Atomictumor

It feels really weird to be as involved as we are now in local politics. Five years ago I couldn’t give two shits about the whole thing, yet here I am, writing about and supporting local politicians. The times, they are a’changin’.

AT has been even more involved than myself. Outside of posting on this site and the occassional comment on other sites, he was asked to work some bugs out of David Stuart’s blog. That, combined with his endorsement of Stuart on the ‘tumor the other day warranted favorable remarks from Stuart to a third party.

This morning, after I voted, I saw a woman sitting in the bed of a truck with a Stuart sign. I spoke with her for a few minutes and then sort of spontaneously gave her AT’s phone number to pass on to Stuart. I mentioned what AT had done and said for and about Stuart and she said she’d pass on the message.

Well, she did, and about an hour later, Stuart gave AT a call. I didn’t really see that coming, at least not on election day. I thought he’d have more pressing matters to attend to, but I guess today all there is to do is wait and wait some more. No amount of politicking is going to change minds at the voting booth.

AT was a little flabbergasted about the whole thing and said that Stuart had called perhaps thinking that AT had something specific he wished to talk with him about. Not being the case, they had a short but polite conversation and went about their day. But it’s nice to know that Stuart took time out of an assuredly busy schedule to call some nut-job blogger. Kudos to you, sir.

Can someone (ahem Netmom?) please point me to any and all laws concerning the sale of beer at a grocery store in OR? Nodbob (6 months shy of 21) and I went to a grocery store to buy beer, and they wouldn’t sell it to me unless he showed them his ID as well. I was carrying and paying, he was just my ride. Are they going to start refusing me beer when I have my kids with me?

I think it’s cuz he has a bitchin’ mohawk.

Beauchamp is not cleared, reports the Oakridger. Evidently his lawyer, Mike Ritter, spoke to soon. The TBI’s spokesperson is quoted as saying, “The TBI doesn’t, quote, clear people,”

Even Anderson County District Attorney General Jim Ramsey agreed with TBI. “We’re not in the business of clearing people,” he said.

Too bad for Beauchamp.

A woman in my class came in distressed the other day.  She claimed that her car had been stolen from her apartment’s parking lot.
Yesterday she came into class and said that she’d received a call from the cops.  Turns out it had been reposessed, not stolen.
Here’s where it gets scammy.  The dealership in question (Smoky Mountain Car Supercenter) had received her car payment only one day late when they sent out their repo guy.  When my classmate called them to ask why they towed the car, the salesman said that he’d mispelled her name on the contract and she hadn’t noticed, so they had voided it.  Hmm.
Luckily, she’d written down the VIN for the car before it got towed.  Upon looking it up, she found out that the car had four owners in this year alone.  It looks like they get their downpayment, maybe a second payment, void the contract and repo the car and start the whole process over again.
Our readers are too smart to fall for something like this, but I know you all know some suckers.  Spread the word and make sure no one gets shafted again.

(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.)