After getting canceled due to weather last month, Touch-A-Truck day is finally here (again)!  From the Be Active Decatur blog…

Join Decatur Active Living this coming Saturday, April 30 for the annual Touch A Truck event. This fun event gives children of all ages a chance to touch, explore and see their favorite truck or equipment on wheels. The City of Decatur and DeKalb County will have fire trucks, dump trucks, tractors, police cars, motorcycles and many other vehicles on display.

The event will be held from 10 am until 1 pm in the Callaway Building Parking lot located at 120 West Trinity Place. Free parking is available in the DeKalb County Parking deck adjacent to the event. This event is offered free to the community.

Long a favorite spot for skaters in downtown Decatur, this bench area in front of the Decatur Medical Plaza (think: Nanston Dental sign) has some newly installed anti-skating devices (?) screwed into the marble, according to this photo taken by Daren.

Kathy sends in this video and writes…

About 20 chickens & a couple of roosters were released on the main floor of the Emory Woodruff Library. The picture & video I have were taken after security had corralled them & barricaded them in a hallway.

Decatur’s Linda Harris alerts us to the city’s latest walkable honor; receiving a Silver Level designation in the inaugural round of Walk Friendly Communities’ uh…Walk Friendly Communities.

The national organization gave out 11 awards this year, with Seattle the only city to achieve Platnuim status.  (No one walks as hard as they do in Seattle!)  Ann Arbour, Arlington, Hoboken, and Santa Barbara all achieved Gold status, while Decatur shared the Silver level with Charlottesville, Va (Home of the great Parking Lot Movie!)

What aspects of Decatur helped it score a Silver?  Luckily, WFC has a quite detailed website.

Decatur is designated as a Silver-level community due to outstanding management of development and parking, top-notch educational and outreach efforts, and progressive evaluation methods. Highlights of Decatur’s application include:

Read the rest of this entry »

Pictures and videos popping up on Twitter and other websites are getting metro Atlanta residents pretty worked up this evening about the line of storms coming our way this evening.

Decatur residents have a couple of ways of being notified of a tornado warning.  First, there are all the tornado sirens around the city.  (Apparently city of Atlanta residents are warned by running fire truck sirens?)

Secondly, you can sign up for Code Red Weather – if you haven’t done so already – which will call you if a Tornado Warning is posted for your area.  (Calls are made for “severe” weather events in your specific area and initiated by National Weather Service Bulletins)  You can sign up right now, HERE.

Everyone be safe out there.  I’m sure you all know the drill.

Cat sends in this very detailed letter from Emory President James Wagner concerning the eight individuals who were arrested on the Emory quad on April 20th.  I’ll post the full letter after the jump, but I want to highlight a portion of it here.

What is at stake is the right of members of our academic community to hear from each other, determine the validity of what they hear, and then respond in a way that guarantees that their own response will be respected. That right to come to a conclusion and live by it, even when differences cannot be fully resolved, is violated when one side in an argument insists that only its perspective is correct, and that it is worth disrupting the life of the community in an attempt for its perspective to win out. That represents its own form of coercion, which shouts down every reasonable counter-argument rather than allowing room for either debate or the resolution of debate–even if the resolution is to agree to disagree. Those who employ such coercive practices deny to others the privileges of engagement in the academic community and risk the consequences of losing those privileges for themselves.

I don’t pretend to know many of the details surrounding these protests and the arrests, but you’ll never see me argue with the point made above.  To again quote Thomas Carlyle, “The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.”.

Full letter below. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s part of the official press release from Ryan Klee at Lenz Marketing…

The third annual Decatur Green Fest—hosted by the Dogwood Alliance—will kick off the Decatur Business Association’s Concerts on the Square series on Saturday, May 7 with a FREE, day-long festival featuring live music, green tasting of local organic produce and food, beer, a showcase of equal exchange and other fairly-traded products, green organizations and vendors, art featuring recycled materials, and a children’s activity area. The event runs from 3 – 9:30 PM.

Please PleaseRock Me—a Beatles spin-off of the Yacht Rock Revue musical act—will headline the event and perform at 7 PM on the Dave FM Stage. Nathan Beaver, an alt-country musician on Decatur’s Red Eye Gravy Records, will perform at 6:15. The live music begins at 3 PM.

John Beal, also known as “John the Baker,” is the organizer of the event. “It’s an honor to work with my fellow organizers, the City of Decatur, our generous and committed sponsors, and especially the good people dedicated to this vital cause,” he said. “They all know that they are making a difference in the world.”

More info on this year’s event, HERE!

(And make sure to check out DM’s newest ad sponsor “The Rain Barrel Depot” at this year’s event!  It’s a local company and they’ll be selling some of their most popular models at this year’s event.)