Atomictumor

Just found out my neighbor’s name is Rinehold. Cracks me up. Not my neighbor. He seems like a good guy.

Get it… Rinehold Neighbor.

Heh…

Right, so the story goes that something like last year a kindergarten teacher in town was fired for insubordination amidst allegations of being vaguely rough on students.

It was ugly, and, as with everything that happens in Oak Ridge, first theres a bunch of people yelling and hollering, and then theres vague allegations in the letters to the editors and opinion pages of the local newspapers that the superintendent is covering things up, and that its all a big conspiracy, and so on, and so forth.

Which you can expect from Oak Ridge. I mean, seriously, a good portion of the local internet community is composed of crackpots. Freaky, babbling, aggressive weirdos.

I digress, and haven’t hit the point yet. So last fall she was fired, and a hearing was scheduled. The hearing started yesterday, and first thing that happens is that the public, including the Oak Ridger reporters, were booted from the building.

And this is where the story gets weird. Because today, the Oak Ridger published an unsigned opinion piece that sounds every bit as disjointed and insane as the freaks that populate its forum page.

Take a sec to read this bad boy. Better yet, I’ll hit some of the high points of the journalistic masterpiece entitled “Get the Hell Out”:

First, it’s the student newspaper scandal that gave Oak Ridge a black eye that stretched across the nation; then it’s playing Russian roulette with the lives of our students in what appears to be a pissing contest with city officials during budget time; and now it’s closing a public meeting at the last minute and telling everyone to get the hell out of the proceedings.

They seem to take a large affront to the fact that school board members, additionally, were not present at the meeting.

And who is the most to blame? Why our vote would go to our old friends serving on the Oak Ridge School Board, of course.

“What?” You may say.

“Ridiculous!” You may opine.

“Why the members of the School Board did not even attend the now-it’s-open-to-the-public and now-it’s-not formal hearing of the allegedly insubordinate and inappropriate Brenda Fellner!”

Exactly.

The School Board members were no where to be seen during Thursday’s morning’s closing of what had been anticipated for months as a public meeting — until a group of Nashville attorneys representing various interests decided to boot the press and the public from proceedings.

Wow.

Thats some vitriol.

The piece then goes on to presume that school board members were in a super secret agreement not to spend their day at a hearing, which involves them in a similar way as it involves the Mayor, the Senator, and the President (maybe the Pope), being that the issue is between a boss (the superintendent) and his employee (the teacher).

Makes sense to me.

And probably to ol Rick Esposito, except I’m starting to really think that theres a vested interest on the part of the Oak Ridger to sensationalize and blow up anything here in town, maybe because they’re tired of trying to compete on just reporting news, or maybe because they wish they were in Knoxville where dirty pool does play on the school board. Last week they blew up a tiff between a county judge and county commissioner into a massive thing (as seen, currently, on their Poll section).

Then theres the fiasco thats been ongoing up until recently with the “user comments” on the bottom of each news article, where each article gets copied up with inane, crazy stupid comments at the bottom, saying something like

I AGRE WITH THE DOGGUY, THE POLICE ARE TRYING TO KEEP US FROM SMOKING IN OUR HOUSES. I HAD THREE SURGERYES LAST YR AND EACH TIME THEREE WAS SICK PEOPLE THERE, AND THEY ALL VOTED FOR OBAMA.

REMEMBER only one time THE SUNSHINE IS ON THE BACKSIDE, AND THE little kids GET IN THE AY!@

Seriously. I kid you not.

I could speculate on the reasons for the Oak Ridger going this direction, from the non-local ownership and editorial oversight, to the local newspaper competition, to the recent purchase of the paper, but I don’t know that it’d make a difference.

It is, however, very disheartening to those of us who are able to function objectively and not see black helicopters on the skyline, who know people working for the city council and the school system, who worked hard to keep buses going while understanding the financial need to have cut them back. The Oak Ridger may not be the best part of Oak Ridge, but it is a part, and one that is every bit as blighted as the apartments in Highland View.

Unfortunately, eminent domain doesn’t apply.

—

To cap this up, the above makes it my distinct and proud honor to bestow upon the Oak Ridger the Atomictumor.com William Randolph Hearst Yellow Journalism award for 2008! Thanks for the hard work, Oak Ridger!

How bout a bullet point post?

• Got a badass new phone.  Its pretty. It does what I like.  It makes me remember how nice it is to have a smartphone that doubles as a phone.   Very nice.
• Odelay is 12 years old.  I’m 30.  But I feel older finding out that first bit of news.
• This Presidential election is really bumming me out.  I mean, as soon as you really get in there and realize that there’ll never be an election in your lifetime that isn’t a ‘lesser of two evils’ kinda gig, they go and make it a ‘lesser of two really really lame evils’ thing.  Except at this point, its a bunch of evils.  Particularly now that Edwards, the only person who had a little bit of pepper (other than maybe McCain, and certainly Ron Paul, if you like you pepper flavored with a hint of fascist) is out of the race, theres really nothing in it for me.  I mean, holy crap, you can sum them all up at this point as either “political party suckup” or “political party suckup”.
  Please correct me if I’m wrong.  I mean, if you can go out there and tell me why exactly either of the frontrunning democratic candidates deserve to be leader of the free world, other than the fact that they’ve gotten significant democratic brownie points, AND make a convincing argument, I’ll bake you… uh… brownies.  Yeah.  Or, for that matter, exactly how electing another candidate running on the same platform as Bush (looking at you, Romney/Huckabee) is anywhere NEAR an intelligent idea, that might get you some fried chicken.
  I’m serious.  This is sad in my native country.  Why the hell should anybody care about the electoral process if THIS crap is the best that the electoral process can give me?  No thanks, I’m fixin to opt out.
• Things are shaping up nicely vis a vis matrimony.  Got our officiant ready to roll, so all we need to do is ship out invitations.   No, you’re not getting one.  Well, maybe.
• Um… so… the house?  Yeah, its on the market.  Found out that one a day before closing.    Apparently I kicked a cat in my sleep, and karma didn’t like it or something. Anybody wanna help me dig up a couple of mortgage payments?
• Speaking of sleep, I’ve been pondering the fact that I woke up this morning babbling something to the lady about tentacles.  I still haven’t figured that one out.  Maybe the cellphone contract’s on my mind…

So, the wedding plans are in full swing. We agreed not to plan or discuss it until after the holiday stress was over. And here we are…

I forgot how much there was to do. The cool part is that I’m not doing it alone. AT is very, very much excited about planning this shindig together. Woot!

In discussions (prior to the holidays), we decided that we wanted to skip all the formal wedding hooha and have a super-awesome party…with a super-awesome live band.. We’ve secured Cristabel and the Jons to play…and THEN it evolved from there. We decided to do the whole wedding/reception with a 1920’s theme.

Yep. Flappers, gangstas, jazz, speakeasies and booze.

And we’re hoping everyone will play the game with us. The boys are excited about dressing the parts.

Finding clothes… uh… that has proven to be tougher than expected. One would first think- go vintage! Uh, not so easy. Aside from the fact that women were very much smaller than most of us today, all the nice dresses that are still wearable and not stained are VERY expensive. Gorgeous, but not gonna happen.

Then, after days of surfing and phone calls… I found a very, very cool shop on eBay. They have “new” vintage dresses, styled from original patterns from the 20’s and 30’s. I found one (well, a few..but picked my fav). Ordered it. It was sitting on my porch 3 days later. The best part? It fits perfect!! Like I tried it on in a store or something. It’s BEEEEAUTIFUL!

We’re not even going to try to find AT a real vintage suit. 6′4. Sheesh.

Let’s see… what else have we done… reserved the location, bought wedding bands, are in talks with food peeps (Time Out Deli, yayah!!)… and we even made our own invitations! Decorations are in the brain-storming process.

Hope time is in our favor.. we still have lots to do. Lovin it!!

Times are good, times are good.

Last night, after dropping off the kids at the legacy in-laws (thats the best name I can determine for a situation like this - alert Emily Post), me and my Lady went arm in arm to the local Mexican food eatery for a nice, grown up double date thing with Bos and Eaves.

With big ass mexican beer and margaritas.

And damn, lemme tell you. That place (the name of which always eludes me, and I can’t be arsed to look it up, so deal) throws some food at you. We’ve had the fajitas there before, and never finished the plate. So, since the Lady and I were both starving, we decided to split an order of fajitas along with a big ass sampler platter, and DAMN. We didn’t finish the food.

Finished the booze, tho, and then the four of us went back over here to drink more booze and play spades, on account of the Lady and I have a crazy psychic connection when we’re playing spades that almost allows us to crush the pathetic competition, except that we tend to be too ambitious, and end up losing. Still, one of these days, we might actually have those 12 tricks that we both think we do, and then we’ll be all like “IN YOUR FACE, COMPETITION” and the competition will be all like “damn, I just got pwned by AT and Ladyfriend”.

Then we’ll drink heavily and sit back, convinced in our mutual awesomnitude.

Look it up.

So, anyway, we got here, and the spades game never happened, because we got to drinking, and listening to music (Hot Chip and Radiohead, both on vinyl, for those keeping track), and we talked about stuff. While Bos and I were talking about cool, interesting, important things like the flash hard drive on his little Asus EEE (which I’m starting to see the point in. I mean, at first, I saw the 900 MHZ processor and half gig of RAM and thought “loser”, but it’s designed to surf the internet and do word processing, not, like, render all sorts of crazy 3D stuff, or track ballistic missiles or something. Those paying attention know that I have, in the house, at least 3 computers capable of rendering all sorts of crazy 3D stuff and track ballistic missiles, but what do I do with them? Surf the internet and word processing. So, there you go) and the new phone that I’m imminently getting to replace the old and busted Samsung piece of large ass heavy not working crap that I carry around on my belt, the ladies were talking about something boring like babies, or families, or something, and having some sort of moment, or something lame like that.

Who knows.

Anyway, we all had a good time, Eave’s nose didn’t seem bothered by the cat hair, and nobody got mauled by the dogs. Then they left, and the Lady and I cuddled up in our amazingly, incredibly, insanely comfortable new bed and snickered about how they had to go pick up their kids and put them to bed. Heh.

And then this morning, we slept in till 10:30 (!) and fixed tasty omelettes for breaky. And lo, it was good.

(this post really had a lot of parenthetical asides. Not sure whats up with all that. I guess I’ve missed em.)