CHOAS 901
Remember Elvis Week 2016? Gosh, it seems like it was only last week when fans of the King assembled in front of Graceland to light a candle and stream up the hill and through the mansion’s Meditation Garden. And all the Black Lives Matters demonstrators showed up to engage in a bit of modestly disruptive protest, so police showed up in numbers sufficient to ensure there wasn’t any fan base mingling at the party. And it rained like hell. Those were the days, my friend. Or as WMC-TV put it in an alarming all-caps headline: “Elvis Week CHOAS.” As in “Get CHOAS a proofreader” maybe?
What does CHOAS even mean? Is it a run-of-the-mill typo or a new word for something worse than ordinary CHAOS because it’s chaos inside of CHAOS? Is it local TV’s Superman Dam Fool moment? Is it a startling vision of Memphis’ future? Is CHOAS inevitable? Stay tuned.
Verbatim
“We’re devastating people’s lives, and I can’t be part of that.” — Michael Rallings announcing his opposition to loosening marijuana laws during a forum on heroin use because REEFER MADNESS! It’s hard to know whose lives the new police director thinks will be destroyed by loosening current pot laws, since, according to data compiled by the ACLU, 88 percent of the 8.2 million marijuana arrests in the U.S. between 2001 and 2010 were for simple weed-only possession, and blacks were 3.73 times more likely to be arrested in spite of relative equal usage rates. Blue Crush service techs, maybe?
