The Blotter
Saturday, November 21st, 2009
PEE-DITTY, PART I: An officer was patrolling the area of Courtland Avenue and Ralph McGill Boulevard, when he reported a man “behind the statues on the Northwest corner, urinating on the base of the statue.” The officer asked the man what he was doing. “He stated he was getting his food together. I then asked him what else he was doing and he admitted that he had to urinate and could not hold it in.” (The Blotter Diva googled “statue” and the relevant street names — the man allegedly peed in “Folk Art Park” near the interstate overpass. The public art installation contains works by Southern folk artists R.A Miller and Lonnie Holley, among many others.) The 51-year-old man went to jail on an indecent exposure charge.
PEE-DITTY, PART II: Around 9:45 a.m., a man allegedly started peeing into a cup, while standing on a sidewalk on Marietta Street. An officer told the man to stop — and the man asked if he could finish. The officer wrote, “[The man] advised that he didn’t feel like using the Porter [sic] Potty.” The 54-year-old man went to jail on an indecent exposure charge.
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(Photo Illustration by Tray Butler)
SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY: A passenger reported a Florida man talking strangely on a shuttle bus at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. The man reportedly said this was the third time Delta had made him miss his flight and made him stay overnight in Atlanta and that someone needs to blow up the airport.
SPOOKY VISITOR: A 33-year-old man said he heard the doorbell ring at his home on Euclid Avenue. He saw a woman around age 30 standing outside his door, peering in his windows. He said she had blond dreadlocks and she wore black pants and a high-visibility green traffic vest. According to the man, the woman walked around to the back of his house, then she returned to the front and broke open the front door. The man said he confronted the woman and she tried to give him a piece of paper saying her name was Denise and she was looking for her stolen television. The man said he was going to call police and the woman walked away, threatening that the man’s stuff would get stolen later. The man wrote down the woman’s tag number before she drove away. Police ran a computer check on the tag — it came back on a 2009 Jeep Wrangler stolen in Atlanta. The woman reportedly caused about $500 worth of damage to the man’s front door.
I’ve noticed a lot of my neighbors have built elevated gardening beds in their yards using wood that’s marked as treated with arsenic. Will the arsenic get into the vegetables and fruits these people are growing? If so, is that a health concern?
FANCY WINE BROUHAHA: A man with a blondish mohawk and a 20-year-old woman walked into a grocery store on Piedmont Avenue. Store employees say the man went to the wine section and grabbed a $130 bottle of wine. He reportedly handed the wine to the woman and she went to the customer service desk and tried to fraudulently return the wine. Employees told the woman that she couldn’t return the wine — so she left the bottle at the customer service desk. At the same time, employees were quizzing the man about the wine. “Kroger employees ran after [the man] saying they had been robbed,” an officer wrote. The man and woman hopped into a Ford Ranger and drove away. As police arrived, nearby citizens said the Ford Ranger had smashed through a garage security gate at a Buckhead condominium on Peachtree Street.
I’ve seen pictures of Pangaea, the giant land mass that eventually separated into the continents we know today. But why were the continents smushed together like that in the first place? What made the land higher on that one side of the earth? Were there other continents we can no longer account for? Is it related to the asteroid that may or may not have smashed into Earth and helped form the moon?
CATNAP? On Pharr Road, a woman called police to report her cat missing. An officer arrived. The woman said she “has not seen her cat in several days and believes that one of her neighbors inside her apartment complex has kidnapped the cat,” the officer wrote. Also, the woman said the same neighbor confronted her and said she knew the woman has “herperies,” the officer wrote. The woman said she didn’t know how her neighbor could know that information about her. The woman “stated that she previous left her personal phone books outside her apartment on her patio, which is an open area next to a bus stop near [her] apartment,” the officer wrote. “[She] stated she found a small knife laying on her patio table when she returned to pickup her telephone book. When I inquired about the knife, [the woman] got the knife from her kitchen drawer and showed the knife to me.” The woman said she thinks her neighbor has it out for her. The officer couldn’t locate the suspected neighbor. The woman insisted on filing a police report.
Superman is able to use his super strength to squeeze coal into diamonds. Theoretically, if someone had unlimited strength in real life, would it be possible to do this?
CRANKY MOMMA: A police officer responded to a call about a dispute on Pineview Terrace. “This was the fifth time since [2:30 p.m.] I had responded to this address regarding this caller and the ninth time since 10 a.m. the suspect had called 911,” the officer noted.
What’s the final word about Y2K? We were told this was a serious problem, and that huge dollars and man-hours were needed to head off trouble. Why didn’t the sky fall, as predicted? Were the dollars spent before January 1, 2000, well spent or not? The date change seemed seamless to a layman. Was this because we headed off most of the trouble before it happened, or because it wasn’t as serious as predicted?
There’s an old saw about God protecting drunks and fools. I’m particularly interested in the drunks part. Almost nightly, it seems, we hear on the news that a drunk driver killed one or more people in another car but the drunk survived, sometimes without injury. A family member suggested drunks are saved because they’ve passed out and are more relaxed, but I’m skeptical. Is it just the crashes where the drunk walks away after killing another that make the news? 
I recently read a speech by Noam Chomsky in which he says that during the Vietnam War, “soldiers were fragging officers.” I, a man too young to have served in that conflict, have heard this before but thought it was just a rumor. Can you shed some light on this dark matter?
WISHFUL THINKING: An officer saw a man on the Freedom Parkway ramp to I-75/85. The man reportedly was walking back and forth, asking for money from drivers. Apparently, as the officer circled around, the man moved to the Ellis Street ramp. “[He] had previously fled from me into the Auburn Avenue area, so I snuck up behind him and took him into custody without incident,” the officer wrote. “[The man] said I must be following him and that his uncle in the FBI was watching traffic cameras in the area, so once Mayor Shirley Franklin was fired for ‘taking that money’ all the police would be fired and they would close the jail.” The officer arrested the 49-year-old man and he “was transported to jail, which remains open.”