Roll'em!

Did you know that there are currently at least six movies being filmed in the Atlanta area right now?

When I heard last week there were six movies being made I thought of some months ago when a movie making company, for a scene, had the City of Atlanta block off the entire street for several days. It was a mom and dad retail merchants kind of street.
The street was closed so there was no retail business being transacted in the retail stores. The store owners asked the city for compensation and the city, more or less, said, “You must be kidding!” I think the movie company had about the same response.

A movie should be made about a movie company taking over an entire street for a week and how the small retailers survived. Of course the city will have to close down the street for a few weeks, but the merchants shouldn’t mind, after all, it is telling their side of the story.

Obama Fighting for Truth, Justice, & the American Way

We watched the inauguration yesterday. It was really something to see. It is about as close as we come to bowing to royalty and worshiping the ground thy lordships walks on.

There were so many house-hold-name politicians floating all over the screen patting backs and smiling.

One Republican they talked to was saying it was time to act and do away with childish quarrels of the past – lets get on with it! He reminded me of Charles Durning, playing to Governor in “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” when he realized the crowd loved the Soggy Bottom Boys’ music and got up on stage and shook his ass with the music too. Maybe you would have to have been there.

That reminds me, my PARDON MY PRESIDENT tear a page weekly calendar, this week told me in 2003 Republican Ohio congressman Bob Ney ordered that all French fries sold in the U.S. capitol be renamed “freedom fires” in retaliation for France’s opposition to invading Iraq.
A few years later he was sent to federal prison for corruption.

Soon –to-be-banished Vice President Dick Chaney was in a wheelchair. Anna said, “What happened to him, did he shoot himself?”

I admired soon-to-be-banished president George Bush for gracefully bowing out so the man of the day could be sworn in and make a speech and tell us it wasn’t about him, it was all about us.

And, by watching the sea of people covering the Mall and the streets of DC, I think the people really believe it is all about them. And I think they are right. And by the way, it was bitter cold, around 19◦. Brrrr.

I think President Obama is an elegant speaker and knows how to move people like a Bible thumping preacher….. I think he can get people worked up in frenzy to do what is necessary to get us out of this economic downward tail-spin we are in. FDR did it – I think BO can too. And, maybe not, only time will tell.

I just hope the radical nuts leave him alone and let him do his job and not throw any shoes at him.

I only wish I had the foresight to be there in that freezing temperature running a “I LIKE BARACK OBAMA” T-shirt stand.

9/11 Anniversary

This is not an anniversary that you celebrate. It is an anniversary you morn for the ones that fell. The only Americans that would have reason to celebrate are head honchos at the White House and the Board of Directors of the Halliburton Corporation. They are the only ones that gained monetarily and the public trust over the ordeal.

And we keep a war going on terrorists – but not in the countries the original 9/11 terrorists infested. Make sense?

No, but it does clear the way for a nice pipeline.

Water Meter Update

In an earlier posting I said the water department sent me a letter complaining because we used too much water, compared to our neighbors.

I found that hard to believe when I see Joe and his mother spraying each other with the water hose and also Joe washing his truck daily before his mother gets home and seeing all the mud on the truck, which was a way of saying he was spinning around and around in the back yard again.

And a couple of neighbors illegally waters their lawn every day. Our lawn is brown from lack of water.

Then, what topped it off was when I went behind the water meter man to look at the meter reading and when I lifted the lid the saw that the glass covering the numbers that rolls over was completely covered with mold, goo, and ants. No way they were reading my meter, so I called the water department and complained.

The meter reading is contracted out. They said they would send one of their men over to check things out.

A week and one day later the man came. He said he didn’t know how they read the meter, but it looks like they did an accurate job. He also said he cleaned the meter glass and sprayed the ants with WD40 – he said that was the best thing to get rid of the ants.

He said 8 days ago when the meter was read the last digit was on 4. Now, he said, it was on 5. The digit he was talking about only moves per 1000 gallons.

I said, “We used a 1000 gallons in a week and one day?”

He said probably not, maybe the hidden part was on 999 and just a couple of gallons and roll it over to the next number.

I told him of the letter I got from the water department. He, a plain spoken black man, said “don’t pay no attention to those letters – they don’t know anything (I’m not sure he used the word “anything”, it may have been more straight forward), they sent those letters out at random, and that way they look like they are doing their job trying to conserve water during this shortage.”

He also let me in on a little secret. Cobb County has plenty of water. He said Atlanta is hurting for water, Cobb County has so much water they sell water to the City of Atlanta.

I guess it pays to have the Chattahoochee River flow in your county.

Illegal To Be Nice To Illegals?

The next county north of here is Cherokee County, Georgia. For a short period in history Cherokee was the only county north of the Chattahoochee River in Georgia. Cherokee County was formed in 1832. It was land owned by treaty the people of the Cherokee Nation. Then gold was discovered… so much for the treaty.

My g-g-g-grandfather Eugene H. Tyson won a gold land lottery in 1832 and moved his family near Woodstock, which is still in Cherokee County. Eugene mined for gold on Kellogg Creek.

About a year ago I visited the Tyson Family cemetery where Eugene is the head member. It was sad to see how the surroundings had changed over the years. Used to, when I first discovered the cemetery, then it was out in the woods, in the middle of pine thicket. Now, there are paved drives and parking lots on two of the sides. One side is a store-all company and the other is the back portion of a car parts company and a coffee break on wheels company. Old car parts have been thrown in and near the graves. On that last visit a Mexican who was washing a coffee break shiny aluminum truck took time off to do a little smoothing with his girlfriend.

I didn’t mind them, but I did mind the car parts, and a few old tires discarded near the graves.

Cherokee County was divided into many smaller counties which is Cherokee County today.

Yesterday the Cherokee Board of Commissioners voted 5-0 to make it illegal to rent or lease property to illegal immigrants and to declare English as county’s official language.

I don’t see any problem as making English the official county language, I thought it was anyway…. But if retailers and service companies want to cater to the Latino community I think they should allowed to use Spanish words in their “come-on advertising”. So, I hope the new law doesn’t band that too.

But for it to be illegal to rent or lease to illegal immigrants? That sounds very unconstitutional with a bit of genocide and the caste system thrown in. They are denying a certain group of people the right of dwell…. And I think laws are supposed to be equally applied to everyone, whether one is a citizen or not.

It may have more consequences that can be foreseen. That is, if everybody obeys the law, or even if it can be enforced.

It reminds me of something similar that happened in a rural community in south Georgia less than a year ago when the local authorities there, under head from their voters, put a squeeze on all the illegal immigrants there. Guess what? After they were gone there were nobody left to do the dirty work in the fields.