atlantalarry

Flynn Broady runs for Cobb County District Attorney

Flynn Broady, the Democrat who ran an unsuccessful campaign for U.S, Congress from Georgia's heavily Republican 11th District during the 2018 midterm elections will be running for Cobb County District Attorney in 2020.

Broady is a retired Infantry First Sergeant, who is currently a prosecuting attorney for the county's DUI accountability court.

His experience in the Cobb County court system includes working as an Assistant Solicitor General, serving the role of Veterans Treatment and Accountability Court Coordinator, and is now Prosecuting Attorney for the Cobb County DUI Accountability Court.

He holds bachelor’s degree in Public Management from Austin Peay State University a Master’s of Public Administration degree from Kennesaw State University and a law degree (JD) from the Seton Hall School of Law.

Read about Flynn Broady on the Cobb County Courier

 

A Pacific adventure

As part of my outreach effort for the Cobb County Courier

I do a weekly event called Meet the Editor at The Cenacle Coffee Shop and Bistro in Austell.  Simply put I invite readers, or anyone else with questions, suggestions, or even complaints about the Courier to show up and chat with me in an informal setting.  Sometimes people show up, sometimes they don't.

One Friday I had a conversation with one of the cooks at the Cenacle, a young man named Jacobo Junior.  He told me about a fascinating adventure he and a friend undertook.  They bought a one-way ticket to the Pacific, and starting in New Zealand, they visited Australia and a number of other countries.

He pointed me to his blog that had a lot of descriptions of his travels, and photographs.

I asked him if he was interested in summarizing his adventures in a series of short articles for the Courier. 

Here's a link to the first article in the series, that describes how the journey started.

What's going on with the Silver Comet Trail

The Silver Comet Trail bridge over Nickajack Creek

For over a decade there has been an attempt to extend the Silver Comet Trail to the Atlanta Beltline.  Roberta Cook, founder and president of the River Line Historic Area in Cobb County began talking up the idea in the early 2000s. 

Cook and others formed a separate organization called Connect the Comet. The effort grew in size and effectiveness.

The Cobb County DOT's 2009 transportation plan included several alternative routes to get the trail eastward across the Chattahoochee River in the event that CSX, which owned the remaining tracks of the old Silver Comet passenger service, would not give up the right-of-way for the extension.

Recently two things happened that sped the process.

Cobb County's Greenways and Trails Master Plan  identified the extension of the Silver Comet Trail to the Chattahoochee as a priority project.

And the State of Georgia's lease with CSX came up for renegotiation.  CSX owned a two-mile section of track from the existing trail head to Plant Atkinson Road that was unused. Connect the Comet advocates lobbied state legislators to make that track a priority in the negotiations.

Finally, the negotiations to get that 2.3 section of track from Mavell Road to Plant Atkinson were successful.

So what's next? Haisten Willis recently wrote an update article in the Cobb County Courier quoting a number of people involved in the effort. PATH Foundation founder Ed McBrayer, whose organization will be involved in the project, hopes that the construction will begin sometime in the second half of 2019, with a target completion date in 2021.

But first, a lot of planning and engineering has to be done.  In the Haisten Willis article, Cobb County DOT Planning Division Manager Eric Meyer was quoted saying, “The next part is the nitty-gritty. We have to do a survey, design and engineer the project and set plans, which will consume probably the next six to nine months. CSX has not removed tracks from the corridor just yet, there’s a federal process to take that step.”

What's new on the Cobb County Courier

Silver Comet Trail cyclist

Most of my time now is spent building an audience for my news site the Cobb County Courier.

I haven't lost interest in the liveability, quality of life, and New Urbanism issues I posted about so frequently in the past.  I just shifted my focus to Cobb County. 

I wound up in Cobb by accident of love and marriage.  My wife's business was in the county, so I sold my house and moved here.

Once in the county, I did what I usually do wherever I am.  I learned about the area.  At the same time, I retired from my previous career as a software systems engineer and went back to school for a journalism degree.

So here I am, with a recently conferred degree, writing about the county.

So what have I written about that relates to my interest in New Urbanism, cycling, and quality of life?

I cover mixed-use development regularly, like this article and slideshow on Riverview Landing in Smyrna on the Chattahoochee River.

As for cycling and multi-use paths, we've been doing regular coverage of the Silver Comet Trail like this article by Haisten Willis on the extension of the Silver Comet Trail eastward toward the river, and the City of Atlanta.

I also run the usual things a news site covers: crime, education, restaurant openings, and a lot more.  I've particularly been interested in covering education more thoroughly.  Rebecca Gaunt is reporting on both the Cobb County and the Marietta boards of education.

I also do a weekly event called Meet the Editor every Friday morning from 7:30 - 10:30 a.m.  I currently do them at the Cenacle Coffee Shop at 2844 Veterans Memorial Hwy. Austell, GA 30168.  It's an informal setting, so if you have any complaints about our coverage or suggestions for what we should be doing, I'm always there to listen.

I'll close with a plug for our free weekly newsletter that summarizes a few things we've published over the previous week, and informs our readers about what's going on at the Courier.  You can sign up by following this link.

Connecting the Silver Comet Trail to the Beltline

It looks like the long-awaited extension of the Silver Comet Trail eastward toward the river, and from there to Atlanta's Beltline might be a step closer to reality.

At a meeting of Connect the Comet on Sunday, Teri Anulewicz, the Georgia state representative representing the Smyrna area, said an announcement would be made this week concerning the extension. The State of Georgia and CSX have been negotiating the lease for track owned by the state that CSX uses, and a section of unused Silver Comet track between the existing Silver Comet Trail and Collier Road in Atlanta was thought to be one of the issues.  If CSX relinquishes any of the track the section they part with will probably fall short of the bridge over the river. 

>> Read about the Connect the Comet meeting and the trail extension here

Connect the Comet has been advocating for over a decade to extend the existing endpoint of the trail, near the intersection of South Cobb Drive and the East West Connector eastward, across the Chattahoochee River, and to Atlanta's Beltline.

It looks as though the likelihood at this point is the extension will extend the trail eastward as far as Plant Atkinson, which is short of the river, but not by much.

Cobb County DOT designated the Silver Comet Trail extension as one of its top priority projects on the Greenways and Trails Master Plan. 

Java Cats Cafe in Marietta

I've largely let this long-standing blog lapse to focus on the Cobb County Courier, my news site.

I've decided to revive the blog to both highlight the work going on at the Courier, and to write the sort of personal essays that are not really appropriate on a news site.

Today's feature is an article by Rebecca Gaunt, who's written a number of impressive articles for us, including ongoing coverage of a deteriorated shopping mall in East Cobb that has residents up-in-arms.

This article is on a more uplifting subject though.  Java Cats Cafe, which opened its first location on Memorial Drive in the Grant Park neighborhood in Atlanta has opened a second location, a short walk from Marietta Square in downtown Marietta.  Follow this link to read the article about Java Cats Cafe, which is now open to the public. Java Cats is both a coffee shop and a cat adoption area, with the food service area separated from the space where cats and humans socialize separated for the obvious health department reasons.

My Social Media Diet

I'm a compulsive writer.  If I'm not working on an article for River Edges, I'm writing a speech for toastmasters, or writing outlines for future articles, or bantering on social media.  The problem with the last thing on that list, social media, is that I'm also an impulsive person.  There's a well-known cartoon on the site xkcd depicting a person typing at a computer.  He says he can't come to bed yet, because someone is being "wrong on the internet"  (Follow this link to see the cartoon). 

That describes my dilemma on social media.  I have strong political views, and it doesn't take much to suck me into time-wasting argument.  On facebook it isn't much of a problem.  Since people from a number of segments of my life and past are friends with me on facebook, I tend to be very careful about what I write.

Twitter is a different thing altogether.  Since I don't know most of the people who follow me on twitter, and since my tweets are public, I tend to dive into controversial topics at the drop of a hat.  This happens at about three month intervals, and detracts from my serious writing.

So I'm going on a "social media diet", starting with twitter.  I'm not going to delete my account, and will continue to tweet announcements of updates to River Edges and to this blog.  But for the most part I'm going to avoid twitter. 

I actually love twitter, and think that the discipline of fitting thoughts into a 140 character limit is great writing practice.  But the trade-off of spending an afternoon in a pointless argument with strangers off-sets the value of tweeting. 

For many journalists twitter is a source of leads, and I'll still keep tweetdeck running with searches targeted to the very local things I write about.  But I'm going to avoid interacting with people on twitter, or even reading my feed, until I have a reason to do so that has a direct relationship to my primary writing.

My plan for the atlantalarry blog

I haven't been updating this blog lately.  Instead I've been focusing my energy on my news site River Edges.

But I've had this blog for a long time (since around 2000), and haven't had the heart to migrate to another platform completely.  I emphasize that it would be a platform switch because the main problem with this site is that it uses a blog management system, Moveable Type, that has fallen by the wayside.  It's not well maintained, and the available plugins are limited.

Moveable type was one of the first content management systems for blogging.  When it launched, it was state-of-the-art. Now, however, the dominant content management system is Wordpress.

Wordpress has an active development community and is available on most major hosting sites.  What that means is that if I want to add a feature to a site I'm running, for instance a polling widget, there are often dozens of plugins for Wordpress, while on Moveable Type I'm lucky if I can find one usable and well maintained one.

But I'm not going to abandon this blog.  River Edges is a very specialized site.  It's a hyperlocal news site for the communities on both sides of the Chattahoochee, from Smyrna and Bolton on the north, to Six Flags and Adamsville on the south.
I've strictly held my articles on River Edges to those boundaries, and avoided writing the opinion pieces and general observations about living in Atlanta that I've been doing here for the past 15 years.

So I'm going to use this blog to write about things I want to say, but that don't relate directly to the geographical area I'm covering on River Edges.

I'll resume writing about many of the things I love: New Urbanism, environmental issues, historic preservation, pop culture, cemeteries, music, and anything else that pops into my head.

I'm going to mirror the things I write here on River Edges, once I find a simple way to do it.  It will be called something like "The Editor's Blog".

I've enjoyed writing this blog for the past fifteen years, and intend to regularly update the content here, with the eccentric stuff you've come to expect.  I've learned a lot about the subjects I love in the course of those years, and I hope you have, too.

 

Expanding my journalistic horizons -- an old guy tackles video games

As a freelance writer I write about whatever interests me,  with special attention to the subset of my interests known as "what editors want to publish."

One thing I've started writing about is video games.  I'm not a "gamer" in the popular sense of the word.  I don't have a console.  I don't follow the latest AAA video game titles.  In fact, I've never touched a modern game controller.

Yet I've been playing video games since a couple I rented from in the late 1970s hooked a Pong console to their television.  I then logged hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours in coin operated video machines such as Pacman, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, and Galaga.  Since then I've played a lot of online games, ranging from web-based versions of ancient board games like Go and Chess, to Facebook and Android games.

I've begun submitting articles to a somewhat soft-landing gaming website called GameSkinny.  The pay is minimal (nonexistent if you don't meet a threshold of clicks on the articles) but the editors are helpful, and the editing advice I've gotten from them so far seems on-target.

So far I've had two articles published:

Has anyone developed a video game as elegant as Go?

and 10 Reasons Aspiring Game Devs and Game Journalists Should Explore the Internet Archive

Check them out, and let me know what you think.

 

 

Gallons of Peppermint Tea

Peppermint invading the lamb's ear

I drink an unbelievable amount of peppermint tea, gallons per week, hot in the winter, cold in the summer.  Part of the reason I do this is out of love for mint tea.  But it's also a necessity. 

Peppermint is invasive.  I never water it, or make any special effort to cultivate it, because it's indestructible once it finds a patch of ground it likes.  The peppermint in my herb garden is on a relentless campaign to displace the lamb's ear, thyme, and oregano. It even tries to do battle with the ancient and equally indestructible rosemary on the periphery of the garden.

As a consequence of this unyielding territorial grab, my choices are:  weed it out and discard it, use it, or let it overrun my entire yard.  I don't like waste, particularly the waste of useful plants, so I use it.

I keep eight 32 ounce glass fruit juice jars for herb tea.  When I'm down to five jars of the prepared tea, I harvest the peppermint that has encroached on other plants in the herb garden, wash it, quickly strip off the leaves, and stuff the leaves and small stems into the clean, empty jars, then add boiling water.

When the jars cool to room temperature, I refrigerate them, submerged leaves and all.  I drink the tea quickly enough that I don't worry about the soggy leaves becoming a bacteria farm, and the used leaves go into my compost pile as I finish the tea.

 Peppermint is a wonderful and productive garden plant, as long as you have the time and inclination to keep it under control, and a thirst for tea.

Atlanta's Railroads -- TV show with footage of Franklin Garrett

Photo from Find-a-Grave and the East Point Historical Society

Franklin Garrett (September 25, 1906 – March 5, 2000) was the official historian of Atlanta, and wrote the first two volumes of Atlanta and Environs.  Those volumes are often a good starting point when researching people and events in Atlanta prior to 1950.  He was a fixture on the Atlanta history scene, and I remember in particular his talks at Oakland Cemetery celebrations in the years before his death.

While browsing the Internet Archive I found this video, from a series on railroading called All Aboard, that was at one time hosted by bliptv.com.

The episode is about Atlanta's railroads.  It's interesting in its own right, but the most unique feature of the video  is a series of segments in which Franklin Garrett talks about the role of the railroads in the founding of Atlanta.

 

 

Best no-budget costuming ever in a terrible drive-in horror movie: 1964's The Creeping Terror

I love terrible movies.  The more awful the better.  Bad acting, editing, set design, and special effects fascinate me.

This morning I was browsing the Internet Archive, as I often do on Saturday mornings, and found The Creeping Terror among their video offerings.  It's a 1964 movie featuring no actor you've ever heard of.  In fact, browsing the cast's credits on the Internet Movie Database reveals that a large percentage of the actors reached the pinnacle of their two to three movie careers with The Creeping Terror.

Although it's only an hour and sixteen minutes long, the movie is nearly impossible to watch in its entirety in one sitting. 

But luckily, the highlight of the movie takes place at the 4 minute 30 second mark, when the monster emerges from a space ship.

The best description I can think of is one of the dragon puppets from a Chinese New Year's parade, except made out of shag carpet.  The front of the costume is in the shape of the waddling human front operator.  The trailing end of the costume seems to be at least one person walking on all fours.  Another comparison might be to a very primitive two-person horse costume.

The sound track is another notable feature.  I particularly like the klezmer-influenced organ music played when the police car is racing to the rescue at the one hour and seven minute mark.  There are so many wacky elements to this movie that it makes me wonder why "Plan 9 from Outer Space" is considered notably bad.

My very favorite thing about the movie is a characteristic  I've also noticed in Mummy movies.  How could the creature really catch anyone?  It's moving so slowly that you could escape from it at a leisurely pace, periodically turning to thumb your nose at the hairy slug-like thing.

My goal is to attempt a complete viewing of the movie in one sitting.  So far I've watched it in five minute chunks, periodically skipping around finding cinematic gems.

I've embedded it here for your edification.  Enjoy.

 

Exploring the Internet Archive -- Atlanta's own Spaghetti Junction in video

This morning I decided to do a search on the word "Atlanta" in the Internet Archive, that massive, glorious repository of assorted stuff.  The first thing that caught my eye was a video called simply "Atlanta Traffic".  It was part of the OurMedia series on the Archive,  described as "an initiative devoted to creating and sharing works of personal media."

I couldn't find out who had uploaded the video, but it is a 3 minute 26 second scene of a drive approaching the Tom Moreland interchange, also known as spaghetti junction.  Spaghetti Junction is the interchange of I-85 and I-285 in north Dekalb County, near its border with Gwinnett County.  It was created to solve congestion problems associated with an earlier cloverleaf road design.

I'm not  fond of Atlanta's automobile culture, and I view the very existence of that interchange as evidence of how insane our dependence on automobiles has become.   It is a hideously ugly structure.  There are many roadways, including interstate highways, that could be retrofitted and given design elements to make them seem as though they were built by a culture that values beauty and dignity.  It is hard to image any makeover of spaghetti junction that would be anything more than the proverbial activity of "putting lipstick on a pig."

It's a short, clever video, and I hope you enjoy it.

 

 

More photos of the demolition of John B. Gordon Elementary School in East Atlanta

I recently created  a blog post, and a photo album, about the demolition of the John B. Gordon elementary school in the East Atlanta neighborhood.  I revisited the site on January 14th, and took a few more shots of the progress.  The demolition does not seem to be moving very quickly.  The machine being used to knock down the walls was sitting idle, and only a few more chunks of the west wall (the one closest to Moreland Avenue) seems to have been disturbed.

The lighting conditions were not idea when I took the shots, but they should be clear enough to mark the progress of the demolition at the time I took them.

I'll continue to post updates and photos as things change.  I have yet to actually see anyone involved in the demolition, so it is evidently not a priority project for the company doing the teardown.

Since there are only 13 photos, I'm going to include them all in the body of this post, but I've also provided an album, available in the sidebar, so you'll be able to easily locate the album later.

All my photos are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International.  That means you can do anything you want with them, without asking my permission, as long as you attribute them to me.

UPDATE:  I drove by the site today, and the contractor has made considerable progress on the demolition.  Most of the main building seems to be down.  It was too rainy and overcast for me to take photos, but I'll return on the first clear day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why I think progressives should stay away from the misogynistic attacks on Holly Fisher

I've taken a bit of blow-back today from progressives for writing that the articles about Holly Fisher's sex life are unethical tabloid misogyny.  I'm no fan of Ms. Fisher.  I think she is solidly in the right wing lunatic fringe, and that her views on gay rights are bigoted.

However, I'm opposed to the slut-shaming that she has been going through, for three reasons.

First, the attacks on her are against the backdrop of similar attacks against women in the course of the loose and leaderless movement known as gamergate.  Charles C. Johnson, the notorious internet troll who initiated the attack on Ms. Fisher, has been a vocal supporter of gamergate.  Johnson launched this immediately after a hit piece by Milo Yiannopoulos  about  Shanley Kane was published.  This is no coincidence.  The sustained slut-shaming attacks on Zoe Quinn, one of the targets of gamergate, demonstrated to ethically challenged writers that publicly attacking the sex lives of women could get them a lot of traction in the current conditions on the internet.

Second, Ms Fisher's indiscretions have nothing to do with her politics.  I've been told that the issue is her hypocrisy.  Hypocrisy is a large and unfortunate aspect of the human condition.  Presumably people on the left are in favor of fidelity in marriage.  I certainly am.  But people on both ends of the political spectrum, particularly young people, do unwise things.  Attack Ms. Fisher for her bigotry.  Not for being human.

Lastly, the internet is in a very precarious position with respect to free and open speech.  Harassment, the worst of it directed at women, has become a large and organized activity.  It won't take many more of these sustained harassment campaigns for the public to begin calling for a crackdown.  It's not likely to be directly because of the attacks on Holly Fisher.  But the focus on her has to be put in the context of the harassment of Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn,  Shanley Kane, Brianna Wu, and a half dozen other women.  The people carrying out these campaigns, primarily from the chan boards and reddit, are a coordinated but largely mindless mob. 

So if you want to attack Ms. Fisher's political views or activities, fine.  But stay away from this tabloid noise about her sex life.

My one month experiment in civility and positivity

This is a personal essay, with its attendant overuse of first person pronouns and possessives, so if you don't like that sort of thing, now is the time to stop reading.  If you decide to continue reading, I hope you will learn a bit about me, and that you'll consider trying my experiment in civility yourself.

I have a contradictory nature. 

On the one hand, people who interact with me, both in person and on the web, find me to be a likeable guy.  I can be a bit sarcastic at times, but I don't have a go-for-the-throat attitude in conflict, and I prefer that people leave conversations with me feeling good about themselves.

On the other hand I have strong opinions on a number of topics, and often get involved in contentious issues, both in one on one conversations, and on the internet.  In personal conversations in the "real world" it's easy to make criticism seem softer with use of body language and facial expression.  On the internet sharply and clearly worded argument can often come off as angry and harsh.

Culture warriors and political crusaders are often derisive toward civility, and put forward the notion that we should be in a perpetual state of warfare with our opponents.  Indeed, there are high stakes in a number of political and social issues.  But does a sustained flow of angry rants really accomplish anything toward whatever goal we are seeking to acheive? 

On social media in particular, millions of hours are wasted flinging insults across a digital barricade.

I am not suggesting that we all become amiable centrists, pretending that all political and social issues we face can be solved by outlining opposing positions, and then finding some center point compromise.  There are a lot of goals worth fighting for, and some political stances are morally indefensible or bad practical policy.

I am suggesting that the venomous and shallow one-liners that pass for open political discussion do next to nothing in advancing the purported goals of either side of a polarized issue.

So until the end of February,  I'm going to stay out of mindless flame wars.  This doesn't mean that I won't enter contentious discussions, or that I won't call out inaccurate or dishonest assertions.  It means I'll be much more careful about what exchanges I get into to begin with, and that I'll focus on presenting accurate and logically sound argument, rather than on "winning" with funny dialogue or clever rhetorical tricks.

I got the idea for this from a controversial statement in which Linus Torvalds, the developer of the Linux operating system kernel, defended his abrasiveness.  He also indicated that he didn't care much about diversity in tech, but that's a subject for another essay.

Civility does matter, in politics, in technology, and elsewhere.  It's impossible to really focus societal resources on problem-solving if the people who berate and bully the loudest tend to win.

Positivity is a separate but related issue.  I'm going to articulate things in a manner that points to solutions, rather than just repeatedly focusing on the problem. 

It's often necessary to point out the injustices and horrors in the world in order to provide an incentive to end them.  But people often spend their time sitting at keyboards digitally ranting about the latest infraction of their enemy-of-the-day, rather than determining what practical and positive steps might help whatever cause they are supporting.  This resembles the compulsion of the 24 hour news cycle to run the latest set of disasters or atrocities in short bursts every half hour or so, then move onto something else, forgetting about yesterday's story.

My goal with respect to positivity is to avoid obsession with any problem for which I don't have a clear and practical solution. 

It's similar to Reinhold Neibuhr's  Serenity Prayer, made famous by Alcoholic's Anonymous:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

The courage to change the things I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference.

This doesn't mean that I advocate only taking on easy, bite-sized problems.

An example would be the problem of trolling and harassment on social media.  It's obviously a problem.  There may be solutions.  But kicking trolls only has the effect of adding to the problem by allowing the abusers to point and say "SEE!  THEY DO IT TOO."

A better solution would be to report abusive social media behavior, and to advocate for better reporting tools on twitter, facebook, and other places where harassment is a problem.   Other solutions include helping in the criminal prosecutions of abusers who cross the line into lawlessness, and supporting the victims of the abuse.

All this could be done while focusing on positive solutions, rather than on engaging the abusers in meaningless internet combat.

So between now and February 28th I'm going to be on my best behavior.  I'm going to be civil, and I'm going to focus on positive solutions.  Wish me luck!

Exploring the Internet Archive -- Newsreel of FDR's first inaugural speech

 

 

 

Public Domain image -- downloaded from Wikimedia Commons

I've been foraging the Internet Archive daily for the past several weeks now.  The archive is a bottomless respository of fascinating material.

Below is a Universal newsreel of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first inauguration in 1933.  The nation was in the depths of the depression and talking film was still a novelty when it was produced.

The 7 minute and 44 second film opens with a narrated action sequence of the film cannister of the event being loaded onto an airplane, flown to New York, and taken to the studio in a car with policemen perched on the running board.  The scene was included to emphasize the speed with which the newsreel was being distributed to the public.

To put this opening into context, ponder the fact that many of the older people in the audience had experienced childhood with no automobiles, no airplanes, and no movie theaters.  Talking film had just become widespread a few years previously.  The novelty of seeing and listening to a presidential inauguration within a week or two of the event, in the depths of the Great Depression,  must have seemed like a futuristic technological marvel.

This newsreel includes the opening sequence boasting about the speediness of the film transport, the swearing-in, an excerpt from Roosevelt's inaugural address, and closing praise of the new president.  It's a fascinating glimpse into the way news was distributed before television and the internet.

 

 

 

Charlie Chaplin and John Rand's great sustained slapstick fight in "The Pawnshop"

 

Chaplin and Rand -- still shot from "The Pawnshop", Public Domain

 

John Rand (1871-1940), who was a clown early in his career, is not as well known as Charlie Chaplin.  But he was one of the great acrobatic slapstick comics of the silent era, and supported Chaplin in 20 films.  The movie below is "The Pawnshop", in which Chaplin and Rand have a fantastic slapstick fight, that periodically subsides, only to reignite, throughout the movie.  The thumbnail photo above is taken from a scene in which Rand fights Chaplin while constrained by a ladder.

Rand used the skills he had developed in the circus to good effect.  This 1916 movie is worth watching for the great ensemble work between all members of the cast, but especially between Chaplin and Rand.

Exploring the Internet Archive -- San Francisco Earthquake film from 1906

The Internet Archive has a phenomenal collection of digitized early film.  This one is of the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. 

It consists of 5 minutes and 13 seconds of of people traveling through the rubble and viewing the devastation.  One of the most interesting things from my perspective is that 1906 was in the decade in which the automobile began making inroads into American cities.  There are shots of people walking, cycling, riding in horse drawn carriages, and in automobiles, often in the same shot.

 

 

Related articles

Exploring the Internet Archive -- Gunsmoke: the radio series and comic book

NCR moving its world headquarters to Atlanta's Midtown

 

photo by James Emery -- Creative Commons 2.0 General Attribution License https://www.flickr.com/photos/62126383@N00/2249173832

 

NCR Corporation (formerly National Cash Register), is moving its headquarters from a suburban Gwinnett County location, to Technology Square in Midtown.  The reasons are to be closer to Georgia Tech, the center of science and technology in Atlanta, and to attract young technology professionals, who prefer a vibrant urban environment.

Technology Square is a wonderful location, near the Midtown MARTA station, Georgia Tech, Atlantic Station, and the center of the Midtown community. 

More information can be found at the following sites

NCR's Press Release on the move

NCR to Midtown from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Moving NCR's Midtown Atlanta HQ relo underscores a corporate culture shift

from the Atlanta Business Chronicle