So much for the return of Freaknic. So far, the rioting brown mobs that Atlanta authorities seem to be expecting have failed to materialize. Still, officials are on the lookout for signs of incipient Freaking:
Freaknik 2010 may be off to a sluggish start, but authorities in every metro Atlanta county are preparing for the worst.
They've gathered at Atlanta Public Safety Headquarters downtown to "speak with one voice" regarding Freaknik, said Atlanta Police spokesman James Polite Friday afternoon.
"Anyone you can name, they're in there," he said of the joint operations center set up to deal with the black college spring break festival. That includes fire and medical units from counties including Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb and Clayton and the local universities, Polite said.
"Every commander in place now is a veteran of the prior [Freakniks]," he said, vowing there won't be a repeat of the traffic jams that accompanied the mid-199s festivals. "We may have more highways and by-ways now, but we also have much better technology," he said. "Basically we believe the mayor's message has gotten through."
There were few signs that revelers were arriving in town. Back in Freaknik's heyday of the mid-1990s, the streets of Atlanta usually filled up by Friday afternoon with thousands of party-goers. In perhaps another sign of more hype than reality, Freaknik didn't seem to be creating much of an Internet buzz. The term Freaknik was not trending on either Google or Twitter.
Source: Atlanta Journal Constitution
Well, even if Freaknic never comes our way again, we'll always have T-Pain's vision of what could have been: