Amazing what you can find searching for more clips from “Kate’s Secret.” I was looking for the counseling scene, led by Ed Asner as Dr. Resnick. Ponder fat Ed Asner as a counselor to bulimics, and Mackenzie Phillips, natch, as one of his patients. Of course she gets all the best lines: “I got a dirty fork again, this is the sixth dirty fork I’ve had this week!”
Anyway, I stumbled upon Meredith Baxter and David Hasselhoff modeling clothes from the future, which is our present.
“This is a BP mess,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said at a news conference with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal and several U.S. senators. “It is a horrible mess. It is a massive and environmental mess.”
Yes, and you’ve let it linger. As this disaster unfolds it’s becoming evident that the Obama administration has been a bystander. Once again Washington has failed the Gulf.
“New Urbanist” James Howard Kunstler has some harsh words for our fair city (via Thomas):
If the Devil created an anti-city, a place where people would feel least human, Atlanta would surely be that place — despite the prayerful babble of tongues emanating from the evangelical roller rinks at every freeway off-ramp. One might think: Los Angeles, but that city at least came up with the amenity of valet parking, mostly lacking in Atlanta, where the suffocating heat slows the journey of blood from heart to brain.
I basically agree, and I’m a native. Atlanta is a city of missed opportunities and unimaginative leadership. Think how much time and money has been wasted creating and attracting diversions (like the NASCAR museum), time and money that would’ve been better spent making the ATL “eminently habitable,” as Sy Ableman would say.
EXHIBIT A: Turner Field and environs
EVERY other city that’s built a new stadium has managed to revitalize the surrounding neighborhood. Not Atlanta. Our city decided to spend $2.5 million in a miniature golf course across the street from The Ted, perhaps the stupidest municipal investment in Atlanta’s history. It stayed open less than two years, losing $500,000. That’s $3 million that should have gone toward restoring the crumbling Summerhill storefronts, located amid the sea of parking lots on Georgia Avenue. It would’ve been a sound investment and sustainable, with Grant Park only a mile away. But instead of creating the next East Atlanta, Summerhill is worse than ever, a blight on display to all those who attend a Braves game (about 2.5 million people a year).
That leaves a pretty bad impression, one that can’t be repaired by tacky theme songs and hackneyed slogans.
