Best Bizarro Local News Story

Young Thug has proudly embodied many entities. The rapper has masqueraded as a therapist, a Martian, a fashion icon. All those facets of Thugga’s identity may be true, yet the entire city of Atlanta (and the whole Twitterscape) scratched their proverbial heads when he added equestrian to that list. In March, YOUNG THUG RODE A HORSE AROUND to announce the tour supporting his album Hy!£UN35. The mini equine-based tour to announce the larger one cruised around Poncey-Highland before stopping to mug beneath Plaza Theatre’s marquee, which displayed the tour details. The resulting photograph featured Young Thug, clad in tight white pants, beaming like a kid on a sugar high. Was the curious publicity tactic inspired by cosmic sway? A lean-fueled fever dream? We’ll likely never know, but then again, some mysteries are better left unsolved, and perhaps Thugga’s horsing around should be counted among them. twitter.com/youngthug. less...

It started with YouTube clips of overzealous onsite manager and security guard Darien Long urging unruly people to move along at Downtown's Metro Mall, a building full of vendors hawking jeans, purses, and gold teeth. When his requests went unheeded, he turned to ... a taser. The videos, shot with a camera mounted on the guard's chest, soon went viral, appearing on Reddit, World Star Hip Hop, and elsewhere, and thus was born Darien Long, Kickass Mall Cop. The jarring recordings of young men and women paralyzed by the electric shocks earned Long criticism for a seemingly vigilante approach to crime-fighting. Downtowners debated whether his tough-on-loiterers stance was good or bad for the area's image. But he also had his fans. Online admirers started a donation fund to purchase Long new equipment, ultimately raising more than $23,500. Fueled by the subtexts of class, race, and criminality, the controversy underscored the decades-long lack of economic development that has made South Downtown ripe for gentrification. And Long, with his aggressive tactics and subversive videos, seemed like the perfect pawn for such an endgame. In late March, however, Long said he was being let go from his gig. Shortly after breaking the news to the public, he was arrested and charged with battery for tackling a mall patron whom he'd allegedly told not to return to the shopping complex. "When you're a whistleblower, you're a hero to some and the scum of the earth to others," he said the day before his arrest. less...

In a year that included stories about a man allegedly beating his girlfriend with her dead dog, Bishop Eddie Long being crowned a king by a visiting rabbi, and a brave woman fighting a flesh-eating bacteria, it was the ribald tales of a drunken day gone wrong at the Piedmont Driving Club's East Point golf course that blew our minds the most. Naked golf. Drunk men slapping passed-out buddies in the face with their penises. Picking up golf balls from pristine, members-only greens with one's butt cheeks. And that's just a sampling. These Caddyshack-type exploits weren't allegedly committed by frat boys freeloading on dad's membership account, but by grown men. The story, which went viral thanks to a leaked, tell-all letter by a shocked - shocked! - member of the historic private club for Atlanta's elite, had it all: intoxicated debauchery, rich people behaving badly, and the closed-lip, we'll-take-care-of-this treatment of the entire affair by the club. less...

Late one afternoon last October, radio and TV news reported that a man was threatening to jump 22 stories from the top of Colony Square in Midtown. Photos of the desperate 24-year-old peering over the ledge, taken by people in neighboring skyscrapers, appeared on Twitter. Police closed nearby streets as a hostage negotiator tried to coax the man off the roof. And then the day was saved as T.I. talked the jumper off the building! Yes, T.I., the rapper and actor, heard the news on V-103 (WVEE-FM) while en route to a video shoot and decided to swing by the scene. Once there, he videotaped a message telling the jumper, "No matter what's going on in life, it gets better," which was quickly taken to the roof. The man came down, spoke with the rapper for a few minutes and was then taken to Grady Memorial Hospital for psychiatric evaluation. T.I. told reporters that the random act of disaster avoidance was in no way linked to his appearance days later before a federal judge for probation violations. It seems he was right: He got 11 months. less...

In saner states, legislative hearings to address the problem of involuntary implantation of microchips would easily score as the year's weirdest news story. But in Georgia, where the General Assembly also passed a bill allowing motorists to keep and eat their roadkill, the proposed BAN ON HUMAN MICROCHIPPING needed a little something extra. As luck would have it, that came in the form of a DeKalb County woman invited to testify to a Senate committee about how "researchers with the federal government" implanted a microchip in her "vaginal-rectum area." The microchip, she said, is activated by phone, like a beeper, with the number displayed "on billboards throughout the city." Naturally, the committee OK'd the bill. less...

You can say a lot of things about the MOVIE VERSION OF “AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE,” the flagship show of Adult Swim on the Atlanta-based Cartoon Network. Sure, the cinematic adventures of a talking milk shake, box of french fries and wad of meat turned out to be nonsensical, maddening, deliberately tedious and seemingly targeted at the totally stoned. You cannot, however, accuse the film of selling out its unique brand of humor for the sake of mass movie appeal. TV-creators-turned-film-directors Matt Maiellaro and Dave Willis unquestionably stayed true to their instincts that made “Aqua Teen” a late-night hit. Even if you don’t get the joke, you have to salute their integrity. less...

Atlanta’s tangential relationship to the murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey just gets stranger and stranger. JonBenet was born here and is buried here, even though she was murdered in Boulder, Col. And JOHN MARK KARR, who confessed to her killing during a press conference at the police station in Thailand, grew up in metro Atlanta. And what is it with Thailand and accused Atlanta killers? That’s where Buckhead millionaire James Sullivan fled and was captured before he was brought back and convicted of engineering a hit on his wife, Lita Sullivan. In August, the media wolfpack, led by CNN’s shrill-meister Nancy Grace (another Atlanta connection — she used to be a Fulton County prosecutor), immediately descended on the Karr story and had the guy practically convicted before he ever got on his flight to the States. And what was up with that flight, anyway? Sitting in business class sipping champagne and eating prawns? Of course, everyone — except Lin Wood, the Atlanta-based attorney for the Ramseys — had egg on their face when Karr’s DNA didn’t match DNA found at the crime scene. The sad part is, this is the second Boulder district attorney to bumble the investigation while the real killer still walks free. less...

Last spring, the world’s media focused itself like a laser beam on the saga of Jennifer Wilbanks, the ditzy, bug-eyed, Gwinnett County “RUNAWAY BRIDE” who bolted to avoid her mega-wedding. Wilbanks split on a bus, while everyone back home feared she had been kidnapped while jogging. Turns out, she planned it. And now she’s got a deal for a book, which ought to be spellbinding, based on a false statement to New Mexico police in which she claimed one of her fictional abductors told her: “Now you can lick my pussy.” You go, girl! less...