Rusty's Blog

The crowded special election to replace District 58 state Rep. Robbin Shipp features several decent candidates, and there’s not a whole lot of information out there to go on unfortunately. Here are the impressions I’ve gathered based on the limited information available to me.

Simone Bell
Website: http://www.simonebell.com/

Simone Bell is the only candidate I’ve met in person. My neighbor a few houses down is helping run her campaign, and I attended a meet-and-greet there. She’s nice, smart and appears genuine, though my impression of her was she was light on specific ideas for how to improve our district. She is a community educator for Lambda Legal, and earned Georgia Equality’s endorsement. If elected, she would be the first openly gay African American woman in any state legislature in the U.S.

I would almost vote for her solely because she rubs that racist fuckwit Pete Randall over at Peach Pundit the wrong way.

Asha Jackson
Website: http://ashajackson.com/

I know she’s an attorney and that she has about as many yard signs in my neighborhood as Kevin Johnson and Simone Bell, but that’s about all I know unfortunately. I really wish I’d been able to hear her speak at the candidate forum at Vinocity a few weeks ago, but I was sick at the time.

Kevin Johnson
Website: http://www.votekevinjohnson.com/

Kevin Johnson has been the most visible candidate in the district to me. He always seems to be out somewhere meeting people, and uses his Twitter account for more than blasting links to press releases. He has a strong record as a consumer advocate, having helped expose a dirty practice of banks and credit card companies called behavioral analysis, where they discriminate against consumers based on where they shop even if they pay bills on time.

J. Lewis IV

I know even less about Lewis than I know about Asha Jackson. According to Southern Voice, he was the only candidate who didn’t declare as a Democrat, and he hasn’t been filing campaign disclosures.

Mike McPherson
Website: http://mcpherson09.com/

Mike McPherson is Doug Stoner’s former chief of staff, president of the Cabbagetown Initiative board, and is a VP at an Atlanta PR and government affairs company. He helped clean up Cabbagetown in the wake of the tornado a couple of years ago, and has said he’d try to get legislation passed to make similar recovery efforts possible. I haven’t seen too many signs for him in EAV.

Comparing the candidates, how I’ll vote

I’ve been impressed with Kevin Johnson’s outreach efforts and record of consumer advocacy, and will be voting for him.

However, you could do worse than to vote for Simone Bell. I expect she would be the strongest LGBT rights advocate out of these candidates, which is important in this backwards state. This is the first time she’s run for office, and if she ends up losing this race, I expect her to learn from the experience and come back as a better campaigner on her second attempt.

Update: Sara, who is an attorney herself, vouched for Asha Jackson as a “a very smart capable attorney & very involved in the community.” So if you somehow haven’t voted yet and are reading this you should consider that as well.

Update 2: For whatever reason, Asha Jackson’s site wasn’t coming up in Google earlier. I found it and have updated the link.

It’ll be a couple of years yet before we know if the Lane Kiffin experiment at Tennessee is a success or a failure. I’d caution against reading much from the game against Florida, or out of this season in general. But I am more optimistic about the future now than I was when he was hired. And I’m hoping it works out, because if Georgia football bloggers’ foreheads burst like they have been while the guy is losing, they’ll be beyond apoplectic when he’s winning. That will be fun to watch.

Meanwhile, Carl is still kicking your asses. But griftdrift is rebounding from a miserable first week, winning the second two weeks in a row after our makeshift bowling frame tiebreaker is accounted for.

Enter your picks

Tiebreaker

How many passing yards will Arizona State quarterback Danny Sullivan put up against Georgia’s defense?

Remember to enter your answer to this question in the comments section, and to make sure your answer isn’t the same as anyone else’s.

Last week’s tiebreaker was “How many points will all ACC teams score this week combined?” The answer was 344. I answered 301, which was closest. I guess that’s my consolation prize for being tied for dead last among players who have actually submitted picks every week.

Both of these videos with my Great Aunt Jane were shot a little over a month ago and I just now got time to go through the footage and edit it. For now, I’m only posting videos from her which contain information that I think is interesting to a broader audience outside my family, but I might post more later.

Great Aunt Jane reacts to photos from Grady taken the night of the Winecoff Hotel fire

Allen Goodwin, who runs winecoff.org and co-authored The Winecoff Fire: The Untold Story of America’s Deadliest Hotel Fire, contacted me after watching my first video interview with Jane. He asked me a few follow-up questions about the interview, and also asked me to show Jane a couple of photos he had to see if she recognized any of the subjects. She didn’t unfortunately, but she still offered a few interesting tidbits, which are included in this video:

Great Aunt Jane remembers The Skullbusters

I’d always heard about a group called The Skullbusters from my mom growing up, as her dad (Jane’s older brother) was a member. I never had a grasp on exactly what it was or what they did, but I did know a lot of people who were in it went on to become influential figures in politics, sports and business in Atlanta. Jane answers some of my questions in this video:

Amber and I visited Fitzgerald, Georgia this past weekend. We were told about 800 wild Burmese chickens have taken up residence there as a result of a DHR program in the 1960s. It’s quite a sight to see chickens walking around on nearly every block in a settled area. The locals hold a festival every year to celebrate them, which we unfortunately just missed this year.

Be on the lookout for a chicken-related episode of Mostly ITP in the next couple of weeks. We’ve already talked to the director of tourism in Fitzgerald, where we go into more detail about the chickens. We plan to talk to The Chicken Whisperer and some folks at the Oakhurst Community Garden soon as well about urban gardening and raising chickens in urban areas.

The folks in Fitzgerald hold a slightly different view of raising chickens in urban areas than I expect the others will, which has helped me think of what I hope are some decent questions to ask on the remaining interviews.

Date: Sunday, March 8, 2009
Time: 6:00pm – 10:00pm
Location: Manuel’s Tavern, 602 N. Highland Ave, Atlanta, GA

For the third year in a row, Seth Harp’s legislation to allow Georgians to vote to allow alcohol sales on Sunday has been thwarted.

Legislators — beholden to extremist religious groups, the liquor store lobby, or both — haven’t been getting the message using traditional methods.

I’m proposing that a large group of us congregate, drink ourselves into a stupor, and leave our respective state Senators drunken voicemails demanding Sunday sales.

I don’t know if we’ll accomplish anything, but we can damn well be a boisterous nuisance and tell them where they can stick their arcane laws.

A list of phone numbers will be provided, so bring your cell phone.

Everyone is invited, please spread the word!

(note: please either take a taxi or drive in groups with a DD)

I’m just going to reprint my comment from Decatur Metro about the City of Decatur’s Virtual Decatur proposal here, as I have yet to weigh in on it on this here blog:

On the whole I think Decatur’s government is one of the more competent city governments in the state. I have enjoyed my stay here, and will miss it when I move to East Atlanta in a couple of months.

I am clearly pro-technology, given my profession and other extracurricular activities. I do generally admire Decatur’s willingness to experiment with ideas, technology-related and otherwise, before other governments are willing to.

But I can’t get behind this one. I don’t understand who the audience is. I don’t understand how the benefit could possibly outweigh the cost of development. I don’t understand why people can’t just walk to the damn meetings if they’re interested, given the relatively small area the city occupies. And I don’t understand why this is a priority when it’s been demonstrated that Decatur isn’t immune to the uptick in crime which has affected the rest of metro Atlanta.

It’s another solution looking for a problem. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, there’s literature here (PDF).

The original Waffle House opened in Avondale Estates, Georgia on College Avenue in 1955. It was later sold and converted into a Chinese restaurant, and has since been purchased back and restored as a museum with furnishings very close to what the original restaurant looked like.

It usually isn’t open to the public, but was open today. We were told it will soon be open to the public two days per week.

We learned some other tidbits, like that this sign they have out front isn’t the same design as the original sign:

It’s actually a late 50s or early 60s design. The letters are supposed to look like dripping syrup. The original sign design isn’t up to current DeKalb County code, and they’re working on getting permission to use the original (or a sign with the same design as the original). The original is currently stored in a warehouse.

Also:

• Filet mignon was served instead of T-bones originally. The urban legend goes that the switch to T-bones was made after a Waffle House location ran out of filet mignon and bought some T-bones from an A&P, which proved to be very popular.
• Other menu ideas — such as the code words for hash brown toppings — permeate up to be corporate standards from flourishes of particular Waffle House locations.
• Originally, everything was made fresh on location except for saltine crackers, Coca Cola and Heinz ketchup.
• The founder Joe Rogers was (and still is) obsessed with not wasting movements, space or materials. At the original location, when they were finished with a paper cash register roll, they’d put it back in the register the opposite way and print on the back. Now, this translates into constant efficiency studies that attempt to cut down on the movements that Waffle House employees make.

You can view the full set of photos here.

Amber also has a photo set here and a blog post here.

The essence of college football fandom is to revel in the theft of someone else’s joy. It’s a nice bonus when you can commandeer that joy for yourself, but it’s not totally necessary to consider an afternoon a success.

From that standpoint, there are worse things than Tennessee being winless in the SEC. Georgia spanked the Vols in Sanford Stadium this past Saturday, true. But since the Vols entered the game with a dismal record against meager competition and no reasonable expectation of victory, there was no joy remaining for Bulldog Nation to steal from the Tennessee faithful.

That, Russell, explains your malaise when the book was closed.

Once you factor in UGA’s red zone blunders and subsequent inability to translate yardage into points, it wouldn’t be outlandish to describe the game as a karmic wash.

Plus, there was Eric Berry’s immensely-satisfying (and perhaps dirty) hit on Knowshon Moreno:

Bon appétit.

Housekeeping notes

• I’m having surgery Monday and will likely sleep through Monday and Tuesday thanks to some prescription narcotics. Fortunately, a couple of (little v) volunteers have offered to enter the betting lines in the comments section. Those hopefully will be in place Monday night for you to base your picks on.
• You may have noticed the ridiculous lead rugbyfan just opened up in the overall standings. This is due to a well-placed side bet with Archibald, whose drop in the rankings is equally as stunning aesthetically. Obviously, we will all be expected to place some side bets as the contest progresses to close this gap. If you don’t remember how side bets works, read this comment.
• The I’s have spoken by a margin of 6 to 4 (including poll results and Alyssa’s comment), and Reggie wins last week’s tiebreaker. Moving forward, we will go with margin of victory over total points scored in counting Game of the Week tiebreaker scores.

Results

The full results spreadsheet for week 7 is here. If you find an error, let me know and I’ll adjust the results.

The full overall standings with week-by-week scores and side wager results can be found here.

Week 8 schedule

^* – In my absence, either Alyssa or Tony Ventry will enter the odds in the comments section when they become available Monday evening. Make your picks against those.

Game of the Week

Missouri vs. Texas.

Previous number three Mizzou was upset by Okie State last week (this Tennessee fan wishes Cowboy co-offensive coordinator Trooper Taylor was still wearing the right shade of orange).

Texas pulled off an emotionally-charged win against hated rival and previous number one Oklahoma, good for their own number one ranking this week.

Conventional wisdom says both teams will start sluggish after last week’s draining contests. If that holds, which one will snap out of it in time to pull off the win? Could be a classic or a clunker, but there’s no shortage of intrigue here.

How to enter your picks

You read the rules, right?

The short version:

• You’re picking which teams won’t cover their spread. You must choose at least one team not to cover unless there is only one game being played that week.
• You’re also entering a predicted score for the Game of the Week, which cannot be the same as a predicted score another player enters.

Example:

Florida and Clemson don’t cover. Alabama wins the GOTW 19-14.

If I entered that, that means I think Florida and Clemson either would lose or not cover their spreads, and you then wouldn’t be able to predict a 19-14 win for Alabama.

You already saw No Twitter for Hitler, right? It’s funny. Like every good YouTube video, it already has many imitations, offshoots and parodies. Typically these are lame, and get lamer as they go along until the joke is run all the way into ground.

This one, about lofty expectations for the Georgia Bulldogs football team this year, made me laugh:

You’re welcome Garrett and Tony. Glad I can be your number one resource for Georgia Bulldogs information.

Watch Mark Richt, coach of the 2009 hypothetical national champion Georgia Bulldogs, and wife Katharyn mumble their collective way through a Carpets of Dalton commercial. This came on CSS last night during a replay of the 2006 Tennessee-LSU game.