Category: Fly On The Wall Blog

• Seymour Mantiddi

Seymour Mantiddi, a loud and proud Shelby County resident says he can’t imagine why anybody would live inside the Memphis city limits, where everybody is a criminal, teachers especially.

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” says Mantiddi, a former neologistics specialist who currently operates an ill-defined internet business from his home in the never-completed Knightwood subdivision near Eads, TN.

“You couldn’t pay me enough to live in Memphis,” Mantiddi insists, and recent history suggests he’s not kidding.

“It’s true,” says Hammertow Neologistics CEO Ted Pickens, Mantiddi’s most recent employer.

“I wanted him to take over more responsibility, and made one helluva good offer,” Pickens says. “But, in our line of work you sometimes need to be in the office at a moment’s notice. He was great and all, but that’s a pretty big commute, so I said it might be better if he lived in the city, and that’s when he got all red, and yelled out something about ‘President Osama,’ and he quit right there on the spot.

“It’s not like I said he had to move, it was only a suggestion,” says Pickens who deeply regrets having opened his mouth in the first place.

“I don’t know what kind of fool you people take me for,” Mantiddi says, claiming to possess “rock solid proof” that everybody who lives in Memphis is addicted to drugs

“For starters, they live in Memphis,” he says adding that he follows many members of the local news media on Twitter and is keenly aware of “what goes down in that hellhole.”

When asked to name the top three reasons why nobody can pay him enough to live in Memphis Mantiddi says he can do even better.

“I’ll give you one reason,” he says. “Because nobody wants to live there. And nothing they do works.”

From FOTW’s earliest days as a slender gray column of newsprint your Fly-team has been on the lookout for the best signs in Memphis. And our definition of “best” is pretty broad.

So, there’s this from The Art Center on Union Ave.

Even more recently this next awesome message appeared on East Parkway at Madison.

CNN thinks Memphis’ Earnestine & Hazel’s is one of America’s best dive bars. And while most of us who live in the Bluff City can probably imagine sets of criteria that might place the ambiance-laden joint somewhat lower in the rankings even on a list of Memphis dives, it’s still a well-deserved honor.

The most interesting thing about this development, however, is the comment thread that seems to suggest that no bars on the list can be “real dive bars,” by virtue of being included on the list. (How Heisenbergian!)

Although the days have long past since one might contract syphilis from the ice cubes (to borrow an image from John Kennedy Toole), perhaps some denizens of the South Main tavern can chime in, and assure CNN’s viewers/readers that, for everything else it may or may not be, E&H is, without a doubt, a dive that reeks of heavenly burgers, and, though less literally, vintage copulation.

UPDATE: E&H is getting a lot of love this week. Thrillist.com just named the Soul Burger one of the nation’s best. Hat tip to WPTY/WLMT’s Cameron Harper (@NewsCam on your Twitter machine) for sharing.

It’s time for concerned citizens to stand up for four day weekends and invent some new national holidays to follow any currently existing national holidays that fall on Thursday. As we round out the 237th year of these United States, I feel that everyone needs an extra shot of AMERICA. It’s July 5th folks! The US is 237 years and 1 day old! What better way to celebrate than watching a guy riding on a flippin’ buffalo accompanied by an American band singing along to a guy riding on a BUFFALO!!!