Yet More Notes

The Bloggies: Some of my colleagues at Cliopatria, alas, are drawn to bloggy fast food. Sharon Howard loves Manolo's Shoe Blog. Chris Bray insists that The Burrito Blog is the"Best. Blog. Ever." Fortunately, Cliopatria's readers are more discerning, so you're invited to nominate candidates for The Cliopatria Awards. No fast food, please. Good, nourishing broccoli and spinach are welcome. Nominations will close on 30 November. While you're at it, over at Liberty & Power you can vote for the Best Libertarian/Classical Liberal Group, Individual, New Group, and New Individual blogs.

National Book Awards: To no one's surprise, Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for non-fiction; but William Vollman's Europe Central was the surprise winner for fiction. Awards for poetry and young people's literature went to W. S. Merwin and Jeanne Birdsall. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Norman Mailer were given life-time achievement awards.

The People Are the Problem: If you lived here in Atlanta, you'd know that we're in the midst of a major effort to revamp the city's public image. The campaign is called"Brand Atlanta." We've just announced a new logo. It looks like a tornado closing in on the city from the west. We've got a new slogan,"Atlanta: Every Day is Opening Day." Personally, I preferred the older one:"The city too busy to hate." And, we've got a new song,"The ATL." It comes in both hip-hop and symphonic versions. Our mayor, Shirley Franklin, is behind this $8,000,000 phew-phaw, but I forgive her for it because, otherwise, she's been great for the city. [more ...]

The pr campaign comes just as the city celebrates the major expansion of one attraction, The High Museum of Art, and the opening of a new one, The Georgia Aquarium. It will rival any aquarium anywhere else in the country, but I'm still trying to decide whether that is what the city really needed. Atlanta is the largest land-locked state capitol in the United States, so take your choice: a) it's not in character with what the city, otherwise, is; or b) it fills a desperate void in the city's life. But I'm convinced that the people rush in, sometimes from the boonies around us, to undermine Shirley Franklin's pr campaign and undergird the caricatures about us. Who can forget these notable recent examples?

* Ray Brent Marsh, who allowed hundreds of dead bodies to accumulate unattended on his crematory property north of here.
* Brian Nichols and the keystone cops who were supposed to have him under control on rape charges.
* Jennifer Wilbanks, the runaway bride, who planned an outrageously elaborate wedding, only to abandon it for a Greyhound bus ride.
* Lisa Lynette Clark, the 37 year old woman, who under Georgia law could legally marry her 15 year old lover without parental consent, because she was pregnant; but who is also in jail on charges of child molestation. Isn't there a problem somewhere there about what the state allows and what it incriminates?

I rest my case.