More Atlanta police fail

There’s no better place to get some ironic inadvertent humor than the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. If I want something to shake my head and laugh at, there aren’t any better sources to check than the good ‘ol AJC.  Sadly however, today’s source of ATLOL is going to be behind the upcoming paywall, and won’t be accessible in two more days.  However, that in itself is going to be a great source of humor, because there’s no way that people are going to subscribe for AJC content online, and it’ll only be a matter of time before myAJC.com falls flat on its face and is relegated into having to provide its content for free again.

But anyway, today’s topic of inadvertent ironic humor comes courtesy of the Fulton County Police Department and their officers’ propensity to no-show in court on dates in which they summon perpetrators to defend themselves in the court of law.

This is a problem because when the prosecuting police officers do not show in court, then the case, just about no matter what it is, is thrown out and dismissed.  This is a problem, because it’s reported that over the span of the last three-plus years, Fulton County has had over 1,800 cases thrown out and dismissed due to the subpoenaed officer failing to show up to court to confirm the prosecution. This is a problem because 1,800 cases thrown out means 1,800 instances of court fees not being paid, which in itself is roughly around $250,000 of state revenue, not including whatever penalty fees, fines and bonds that guilty parties are required to pay if actually sentenced.  This is a problem because cases as innocuous as traffic violations, as well as cases as severe as hit-and-runs, domestic abuse, molestation, and malicious violence, are dismissed without any punishment, because the appropriate officers fail to show up to court.

I find these statistics to be baffling sure, but at the same time, I can’t say that I’m entirely surprised.  Atlanta’s a crooked city to begin with, and as much as I love this place and call it home, let’s face it, the place is corrupt, compromised, and completely run by greedy, misguided parties.  The ineptitude of the police is about as surprising as Jodi Arias being found guilty of murder, and it’s just another instance of a city that continuously cries poor that really has fewer parties to blame than themselves for not capitalizing on such free-money streams such as collecting on court fees and fines.

Obviously, I’m no expert on law enforcement, but I have unfortunately been the recipient of court-ordered appearances before.  It was my understanding back when these incidents happened, that the officers deliberately set aside dates in advance for their court appearances, and anyone they happened to ticket and order to appear in court would be summoned for these particular dates.  And it’s not like they didn’t give people fair warning; it’s like when I got pulled over in North Carolina by Robocop in a November, he told me, and it was written on the ticket, that I was supposed to appear in court the following January.  And when I showed up to court in January, there was Robocop in the box with several other officers, and the judge systematically went through the list and asked what we plead, and then we paid our court fees and were off on our merry way.

With no tracking or accountability measures in place, as it’s revealed in the article, Atlanta-Fulton County police clearly have zero care for punishing those who break the law.  It’s like they’re content to stay on the streets and hand out tickets and court-orders, to prove that they’re doing their job on a daily basis, but they’re too lazy, negligent, or ambivalent to actually follow through in the court of law to make sure that these perpetrators are properly punished.  And without true punishment, what’s going to stop these law-breakers from committing crimes again, with knowledge that they stand a very high chance of getting away with it again?

A pretty Riverdale being Riverdale story

This is just one of those stories that really encapsulates Riverdale in a nutshell pretty succinctly.

Long story short: principal gets arrested, student finds mugshot online, posts mugshot to Instagram.  Principal gets pissed that her mugshot is discovered and posted online, confronts and then suspends student for no real good reason.  lols ensue.

• The student, named “Keandre” (thank GOD even Word thinks that’s a misspelling) says this after he is suspended:

I gots to be in schoo

Because he “has to study” for finals.  Anyone who’s ever been to Riverdale knows that the only real education that happens in Riverdale is how to correctly hold a gun, how to escape from the non-existent police force, and how escape from the scene of a crime.

• Regardless of the semantics, the principal really had zero basis for suspending Keandre in the first place.  This isn’t much more of a story than it really is if she just confessed that she did it because she was butthurt, embarrassed and probably humiliated that her mugshot was found out and posted to the internet.

Seriously, mugshots are public record, and public information.   If I were Keandre’s dad, hell, I’d post her mugshot to the internet and email all other parents I knew.  What’s she going to do, suspend me?  The principal was clearly humiliated by being easily revealed, and tries to use the justification of “distributing false information” as just reason to suspend Keandre.

• Principal takes offense to being falsely hypothesized of having been arrested for DUI, when she was actually arrested for failing to show up to court for speeding.

Who cares?  Arrest is arrest.  Both are breaking the law, and it doesn’t hold up too well that a school administrator, much less than a school’s principal has an arrest record.  Anyone who’s ever been to Riverdale knows that all black folk there, regardless of gender, speeds like Foot Locker is about to run out of Air Jordans, and unfortunately for this retard principal, she just happened to get caught.

• Bottom line, principal is in the wrong, student is in the clear.

This is only a story because it happened in Riverdale, and if there’s one thing the media really loves to hone in on, it’s America’s fascination with examining and prodding at what the poor working-class black America is up to on a daily basis.  Either way, everyone’s a loser in this scenario, but it’s still a pretty good example of what Riverdale really actually is.

An attempt to put into words how much I hate ESPN

It’s not that want anyone to keel over and die, but if Stephen A. Smith were to keel over and die, I’m pretty sure that not only would I not give a shit, there would be a part of me that would be glad.  Yes, that’s a horrible thing to put into writing, but I can’t really say that it would be an inaccurate statement.

Whenever Stephen A. Smith is on television, which is unfortunately way more than he should be, because the retards at my gym have the locker room televisions set to ESPN, and there’s no known way to change the channels without a remote, and First Take seems to be on for eleventy-billion hour blocks at a time, I want to shower and dress out and get out of the locker room as quickly as humanly possible.

Stephen A. Smith makes me want to get away from a screen faster than a snuff film, or any one of those ASPCA commercials with Sarah McLaughlin music in the background.

I honestly think that Stephen A. Smith is a bigger pox on this world than like AIDS, Ebola, or any of those super-mutating diseases that the news likes to claim are capable of wiping out human kind.  Hell, if Stephen A. Smith continues to get as much screen time as he does, or god-forbid, gets more than he does now, then the extinction of the human race doesn’t sound like such a bad thing after all.

However, even still, no matter how horrible Stephen A. Smith ultimately is, he’s still a microcosm of the bigger problem, which is just how much ESPN absolutely, completely, irrevocably sucks.  Seriously, I honestly do not think that there is a single network out there that is worse than ESPN, and that’s even considering that one network that’s owned by Al-Jazeera (Current?)

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It’s not called “Challenger” without reason

I’m sitting at a stop light, and a Dodge Challenger pulls up in the lane to the right of me.  As the driver evidently lives his life a quarter mile at a time, when the light turns green, he takes off, leaving me behind.  But not before I noticed the fuel cap on the vehicle.

Clearly, the only way I knew it was the fuel cap was because it was clearly marked FUEL, and not because it was located on the rear quadrant of the vehicle LIKE 98% OF CONSUMER VEHICLES.

If the cap did not so succinctly indicate that fuel was to go inside of this depository, I’d be afraid that I might recognize it as a dock for my Confederate flag to embed into, or perhaps I might mistake it for a port where I could discreetly urinate into when I have to go to the bathroom.  But because it’s marked FUEL, I know that it is neither of those things, and only a repository for gasoline.  Good thing too, because I’d hate to have made such an embarrassing mistake.

In all seriousness though, can we recognize the Challenger’s fuel cap design as being something completely redundant and almost insulting?  Like who really needs to be told where the fuel needs to go?  I rent a lot of cars, so the only thing I really need to know is which side of the car the fuel port is on, because I’m fairly positive I’m going to be able to locate it on my own once I figure out which side it’s on.

(On a side note, I never knew that it’s possible to figure out which side of the car the fuel port is on from within the car; you only have to look at the little gas pump icon on the fuel gauge, and there’s a tiny triangle on the left or right side that indicates)

The saddest thing is that the FUEL cap appears to be standard equipment on the car nowadays.  You can’t even get rid of it if you wanted to, because there’s no alternate options to the FUEL cap.  How ironic is that; it’s so clearly labeled to make it retard-proof, but in the process of having it, you look like a retard because you need to be told that it’s for FUEL only.  Who knew that owning a Challenger would be so . . . challenging?

Oh, just a veiled message hinting how I’m feeling today

Between kindergarten and the third grade, I apparently had a very poor attention span. I’m pretty sure that if I were a kid in today’s society, I’d have been diagnosed with ADHD, and be put on medication of some sort, but since I wasn’t, we’ll just say that I was a typical kid who erred on the side of hyperactive, and it reflected in my performance in school.

Anyway, the most frequent evaluative remarks I would get during those years of contemporary schooling were along the lines of “needs improvement with paying attention, listening to and following directions.” Such sentiments would reflect in my report cards where I would apparently have low marks in those exact behavioral categories, despite the fact that I was doing pretty well in the actual educational aspect of school. It got to a point where my mother engrained the fear of god into me that paying attention and listening to and following directions were the most important categories to excel at when considering the next report card.

But since effort is one thing, and actual results are a completely other thing, there was a report card where it was more of the same thing; poor marks in paying attention and listening to and following directions. My mom apparently hit a boiling point and beat the shit out of me.

In a way, it could be said that such aggressive parenting might have worked, or maybe it was just a fact that I was actually growing up a little bit. When I hit the fourth grade, something clicked, and although I can’t say that I ever got straight A’s (science was always my Achilles heel), I was posting up excellent grades from then until the eighth grade when teenage rebellion began to kick in but that’s a different story.

The point is I think as I grew up I eventually learned the importance of paying attention, and personally I think I’m a pretty astute person these days. More than I may lead on at times, but I like to think I’m fairly decently aware of all the obvious things going on around me at any given time, and this goes back to that recent post I made about spatial awareness too. It’s the littlest things too, like approaching an intersection, noticing the opposite crosswalk timer is ticking down to zero, and not having to break my stride because I’ve learned the timing of the lights from simple observation, and I walk right past crowds of ambivalent students and working stiffs and get to Starbucks before any of them do.

Based on how often I witness people not paying attention to the world all around them in all sorts of scenarios and applications, it makes me wonder if these people got as poor marks in school as I may have had. And if they did, did any of their parents put forth the effort to beat the importance of paying attention into them? Probably not.

It’s not that I condone parents applying physical violence onto their own children, but I like to think that it works when done correctly – sparingly, as a last resort, and purely disciplinary. All joking aside, I think I turned out pretty well, because my mom instituted disciplinary ass kicking for me failing to improve on my shortcomings. Sometimes I look around at people, and think that they might have turned out to be better, sharper, more astute human beings if perhaps their parents had done the same to them too.

Photos: Clearwater, Hogan Beach and baseball

I made a spontaneous trip down to Tampa, Florida, because my boy James said he was going to make the trip up to Clearwater to visit the Hulk Hogan Beach Store.  Frankly, I couldn’t see myself visiting on my own and I’m not sure to who I would be able to force come along, so this was an opportunity that I was not willing to pass up.

As for the store itself, it was pretty much the Hulk Hogan Nostalgia Center located on the Beach for all intents and purposes, filled to the brim with Hogan-related memorabilia, souvenirs, crap on the wall, as well as a huge variety of t-shirts and other chintzy things that all have Hogan’s likeness all over it.  And tons of yellow, it was like Asian camouflage in there.

Unfortunately for us, the Hulkster wasn’t actually present at the store when we went; according to the shop’s co-owner, Hogan often does show up, but he was “working out with Nick (his son)” and was not coming in that afternoon.  But the best part about the visit was when apparently Dusty Rhodes called the store looking for the Hulkster, to which it dawned on me that Hogan must not like Dusty enough to give him his actual cell phone number or anything, so the American Dream is relegated to calling the store to try and find him.  Owned.

And since as a rule of thumb, traveling in the summer to a place and not seeing baseball is akin to breaking the law, we went to the Trop, and watched the Rays play the Blue Jays.  And what turned out to be a relaxing garbage time game after the Rays hung seven in a single inning, turned out to be the perfect storm of failure as the BeeJays chipped away at their deficit, and after a massive Fernando Rodney meltdown, take the lead and steal a win from the home team.  Owned x2.

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