And you thought it was already slow enough. Not according to city planners, which has adopted a *”road diet” strategy to make downtown’s streets more pedestrian-friendly.
*A modification of a road or street that narrows the road by removing travel lanes. Most commonly, a road diet involves the conversion of 4-lane street with a center turn lane to a 2-lane street with turn pockets, landscaped median, and on-street parking. The result, in general, is slower, more well-behaved car speeds with little or no reduction in traffic volume, greatly increased safety, improved street appearance, improved community pride, and a substantially improved environment for retail shops along the street.
Those who commute from east Atlanta and DeKalb to downtown have noticed the impact this strategy has had on Decatur Street, now plagued by bottlenecks and poor planning. Those difficult-to-navigate medians have been flattened, barely a month after they were erected. Guess who’s paying for that?
The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation has issued a CALL TO ACTION (in all caps, no less) over “South Park’s” repeated use of “fag” in Wednesday’s episode.
Never mind that the epithet was borrowed to describe bikers who ride without a muffler — “Just because a person is gay doesn’t mean he’s a fag,” says one of the characters. “South Park” was making fun of macho assholes, not gays.
Of course the proper context might deter all but the professionally indignant, so the humorless prigs at GLAAD have raised the stakes. “It is an epithet that has real consequences for real people’s lives,” GLAAD said in a statement. “Just this year, an 11-year-old Massachusetts student named Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, unable to endure the unrelenting anti-gay bullying and name-calling he experienced at school, committed suicide.”
I don’t call ‘em the Petty Queer Establishment for nothing.
Nathan Deal, once respected across the aisle, has demonstrated he’ll do anything to get elected governor, even out-nutting his chief competitor, John Oxendine.
“I am joining several of my colleagues in the House in writing a letter to the President asking that he release a copy of his birth certificate so we can have an answer to this question,” Deal confirmed today.
Carrie Prejean has withdrawn her suit against Miss California USA after pageant officials played her a scene from a homemade sex tape starring a certain heroine to the cultural right. Oh to be a fly on that wall.
Houstonians appear poised to elect a lesbian as their next mayor, which would be a first for a major American city. Had Cathy Woolard not left the Atlanta City Council to run for Congress in 2004, she might well have been celebrating history tonight.