I heard this afternoon that the Grizzlies were working on a deal that would send a protected first-round pick next season to the Utah Jazz for swingman Ronnie Brewer. I have not confirmed that this is a finalized deal, but the Salt Lake Tribune is also reporting that Brewer could be traded today.
More as it comes.
UPDATE: Brewer deal done, for protected first-rounder in 2011. I’ll be on the Chris Vernon Show at 4:20. Will try to have a trade breakdown post up before then.
Next week’s Memphis City Council meeting could be a doozy.
On the agenda: an updated budget forecast and funding options for Memphis City Schools.
And unlike previous talk-talk meetings, this time the council may have to make a big decision or two about tax increases, pay cuts, and spending reserve funds.
Congressman Steve Cohen joined with over 1,000 journalists, media, public relations and corporate executives to honor the work of Bill Day, a syndicated editorial cartoonist from Memphis, at the 27th Annual National Press Foundation Awards Dinner Wednesday.
“I was honored to join Bill, his wife Susan and their three sons last night as he was recognized by his peers for his media contributions,” Cohen said. “Whether it is shining a light on crime, poverty or the scourge of infant mortality, Bill’s artwork lives up to what he has called the theme of his work, the defense of the oppressed.”
Day received a Special Citation for his work addressing the growing rate of infant mortality in the United States.
Other honorees last night included: the CBS News program 60 Minutes, Brianna Keilar of CNN, Julie Hirschfeld Davis of the Associated Press, Colbert I. King of The Washington Post, and The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Day’s award-winning cartoons are available to newspapers worldwide three times a week through United Feature Syndicate, and it is widely reprinted in major national magazines including Newsweek, Time, U.S. News and World Report and Business Week.
The former Commercial Appeal cartoonist was let go by the paper last year during a staff reduction.
Memphis blues musician Wilroy Sanders, perhaps best known for owning the South Memphis nightclub Green’s Lounge and leading the band the Fieldstones, died Tuesday afternoon at his home after a long battle with lung cancer, according to Sanders’ great-niece, Candice Ivory. Sanders was 76 years old.
“Uncle Wilroy had been kind of going down this summer. He had been diagnosed with lung cancer but had been able to work through it [for a while]. He went into hospice care a few weeks ago,” Ivory said.
“We’re still trying to determine how many grandchildren, how great grandchildren,” said Ivory, who is assisting Sanders’ widow, Dorothy Mae Tucker Sanders, with funeral arrangements.
A Korean War veteran, Sanders presided over the vital Green’s Lounge scene and, along with such artists as Junior Kimbrough, R.L. Burnside, and Othar Turner, was a key figure in the Mid-South’s fruitful traditional blues scene in the 1990s. He was featured in the 1999 documentary and soundtrack album Will Roy Sanders: The Last Living Bluesman on Shangri-La Projects.
“There were a lot of people who really adored him and really appreciated his music, but I didn’t feel like — and I don’t think he felt like — he ever really got his due,” Ivory said.
If you’re into sports oddities, consider Ivo Karlovic, the 6′ 10″ Serbian playing this week in the Regions Morgan Keegan Championships.
There has never been a player like Karlovic in the history of tennis. He’s the tallest pro to climb high (#37) in the world rankings, and he has, arguably, the biggest serve ever.
In his opening match this week, which he won 7-6, 7-6, he served 32 aces. That’s an ordinary day’s work for him. In a Davis Cup match last year, he had 78 aces. That broke his previous ace records of 51 and 55. The oddity of oddities is that he lost all three of those matches. He is like a long driver in golf or a home-run hitter in baseball.
This week I wrote about a plan to basically swap funding for MCS and the Med.
The city would take on the $30 million in annual funding that the Med needs, while the county would slowly take over the funding the city has been giving to MCS.
As councilman Reid Hedgepeth said at a recent Memphis City Council meeting:
“We’ve got $38 million we tried to give away two weeks ago. The school board did not accept the money,” he said. “We have $38 million we’re going to give to someone. We want to get out of the school business.”
The city and county have had a long, thorny relationship with funding their joint entities.
Take, for instance, $12 million in emergency funding for the Med.
Despite an injury to guard Elliott Williams, the Memphis Tigers toppled Tulane Wednesday night in New Orleans. Frank Murtaugh has more.
For some filmmakers, the short film is a proving ground to help raise funding to make a feature-length movie. For students, it’s a way to learn the technology and hone the tricks of the trade necessary to have a career in the industry. And for many homegrown filmmakers toiling around the world, the short is a way to scratch a creative itch: to tell that one story inside.
In other words, it’s not a novelty. The proof is on display this weekend when this year’s crop of Oscar-nominated shorts will be screened at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. The program is presented by the local film festival organization On Location: Memphis. All five nominees for Best Short Film, Live Action and five for Best Short Film, Animated will be screened.
The live-action nominees include a trio of modern-day nightmares, a black-as-death joke, and a palate-cleansing comedy.
Kavi is set in present-day India and shines its light on slavery in the world’s second-most populated country. Kavi (Sagar Salunke) is a little boy who is subjected to back-breaking, skin-tearing work making bricks to help his father pay off a debt. In the distance he sees other kids playing cricket, and he longs to be one of them. “School is for rich kids,” Kavi is told by the slave-camp master. “But cricket is for everyone,” Kavi responds.
There’s one word that’s never uttered in The Door that informs and colors everything in it: Chernobyl. Igor Sigov stars as Nikolai, a father and husband who must flee with his family from their home following the 1986 nuclear disaster. What they don’t realize at the time is that the refugees are “ticking time bombs” evacuated into the world.
Okay, Miracle Fish might be a little tough, too. For his 8th birthday, Joe (Karl Beattie) is given a little wish-fulfilling fish novelty by his father. Joe suffers at the hands of grade-school bullies, who taunt him and call his family poor, so he hides in the nurse’s office and takes a nap. He wakes to find that everyone in the school has disappeared. There’s a book about alien abductions left behind. Is that a clue? Joe doesn’t care. He’s happy to be by himself. He’s not alone, though.
Strangely, The New Tenants ties these other three together. It opens with a two-and-a-half-minute rant from Frank (essayist/actor David Rakoff), sitting at a kitchen table with his partner/roommate Peter (Jamie Harrold), who has heard it all before. Right now, somewhere else in the world, people are dying horrible deaths. Every moment of every day: misery and biological expiration. The couple then proceeds to be interrupted by a series of other tenants.
Instead of Abracadabra is different: It’s about 25-year-old amateur magician Tomas (Simon Berger), who still lives with his parents, and no one dies. It’s kind of a Swedish Napoleon Dynamite.
On the Animated side, the mainstay animated characters Wallace and Gromit anchor the field. The oblivious Wallace and his ingenious dog Gromit return in A Matter of Loaf and Death, another in Nick Park’s multiple-Oscar-winning films. There’s also a screed by an old woman who’s bitter about being cast aside by the younger generation (Grammy O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty), a comic tug-of-war between a doctor and death (The Lady and the Reaper), a karmic comeuppance for a man who has lost his wallet and can’t pay for his coffee (French Roast), and, best of all, a brilliant rendering of L.A. as a cacophony of corporate logos caught up in an action disaster plot like only Hollywood could imagine (Logorama) — worth the price of admission.