The AsianCajuns report that Eviva, the trendy little shoe store in the 335 building, is closing this weekend and the closeout sale begins tomorrow.

If my wife, Catherine and Lauren, and cubalibre (who emailed me minutes after my wife told me it was posted on AC) are any indication, a fair number of people are going to be upset about this one.

Remember that ridiculous statewide recycling campaign, “You Gotta Be Kidding” (no I’m not), that chided state residents into recycling by creating a bunch of fictional simpletons who didn’t recycle and then shooting down their nonsensical defenses?

Well, enter the big, fat state-run Georgia World Congress Center.  From this morning’s AJC…

Georgia World Congress Center officials are turning off lights, cutting off the air conditioning and silencing the murmur of escalators this summer in an effort to save money….“We will be a lot more frugal with electricity when parts of the buildings are not in use,” GWCC spokesman Mark Geiger said.

Glad to see that it took a $6 million deficit to convince you to conserve energy GWCC.  Let me author your own “You Gotta Be Kidding” webpage.  No, no…it’s no trouble at all.

Meet GWCC: Hideously ugly downtown resident, who has $6 million in projected debt.

Home: Up top of “The Gulch”

Occupation: Hosting hair and chicken conventions

Why I don’t recycle conserve energy:   Because I’m just a convention center with a paltry 3.9 million square feet of interior space.  What kind of difference can I make?

Yeah.  So, maybe the state wants to consider getting his own house in order before characterizing its residents as a bunch of energy-sucking yokels.

Dagnabbit!  I was sitting on this story waiting on a response from the mayor, and Dave beat me to it.

So here’s ’tis without the mayor’s response (yet)…

Decatur mayor Bill Floyd was elected president of the Georgia Municipal Association at their association’s annual meeting yesterday.  Read all the details in the official GMA press release.  You can also listen to the mayor’s full speech to the GMA here.

The mayor has promised me a response in the next day or two regarding this and one other issue.  I’ll post as soon as I receive word.

From the Decatur Metro Fictional Desk…

With the rising sun at her back, Decatur’s special events coordinator Cheryl Burnette stood at the top of Ponce de Leon Avenue on Monday morning with a broad smile on her face as a dump truck filled with fresh cantaloupes emptied them onto the closed street.

As Burnette had explained to the hoard of reporters earlier in the morning, “With all the positive resident response we’ve received to dumping sand on the street for the Beach Party, we all agreed that cantaloupes were the next logical step.  We have all sorts of great cantaloupe events planned for the festival tonight: bowling, ring toss, eating contests, you name it!”

But unlike sand, which tends to stay put, these cantaloupes had more mobile plans.  As soon as they were released onto the pavement, the fruits immediately began their descent with around 200 heading north down Clairemont Road, while hundreds of others took an east or west route down Ponce de Leon.

Having expected this reaction from the feisty fruits, the city had preemptively set up a series of wooden barriers on each street to prevent escape. However it seems that no one truly understood the sheer power of a cantaloupe (or 100) on a steep downward descent.

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A little Decatur Book Festival Trivia for you this morning.

If you’re like me and love the Decatur Book Festival, but aren’t necessarily a connoisseur of these bound word extravaganzas, you may also have wondered, if Decatur is the largest INDEPENDENT festival, what are the largest overall regardless of dependence?

I posed this question to DBF self-described crackpot Daren Wang, who replied..

The other three are LA Times, Miami, and the National. We’re probably tied for 4th with Printers Row. [I added the links]

Those three are owned and operated by the Tribune Company, Miami Dade College, and the Federal Government, respectively. That’s why we call ourselves the largest independent–we’re just a couple of crackpots with an idea.

LA and Miami are both in the 150,000 to 200,000 range. I’m not sure about National, but that is a one day event on the mall in Washington.