Atomictumor

All of this local stuff has kept me away from talking about the crushing blows to consumerism that the big telco’s are getting ready to rain down on people like me, and some things have gone unTumored for a while.

I mentioned the anticipated merger of Bellsouth and AT&T a few months ago, and there hasn’t been much to say. They’ve been cutting through the red tape of an FCC that would just love to close the book on 20 years of regulating monopolies in the telecom industry (after all, if the government can be a monopoly, why can’t big business), and being pretty successful. First of all, last week Bellsouth and AT&T shareholders voted overwhelmingly to approve the merger (despite the ACLU, being a shareholder in Bellsouth, wanting feds to investigate those pesky reports that Bellsouth was giving the .gov phone records without subpoenas).

Our next bit of news comes from Will Street, where Bellsouth and AT&T both posted good looking second quarter profits. Woot.

Finally, the great state of Kentucky has approved the merger in the state, with the caveats of not raising local land line rates for 5 years, keeping a state headquarters, and probably some goats or whisky or something.

So, we’re pending FCC approval, a few more states, and we’ll have a super powerful AT&T-Bellsouth monster to deal with. Yep, that sounds fun. I’m glad AT&T is starting with us on its great path to resurrecting Ma Bell, that way we can complain the loudest about the high assed internet and phone prices, because once it becomes a duopoly between Comcast and AT&T things are going to get ugly.

Using the gayest picture available, cnn.com rocked the world of pop music today by reporting that 1/5th of the group ‘N Sync has come out of his fabulous closet. Tens of teenage girls will be crying themselves to sleep tonight.
Normally Atomictumor doesn’t report on celebrity gossip, but what the hell.

(disclaimer: this story contains heresay, which means its the best kind)

On our road, there’s a house that seems to present ‘problems’.

We live in an otherwise good part of town, but for this house. The problems with this place started up shortly after we moved in, when the (quiet and yard maintaining) couple living there pulled up stakes and moved to the big city, selling the house to, you guessed it, an out of town landlord.

Since then, the place has been trouble. There have been two tenants since then, “Trash in the Front Yard Rednecks”, who seemed to be well on their way to making an addition to the house with egg crates and cardboard boxes. They moved out, and “40 year old methhead with delinquent son” moved in, and that was the good one. That one would play music so loud the bass would wake me up across the street and 4 houses down. We caught their teenage son hiding behind a tree in our front yard one day while the kids were playing. Good stuff!

Finally, and thankfully, they moved, and apparently the jackass landlord gave up and sold the place. Thus began the spring of restoration, where a new floor, among a buncha other stuff was installed, and that took until about a week ago.

We didn’t give it any though until this weekend at about 1 AM, when GAC and I (well, mostly GAC) were awakened by a large group of thugs outside the house. When some woman starting screaming, we called the cops, but evidently somebody had beaten us to the punch. Still, despite having been called twice, GAC never saw a cop show. Hmm.

Fast forward to Monday. MastaG stayed home sick, and I came home early to keep an eye on him, and to pick up Pigpen from the bus at noonish. While walking down to the bus stop, we noticed that the new house had some yardwork done recently, and a big nice swingset installed in back. They can’t be THAT thuggy, can they? Walking past, we were stopped by their neighbor, “the old man”, who said he had called the cops that night, and confirmed that they never showed. Evidently, the neighbors had a bunch of crackheads come over with a girl named Angela, and they broke the arm of the guy who lives there. The old man said that the folks who moved in seem decent, and that they didn’t seem druggish.

Hmm, thought I, and forgot about it. Yesterday GAC met the neigbors, a married couple about our age with two young children.
Heres what happened, according to them:

So it was the husband’s birthday on Saturday, and he had 3 friends over playing poker. The kids were at babysitters for the night. He asked the wife if she’d like to invite some girlfriends over, but she couldn’t find any that could get babysitters at short notice, so she called her friend Angela from some class she had taken.

Angela was at a party, and asked if she could invite about 15 or so others. “No”, said neighborwife, explaining that its a small birthday party thing for her husband, and they don’t want a debacle. Angela whittled it down to 4 friends, and neighborwife reluctantly agreed, providing she knew everybody Angela was bringing.

3 or 4 hours later, Angela showed up with two cars full of people, including her brother, and eight or so crackheads, who all wanted to know where the party was. When they showed up, neighborwife and neighborhusband came outside and asked them to leave, at which point hostilities broke out. They jumped neighborhusband, breaking his arm and throwing him into some newly installed landscape lights. Neighborwife was screaming and beating them in the head with a shoe, but the crackheads were, well, crackheads, and didn’t really notice. Finally, they left having done their damage.

Thing is, neighborwife explained, was that Angela’s last name is Beams. Her and her brother are, she explains, the kids of Oak Ridge police chief David Beams, which might explain the lightning quick response time of the police that night? Regardless, our road is now “under surveillance” which makes me giddy with dropping land value joy.

(2nd disclaimer: so the story goes… we don’t know these neighbors, and they could have some evil vendetta against the good Beams family that would go as far as finding us, buying a house near our street, and staging this whole thing just so we’d put it on the tumor.  thats what Cheney tried to do that one time.  Still, it sure would be something if the police chief, fighting a seeming losing war against crack in Oak Ridge, can’t control it in his house.  Yep.  It’d be something.)