When Sarah Palin was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, her vice-mayor was a woman named Judy Patrick. Judy is a photographer, it turns out, and she is offering a stunning Sarah Palin calendar for only $13.56 (marked down from $15.95).
The calendar features more than 50 pictures of the Palin family, including the rifle-packin’-mama pic shown here. To order, go here.
Phil Bredesen, eat your heart out!
Tonight, former Griz “great” Pau Gasol returns to FedExForum for the first time since his controversial trade nearly a year ago. Pau, Kobe Bryant, and the rest of the Los Angeles Lakers take on the Grizzlies at 7 p.m. Chris Herrington has a game preview up at Beyond the Arc and, if you can’t make it downtown tonight, check in during the game, as Chris will be live-blogging from courtside throughout the game.
For more than 60 years, a ramshackle fruit stand — just bare wooden shelves protected by a striped canvas awning — stood on the northeast corner of Main and Beale, enduring heat and humidity in the summer, sleet and hail in the winter, and rain throughout the seasons. Tony’s Fruit Stand, as the little place was called, became a Memphis institution, where businessmen and -women would pick up apples, bananas, chewing gum, cigarettes, soft drinks, and candy on their way to work. Then one day, all it took was a piece of paper to knock it down.
An Italian truck farmer named Tony Bova opened his little stand in 1905. I’ve seen photos that show it was originally located in Court Square, but then he moved to Beale Street, renting space from the owner of the building behind him. The overhead sign spelled his name “Toney” but since he had it painted for free, so the story goes, he didn’t bother to change it.
Bova died in 1954, and his nephew, Joe Cianciola (that’s him in the photo above), who had begun working at the stand when he was just 11, took over the business. “A lot of people call me Tony,” he once told a reporter, “and that’s all right.”
The Grizzlies got blown out by the Charlotte Bobcats Friday night. And things didn’t get any better Saturday, as the football Tigers were trampled by South Florida, 41-14, in the St. Petersburg Bowl, and the basketball Tigers were spanked by Syracuse, 72-65, at FedExForum.
Oh, well, there’s always next year. Which is only 11 days away, thankfully.
Memphians have longed used Google for finding information, images, and maps. Now, through a collaboration between MATA and Google Transit, they can use it to find local bus routes.
“Google Transit is a trip planning program that Google provides that integrates with their Google map program,” says Tim Moreland, a member of the Sustainable Shelby initiative and a planner with the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO). “Anytime you get directions on Google maps, you can click to get directions by car, by transit, or by walking, and you can see how long it will take to get there by each way.”
MATA had an existing trip planner, but Moreland had heard about Google Transit — which is available in places such as Denver, Miami, Chicago, Austin, and New York — and thought it would be good for the city.
“I had used the MATA trip planner, but I really liked the interface of Google Transit. It’s much slicker; it’s more intuitive,” Moreland says.
For more, visit Mary Cashiola’s In the Bluff blog.
I’ve been thinking about Jenga lately. You know, the game where you build a tower of little slotted logs, then players take turns removing them until the tower collapses in a heap. Seems to me, life is filled with Jenga moments …
It is no secret that state representative Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) has further political ambitions — most likely, as a would-be successor to 7th District U.S. representative Marsha Blackburn if and when she decides to move on (or maybe even if she doesn’t).
Kelsey, who was first elected to the state House in 2004, is one of the new breed of take-no-prisoners conservatives who have dominated state Republican ranks in recent years. In 2007, when a temporary state surplus allowed the legislature’s Democratic leadership to distribute excess funds to members as community-improvement grants, Kelsey called it all “pork,” put a few slabs of bacon into an envelope, and made a show of returning his share to House speaker Jimmy Naifeh.
“Brash” is a word that has often been used to describe Kelsey — by some of his Republican colleagues as well as by aggrieved Democrats. Bashful he’s not.
The young House member signaled his determination to make waves in two different actions over the past week. First, he proposed an amendment to the state constitution that would put to rest any residual questions about the constitutionality of a Tennessee income tax — “for once and for all,” as Kelsey put it.
Next, Kelsey teamed up with state senator Reginald Tate of Memphis, a Democrat, to propose legislation that would, in effect, abolish the residency restrictions on Memphis police — thereby rendering moot the hot-button issue that has plagued the Memphis City Council and divided it along racial lines.
Whether or not Kelsey’s legislation passes, he has pulled off something of a coup merely by gaining Tate, an African American, as a co-sponsor of a bill that would nullify any residency requirements “to be or become a full-time or part-time law enforcement officer for any law enforcement agency employing at least 2,000 full-time law enforcement officers.” Only the Memphis police force is encompassed by that description.
For most of this year, proposals to relax residency restrictions on Memphis police — now mandating residence in Shelby County — have resulted in a series of 7-6 votes against, with blacks uniformly opposing the change and whites favoring it.
Kelsey and Tate scheduled the formal announcement of their bill on Tuesday, even as members of the council seemed resigned to fall back on a compromise resolution to offer police recruits bonus payments to relocate in Shelby County.
By comparison, Kelsey’s proposal for a constitutional amendment to close all potential legal loopholes that might allow a state income tax is backed by 38 of his GOP colleagues and is relatively uncontroversial — though a proviso that would extend the ban to any and all versions of a local payroll tax could generate some opposition in Shelby County, where the idea of such a tax has been floated across party lines, most recently by county mayor A C Wharton.
In any case, the income tax amendment would require passage by both the House and the Senate in two consecutive legislative sessions, followed by a favorable vote in a statewide referendum which couldn’t happen until 2014, at the earliest.
By contrast, the police residency bill would go into effect immediately if passed by both houses and signed by the governor. Its enforcement mechanism would be a provision to allow the state to withhold “all revenue derived from seized, forfeited, or confiscated property.” In the case of the Memphis police, that could mean an annual loss in the millions of proceeds from drug busts.
• Shelby County’s two political parties will be looking for new people at the helm in 2009.
Incumbent Republican chairman Bill Giannini is presumed not to be a candidate for another term, and his potential successors being talked up so far are Lang Wiseman and Scott Pearce.
Democratic chairman Keith Norman is also expected to step down, though he has not indicated so formally. It is uncertain which Democrats might be contenders for the chairmanship, but the names of current vice chair Cherry Davis and former vice chair Desi Franklin are among those most often mentioned.
Another change facing Shelby County Democrats: They will lose one of their current three members (Myra Stiles, O.C. Pleasant, Shep Wilbun) on the county Election Commission with the convening of a Republican legislative majority in the New Year. State law mandates a 3-2 split, favoring the majority party, in each of Tennessee’s 95 counties.
• At the state level, Robin Smith, who succeeded to the Republican chairmanship when former chairman Bob Davis went to work for Fred Thompson‘s ultimately abortive presidential campaign, has already been elected by acclamation of the GOP executive committee for a full term in her own right. Smith, an aggressive promoter of the party’s legislative ticket in this year’s election, saw her efforts crowned with GOP control of both chambers of the General Assembly.
Things are not so upbeat among state Democrats. Current chairman Gray Sasser, on whose watch the partisan changeover took place, plans to step aside, and the race to succeed him comes down to two contenders, both of Nashville: longtime party treasurer and onetime state Democratic executive director Chip Forrester, who was first out of the box, and Charles Robert Bone, son of a prominent party fund-raiser.
The Democratic race looks like an arm-wrestling match. Forrester, who has tirelessly proselytized for his prospects across the state, has built up some decent grass-roots support among members of the party’s executive committee. But Bone is being aggressively promoted by mid-state congressmen Bart Gordon and Lincoln Davis, the latter a gubernatorial prospect for 2010. Governor Phil Bredesen is reportedly acquiescent on Bone’s behalf.
The issue will be resolved at a meeting of the Democratic executive committee in Nashville on January 24th.
If you’ve had it up to here with “Jingle Bells” and “Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer,” you may want to consider added some class to your Christmas tune repertoire. At their annual “Classical Christmas” performance, the Memphis Symphony Orchestra will perform holiday songs by Handel, Fauré, and Respighi. The performance begins at 8 p.m. tonight at First Congregational Church.
Tried of bringing that same old batch of gingerbread people to the holiday potluck? Sample new cookies and swap recipes with other home bakers at the Whole Foods Cookie Recipe Swap. Participants are encouraged to bring printed recipes and cookies to share. But there will also be plenty free samples of provided by the staff of Whole Foods (including vegan and gluten-free cookies). The swap begins at 1 p.m. on Saturday.
Head to Hattiloo Theatre this weekend for an urban twist on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Called If Scrooge Was a Brother, the play features black culture icons in place of the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. The play runs though Jan. 4th.
Christmas isn’t the same without at least one viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life. Learn how angels get their wings during this classic film screening at Majestic Grille’s Sunday Supper and a Movie. Dinner begins at 6:30 p.m.
When rapper T.I. penned the lyrics to “Whatever You Like” (“You need to never ever gotta go to yo wallet/ Long as I got rubberband banks in my pocket”), he was obviously thinking about the true spirit of Christmas (because everybody knows it’s really all about receiving awesome gifts). T.I. will perform that song and others, along with Young Jeezy, during the Holiday Hip-Hop Jam at FedExForum on Sunday at 7:30 p.m.
Over their past seven games, the Grizzlies are 0-2 against the New Orleans Hornets and undefeated against everyone else. The good news tonight: The Hornets are not in town.
Instead legendary coach Larry Brown brings his 8-18 Charlotte Bobcats team to town. Tip-off is 7 p.m. Check out Chris Herrington’s Grizzlies blog, Beyond the Arc, for a game preview and check back for reports during and after the game.
Somebody had to think this up sooner or later. Invitees to Memphis state Representative Karen Camper’s forthcoming January 8th fund-raiser (in the King’s birthday week) are advised that it is an “Elvis Night In” affair — apparently meaning that it takes place in cyberspace, since no location is mentioned.
Or, as she puts it in the e-mailed invitation: You get to participate in this fund-raiser by “staying at home’ and enjoying Elvis (her bolds).”
Camper makes the following suggestions to donors: “$100—Dance the night away in your ‘Blue Suede Shoes;’ $250—Serenade your love one with your personal rendition of ‘Love Me Tender;’ $500 — Watch your favorite Elvis Movie; $1000 — You decide (cook dinner, play cards, read a book, totally up to you) ‘My Way.’
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Oh yes, there’s a “Return to Sender” RSVP e-mail address included.