Radical Georgia Moderate

I‘m ripping of the first part of this post from Amber because I’m not feeling super creative this evening. This was how the GDGF and I spent much of the last night of the year:

It’s already been covered elsewhere, but state Sen. Chip Rogers has withdrawn his pre-filed “can’t remove feeding tubes” bill. I think it would have been awesome if the Legislature had tried to pass that dog. Roundabout 80 percent of the country (my recollection, which is not likely 100 percent accurate, but not far off either) thought the national Republican leadership’s reaction was crazy and stupid in the Terry Schiavo case. Remember Senator Bill Frist declaring her “not a vegetable” after watching a tape? Anybody care to guess how many state House seats the GOP would have lost if they’d dabbled with that degree of wingnuttery in an election year?

It’s going to be a little while before I upgrade, but Wordpress 2.0 was officially released today for you early adopters. Download it here. A shiny new web site appears to have been designed to match the release, at least at a glance. The existing versions of my Wordpress themes should work with the new version, though you won’t get the nifty thumbnail preview in the admin section right now. Upgrades to come when I get time.

I propose the Fuck You Politics political party, with this post from Donnie as its manifesto.

As a running warts-and-all tally of what someone was thinking at a given moment in time, blogs lend themselves well to retrospecting. To me it seems inevitable for someone who amasses daily thoughts into a categorized, dated journal to look back on those thoughts at some point and to say: what was that about? It seems especially inevitable at the end of a calendar year, a time when most people evaluate where they’ve been, where they are, and where they’re going.

If I hold another NCAA picks contest next year (as of now, I tentatively plan to, but who can predict the future?), there will need to be some changes. There are a few problems that arose in this year’s contest that I’d like to address next year, not the least of which is the basic format of the thing is flawed. As the pre-bowl standings suggest, the format would allow someone to just choose favorites the entire season and be in contention to win. So, there will be a format change of some kind next year, because people betting that way would make for a boring contest until the last week.

The vote was 5-1 this time around after being deadlocked in a 3-3 tie for weeks. Read about it here (login). If North Fulton were to break off into Milton County, I wonder how that would affect the Beltline’s funding. And MARTA’s funding.

Some of metro Atlanta’s traditional media outlets have made a big push onto the web recently. This post is mostly a reminder to me to review the new sites and features later since I haven’t had time to really dig into them.

• New web site for Air America affiliate - I’ve never actually listened to Air America, but maybe I’ll give it a shot now that they’re posting old shows on the web at www.1690airatlanta.com. I’m mostly interested in Air Loaf, Creative Loafing’s local politics program, but will probably dabble with the other shows at some point. The site’s design is pretty hideous, with a jump page and frames, but… well, like I said, at least they’re posting old shows.
• AJC4Me - AJC4me is a new off-shoot of the AJC’s regular web site. My first impression is it’s like Yahoo’s personal homepage, but on a more local scale. It’s an aggregator where one can drag and drop blocks of content from both inside and outside the AJC’s site. This gives the site a Tivo-like shine instead of the impression of an identitiy crisis that most newspaper sites (including the AJC’s main site) give off.

  You might remember that the paper has also created an expansive blogs section during the past year or so. I was skeptical of it at first, but I’ll give them credit for letting it evolve into something more than just re-branded news stories. This primarily occurred because they let readers comment on the site, a relatively bold step for a company like Cox (which owns the AJC).

• Creative Loafing redesign, blogs, podcasts - The new site isn’t quite as pretty as the old site, but it’s hella better as organization and actually using it goes. I’d be hard-pressed to tell you exactly when the site changed to the new design since I mostly have been reading the print edition of the Loaf, but I think that — like the podcasts and blogs — it must have happened after the new web editor Laura Fries took over (she has her own web site). I definitely want to check out the podcasts when I get some time.

The nerd in me would have liked to have seen all the companies use standards-licious XHTML and CSS on their web sites, but I’m just happy for now there are more (and better) options for how to get my news.

I grew up playing and watching baseball. I collected cards. Moreover, I poured over Beckett’s price guides every month like a little stock broker. My dad bought me hundreds packs of baseball cards at Guthrie’s Pharmacy, urging me not to tell my mom about them. They were organized in bleached cardboard boxes that took up close to all the various nooks and crannies of my bedroom (the parts that weren’t taken up by baseball and karate trophies).

For several summers, an older friend, my brother and I would walk up to Field 2 in Sewell Park to throw and hit around. I could still guide any of you through the treacherous shortcut behind one of my neighbor’s houses that cut about half a mile out of the trip. When we weren’t doing that, we were playing tennis ball baseball in the cul de sac in front of my parents’ house.

I played summer league baseball. I played in spring and fall leagues. I kept on playing even when I was the kid good enough to make the team, but not good enough to earn playing time. Then, I threw around with the starting outfielders between innings while waiting for some scrap of playing time.

I waved red foam tomahawks and chanted and was a serious jingo for the Atlanta ball club. I sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” I chanted “LA sucks” at Atlanta-Fulton County stadium until my voicebox was raw, swollen and useless. My best sports moment ever (better than being at the Fiesta Bowl when Tennessee won the national title in 1998) was being at the 1992 NLCS game when Sid Bream chugged around third after a Francisco Cabrerra base hit to score the game-winning run.

Johnny Damon just signed to play for the Yankees. And that part of me died some. Last year’s Red Sox team was one of the few moments that gave me hope for the sport, and Johnny has rendered it a fraud. Screw you Johnny. R.I.P. baseball.

Two articulate critiques from local folks about Bush’s hoarding of executive privilege since Sept. 11 are up this morning. They’re somewhat long, but worthwhile. Check them out:

Daily Whim: The War on Extraordinary Executive Orders

Simianbrain: Defending the Indefensible

I try not to even think about the asshole in the Oval Office or the cretins in Congress anymore because they make my blood boil, and… for what? All I can do is rant ineffectually while forces much larger than myself clash in a multi-generation struggle that started without anyone consulting me for advice and will eventually end without anyone consulting me for advice. Yet, it nags at me that this fucking guy and those fucking people are what America has come to.

When I think about this president, I can only draw one conclusion: all organized religions are full of shit. No benign god would mold George W. Bush out of clay. Only a God with a taste for the sadistic, ironic and misleading could create such an affront on all that is decent and honest. Bush’s existence can only be explained by a Holy Father who jerks off while peering through a peephole in a wall of the locker room of Humanity; a twisted little fuck with a small dick who prematurely ejaculates every time a detainee is falsely imprisoned and whipped. That, or by no God at all.