lol MARTA, #896

TL;DR – when queried to what MARTA stood for, Google’s response was the politically incorrect acronym

Ironic hilarity ensued.

Known by many, spoken aloud by none; except among closed trusted company.  When I came across this story, my jaw kind of did a quarter-drop; it was one of those stories that was tailor-made for the MARTA criticism that I love to spotlight like it were sport.  If not for the simple fact that I’ve been slammed at work and only came across it during the few minutes I afford myself to surf the internet while I’m eating at my desk, I probably would have vomited out a ton of words in knee-jerk reaction to it, prefaced with a hundred lols or rofls, but such time could not have been spared at that moment.

But really, this is kind of the epitome of the perpetual failure of MARTA; I’ll be the first to admit that former CEO Keith Parker did a fantastic job of improving the infrastructure of the company a considerable amount, and actually managed to get their finances into the black, but the one thing that even he couldn’t really overcome was the sheer perception of the agency as a whole.  And as we all are firmly aware of, perception is reality, and if the perception of MARTA couldn’t be changed, it’s hard to say that that much improvement had actually really occurred.

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Too distracted to enforce the distracted

Georgia Senate approves House Bill 673*, outlawing motorists from holding their cell phones while operating a vehicle AKA the stop fucking texting while driving bill.

*behind paywall, but just hit the stop loading button before the paywall script popup has a chance to load to read content anyway because fuck myAJC

That’s great and all, but it’s going to be completely meaningless when no cop in the state is going to bother enforcing this law.  Unless they’re extremely bored and want to do work to pass the time and/or they’re targeting minorities.  One of my best friends works in law enforcement, and every time I have questions about “is X illegal?” the answers are almost always yes, but with a disclaimer that it’s basically discretionary on the officer to whether or not it’s worth the effort to tie themselves up with menial violations when there are bigger fish to potentially fry.

And considering Georgia’s lax discretionary ambivalence about HOV lane violators, blackout license plate covers, jaywalking, and other seemingly innocuously negligible yet illegal misdemeanors, HB 673 seems destined to be as useless as most of these other laws, because if nobody’s going to bother enforcing it, what’s really the point?

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Unpopular opinion: Jessica Jones is a weak show

Yes, I have seen Iron Fist.  Yes, I agree that Danny Rand is a bitch and a square simultaneously.  But when the day is over, after finishing the second season of Netflix’s Jessica Jones, I can still say that I found Iron Fist to be the more enjoyable show.

Granted, this is like debating on Pizza Hut or Papa John’s over who’s the worst pizza, and both shows sit at the bottom of the barrel in my opinion when it comes to Netflix’s ever expanding library of Marvel properties set primarily in Manhattan.  But for reasons I can’t comprehend, Jessica Jones always seems to have this pass that the majority of the populous I ever speak with in regards to these shows always seems to think that it’s such a fantastic show.

I get that it’s a show with a strong female lead created by a crew with primarily females in key roles, so I understand the importance of the show from that standpoint, but from just the sheer storytelling and enjoyment factor, I just don’t see it.

The main takeaway I had after I finished the last episode of season 2 of Jessica Jones was it was a season with an objective of deconstructing all of the characters in the series, and presumptuously setting up for a third season that hasn’t even been confirmed yet.  I will say that I do think it was better than the first season, which literally reset three times, versus the actually linear singular plot of season 2, but again, that’s another comparison of two low-grade things.  I walk away from Jessica Jones S2 with feelings of unsatisfied disappointment, little excitement for another season, and a general loathing of the Trish Walker character.

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I’m sure a college team wouldn’t have gotten blown out by 61

As if I ever needed any more reason to harp on the fact that the NBA today is utter crap, along came this game the other night where the Memphis Grizzlies lost to the Charlotte Hornets – by 61 points.  I had to stop and do the math in my head when I saw the final 140-79 score to verify that it really was a 61-point blowout, and yep sure enough, the Hornets blew out the Grizzlies by 61 points.

It’s no surprise to me the frequency in which I see 30-point blowouts with regularity in today’s NBA scores, but to see it somehow doubled up, now that takes a tragic amount of effort in futility to attain.  Seriously, I was an NBA fan in an era where 20 points was considered a blowout, and they really didn’t happen that often.  The most lopsided wins I’d ever seen in my life in the NBA up until the turn of the century was this extreme abomination clunker of a game where the Knicks beat the Jordan-led Bulls by 32 points during the 96 season in which the Bulls still won 70 games, and this stinker of a game by the Jazz in the NBA Finals, where they got blown out by 42 points by the Jordan-led Bulls.

But those were just two games in nearly a decade of watching basketball in which I saw such gargantuan blowouts. The Grizzlies somehow managed to lose by a bigger margin (61) than the total score the Jazz put up in that 1998 game (54).  61 points was typically the average score of any team that lost to the defense-heavy, hard hitting Pat Riley-coached New York Knicks teams of the 90s.

To put it in perspective, the only time that I, and probably most people my age, have ever seen a 60+ blowout was in 1992, when the United States Dream Team featuring Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and other superstars blow out a star-struck squad from Angola by 68 points.  The 2018 Charlotte Hornets might be owned by Michael Jordan, but there sure as shit aren’t players remotely close to his level of greatness, that still managed to blow out the Grizz by 61.

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Who knew anarchists were so detail-oriented?

Impetus: vandals break into church, spray paint satanic symbols all over the walls

First off, I don’t condone breaking and entering, or vandalism.  I don’t even condone the smoking of marijuana, but that’s more an eye of the beholder kind of opinion.  And I most certainly feel empathy for this church that hasn’t even officially opened and had its first service, before some shitheads broke in and spray painted shit all over the walls.

However, I have to say I have a hard time getting over the vandals’ execution of the anarchy symbol (pictured) they left in the church; namely the fact that they clearly utilized some painters/masking tape in the process of making it, as indicative by the extremely clean and straight lines of the anarchy-A.

Look, I give them a little bit of ironic credit of thinking outside the box, and instead of just spray painting the standard circle-A line art of a traditional anarchy-A, they decided to try and be all artistic and reverse that shit out, and knock out an anarchy-A out of circular blob of clearly-satanic red.

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Individual tweets, are somehow news today

I’m sure it’ll be a shocker to know that I abhor social media, and that I pretty much think it’s a metaphorical cancer on the entire god damn planet.  I feel like just about everything terrible in the world now can be traced back to something related to social media, or that social media inevitably takes most things and somehow inexplicably finds every single way to make them worse than in which they started.  Behind screens and occasional veils of anonymity, either people feel emboldened to be shitheads, or perhaps their true selves emerge when they feel the safest, outside of arm’s reach to the people they choose to fling stones at.

The bottom line is that social media tends to steer things into the tragically negative, rather than the one out of a hundred cases in which social media manages to do something good, to which the they’ll still get twisted into misguided and greedy intentions by association.

The problem is, social media has become so prevalent and commonplace in the world today, it’s become a primary source for news and general content.  I’ve always made the analogy that social media has turned the entire planet into America Online, except that instead of subscribers holed in their houses looking for poorly photoshopped pictures of Kathy Ireland or Teri Hatcher naked, the vast majority of the modern world is connected to AOL, with shitty screen names, and the capability to IM one another or the entire world as a whole, at any given moment they feel like it, and they most certainly capitalize on such immediacy.

However, whereas in the past if celebrities, athletes or known figures were AOL subscribers, like hell would they let just anyone know what their screen names were.  The last thing they would want is to have their email box pinging YOU’VE GOT MAIL every two seconds from fans, admirers and haters to have access to a direct line of communication with them.  Somehow in this day and age it’s quite the contrary, and people who are known can’t not broadcast their online handles enough, with Twitter handles being the subtitle on just about any source of communication, and a seeming requisite space requirement on every form of marketing these days to account for a Twitter handle, Instagram handle, Facebook URL and whatever other social media platforms a person or entity feels the need to shill themselves on.

Obviously, I’m veering off point, as is often the norm when I rant, because my disdain at what started this train of thought snowballed a little off the original rails.  But I was looking through my news feed this morning, and for some reason, surprisingly high on the morning’s recommended reads, was this link about AN AMAZING TWITTER CONVERSATION.  I mean that’s already an oxymoron in itself because almost nothing on fucking Twitter can really be classified as amazing in my opinion, but I guess I was curious to see what fluffy bullshit could possibly be constituted as “news.”

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Would you rather have an awesome player longer, or an awesome player immediately?

This is the age-old debate that resurfaces just about every single year, around this time during Major League Baseball’s Spring Training time.  Team X has a highly-touted prospect that has some hype behind their potential, and they get a substantial chunk of time with the Major League squad, getting to scrimmage against Major League players, and it turns out that they can not only hold their own, but excel immediately.

But then right about this time every year, citing some sort of bullshit excuse along the lines of “they need more seasoning” or “they need to work on hitting breaking balls on Monday night games with 75%+ humidity,” Team X, Team Y and every other team that has a hotshot prospect, reassigns them to minor league camp, where they will inevitably start out their seasons in either Triple-A or Double-A minor league baseball.

And then right on cue, the internet explodes up in arms about the fallacy of the so-called “abuse” of the “system,” how young prospect players are artificially held back in the minor leagues, regardless of how ready they are, so that the teams can manipulate their service clocks in a manner that would give them the maximum amount of time they are allowed to employ the player at the most minimal financial commitment.  How it’s crooked, and abusive to the players, and this and that concerning themselves over money that is hardly their own, and concerns that are curious to why people care so much about how a private business operates.

This year, the Atlanta Braves are the de facto Team X of 2018 Spring Training that is embarking on this journey, as they have just recently assigned 20-year old phenom outfielder Ronald Acuña to minor league camp, where he will remain and begin his season with the Triple-A Gwinnett Strippers Stripers.  Despite the fact that he had a blistering Spring Training up to this point where he literally led the big league squad in hitting, batting .432 with 4 home runs and 11 RBI, the Braves have stated the fluffy excuse of how he needs to “work on his flow,” to which not a single person can comprehend what that actually means, but whatever, Acuña is in the minor leagues, and just about any educated baseball fan with a brain would have guessed, was going to happen with 150% certainty.

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