Here’s a Hilarious News Blooper For the Ages
Photo courtesy of Getty Images
They blew up the Georgia Dome in Atlanta this morning. The 25-year-old stadium was home to so much history—the rise of the Dirty Birds, two Super Bowls, four NCAA Final Fours, Goldberg’s epochal WCW World Heavyweight Championship victory over Hulk Hogan, Kevin Nash’s infamous “Fingerpoke of Doom,” that time we saw a guy at a WCW Monday Nitro holding up a sign that just said “I smell sex and candy,” and so much more. It will forever be a pivotal part of the history of Atlanta and its sports teams, and its implosion this morning was appointment viewing for millions in Georgia and throughout the Southeast.
Hopefully not too many of them were watching the Weather Channel.
The cable station, which is based just a few miles up I-75 from the Dome, in Cobb County, was all prepped to telecast the destruction of the local landmark this morning when fate and municipal planning intervened. Right as the Dome started to collapse, a MARTA bus almost completely blocked the Weather Channel camera’s view. The results should pop up in those YouTube supercuts of live news mishaps until society crumbles.
The most Atlanta thing to ever happen? MARTA bus parks right in front of The Weather Channel’s Dome implosion shot ???? https://t.co/poMIDFwMe8pic.twitter.com/MW9wwTU09I
— AJC (@ajc) November 20, 2017
You can’t blame the Weather Channel for not being familiar with MARTA’s bus lines. After all, Cobb County has fastidiously prevented Atlanta’s public transit line from being extended into it for decades. To most Cobb County residents MARTA is about as unknowable and intimidating as the New York subway.
As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution notes in that tweet above, this could very well be the most Atlanta thing to ever happen, at least when it comes to sports. We are a city whose sports teams constantly fall just short. After decades of losing, the Braves, Falcons and Hawks have all turned into one of the best teams in their respective sports at different points in time, only to almost always fail in the playoffs in absurd ways. (The 1995 Braves are the exception that proves the rule.) We’re a city that’s lost not one but two NHL franchises. We did bag the Olympics, but then those Olympics got bombed, and we’ve had to spend over two decades hearing about how our Olympics sucked. (Fuck you: they sucked but they were ours so they were awesome.) Atlanta’s sports history is one of unforgettable futility, and it extends even to our ability to watch our own damn stadiums fall apart.
Thankfully there’s a lot more to this awesome city than sports. Look for more information on that in Paste’s brand-new Atlanta section, launching whenever I’m able to buy this company.