This isn’t any big secret or anything since Kyle mentioned it on Facebook a while ago, but in the interest of full disclosure I should tell you I was paid $300 to shoot and edit this campaign video for Kyle Williams’ Decatur City Commission District 2 campaign:
Kyle and his partner Larry are friends of mine, and we put this together quickly to coincide with the launch of his campaign website. Municipal election disclosures aren’t processed electronically or I would link to the form. All the talk of ethics.georgia.gov being down today and Jason Pye running a disclosure of work he did reminded me I should disclose this work.
I don’t have an ongoing commitment to work for the campaign, though we have discussed shooting other videos in the future. I’ll be happy to help out if asked, and will disclose any other income that comes from any other campaign work.
Kyle is good people, you should vote for him. I don’t live in Decatur anymore or I would. And I’d tell you that even if I hadn’t been paid to shoot a video.
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
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:
With the economy in the crapper, there are going to be a lot of online services folding or cutting corners to survive. This is a good time to make sure you are keeping local copies of any work that is important to you.
Larry Kudlow: I want to start with this, an oddball question. Senator McCain says it’s too pristine to drill, Senator Obama says the drilling won’t work. What is your response to this? How do you fight back?
Sarah Palin: Well, it will work. And Senator McCain is wrong on that issue.
If you smoked enough pot in college, as I did, you probably watched Easy Rider at some point. Taken on its own merit without the benefit of generational context, it’s pretty unwatchable after the first ten minutes or so. But that’s not really the point. It was part of that wave of late sixties films with anti-heroes who died at the end, and is important for its square-jolting qualities. A lot of upstanding people found out what the dirty hippies were up to by watching this movie, and it terrified many of them. That’s pretty cool.
The anti-hero in Easy Rider was Captain America, played by Peter Fonda. His sidekick was Dennis “I don’t even remember filming Apocolypse Now” Hopper. They rode big fucking Harleys through the countryside with Steppenwolf roaring in the background, smoked a lot of pot, dropped acid, sold cocaine, slept in communes, camped out, and generally were out to show the squares there was, like, totally a better way man. And to find America along the way. Or something.
As I mentioned earlier, I think Easy Rider gets kind of unwatchable to me after the first ten minutes or so, at least when I’m sober. But the intro sequence was pretty fucking cool:
They pound you in the face with metaphors. Watch as Captain America pushes drug money through a plastic tube into a gas tank painted like an American flag. I bet you could write a pretty decent thesis paper on just that one shot. Even if it wasn’t a good thesis, at least you’d have an excuse to smoke a bowl.
Agree with me? Not? Doesn’t matter, because regardless of my or your opinion, Easy Rider and Captain America have become cultural fixtures which have spawned much discussion, imitation and parody. They represent ideals which have long since died, but which are remembered fondly by a lot of people.
Which is what makes this advertisement I ripped off my Tivo so fucking sad:
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.
This CBS 46 promo came on after Swingtown last Friday. It makes me laugh because I can’t see a promo like that without thinking of the very entertaining and informative Live Apartment Fire blog, which skewers local TV news.
My DVR cut this off in the middle, but I thought it was still good for a LOL.
The Brickstore Pub in Decatur is one of my and Amber’s favorite places to eat. Amber usually gets a chicken salad sandwich and a side salad, and I usually get the penne pomodoro with andoville sausage, though I’ve had nearly everything on the menu. Most of the food is good, some of it is great, and the only thing I’ve had which I would say is bad is the turkey burger. Avoid that and you should be fine.
More importantly, it’s the best place in metro Atlanta to sample craft beers. Watch the video below about the pub’s new cellaring program and it should be easy for you to see why:
If you’re not a beer nerd (and I don’t qualify as a beer nerd, though I do try to look for an IPA I’ve never tried before whenever I go somewhere with an extensive beer menu), you might not have been aware that some beers are designed to be aged as wines are. The Brickstore Pub is taking over space in the basement of an adjacent bank to age those types of beers.
In the video, they discuss plans to have invite-only beer tastings to determine when the beers being aged are ready for public consumption. The space looks like it will be really cool for that purpose. I especially loved the mechanism to let air in the bank vault. Maybe Tony can get invited to test some beers out. Me, I am mostly useful for describing shitty beer.
I can’t entirely explain why I find this so amusing, but here you go. University of Tennessee head football coach Phil Fulmer orders a latte at Starbucks:
