Tag: ohatlanta

Oh, Atlanta #819

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Long story short: cops execute some raids on a home on account of investigating a meth operation, unearth a motherlode of meth, but in the process also discover that the owners of the property are also running a cockfighting ring

There’s not a lot to really say about the situation; meth is dangerous, cockfighting is inhumane, both are highly illegal.  Cops had just cause to raid for one thing, find out that there’s a second thing going on in the process.  77 lbs. of meth, plus a bunch of pissed off chickens ready to kill motherfuckers.  Kinda fucked up on all accounts, no matter what way you look at it.

But what drew my attention in this whole story is that, as a former resident of South Fulton county, this is a region that I’m pretty familiar with.  The two raids happened at properties where the streets are disclosed, and the interesting thing about them is that they all occurred less than a mile away from the Fulton County South services center.

I’ve been to the services center more times than I’d like to have had in my life, because it’s the place where tags are issued, among other things, but the reason I point this out is that it’s also a place that at any given time, is crawling with police.  I don’t know the specifics, but I’m pretty certain there’s police training, some modicum of local court businesses going on, but the bottom line is that it’s basically a police station among other county-related operations.

Basically, this whole meth and cockfighting ring, was happening less than a mile away from a police station.  There’s a lot of context missing in the details, most notably time frames, so the jury’s out on whether it’s ironic or not to say, fucking brilliant.

But if I’m a betting man, I’d have to lean that there was probably a lot more meth produced and a lot of illegal cockfighting that occurred before any busts actually happen, because government is slow to act or react, plus South Fulton county is about as competent as a Walmart greeter is at stopping theft.

So cockfighting and meth happening just a stone’s throw away from a police station?  That’s an Oh, Atlanta post if there ever was one to come back with.

lol Barves

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Not much to really say.  As a fan of both baseball and human rights in general, I for one stand in full solidarity with the decision to strip the All-Star Game from Atlanta because of Georgia’s turrible voting rights laws.  I hear it’s going to Denver instead, which will probably be good for baseball, because people like legalized weed, and home runs, both of which exist in abundance in Denver.

But in spite of being for lack of a better term “my team,” I’m taking sadistic amusement of seeing ScumTrust Truist Park being forced to embarrassingly remove all mention of the All-Star Game from the ballpark and probably all around the surrounding Battery.  Probably at the airport too.  Oh fucking well.

This is what leadership like Bubba Kemp looks like – big talk, no action, and getting owned.  Yea c’mon~

I’m okay with whenever Braves corporate gets owned

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When the topic of Georgia’s recently passed voter suppression laws were fresh, I had plenty of thoughts about it, but no real desire to write about it, because when it comes to politics and racism, it’s a sad and unfortunate feeling of a pointless debate, because it doesn’t matter just how flagrant and blatant it can be, it still inexplicably breezes on through to law and no amount of protesting and action afterward ever can undo it.  That, and the whole I have no time ever thing, to where when I do have a little bit of free time to myself, none of it wants to be spent writing about the futile state of Georgia’s politics.

But the recent news of Major League Baseball plucking the 2021 All-Star Game right out the hands of Cobb County, the Atlanta Braves and ScumTrust Truist Park, as something of a national punishment for being in a state that allowed such flagrant discrimination?  Now that’s some shit right there, that piques my interest and gets some creative writing juices flowing.

In one hand, there’s a sensible portion of me that feels a little bit bad for ultimately, the Atlanta Braves organization, because they’re the ones getting embarrassingly punished for a decision that has next to nothing to do with baseball, and sits on a level way above a glorified kids game.  This is kind of along the lines of businesses threatening to boycott and leave the state because of Jim Crow 2.0, where that might send a message to people that what Georgia politicians did was a bad thing, but it will definitely hurt the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people who work for these businesses or rely on these businesses to make livings.

But in the other hand, there’s a sadistic part of me that sees the Atlanta Braves organization-real estate conglomerate is this entity that makes a gozillion dollars every year on a variety of revenue streams, and is ultimately headed up by some circle-jerk of old white people who I have no qualms with seeing take a humiliating slap on the wrist on a national level, and hopefully lose out on some large pies that will instead go to like Chicago or Philadelphia or Los Angeles instead.  Sure, the hundreds of people that would be allowed to actually attend in a pandemic ‘Murica won’t spend their money at local businesses, but MLB’s All-Star break is just a few days in which some projected money won’t be thrown about; it’s a vastly different scenario than say the Georgia film industry, uprooting and leaving, forever, killing thousands of jobs in the process.

When the day is over, I’m glad that Atlanta lost the All-Star game. Aside from being a newer ballpark, and MLB loves to award All-Star games to newer ballparks, the Braves or the city, or this fucking state hasn’t done shit to deserve getting a cash injection that an All-Star game tends to bring, and I’m not going to lose any sleep over the city getting owned, as a result of a crooked choice made by the state.  Because let’s be real here, in spite of their efforts to remain politically ambiguous, most records revealed just how much of the Braves brass leans right, and so they kind of indirectly did this to themselves.

No matter the fact that I support the baseball team and want to see them succeed, I love hearing about when the Braves business organization gets owned.

Not sure if sad or Oh, Atlanta

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Pretty sure this wouldn’t be news if it weren’t tied to Shaquille O’Neal: Atlanta Krispy Kreme owned by Shaq basically burned down

Not entirely sure how I feel reading this.  The fact that I’m writing about it speaks to the fact that it clearly triggered some sort of response in my brain.  I maintain the fact that this wouldn’t have made national news if there were no ties to Shaq, but it is somewhat of a deal for those Atlantans who all hate change, are attached to their city’s things, and come out in droves when something they haven’t thought about in years changes or is harmed.

Frankly, moving out to the burbs and being at peace with the fact that I don’t really miss the city at all, and I’ve long passed the days of where I used to feel like I should have some finger or limb still associated to something in the city, so I could feel like I could always have a stake in all-things City of Atlanta.  And unlike the people who probably never went there because doughnuts are inherently bad for your health, but are pretending like they care about this Krispy Kreme getting severely damaged, I do have many memories of this particular place.

Ponce de Leon Ave. is one of the major thoroughfares in the actual City of Atlanta, and just about everything on it people tend to get attached to, like Murder Kroger, Paris on Ponce, the Plaza Theatre and the Majestic, the old Kodak building, among other things.  The Fellini’s on Ponce was a place where I’ve had lots of meals with friends and in the very rarest of times a few dates.  The Plaza Theatre was one of the go-places to watch indy flicks, and although I never was interested, where Rocky Horror allegedly took place.

But the Krispy Kreme on Ponce, this was the place to get late night donuts after a Braves game, get donuts after eating at somewhere like Cameli’s or Willy’s, or in more than one instance, an excuse to duck out of traffic and circumvent a red light by cutting onto North, but then actually stopping for two donuts and coffee instead and then passing through.

And like in the photo above, when friends would come in for past Dragon*Cons, and actually wanted to leave the con-space and see shit outside of the then-three hotels, where we’d go to stop and get donuts spontaneously, because we saw the red hot-and-ready light on.

The reality is that I’m sad that a place of business is going to be put on indefinite hiatus until it comes back, and make no mistake, it will come back because Shaq is rich as fuck and is real business smart, and not likely to let his investment of a Krispy Kreme on prime central real estate go to pot.  But I’m not really that sad that this happened, because like me, there are lots of people reminiscing about a simple doughnut shop and thinking about happier memories, and I know that when this place comes back, it’ll ultimately be business as usual, but for at least a week or so, I’m sure they’ll have a blowout of a return which will once again put this place in the news and most likely be an appearance by Shaq, and Shaq is always amusing to me.

Patience is a virtue

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In short: teenage Kroger employee in Gwinnett County arrested for stealing nearly $1 million dollars from his employer over the span of several weeks

The thing is, if this kid only paced himself and didn’t make it flagrantly obvious that something was amiss by refunding an $87,000+ transaction among the other $900,000 worth of refunds he issued to himself over two weeks, he probably would’ve had a system that could’ve stole about as much money with almost no risk.  But when you steal nearly a million dollars from your employer by issuing false refunds, from the same store you work at, within the span of two weeks, it’s this dumbass’s turd for thinking he’d actually get away with it.

Companies as large as Kroger typically have a built-in margin of loss on a daily basis, because of stuff like employee accidents, customers that accidentally ruin merchandise, prepared food that goes bad, and of course, petty theft, and if this kid were to keep his falsified refunds to smaller amounts, if he wanted them frequently, or numbers that weren’t $87,000 if he wanted to swing for the fences, but on much less frequency, then the losses probably would have slipped through the cracks and not rose any red flags unless there was some skepticism in the first place.

But as my brother pointed out, the simple reason was the fact that we were referring to the perp in question as a kid, because kids have no fucking sense, even less intelligence, and clearly don’t grasp the strength of the long game.  Because it sounded like he had a pretty rock solid system for pilfering extra cash, and if he could just keep his vices in check and not have to have Camaros and guns and shoes, he could’ve built up a sweet little side gig to keep things fluid and probably gotten away with it.

Whatever though.  It’s clearly a slow news day when people aren’t talking about politics now, because this story showed up in no less than all of the major Atlanta-area news outlets, and was picked up by a number of national news outlets too.  I guess when people want someone to point and laugh and judge from afar, dumbasses like this become low-hanging fruit and easy targets.

This is really the state of America in 2020

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

No matter how much I never liked to admit to feeling it, now that the faucet’s been turned, it seems like not a day goes by where the words don’t pass through my lips, and it doesn’t make me feel any better verbalizing it now as it did when I first came to the realization that right now, America sucks.

Talking with a friend about the state of the world, I found myself saying things that I’d never said before in regards to how I felt, mostly because I’ve been isolated, and mythical wife and I try not to talk about things too much because they really are that depressing, but what came out of my fingers in text is that I don’t think it’s ever felt so physically possible to feel just how much our country is letting us down, the way America is completely and utterly failing the American people on a daily basis right now.

It really is becoming impossible to keep up with all the ways things are fucked up, at least for me, who likes to jot down notes on a daily basis so I can remember the things happening in history for another day, especially in case I feel inspired to write about them at some point.  But it’s downright sad and pathetic the things that emerge on a daily basis about the state of America in the state of the world currently, and I realize that it becomes a little more difficult every day to not grow more jaded and nihilistic about how things are, which are definitely things I don’t want to be happening when I’m in a period of my life where I’m trying to enjoy and savor the time of new fatherhood and spending time with my baby.

It’s kind of not fair that America is in such chaos and forced to hunker, when all I want to do is show my kid the great big world and can’t, because neither of us want to get the coronavirus that’s fucking everywhere and risk our lives.

Continue reading “This is really the state of America in 2020” →

Oh, Atlanta #781

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

An acquaintance of mine posted this link to a story about how Atlanta wanted to designate an area for legalized street racing, and all I could do is wince and knee-jerk react about how stupid this idea sounded, without even reading the article or understanding the context behind this thought.  But then I read the article, and its own impetus article, and yep, everything is about as stupid, reckless and a terrible idea as it seems.

For starters, we have this little nugget of information:

On May 14 Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said the city is looking at a new solution that came as a recommendation from her 18-year-old son.

I have mixed opinions about Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms.  Personally I think she is what a lot of people thought she was, a hand-picked stooge by departing mayor Kasim Reed, who ultimately is in office to pad her pockets as much as she can before departing, and granting favors to all within her circle for them to pad their pockets as much as they can, much like Reed did.  But at the same time, I appreciate her staunch opposition to the current federal administration, and how she often times make a point to hold press conferences to state her intention of doing the opposite of what the Baked Potato in Charge is trying to do, as well as his local butt-buddy, Bubba Kemp, like strongly advising Atlanta residents to stay home and exercise proper social distancing, despite the reopening of the state.

But the fact that Bottoms is even considering this idea on the recommendation from her 18-year old son, this says to me that he himself is probably into street racing, probably partakes in it himself, and Keisha would only try to make it legal, because she doesn’t want her shithead son getting arrested and/or wrecking and hurting innocent people and becoming an embarrassing shit-stain on her career.

Continue reading “Oh, Atlanta #781” →