Tonight marks October’s version of “Last Mondays in Studio A” at the Stax Museum. Performing from 7-9 p.m. will be Stax legend Eddie Floyd and the Bo-Keys.

There will be complimentary hors d’oeuvres and soft drinks — and a cash bar. $20 General Admission; $5 Stax Museum Members.
Doors open at 7 to the general public and at 6:45 for members. Seating is limited.
For more information, see the Stax website.
Forbes Magazine set out to find America’s Most Sedentary City, and guess what? It’s US! Good ol’ Memphis, Tennessee.
Memphis’ perfect combination of high obesity, high television-watching rate, urban sprawl, poverty, and relative lack of parkland, landed us the top spot.
It sounds sort of silly, but the article is quite serious, well-researched, and well worth a read.
It appears former Memphis Tiger point guard Darius Washington will be in uniform when the NBA champion San Antonio Spurs open their season Tuesday night. With injuries to a pair of guards already on their roster, the Spurs may well suit up Washington for his NBA debut.
The Spurs come to Memphis Wednesday night for the Grizzlies season opener at FedExForum. Will D-Wash return to the scend of his collegiate glory? Stay tuned.
Millington-bred heartthrob Justin Timberlake has started his Australian tour with a donation to Australia Zoo.
According to Australia’s SkyNews.com, Timberlake stopped during his performance to hand a check for $100,000 to Australia Zoo director Wes Mannion.
Timberlake said he was impressed with Australia’s love of its native animals.
He then invited the crowd to join him in a tequila toast with his band members to celebrate crazy, sun-kissed, beautiful Australian women.
Okay. That’s weird, but at least he likes animals.
Australia Zoo is owned by the family of the late Steve Irwin family. Timberlake will perform again in Brisbane tomorrow before heading to Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth.
It was not necessarily a thing of beauty, but the Memphis Tigers and Coach Tommy West will take it. The Tigers came from behind three times and overcame their own turnovers to pull out a last minute 28-27 victory over the Tulane Green Wave in New Orleans Saturday.
Quarterback Martin Hankins threw for 355 yards and two touchdowns and nine Tiger receivers had at least two catches, led by Duke Calhoun with five.
For a full box score and play-by-play visit ESPN.com’s game recap.
North Carolina leads four teams from the 2007 Elite Eight in the preseason ESPN/USA Today coaches’ poll, released Friday morning.
The No. 1 Tar Heels edged UCLA and Memphis for the top spot, despite the fact that the Bruins had two more first-place votes (12) than the Tar Heels (10). North Carolina had 739 points in the poll, followed by No. 2 UCLA with 734 and No. 3 Memphis with 731 points and 8 first-place votes.
Fellow Elite Eight participants Kansas and Georgetown complete the top five.
Louisville, Tennessee, Michigan State, Indiana and Washington State rounded out the top 10.
Read more at ESPN’s website.
In real life, Elvis Presley was supposedly jealous of the Beatles. Now, 30 years after the death of the King of Rock-and-Roll, the owner of the top Elvis souvenir shop in Britain is trying to boot his next-door neighbor, who just happens to run a shop devoted to the Beatles.
Sid Shaw, owner of Elvisly Yours in London, has obtained an eviction notice against Howard Cohen (who, it must be said, in his newspaper photos looks more like Elvis than Sid). It’s certainly been “A Hard Day’s Night” for both of these mop-topped gentlemen.
Read more about it at the Daily Mail website.
Fresh from their recent “Honda Civic” tour, the Chicago-based emocore band Fall Out Boy has launched yet another cross-country tour. The “Young Wild Things Tour” will stop in Memphis on Saturday, Oct. 27.
The Gym Class Heroes, the Plain White T’s, and Cute Is What We Aim For will join Fall Out Boy at Mud Island Amphitheatre at 7 p.m.
To find out more, read the Flyer‘s exclusive interview with Fall Out Boy drummer Andy Hurley.
Tom Jones and Virginia McLean are making the Riverfront Development Corporation irrelevant.
Jones is the cofounder and main writer for the Smart City Memphis blog (smartcitymemphis.blogspot.com). McLean is the founder and chief activist of the nonprofit Friends for our Riverfront (friendsforourriverfront.org).
They are often on opposite sides of riverfront issues, including the proposed $29 million Beale Street Landing. Jones has emerged as its most articulate and well-informed defender. McLean, equally hip to the latest ideas and trends in parks and cities, is the RDC’s most passionate and dogged critic.
Both of them run on shoestring budgets and receive no money from local government or the RDC. Jones, a former newspaper reporter, was a spokesman and policy-maker for Shelby County government for some 25 years. McLean is an heir to the Overton family that was one of the founders of Memphis.
Their websites are timely and frequently updated, and they have become bulletin boards for unusually thoughtful comments, speaker listings, and even occasional news items. When a state official weighed in on Beale Street Landing this month and delayed the project, Jones and McLean were ahead of most if not all of the news pack spreading the word and collecting different points of view.
The RDC, in contrast, often seems muscle-bound. Created six years ago to focus public and private resources and cut red tape, it has a staff of former city division directors and City Hall cronies making six-figure salaries. It also has a blue-chip board of directors including public officials and downtown bigwigs. And it is consistently outhustled, outsmarted, and outmaneuvered by Jones and McLean and their helpers.
While Jones and McLean embrace the Internet and rough-and-tumble debate in real time, the RDC’s website is outdated and trite. “Steal away to a day’s vacation in the city’s front yard,” says the home page. “Nowhere else can you feel the rush of the Mighty Mississippi as its breeze flows through your hair and its sunsets warm your soul.” The most recent “news” is a June 12th press release and a year-old item about the Tom Lee Park memorial. The description of the master plan still includes the aborted land bridge to Mud Island and pegs the total public cost at a staggering $292 million, which “will spur $1.3 billion in private investment in real estate alone” and bring “a minimum” of 21,000 new jobs and 3,400 new residential units to downtown.
Meanwhile, Jones and McLean are slugging away about the latest delays to Beale Street Landing and the next meeting of the Shelby County Commission. Within the last year, each of them helped bring national experts to Memphis for well-attended discussions of parks and citizen activism. The RDC, meanwhile, made a by-the-numbers Power Point presentation to the Memphis City Council aimed at justifying its own existence as much as informing public officials.
The RDC is not without is success stories. Its park maintenance is exemplary. Its concert series and improvements at Mud Island have made the park more attractive. Its structure involves business leaders and nonprofits in a way that government cannot, although the group’s standard claim that it saves money is difficult to prove.
But the riverfront — Tom Lee Park in particular — often seems antiseptic and sterile, like a set-piece instead of a true park. On Sunday afternoon, for example, hundreds of people came to Overton Park in Midtown to beat on drums, whack golf balls, ride bikes, pick up trash, have picnics, toss balls, exercise dogs, visit art galleries, stroll babies, and do whatever. Midtown has no development authority, but funky Overton Park is surrounded by neighborhoods that feel invested in it.
Beale Street Landing looks more and more like a bet-the-company deal for the RDC. Without a big project — the land bridge (aborted), the promenade (still stalled), the relocation of the University of Memphis law school (coming soon) — why not turn its duties back over to a reenergized park commission and city administration? The Memphis riverfront, from The Pyramid to Mud Island to the trolley to proposed Beale Street Landing, doesn’t lack for big investments. It lacks vitality, a decent public boat launch, walkable cobblestones, a skate park or something fun to watch, a working fountain next to the Cossitt Library, and enough shade and sprinklers to give tourists a fighting chance against the heat.
If those things happen, it will be because of citizens like Jones and McLean and their readers as much as the RDC.
The election in 2006 of a new and, thanks to term limits, almost completely overhauled, Shelby County Commission led to a plethora of ad hoc committees, new regulations, what-have-you. Two of the new rules deserve special mention.
One is the so-called “Mulroy Rule” named after first-term commissioner Steve Mulroy, a lawyer, who proposed it by way of streamlining the parliamentary aspects of commission business. The old protocol had it that members seeking recognition from the chair would be called on in the order of their requests, regardless of the subject matter. The Mulroy Rule gives the chairman discretion to vary that order in the interests of a commissioner who seeks recognition for a point previously covered in the discussion but still pending.
Another new one is Rule 33, so called for its place in the revised bylaw sequence. This one is even more innovative, in that it allows for a commissioner to ask for and get a two-week deferral on any item, so long as the commissioner seeking the deferral has not been granted one on that item previously. Given the well-known complications of Roberts’ Rules, the new rule has often proved to be a convenient piece of streamlining.
It has also served once or twice as a means, for better or for worse, of circumventing an action about to be taken by the commission as a whole. So it was on Monday, when Rule 33 was invoked by Commissioner Mike Ritz to defer a resolution to appropriate $1 million to the Memphis Chamber Foundation. The money would be used to fund a plethora of local organizations and other beneficiaries in the interests of “facilitation of economic development in Memphis and Shelby County.”
And that was a no-no in the eyes of a couple of commissioners, notably Henri Brooks and Sidney Chism, the latter a well-known political broker during election seasons. In the last few weeks, Brooks has carried the brunt of a battle against the resolution, noting that one of the proposed beneficiaries was the local group Mpact, which over the years has involved itself in political issues, though not especially in advocacy of this or that candidate. New Path, another organization not included in the grant, does play politics in the direct sense, however, and normally endorses slates of candidates at election time.
There happens to be a modest overlap of membership between the governing boards of the two organizations, and that was enough to prove antagonistic to Brooks and her commission ally Chism, who prefers to push candidates of his own choosing, sans benefit of county funds. In committee hearings, therefore, Brooks managed to attach conditions utterly forbidding the use of county-appropriated money for overtly political purposes.
There ensued objections to the objections, however, and efforts to parse the issue a bit more proved fruitless. The matter got so tangled that a frustrated and/or confused Ritz moved for a deferral. When that motion was defeated, he shrugged and invoked Rule 33, which meant that the resolution got deferred anyway.
Perhaps the two weeks’ respite will allow the commissioners to unravel the controversy and arrive at a satisfactory compromise. If so, the odd but promising Rule 33 might become a precedent for other local bodies.