BURKARD'S BLOG
I searched on the Internet months ago, and found no one keeping a blog about events in Columbus, Georgia. (Well, other than a 15-year-old high school student, and who knows how much he pays attention to the news?) So being the hip web-savvy guy that I am, I decided to start a blog of my own - chronicling happenings in the town I've called home for six years, as well as my experiences in it.
But be warned.... I used to have a humor service called LaughLine.Com, so my views may be a bit amusing. And the views
are my own; no one has paid me to present theirs. Pressured, yes - but paid, no.
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4 AUG 03: OUR COMMON PRESENT
After I called the police Sunday afternoon, I walked over to the Columbus Civic Center for the annual International Festival. Not far away, another event displaying international diversity attracted a much smaller and quieter crowd - the South Georgia Waves baseball game.
The goal of the International Festival is to show what a diverse city Columbus is. But somebody's gotta ask it - whose idea was it to put all the Spanish-language countries on one side of the Civic Center, with the rest of the world on the other side? Wouldn't some call that segregation?
Really! They put the Latin American booths on one side of the Civic Center's main floor -- leaving Europe, Asia and Africa for the other side. If hundreds of spectators had not been in the way, a soccer match might have broken out.
We toured the Civic Center's main floor and found Mexico and Guatemala had two booths each at the International Festival. Mexico we can understand - but Guatemala? We can't name a single Guatemalan restaurant in town....
To be fair, there WERE signs of love and diversity at the International Festival. We happened to see a white-skinned woman, apparently German, stationed at the table for Malaysia.
The International Festival once featured free food from many cultures - but not anymore. This year you had to buy "food tickets" for 50 cents each, and the food was from big-name restaurants such as Miriam's. Then again, it marked the first time most people could eat food from Miriam's without a reservation.
Some of the "international dishes" were a little humorous. Ritmo Latino Restaurant offered an apparently Hispanic version of bread pudding, called "puden de pan." We didn't try it - so maybe it's laced with jalapenos.
Of course, the Ritmo Latino broadcasting team was on hand at the International Festival. They had a video camera and wore WMLF T-shirts - while back at the station, the Spanish-language music was pre-empted by the "Brickyard 400" stock car race in English.
For the first time I can recall, WRBL did NOT provide an emcee for the International Festival. Instead, we saw Cathy Anderson from Channel 38's "Coffee Break." Maybe if Patty Pan had stayed in Columbus a little longer....
All in all, it seemed the number of booths at the International Festival was down this year. Even on the upper level of the Civic Center, there was open space - and the pro-homosexual group didn't show up, so the pro-Christian group wasn't there either.
(You KNOW it's a bad year when all the International Festival booths gave away were rulers and pencils - instead of ink pens and New Testaments.)
It didn't take long to finish our tour of the International Festival - and as we left, we heard a siren sound from Golden Park nearby. Either one of the Waves had just hit a home run, or a big bench-clearing brawl was breaking out.
I walked over to Golden Park and found the score tied at seven in the seventh inning. As is usually the case that late in a game, no one was standing at the gate - so I walked right in untouched to watch the last two innings. As Don Sutton loves to say: "Free baseball.... you didn't pay for it."
Who should walk over to greet me during the eighth inning at Golden Park but big baseball fan Kurt Schmitz! I wouldn't be surprised if he signed more autographs than any of the players.
(Kurt Schmitz informed me there was a fairly nice crowd at Golden Park, but some of them had left as a light rain fell. So before you point a finger at me - I came on as a relief fan.)
Because of the light rain, a groundskeeper came out before the ninth inning, broke open a big bag of sand and spread it around the pitcher's mound. I wondered what happened to those bag since May, after West Point didn't need them anymore.
(Hey, there's a marketing idea! They're called the South Georgia Waves - so have a game where the field is covered with sand, and everybody pretends they're at the beach.)
Two walks and a double into the right-field corner in the bottom of the ninth made South Georgia an 8-7 winner over Charleston, West Virginia. So all the Golden Park fans went home happy -- the 200 or so who still cared.
COMING TUESDAY: A "45-r-p-m" milestone (can anyone figure that one out?)....