the loss of his favorite guns; when they were regained he had only a few men left, and not a single horse. He asked an order for a reëquipment, but I told him he must beg and borrow of others till he could restore his battery, now reduced to three guns. How he did so I do not know, but in a short time he did...

This was from my old Inman Park house: What buildings can you see? Until last week I could see the Bellsouth tower, but it's getting blocked by some of the new apartments at the Mead development which also blocked what little I could see of One Atlantic Center. I can still see Bank of America building and SunTrust Plaza. Until the leaves grow in I can barely see the downtown Marriott, 191 Peachtree, the Westin and Georgia Pacific building. What can you see from your house? Currently I can only see the Bank of America tower but in the winter I can also see SunTrust Plaza (are they going to rename it soon?), the downtown Marriott and, of course, Ponce City Market.