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38 minutes ago, watermaker said:

Just a few points I would like to make about the game last night. I now fully understand how it has been 19 years since a home playoff loss at Maryville. Now you folks may THINK your team is beyond reproach, but some help in a tight situation doesn't hurt either. Can you HONESTLY think that a team in a game such as last can commit only 2 penalties ? These officials were from the Athens area and they were I am sure in awe at what the normally see. 

As for the player in motion on the field goal, you can spew all the so called rules you wish, it was an ILLEGAL movement. Finally why was it deemed necessary to send a car containing 2 people to Oakland this week to film practice from the parking lot? A parent witnessed the vehicle with Blount county plates and alerted the staff. When they were about to be confronted, the left in a cloud of dust and gravel. This is the truth and it CAN be proven.

This is no sour grapes or "whine" as you like to say. This is what you do when all else fails. I hate to see what kids have worked so hard for be taken from them by underhanded methods. So in closing, enjoy your trip next week and may you all have a long ride back to East Tennessee !

THE MYSTERY OF THE BLOUNT COUNTY PLATES

Posted on October 25, 2013 by countytrip under Side Projects

Yes, I know.  Another entry about license plates.  Please, do not groan just yet, as I am confident you will find this tale interesting and with a splash of intrigue.  It will also supply you with a solid piece of cocktail party trivia (as promised in this blog’s first entry!).

Back to the story at hand.  When you are constantly on the lookout for rare county plates, you begin to take notice of certain trends.  One, of course, is rather drab: the proliferation of “Big Four” county plates (Fulton, Gwinnett, DeKalb, Cobb) in Georgia – in fact, they make up over 33% of the total registered passenger vehicles in the state!  This always leaves you hungry for something fresh, and when a rare county plate does not appear for you,  it is always nice to see an out of state tag every once in a while to break the monotony.  You will never be hard pressed to find a selection of Alabamas, Floridas, and Tennessees on the roads of Atlanta.

One observation that frequently came up between John and me was the proliferation of Blount County, Tennessee plates throughout the Atlanta metro area.  Everywhere we go around Atlanta, there seems to be far more than a fair share of Blount County plates on the roadways.  Here is a just a MINUTE sampling of the Blounts I have come across:

Image

Image

Image

Now you may ask – what on earth is Blount County?  Don’t fret — we were asking the same question.  Neither of us have visited Blount County, nor honestly knew where it was located, so here are some basic facts on this mysterious and elusive place:

Location: East Tennessee, part of the Knoxville MSA

Screen Shot 2013-10-25 at 10.44.02 AM

County Seat: Maryville

Population: 124,177 (2012 US Census estimate; 10th most populous in TN)

Notability: None?  (Maybe aside from hosting a massive DENSO manufacturing plant that makes automotive stop/starters, employing over 3,000 in the county. Or maybe as home of Alcoa, the site of a large aluminum smelting plant that serves as the town’s namesake.  Yikes.  OK, I must concede they do have Blackberry Farm, which I would enjoy visiting at some point)

With this knowledge at hand, John and I attempted to rationalize this phenomenon, but we were left with more questions than answers, chiefly:

  • Why were there so many more Blounts on the roads than plates from Hamilton,  Davidson, Rutherford, Knox or Williamson, counties with significantly greater populations and virtually the same (if not better) access to Atlanta via major roadways?
  • Could these people all just be passing through town?  If, so where are they going?  In fact, there is not even an interstate highway in Blount County (with the exception of the small spur of I-140 ending in Alcoa), which made it even more perplexing.
  • Is there actually a method or direction to their travels?  Is everyone in Blount County literally just an itinerant gypsy, having registered their cars back in Blount for a life of endless road wanderings, never to return?
  • If Atlanta is truly their destination, what could these people possibly be doing in here? Is life so incredibly mundane in Blount County that there has been some mass exodus of Blountians to the great city of Atlanta?  But if this is the case, why would they not attempt to stimulate their senses in closer cities with a similar array of amenities, such as Knoxville, Chattanooga, or Nashville?

Alas, the presence of these plates vexed us for months.  There was even talk of an East Tennessee CountyTrip to attempt to find the source of these cars and plates. Maybe there was some secret underground factory churning out cars with Blount County plates, or some nifty contraption that surreptitiously slapped a Blount County plate on every non-local car caught passing through the county.  Maybe there was some sort of secret society or guild of freemasons that used the Blount County plate as a nifty form of identification of one of their own.  Maybe it was all government conspiracy. We thought the answer would never be discovered.

Fortunately, after months without answers, the powers of Google came to my rescue. I guess I never thought anyone would take to the Internet to inquire about such an absurd and obscure phenomenon, but I was wrong.  I found two interesting threads on the topic, and I highly recommend glancing at both.  The first message board is from a Kentucky fan in South Florida fretting about the number Blount plates he sees – and the responses he gets confirm they are rental cars!  The second board, from the flyertalk online travel community, basically confirms that these are more specifically Hertz rental cars.  Chalky White gives a most interesting statement:

Someone told me that Hertz has basically paid the salary for Blount County to hire an employee that handles renewing Hertz cars. Seems like a good deal to me–pay some bumpkin $30,000 to handle a ton of renewals for your company. Saves a lot of headache and you get the benefit of having one person to talk to for all your issues.

But of all places, why Blount? dwbf11 gives the reasoning:

Blount County, Tennessee has no “Wheel Tax” meaning there is no yearly fee to re-register a license plate there. Makes sense why a large agency such as Hertz would try to plate many of its cars there, since registration fees are probably a huge annual cost, and if they can get the plate once and keep using it free of renewal charges, that would represent a huge savings.

Just for my own confirmation, I just so happened to cruise by a Hertz office on my way home from work, and low and behold, look what I saw (pardon for the blurry images.. I was in a slow moving traffic jam):

Image

Image

Image

Blounts out the kazoo!  There were probably far more hiding back there.

So there you have it, and I guess we can consider this mystery solved.  Have any of you been to Blount County?  Is it worth a visit?

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33 minutes ago, watermaker said:

Just a few points I would like to make about the game last night. I now fully understand how it has been 19 years since a home playoff loss at Maryville. Now you folks may THINK your team is beyond reproach, but some help in a tight situation doesn't hurt either. Can you HONESTLY think that a team in a game such as last can commit only 2 penalties ? These officials were from the Athens area and they were I am sure in awe at what the normally see. 

As for the player in motion on the field goal, you can spew all the so called rules you wish, it was an ILLEGAL movement. Finally why was it deemed necessary to send a car containing 2 people to Oakland this week to film practice from the parking lot? A parent witnessed the vehicle with Blount county plates and alerted the staff. When they were about to be confronted, the left in a cloud of dust and gravel. This is the truth and it CAN be proven.

This is no sour grapes or "whine" as you like to say. This is what you do when all else fails. I hate to see what kids have worked so hard for be taken from them by underhanded methods. So in closing, enjoy your trip next week and may you all have a long ride back to East Tennessee !

Ok mr pees on himself... I have been watching MARYVILLE play for nearly 20 yrs. Yes they do commit penalties but not on the same scale as Most other teams do. Trust me when I say that your boys got away  with probably 100 + yds of holding penalties last night. We have complimented and raved over what a great team you have and have much respect for your program. And yes we might very well have a long ride home next Friday kinda like yours last year and last night.  BTW we dont need to send anyone down to Oakland to spy , we are the evil empire... we have our own satellite's. However if you will send me the pic of the tag ill be happy to run it and see who it was. Now go take a xanex and for Gods sake man quit crying. 

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1 minute ago, watermaker said:

Go ahead, make fun, in your usual ARROGANT Maryville way. Funny how your last 2 beat downs came AWAY from home, one to the GOD of Maryville football . Karma is a b***h dressed in red, white and blue !

Oh we will make fun of your post. It has to go down in history as one of the DA Hall of Fame posts. Oakland is 2-3 against Maryville btw 

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17 minutes ago, Red Rebels said:

THE MYSTERY OF THE BLOUNT COUNTY PLATES

Posted on October 25, 2013 by countytrip under Side Projects

Yes, I know.  Another entry about license plates.  Please, do not groan just yet, as I am confident you will find this tale interesting and with a splash of intrigue.  It will also supply you with a solid piece of cocktail party trivia (as promised in this blog’s first entry!).

Back to the story at hand.  When you are constantly on the lookout for rare county plates, you begin to take notice of certain trends.  One, of course, is rather drab: the proliferation of “Big Four” county plates (Fulton, Gwinnett, DeKalb, Cobb) in Georgia – in fact, they make up over 33% of the total registered passenger vehicles in the state!  This always leaves you hungry for something fresh, and when a rare county plate does not appear for you,  it is always nice to see an out of state tag every once in a while to break the monotony.  You will never be hard pressed to find a selection of Alabamas, Floridas, and Tennessees on the roads of Atlanta.

One observation that frequently came up between John and me was the proliferation of Blount County, Tennessee plates throughout the Atlanta metro area.  Everywhere we go around Atlanta, there seems to be far more than a fair share of Blount County plates on the roadways.  Here is a just a MINUTE sampling of the Blounts I have come across:

Image

Image

Image

Now you may ask – what on earth is Blount County?  Don’t fret — we were asking the same question.  Neither of us have visited Blount County, nor honestly knew where it was located, so here are some basic facts on this mysterious and elusive place:

Location: East Tennessee, part of the Knoxville MSA

Screen Shot 2013-10-25 at 10.44.02 AM

County Seat: Maryville

Population: 124,177 (2012 US Census estimate; 10th most populous in TN)

Notability: None?  (Maybe aside from hosting a massive DENSO manufacturing plant that makes automotive stop/starters, employing over 3,000 in the county. Or maybe as home of Alcoa, the site of a large aluminum smelting plant that serves as the town’s namesake.  Yikes.  OK, I must concede they do have Blackberry Farm, which I would enjoy visiting at some point)

With this knowledge at hand, John and I attempted to rationalize this phenomenon, but we were left with more questions than answers, chiefly:

  • Why were there so many more Blounts on the roads than plates from Hamilton,  Davidson, Rutherford, Knox or Williamson, counties with significantly greater populations and virtually the same (if not better) access to Atlanta via major roadways?
  • Could these people all just be passing through town?  If, so where are they going?  In fact, there is not even an interstate highway in Blount County (with the exception of the small spur of I-140 ending in Alcoa), which made it even more perplexing.
  • Is there actually a method or direction to their travels?  Is everyone in Blount County literally just an itinerant gypsy, having registered their cars back in Blount for a life of endless road wanderings, never to return?
  • If Atlanta is truly their destination, what could these people possibly be doing in here? Is life so incredibly mundane in Blount County that there has been some mass exodus of Blountians to the great city of Atlanta?  But if this is the case, why would they not attempt to stimulate their senses in closer cities with a similar array of amenities, such as Knoxville, Chattanooga, or Nashville?

Alas, the presence of these plates vexed us for months.  There was even talk of an East Tennessee CountyTrip to attempt to find the source of these cars and plates. Maybe there was some secret underground factory churning out cars with Blount County plates, or some nifty contraption that surreptitiously slapped a Blount County plate on every non-local car caught passing through the county.  Maybe there was some sort of secret society or guild of freemasons that used the Blount County plate as a nifty form of identification of one of their own.  Maybe it was all government conspiracy. We thought the answer would never be discovered.

Fortunately, after months without answers, the powers of Google came to my rescue. I guess I never thought anyone would take to the Internet to inquire about such an absurd and obscure phenomenon, but I was wrong.  I found two interesting threads on the topic, and I highly recommend glancing at both.  The first message board is from a Kentucky fan in South Florida fretting about the number Blount plates he sees – and the responses he gets confirm they are rental cars!  The second board, from the flyertalk online travel community, basically confirms that these are more specifically Hertz rental cars.  Chalky White gives a most interesting statement:

Someone told me that Hertz has basically paid the salary for Blount County to hire an employee that handles renewing Hertz cars. Seems like a good deal to me–pay some bumpkin $30,000 to handle a ton of renewals for your company. Saves a lot of headache and you get the benefit of having one person to talk to for all your issues.

But of all places, why Blount? dwbf11 gives the reasoning:

Blount County, Tennessee has no “Wheel Tax” meaning there is no yearly fee to re-register a license plate there. Makes sense why a large agency such as Hertz would try to plate many of its cars there, since registration fees are probably a huge annual cost, and if they can get the plate once and keep using it free of renewal charges, that would represent a huge savings.

Just for my own confirmation, I just so happened to cruise by a Hertz office on my way home from work, and low and behold, look what I saw (pardon for the blurry images.. I was in a slow moving traffic jam):

Image

Image

Image

Blounts out the kazoo!  There were probably far more hiding back there.

So there you have it, and I guess we can consider this mystery solved.  Have any of you been to Blount County?  Is it worth a visit?

TLDR.

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18 minutes ago, Red Rebels said:

THE MYSTERY OF THE BLOUNT COUNTY PLATES

Posted on October 25, 2013 by countytrip under Side Projects

Yes, I know.  Another entry about license plates.  Please, do not groan just yet, as I am confident you will find this tale interesting and with a splash of intrigue.  It will also supply you with a solid piece of cocktail party trivia (as promised in this blog’s first entry!).

Back to the story at hand.  When you are constantly on the lookout for rare county plates, you begin to take notice of certain trends.  One, of course, is rather drab: the proliferation of “Big Four” county plates (Fulton, Gwinnett, DeKalb, Cobb) in Georgia – in fact, they make up over 33% of the total registered passenger vehicles in the state!  This always leaves you hungry for something fresh, and when a rare county plate does not appear for you,  it is always nice to see an out of state tag every once in a while to break the monotony.  You will never be hard pressed to find a selection of Alabamas, Floridas, and Tennessees on the roads of Atlanta.

One observation that frequently came up between John and me was the proliferation of Blount County, Tennessee plates throughout the Atlanta metro area.  Everywhere we go around Atlanta, there seems to be far more than a fair share of Blount County plates on the roadways.  Here is a just a MINUTE sampling of the Blounts I have come across:

Image

Image

Image

Now you may ask – what on earth is Blount County?  Don’t fret — we were asking the same question.  Neither of us have visited Blount County, nor honestly knew where it was located, so here are some basic facts on this mysterious and elusive place:

Location: East Tennessee, part of the Knoxville MSA

Screen Shot 2013-10-25 at 10.44.02 AM

County Seat: Maryville

Population: 124,177 (2012 US Census estimate; 10th most populous in TN)

Notability: None?  (Maybe aside from hosting a massive DENSO manufacturing plant that makes automotive stop/starters, employing over 3,000 in the county. Or maybe as home of Alcoa, the site of a large aluminum smelting plant that serves as the town’s namesake.  Yikes.  OK, I must concede they do have Blackberry Farm, which I would enjoy visiting at some point)

With this knowledge at hand, John and I attempted to rationalize this phenomenon, but we were left with more questions than answers, chiefly:

  • Why were there so many more Blounts on the roads than plates from Hamilton,  Davidson, Rutherford, Knox or Williamson, counties with significantly greater populations and virtually the same (if not better) access to Atlanta via major roadways?
  • Could these people all just be passing through town?  If, so where are they going?  In fact, there is not even an interstate highway in Blount County (with the exception of the small spur of I-140 ending in Alcoa), which made it even more perplexing.
  • Is there actually a method or direction to their travels?  Is everyone in Blount County literally just an itinerant gypsy, having registered their cars back in Blount for a life of endless road wanderings, never to return?
  • If Atlanta is truly their destination, what could these people possibly be doing in here? Is life so incredibly mundane in Blount County that there has been some mass exodus of Blountians to the great city of Atlanta?  But if this is the case, why would they not attempt to stimulate their senses in closer cities with a similar array of amenities, such as Knoxville, Chattanooga, or Nashville?

Alas, the presence of these plates vexed us for months.  There was even talk of an East Tennessee CountyTrip to attempt to find the source of these cars and plates. Maybe there was some secret underground factory churning out cars with Blount County plates, or some nifty contraption that surreptitiously slapped a Blount County plate on every non-local car caught passing through the county.  Maybe there was some sort of secret society or guild of freemasons that used the Blount County plate as a nifty form of identification of one of their own.  Maybe it was all government conspiracy. We thought the answer would never be discovered.

Fortunately, after months without answers, the powers of Google came to my rescue. I guess I never thought anyone would take to the Internet to inquire about such an absurd and obscure phenomenon, but I was wrong.  I found two interesting threads on the topic, and I highly recommend glancing at both.  The first message board is from a Kentucky fan in South Florida fretting about the number Blount plates he sees – and the responses he gets confirm they are rental cars!  The second board, from the flyertalk online travel community, basically confirms that these are more specifically Hertz rental cars.  Chalky White gives a most interesting statement:

Someone told me that Hertz has basically paid the salary for Blount County to hire an employee that handles renewing Hertz cars. Seems like a good deal to me–pay some bumpkin $30,000 to handle a ton of renewals for your company. Saves a lot of headache and you get the benefit of having one person to talk to for all your issues.

But of all places, why Blount? dwbf11 gives the reasoning:

Blount County, Tennessee has no “Wheel Tax” meaning there is no yearly fee to re-register a license plate there. Makes sense why a large agency such as Hertz would try to plate many of its cars there, since registration fees are probably a huge annual cost, and if they can get the plate once and keep using it free of renewal charges, that would represent a huge savings.

Just for my own confirmation, I just so happened to cruise by a Hertz office on my way home from work, and low and behold, look what I saw (pardon for the blurry images.. I was in a slow moving traffic jam):

Image

Image

Image

Blounts out the kazoo!  There were probably far more hiding back there.

So there you have it, and I guess we can consider this mystery solved.  Have any of you been to Blount County?  Is it worth a visit?

Looks like yore bein' vurry vurry Blunt hear RR....:popcorneater:

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