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Saturday, June 14th, Woodruff Park
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I’m supposed to be concentrating on a feature story I have to turn in tomorrow.
But I can’t stop reading Garfield Minus Garfield, a website that makes Garfield comics funny by simply removing the titular cat.
(Tip of the lasagna tray to Andrew Sullivan)
From the AJC:
“The coffee house is closing all 7,100 company-owned U.S. stores for three hours on Tuesday for remedial espresso training for its baristas.”
(Pop Films)
Thirteen months after its screening at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, Atlanta’s homegrown horror film The Signal finally gets a national release. Directed by local filmmakers David Bruckner, Jacob Gentry and Dan Bush, The Signal opens Feb. 22 and assuredly isn’t for everyone: It’s a violent, ultralow-budget thriller with occasionally jarring changes in tone, as this photo of 
Sahr Ngaujah suggests.
That said, if you have even a passing interest in the project, believe in supporting local filmmakers or just want to see certain Atlanta actors and locales you’d otherwise seldom watch on the big screen, be sure to see The Signal this weekend. Opening weekend grosses are enormously influential in dictating the life of the film, so this is your chance to show your school spirit and root-root-root for the home team. (You can check out a trailer and more info about it here.)
Incidentally, The Signal is playing at AMC North DeKalb 16, AMC Discover Mills, AMC Southlake Pavilion 24, Landmark Midtown Art Cinema, Regal 22, Regal Hollywood 24, Regal Arbor Place 18 and Regal Town Center 16. So it’s not like you can use a lack of choices as an excuse.
From the New York Times:
The so-called sunshine vitamin is poised to become the nutrient of the decade, if a host of recent findings are to be believed. Vitamin D, an essential nutrient found in a limited number of foods, has long been renowned for its role in creating strong bones, which is why it is added to milk.
Listen up, rickets sufferers. Not only are your bones weak, you’re hopelessly out of fashion as well.
Twice in recent days, I’ve left comments on Peach Pundit comparing the blog’s loudest “liberal” contributor to Fox News’ “liberal” personality Alan Colmes. Both are ineffectual foils whose tone and personalities discredit liberal viewpoints in front of largely conservative audiences.
Alan Colmes apparently reads Peach Pundit because last night he e-mailed me twice.
In the first e-mail, he asked me how often I watch Fox’s “Hannity & Colmes” or listen to his radio show. I replied that I don’t listen to his radio show, but I do watch “Hannity & Colmes” frequently, not regularly.
A second e-mail from Colmes arrived minutes after he was on-air speaking to Karl Rove. It said simply:
If you were more familiar with my work you probably would have written more favorably.
NPR’s Michelle Norris interviewed the Huckster on “All Things Considered” today. Not a single question or answer on squirrel munching.
I was gravely disappointed. MSNBC’s Scarborough did a much better job getting to the bottom of this topic.
Michael Vick’s pit bulls are getting the celeb-reality treatment. The much-pitied animals will be featured on the upcoming season of the National Geographic Channel’s “Dogtown,” according to a recent story in the Hollywood Reporter.
National Geographic Channel said Monday that its new series “Dogtown” will spend the next few months documenting the attempted rehabilitation of 22 dogs that belonged to jailed Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick and are now residing at Dogtown, the Best Friends animal sanctuary in Utah.
“Dogtown” is in production on new episodes set to premiere in the summer.
The series will focus on four of the toughest cases as the experts at Dogtown try to “resocialize these seriously aggressive pit bulls.”
I keep reading that an old American spy satellite is going to crash to Earth soon.
Unlike a lot of the stuff the media have told me over the years I’m supposed to be afraid of (radon, Y2K, apples with razor blades, strangers offering me rides to the hospital to see my injured parents, tuna, Jamaican drug posses, anti-depressants, iced tea, Ice-T, cell phones, stuffed koala bears) I’m actually kind of nervous about this satellite.
What if I’m walking the dogs and, SMACK, a chunk of sizzling-hot spy satellite crushes me? Stranger things have happened.
How are the dogs going to get home? And if they get home, how are they going to open the garage door? They don’t know the code. Even if they did know the code, they can’t reach the keypad.
(Editor’s note: Lianna Shen is one of our newest interns at CL. She’s not only new to Atlanta, she’s new to the U.S. Below, she shares her thoughts about some of what she’s seen on her way to the office.)
I have a confession: I’m Canadian, born and bred.
I moved to Mableton from Toronto this month to intern at Creative Loafing. The quickest route to the office from my home is Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway, aka Bankhead Highway.
On my first day at CL, my boyfriend insisted that I take something other than “Hood Road,” but I refused. I didn’t want to get lost on my first day. When I got to work, my supervisor made some comments about Bankhead Highway, notably that he remembered hearing about some guy getting pulled out of his truck and stabbed awhile ago. (more…)
A Midtown pig shot at Piedmont Avenue and 10th Street on Wednesday around 10 p.m.
(photo by Thomas Wheatley)
Employees of the Cobb-based Weather Channel had a rude awakening Thursday morning when they showed up for work and discovered their company is being sold. According to one source at the cable channel, rank-and-file staffers didn’t know they were on the auction block until someone spotted this item in the New York Times online.
According to the Times, the WC’s owner, Landmark Communications, a private media company based in Virginia, is seeking to collect as much as $5 billion for the channel and its popular website, weather.com. No word yet on what would become of the channel’s Forecast Earth website, where climatologist Heidi Cullen has ruffled some conservative feathers with her dissing of global warming deniers.
The NYT predicts that NBC, Comcast, Time Warner and even Faux News could be interested in bidding on the channel, which, appropriately, is located just off Windy Hill Road.
I, for one, am quite excited by the news that a Dutch company wants to build a theme park in Atlanta containing miniature versions of familiar landmarks.
Miniature cities are quite popular in Europe and elsewhere. Fans of the film Hot Fuzz will recall the climactic shoot-out among the wee buildings of the model village, as they’re called in England. I’ve actually visited the model version of the Cotswolds village of Bourton-on-the-Water. But it seems the builders of Japan’s Tobu World Square clearly weren’t informed that NYC’s World Trade Center did not overlook Versailles.
The ADA press release claims it’s looking around Atlanta for potential sites for such an attraction. But, honestly, America doesn’t have the kind of quaint Tudor cottages, French palaces or Bavarian castles that give model villages their charm. So what would an Atlanta park commemorate in miniature? The Big Chicken? The Mall of Georgia? Spaghetti Junction?
At the very least, a miniature version of the U.S. of A. could help provide kids with something of a geography lesson so they don’t turn out like Kellie “I thought Europe was a country” Pickler.
Jordan: Cinemechanica’s The Martial Arts. It’s not the individual tracks but it’s like an emotional roller-coaster ride if you listen to it from beginning to the end. It’s progressive indie. It’s awesome. The worst is the Cat Empire’s Two Shoes. It’s crap. Tone-deaf retards. They’re holier-than-thou musicians that aren’t on the level of being holier than thou. It’s trying to be radio-friendly. It doesn’t work. It takes a certain personality to listen to that crap — idiot. If you relate to it you’re just as bad as the music.
Dee: Best is Bad Brains’ Build a Nation. When they decided to come back, it sounded like new and old stuff put together. They put on a really reggae vibe and a really good punk vibe. They’ve been feeding off both and it comes off as a new look on music. Worst? The Killers’ Sam’s Town is horrible. All their music is horrible. They’re stuck in that whole “too indie†phase. They’re trying to come out with their own style, but they’re still making music that kids listen to like they’re in middle school or the ninth grade.
Bri: Venus Doom by HIM. His voice is just like so amazing and deep, and it’s foreign so it makes it like 10 times cooler. They know how to harmonize really well. It’s really easy listening. Really smooth. The new Good Charlotte CD — Good Morning Revival is the worst. They used to be really good, but they’re now mainstream and just crap. Before they got famous they really had their own sound; now it’s annoying. It’s made for American teenagers, and American teenagers don’t have good taste in music.
