Criminal Activity
• A Memphis man was arrested for possession of women’s underwear with intent to sell. According to reports, Joe Milam opened his very special pop-up shop at a downtown MATA station and attempted to sell approximately $800 worth of Victoria’s Secret underwear. The fancy drawers were unworn and still festooned with the original price tags and clearly ineffectual anti-theft devices. Few souvenirs really scream “Memphis” like a pair of stolen bus station panties.
• A man named James ‘Peg Leg’ Adams was arrested after getting into a fight over who was the best karaoke singer at Barbie’s Sports Bar. Linda Wyman and her friend Possum were singing the Kid Rock/Sheryl Crow song “Picture” when things got ugly. Wyman told WMC’s Janice Broach that she continued to sing although she heard the victim hollering that he’d been stabbed and saw blood coming. “They were all drunk,” the witness was quoted as saying.
Politics
• Who among us hasn’t occasionally wished there were more hours in the day? State Rep./Time Lord Curry Todd waved his sonic screwdriver and created legislation to eliminate Daylight Savings Time and/or make it permanent, miraculously giving Tennesseans an extra hour to get ready for work in the morning and an extra hour to unwind in the evening. Or something like that.
Todd’s brave and ambitious proposal was met with skepticism by science wonks and global sorcery-deniers like Rep. Kent Williams, an independent from Elizabethton, who asked if Todd could make Tennessee more like Alaska: “Six months of daylight and six months of darkness?” State Rep./Tribal Chieftan Ryan Haynes (R-Knoxville) asked for a year’s delay so lawmakers could study the issue. The Tennessean‘s political reporter Chas Sisk suggested, “Perhaps by watching the skies.”
• A recent Commercial Appeal feature spotlighting Mayor A C Wharton’s “Blueprint for Prosperity” yielded this charming anecdote from the Whitehaven Christmas parade. Once upon a time Wharton was riding in a convertible through the streets of Whitehaven tossing individually wrapped pieces of candy …
“I don’t want no damn candy. I want a job,” one woman called out, causing the mayor to think. “We’ve been throwing them candy,” he was quoted as saying. “What they want to do is to be able to buy their own candy.”
Media
• The thing about live TV is, well, it’s live. That’s the lesson WMC news reporter Jerica Phillips learned when she reported the impact of heavy rains on one of Memphis’ poorer neighborhoods. Priscilla Lester, an angry Frayser resident, walked into the shot complaining — and rightfully so — that this marked the fourth or fifth time the “motherf#$%&r” had flooded. The video went viral and became so popular that WMC returned to the scene to meet Lester, a 51-year-old mother of five adult children, who was sorry about cursing on TV, out of Kool cigarettes, and in need of a hug.
• 2014 is notable for this photo of WMC reporter Jason Miles under a car on a birthday cake.
• The best trending topic of 2014 had to be #Rockbone. The word started trending after an official tweet from WREG News Channel 3, generated ostensibly to encourage viewers to use the station’s interactive weather radar, was loosed into the twitterverse with an attached link for
Twitter users responded immediately with things like this …
And this …
Memphisness
• Justin Timberlake answered a social media critic who accused J-Tim of being a “bandwagon” Memphis Grizzlies fan. Timberlake’s response: “Uh … I’m from Memphis and I’m an owner. Anyone else? #WigSnatch.”
• An unidentified woman was permanently ejected from the Memphis Zoo for getting a little too close to the animals. On Monday, June 23rd, a woman wearing brown scrubs crossed a barrier in Cat Country in order to serenade the lions and feed them cookies. Nobody seems to have recorded what types of cookies she thought a 250-pound carnivore might enjoy. Ladyfingers, perhaps?
Mississippi, Our Neighbor
• Life imitated a worn-out Monty Python sketch last week when 78-year-old Walter Williams of Lexington, Mississippi, turned out to be “not dead yet,” in spite of the fact that he’d been pronounced so by the coroner, zipped into a body bag, and taken to Porter and Sons Funeral Home to be embalmed.
“He was not dead, long story short,” funeral home manager Byron Porter was quoted as saying, explaining how it came to pass that Mr. Williams got better and started kicking and making noise inside his body bag, trying to get out.
