Tag Archives: Birmingham

East Lake wants to stay weird

A call has been sent out to all artists, musicians, poets, prose, and liberal thinkers to “…relocate and create our own Art’s District here in the shadows of Birmingham.” The Keep East Lake Weird and East Lake Arts District movements have Yahoo Groups that have been in existence for at least the last year. Organizers are attempting to leverage the development of an artists community among the area’s 1920s era bungalows with the potential revitalization of the community’s downtown area – the blocks near 1st Avenue North and Oporto-Madrid Blvd.

UPDATE: Is the Heritage Festival returning?

UPDATE – 5.19.2009: According to Urbanham.com, the festival will return in mid-August. Here are the details.

A quick look around the Internet late last night brought up this page of information for folks wondering about the future of the Birmingham Heritage Festival.

There is no location listed but there are dates for this year’s event (in August) and contact information for anyone looking to be involved in the festival. We’ll keep an eye on it and look forward to doing some coverage of it this summer.

Fireworks at the BJCC yesterday

We’ve known for some time (well, some of us have) that Alabama State Representative Mary Moore has wanted City Council representation on the BJCC’s board. Well, yesterday she decided to make those comments again during the BJCC Board meeting and had some words with the city’s current representation on the board, Mayor Larry Langford. Apparently, a lot of words.

I’ve got some words about the situation of my own today over on My Birmingham.

Last Car, 29.2009

absolutely no parking

The economic stimulus bill passed its first hurdle this evening, but do you want to see what the makeup of it was prior to its passage (and removal of $6 billion)? Check out this interactive map courtesy of ProPublica.

The Blazers got beat by Tulsa on a buzzer beater, 75-74. And if you thought you were going to that Samford vs. Davidson game on Saturday (like I did), you better have a ticket, cause they’re all gone.

The folks at Mayfield Ice Cream say it’s still safe to eat any of their products made with peanut butter.

Speaking of peanut butter, Mike’s saying there’s a chance we may see snow on Monday – only a chance, mind you…

Photo: absolutely no parking. briantmurphy/Flickr.

A tale of two elected bodies

Yesterday could be seen as a microcosm of what’s going on in Jefferson County right now. The Birmingham City Council was able to listen to Mayor Langford present the State of the City address (complete with stern remarks towards the council and others) and then vote against using a portion of the former Social Security headquarters to house the city’s police department. Meanwhile the Jefferson County Commission proceeded to approve spending $237,500 for a lobbyist to Washington, DC to help “fix” the sewer crisis. Their vote allows for the contract to be renewed every 90 days. Quite a contrast…

A new Batman for Birmingham

bhambatmanSomeone has donned the mask of the Caped Crusader, if only virtually, for the Magic City. This one hopes that they can make people aware of what’s going on around them in terms of crime.

Birmingham Batman has recently re-appeared as a MySpace profile that connects to a Spotcrime.com map of the area. The profile also includes an widget that pulls the RSS feed from our local Crimestoppers site. According to the profile, comments will be limited to information relevant to dealing with Birmingham crime. We don’t know who it is (though we wish we’d done it first 🙂 ), but we’re hoping that folks will take advantage of it. We’re thinking the original would be proud (we talked about him here in 2007), though we’re not sure…

No pets on Wednesdays

The economic crisis is starting to affect our four-legged friends. NBC 13 is reporting that the Greater Birmingham Humane Society will be closed on Wednesdays (and not closing for good on Wednesday as some may infer from their post’s headline) for the foreseeable future, starting tomorrow.

While we haven’t seen the press release, the information is up on their website’s front page, giving you a great excuse to see what else they may need.