The Blotter
Saturday, November 14th, 2009
HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES: An officer was working an extra job for Ansley Park Security Patrol when he responded to a call about an alleged theft on Inman Circle. A woman said in April or May 2009, she loaned a diamond ring to a female friend. “The ring holds sentimental value to both parties,” the officer wrote. Also, the ring is reportedly worth $27,500 and the diamond is 2.68 carats. The woman said in August 2009, she asked her friend to return the ring, but her friend refused and said, “Buy another one.” Now, her friend won’t return her calls, the woman said. She said she talked to her lawyer about the situation and she isn’t sure she wants to press charges, but she wanted an informational police report filed, because of the value of the ring. The officer gave her a case number. Her female friend lives in Smyrna.
DOWN AND OUT IN ATLANTA, PART 1: An officer dealt with a call about a homeless person sleeping in a city vehicle at Trinity Avenue and Broad Street. The officer said the homeless man exited the car and talked to two city workers who were preparing to leave. “The area in question is a fenced-in and locked parking area for City of Atlanta Planning and Research vehicles,” the officer wrote. “The vehicle is a white Taurus that is parked in a parking space.” Cardboard had been placed against the windows to prevent people from looking into the car. “The vehicle had a lot of trash, feces, urine, food, throwup, drug paraphernalia and a broken window,” the officer wrote. “The suspect advised to me that he has been sleeping in the vehicle for over a month.” The front gate was locked, but the man apparently entered through a piece of fence that was cut open. “The vehicle will be removed by city workers and attempts will be made to salvage what they can.” The homeless man, age 55, went to jail on a trespassing charge.
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.”
In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond claims, “When NASA wanted to find some place on Earth resembling the surface of the Moon, so that our astronauts preparing for the first moon landing could practice in an environment similar to what they would encounter, NASA picked a formerly green area of Iceland that is now utterly barren.” This struck me as wrong. Growing up, I heard the slag fields around Sudbury, Ontario, helped get the lunar astronauts accustomed to the moon’s desolation. I’ve heard similar things about islands in the Canadian arctic and deserts in the American southwest. I can’t see NASA hauling astronauts around the world just to look at places without trees. I wonder if the real explanation is that the astronauts had to take geology lessons. True?