We, the writers of the Flyer, report the news, and sometimes we make the news. Case in point: Our reporter Toby Sells wrote a book. (Yay, Toby!) It’s called Haint Blues: Strange Tales From the American South (available on Amazon), and it’s about, well, strange tales from the South — UFO abductions, ghosts, Bigfoot, psychic horses, you get the gist. It’s the stuff that Sells just doesn’t stop talking about and now he’s written 20 chapters of it for anyone to read.
“I’ve been into unexplained and folklore stuff since I was in third grade,” he says in an official interview (not during an off-the-record office gossip session, for the record). “I won’t go into the whole story, but a friend of mine showed me the movie The Legend of Boggy Creek when I was at his house for a sleepover in third grade. I think I told you this before [Yes, Toby, you have]. That was my paranormal gateway drug. And I just started consuming every bit of media that I could find after that.”
Yes, that meant watching Unsolved Mysteries but that also meant digging into the archives and doing good old-fashioned research that eventually led him to creating the scripted podcast Haint Blues. “The show got, literally, dozens of listeners,” Sells says (brags?), adding that he recorded his last episode in 2020. “Those scripts kind of sat on the shelf for a little while, and then I was reading one day about average word length of books, and I was doing the math and thinking about how many scripts I had. Those were about 3,000 words each. And I thought, well, it’s getting pretty close. … I thought maybe that’s a way I could share these stories with people. And so I went back to the scripts and rewrote everything in a more nonfiction, prose style, but it still sounds really conversational and still sounds folksy. It’s really laid-back and Southern and comfortable.
“You know,” Sells continues, “all these stories, somewhere down the line, if they’re not just completely fabricated, involved real people at one point, and you want to treat that as respectfully as you can, and that’s what I tried to do. But I think what I really wanted to do is put these stories out as a collection of Southern culture. We all know about Southern food and Southern music, and what I hope I’ve done in the book is let everybody know that we have our own folklore traditions, too. … I think that stuff is as important to Southern culture as any other thing.”
This Friday, you can meet Sells at An Evening of Ghost Stories with Stephen Guenther, paranormal investigator and owner of Historical Haunts. They’ll both share paranormal stories and do a Q&A, and Sells will sign books after. “If you’re ready for an evening of spooky stuff, even before Halloween, come on out and join us, grab a beer,” Sells says.
Toby Sells is Associate Editor for the Memphis Flyer, responsible for breaking news of great civic import and, more importantly, craft beer coverage. He had somehow managed to miss the 1988 action film classic Die Hard. True to his penetrating journalistic brain, he sought answers to the most important question: Is it a Christmas movie? Here’s how it went.
Chris McCoy: Toby Sells, tell me what you know about Die Hard.
Toby Sells: Not much. I know that Bruce Willis plays a guy named John McClane. This is from years of just hearing about this movie when I would bring it up and say I’ve never seen it. People would say, “I can’t believe you’ve never seen Die Hard!” And I’ve never seen a single one of ’em. John McClane wears the white wife beater shirt, and for some reason, he doesn’t have any shoes on. He’s trying to crawl around in a building to kill Snape. And people argue about whether or not this is a Christmas movie. I have no idea what that’s about.
132 minutes later …
Chris McCoy: Toby Sells, you are now a person who has seen Die Hard. What did you think?
Toby Sells: Well, I get 10 or 12 pop culture references that I did not get before.
CM: Like what?
TS: Well, the “Yippee ki yay yay, motherfucker!” is one I’d heard people say, I didn’t know where that was from. As I was watching it, I was trying to — ’cause I really admire the way that you write about film — I was trying to come up with some ways to go deeper into the movie somehow, but it was a lot of explosions and gunfire and glass everywhere, and a guy trying to save the day. And it was just a whole lot of fun.
CM: I think it’s tons of fun! They teach this movie in film writing classes, because it’s so efficient and well structured. By the time the credits are over, you know who John McClane is, you know what his problems are, and what his life is like. You know he’s coming from New York and he’s going to L.A., and you know that he doesn’t fit in in L.A., because he’s a New York guy. And he really doesn’t change through the rest of the movie.
TS: No, he does change in one key way! There’s the bathroom scene, where he’s cut his foot, and he doesn’t have a shirt on anymore. John McClane is thinking things are looking pretty grim, and he’s been talking to his buddy Al outside on the radio. He’s had this revelation about his relationship with his wife who is kind of not his wife, at this point. It takes a terrorist, threats on his life over dozens of times, and many, many rounds of gunfire to realize that maybe he should have told his wife that he loved her and supported her and gone with her to Los Angeles when she took the job and moved out. It took all of that for this man to become vulnerable and decide, “Hey, you know what? It’s time I supported my wife.”
CM: As you said, it should be called Die Hard, or How Hans Gruber Saved My Marriage.
CM: When this came out, Bruce Willis was on Moonlighting. He’d never done action before. Now, he’s Mr. Action Guy. But in Moonlighting, he solved mysteries with Cybill Shepherd, and cracked wise.
TS: I thought he went the other way around. I thought he did action, but he’s also funny.
CM: There’s some kind of rights issue with Moonlighting, so it’s not on streaming or anything. But it was such a good show. I was devoted to that show. But he was a comedy actor, and now, because of Die Hard, he’s Mr. Action all the time. He became a huge star and quit Moonlighting. Then he had a blues band where he played harmonica.
TS: Yeah, he started Planet Hollywood back in the day with Schwarzenegger and all those other guys.
CM: What did you think about him in the film?
TS: He was pitch perfect. That’s John McClane, that’s not just Bruce Willis. He’s the guy in the air duct. That’s who you think of when you think about Bruce Willis.
CM: “Come out to the coast, we’ll have a few laughs!”
TS: That’s him. The other thing is, I knew going into it that he didn’t have shoes on, for some reason. Figured it out!
CM: It’s literally set up in the credit sequence, when some guy tells him to take his shoes off and make fists with your toes — which I always do! Seriously, to this day, I do that. I had forgotten why I did that until today, because I haven’t seen this movie in years and years.
TS: It is a bit of a cowboy movie, and it’s also a big heist movie. It’s kinda like Oceans 11, when they’re trying to drill into the vault, and Hans Gruber’s got this whole thing planned very well. He knows they’re gonna have to come in and cut the power, and then that’s when the vault opens. It’s got the heist vibe, which is great.
CM: They talk about the cowboy motif throughout the movie.
TS: He said he was a big Roy Rogers fan and all that, and it’s like one guy saving the day against all odds. He’s cut his foot. He’s been shot at a dozen times. And somehow, you know, this gritty New York cop sees through all of it, and figures it all out enough to win the day, get the girl, ride off into the sunset, and crack jokes along the way.
CM: He’s also the cop who won’t follow the rules, which is so Reagan Eighties. All the guys who are FBI, and the police Lieutenant that takes over at the scene, are so ineffectual. The Lieutenant [Paul Gleason] is the same actor who was the coach in The Breakfast Club in charge of detention. This guy made a career in the ’80s of being ineffectual authority figures that were meant to be ridiculed.
TS: I thought the characters were perfectly all ’80s. They fit all the molds.
CM: Everybody was an archetype.
TS: But then I’m wondering if the archetypes didn’t come from this movie?
CM: I think the hero cop who won’t follow the rules thing goes back to Dirty Harry in the ’70s, which was a reaction against the counterculture. This is a deeply conservative movie. Like, we were talking about Al the, the cop, and you’re like “What’s Al’s problem?” Oh, I killed a 13-year-old kid is the problem. And then his redemption arc is, he gets to use violence again!
TS: He gets to shoot the big zombie German at the end.
CM: That’s Alexander Gudnov, who was a ballet dancer with the Bolshoi and had a second career in America playing vaguely foreign bad guys. You know, the bad guys, Hans Gruber and his people, they set you up to think that they’re leftist revolutionaries.
TS: And apparently, Hans Gruber was one, at one point. They disavowed him, but he used to be like an actual terrorist.
CM: It was like the Baader-Meinhof Group, West German communists, but they had a fake name.
TS: But now, he’s gone rogue, so he’s just a thief.
CM: Right, just a criminal. And when he calls out these other revolutionaries, it kind of dismisses them. They’re all just thieves at heart. That’s the subtext.
TS: He can’t fight for a cause anymore, so he’s like, okay, well, if they don’t think I’m good enough for that, then screw it. I’m just gonna go for the money. And I’m gonna steal from the guy who’s got a whole lot of money. That’s gonna be my redemption. Since I can’t have the glory of saying that I helped change the world, I’m gonna get mine. I’m gonna sit on a beach and earn 20 percent interest. There are no values, you know, it’s just greed at that point. He even says so at the beginning. He talks about the Nakatomi group and says that they’re just these greedy people with all this money.
CM: But he’s greedy, too. The movie says, everybody is greedy, no one has ideology — but that’s an ideology in itself. And by the way, the Nakatomi corp. is explicitly a fossil fuel company. They’re drilling for oil in Indonesia.
TS: They have got those models of the drilling rigs and stuff. As a bad guy, the only thing he’s fighting for now is just an easy life, where John McClane has got everything to fight for. His wife is in there, and they put his kids on television. It really is that story of having principles and overcoming somebody with no principles. All that stuff and all the violence does make this a deeply conservative movie. You look at the way people think about the world and how things are black and white, and it’s all right there.
CM: Here’s the bad guys: Hans Gruber’s group, who are sellout leftist terrorist or whatever, and are now like super thieves. And then there is the, the rules-following LAPD guys.
TS: There’s the FBI following the FBI playbook, which leads to disaster and everybody gets killed.
CM: And finally, the worst of all, the news media.
TS: That’s us! [laugh]. Yeah, I have thoughts on that. Of course it’s a movie and I’m not gonna hold anybody to standards or whatever. But this guy, he’s getting ready to leave, it’s Christmas Eve and he’s gonna go to some restaurant with his wife or something. Then here’s his thing on the radio. He decides he’s gonna go get glory for himself and get this crew together, go over to Nakatomi Plaza and check it out. So as it’s going along now, that can happen. Something on the scanner, head out.
CM: That happens all the time. Not to me personally, but it happens.
TS: Right. But as it’s going on — and remember, this is the evening of Christmas Eve — the station has somehow gotten the author of a book on terrorism to come in on a moment’s notice and go on the air. So then, they figured out it was Hans Gruber, and somehow his group had issued this statement, they communicate somehow that they disavowed him. And they had a file photo of Hans Gruber somehow there at the station and put it all together in no time.
CM: While we were watching, you were like, “How did they put out statements that quick before Twitter?” They called Der Spiegel and said, “Yo, that’s not our dude.”
TS: When the TV station shows up, when the press shows up, the cops have the reaction that you would think they would. “Oh great, here comes the press.” You know, that’s what we think the cops do every single time the press is involved in anything. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. But the press crossed the line right?
CM: When they dug it up and found out where McClane’s kids live and they wanted to put them on air. Right.
TS: They put them in danger and all that kind of stuff. Then it became okay to punch the guy in the face at the end.
CM: I thought about that too, which is something I probably wouldn’t have thought about years ago. That actor [William Atherton] is the EPA guy from Ghostbusters. He’s another person who made a career in the ’80s out of being ineffectual authority figures. He goes to the house where we’ve established that John and Holly’s kids are, and threatens to have the housekeeper deported, because he just racistly assumes she’s an illegal alien, and then says, manipulatively, that this is the last time these kids are ever going to be able to talk to their parent. And I was like, who the hell does that? It’s never occurred to me to do anything like that. You’ve done a lot of beat reporting. Have you ever done anything like that?
TS: Absolutely not. I mean, that’s not good professional ethics.
CM: I guess people do it?
TS: You know, it’s meant to be over the top. It’s set up in a way that this guy who he was really just trying to beat channel five, as he says in the movie. But it set up this kind of emotional pivot in the movie where it then became really personal. But I’ve never, never dreamed of going to anybody’s house like that.
CM: Alan Rickman!
TS: Yeah!
CM: How amazing is he?
TS: At the beginning of this, I said, “He’s trying to get Snape.” Of course, because I’m a huge Harry Potter fan. I’ve completely rethought Alan Rickman after this performance. He was incredible, such a great bad guy.
CM: You know, he is kind of a bad guy in Harry Potter, too.
TS: Yeah, but you love him.
CM: He steals every screen that he’s in.
TS: There was that scene where he’s off looking for the detonators, and then John catches him, so he pretends to be one of the hostages. He puts on that kind of fake American accent, which was great. Still sounds like Alan Rickman with an American accent, but John kind of falls for it just enough.
CM: That scene is so great. At that point, Rickman is playing Hans Gruber, who is playing what he thinks will be a believable accent to an American. You can see the wheels turning as he fakes his way through it. That’s what makes that scene work. It’s not the accent, it’s that you can see him improvising. And that is just a stunning, stunning piece of acting. He was always, low-key, the best thing in any movie he’s in. And by the way, Bruce Willis plays that scene really well, too. That’s also really hard, ’cause he’s kind of the straight guy, and you don’t know who’s fooling who.
TS: So good. And then the fall there at the end, from the top of the tower, that was iconic too. I think I’d seen that before somewhere also.
CM: That’s been copied a lot.
TS: We talked about this being a Christmas movie.
CM: That was my next question. People argue about that.
TS: Right. I think absolutely it is a Christmas movie. They set it at Christmas time. They’re having a Christmas party. And I love the way the music just kind of peppers in little references to Christmas carols here and there. There’s kind of an ominous “Jingle Bells.”
CM: At one point, they used jingle bells in the same rhythm as the Psycho theme. Jing Jing Jing Jing …
[Laughter]
CM: You know, I think this is a perfect movie, because everything works together. Everybody’s good in it. The screenplay is well structured. We were talking about the motivations of minor characters a minute ago. Well, it’s a credit to the screenwriting that you think that these people have motivations and you can identify them. Nowadays, a lot of times, I don’t even know what the motivation of the protagonist is.
TS: They are just out there wielding weapons for some reason, and you hope they turn out okay. And that guy they’re shooting is probably bad.
CM: All the action scenes in this, I was just noticing how good they are. And that is really difficult to do, to make action scenes that work. You have a sense of what the space is like. How does this guy relate to that guy? How far away are they? For example, when they shoot the glass.
TS: You know he’s barefoot.
CM: Exactly. You know he’s been barefoot from the beginning. They show you the glass, and then show you Hans Gruber having the idea to shoot the glass.
TS: Yeah. So you’ve already had the idea and it’s like, “Oh look at this guy. He knows what’s up.”
CM: Obviously, this movie inspired so many action movies. But today, it seems like nobody can do this kind of craftsmanship.
CM: So, bottom line.
TS: Bottom line is, I’m glad I’ve seen Die Hard.
CM: Would you recommend it to others?
TS: I would recommend it to others, just for a great action movie. Unplug your brain, go check it out.
Memphis Flyer reporter Toby Sells and photographer Justin Fox Burks road-tripped to Ed Duvall Landing last week, working on this week’s cover story: Pipe Dream.
The landing is close to where state officials hope to run a wastewater line across Tipton County and into the Mississippi River with the potential to pour 3.5 million gallons of waste every day. State officials say they need that line to lure a potential tenant to the Memphis Regional Megasite in Haywood County.
Winter is coming, my friends. Dark clouds are building in the western sky. Alliances are being formed. Treachery and connivance are afoot. The battle — soon to come — could be epic and bloody, a mortal combat to see who will control the kingdom of Tom Lee, a vast and glorious prairie on the banks of the majestic Mississippi River near Castle Memphis.
On one side is the Memphis River Parks Partnership (aka Mr. PP), led by Lady Coletta and her powerful allies, including the Great Lord of the House of Hyde, the Downtown Memphis Commission of Great Visions, and the mercenary knights of Studio Gang — brought in from the northern kingdom to wreak havoc on their sworn enemies: the House of MIM.
Studio Gang visual of the proposed water feature in Tom Lee Park.
The House of MIM (aka Memphis in May), led by Lord James Holt, is enjoined in this coming battle by the Sacred Alliance of Motels and Hotels, the Viscounts of Beale Street, the Barons of Barbecue, the House of Rock, and probably the Duke of Earl.
In coming days, there will be negotiations held in the chambers of the great High Castle on the Bluff, seeking to avoid bloodshed and form a truce, however uneasy. Emotions are high. Anything could happen. The fate of Tom Lee hangs in the balance, my friends. Thoughts and prayers …
For the record, the preceeding verbiage was satire. You know, what Webster’s calls “the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.” We do that a lot at the Flyer, because, well, if not us, who else in town is going to provide the snark essential to the civic process? I mean, someone has to point out when the emperor is going commando, right?
I mention this, because a cartoon by our illustrator and master of visual snark, Greg Cravens, poked fun at the House of MIM a couple weeks back, and a few of their friends got upset. Some said the Flyer was “attacking” Memphis in May.
No. Believe me, if we attack you, you’ll know it. It was satire, the same kind of stuff we’ve thrown at MRPP on several occasions. I mean, our Chris Davis was the guy who dubbed them “Mr. PP” in the first place. We’ve also taken shots at Studio Gang’s idyllic bird-infested visuals and the new park signage that’s already been installed. It’s what we do.
But that’s different from our news coverage, which has highlighted the details of the MRPP design and MIM’s concerns with it. We’ve reported extensively and objectively on the battle for public opinion that’s ongoing between the two organizations. See Toby Sells’ story in this issue for another example.
That said, I’m excited and optimistic about MRPP’s overall plan for the riverfront, which includes renovations of all the city’s public lands along the river, and the linking of Greenbelt Park, Mud Island, the Fourth Bluff, Tom Lee Park, and MLK Park. It’s a big and ambitious design, and because of that, it has drawn fire from several sides.
But the central sticking point is Tom Lee Park, the 30-acre, mile-long, flat, open space now occupied by a few jogging paths and not much else. MRPP’s plan, as most people know by now, involves adding various elevations, a sheltered facility, a water feature, a wildlife habitat, and lots of trees. Memphis in May, understandably, likes the park the way it is, because a big field is much more conducive to its month-long event, which includes a music festival and the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, both of which sprawl over most of the park. How’s that going to work with all those trees and other stuff, they ask. That’s the $70-million question, isn’t it?
We at the Flyer also support Memphis in May. It is a civic treasure that brings lots of people and money to town, and we believe all concerned should be able to figure out a way to keep the celebration Downtown and also reinvent the city’s riverfront. Tom Lee Park belongs to all of us, including those who use it the other 11 months of the year. Let’s get a deal done. May is coming.
The whole thing started a few years ago, when Flyer associate editor Toby Sells blindfolded himself to pick the match-ups for the Flyer‘s first Beer Bracket Challenge. It was all kind of a goof that first year, replete with a “trophy” made from an old ice bucket that editor Bruce VanWyngarden found in his garage. Now, the Beer Bracket Challenge has morphed into a lineup of 24 local beers from five breweries going toe-to-toe against each other for votes from Flyer readers. It is a friendly competition, but it is a competition — and these Memphis beer gurus want to win.
For the more casual craft beer fan, the Beer Bracket Challenge, assisted by some delicious pizza at Aldo’s Pizza Downtown, where this year’s seeding ceremony took place, is one of the best ways to take the aimlessness out of your tour of the booming Memphis craft beer scene. Sure it’s fun to simply toss a ball idly into the air on a lazy day, but sinking it through the hoop when there is a mob trying to stop you is just more fun.
There are four divisions in the challenge. The “Tapped Out” division was seeded with two big winners from last year, Meddlesome’s 201 Hoplar and one of my long time go-tos, Wiseacre’s Ananda — two IPA heavyweights in a town that loves its IPAs. In the first round of voting, 201 Hoplar beat out Midnight Magic, a German Black Ale from Memphis OB (Original Brewer) Ghost River. Ananda lost out to another Meddlesome entrant, Dirty Dova. This was a little surprising, but as beers go, Dirty Dova, a crisp and refreshing double IPA, is a winner. In fact, it may go down a little too easy; its 8.5 percent ABV makes it a brew on a mission. Get a Lyft home.
In the “Perfect Pour” division, Wiseacre’s Tiny Bomb lager beat out another top seed from last year, High Cotton’s Thai Pale Ale, making it to the third round, where it was voted out, losing to Memphis Made’s Fireside, a malty roasted Red Ale.
In the “Drafted” division, Meddlesome continued its winning streak, as its Broad Hammer American Brown Ale edged out Memphis Made’s Cat Nap IPA. Broad Hammer then went on to beat out Crosstown’s Siren Blonde Ale in the next round and, then, finally, steal a win over Wiseacre’s Regular Pale Ale to make the Final Four.
Over in the “Frosty Mug” division, Wiseacre’s coffee stout (and nearly guaranteed hangover cure) Gotta Get Up to Get Down, beat out Plaid Attack Scotch Ale, another perennial favorite from Memphis Made. Gotta Get Up was beaten in the next round by this year’s Cinderella story, Meddlesome’s Brass Bellows, a great blonde ale. For the record, Brass Bellows had some fearsome competition from long-time favorite Ghost River Gold, followed by a close contest with High Cotton’s Mexican Lager, a sort of cosmic ideal of Corona.
The Beer Bracket Final Four for 2019: 201 Hoplar, Broad Hammer, Brass Bellows, and Fireside. The big winner in the tourney has been Meddlesome Brewing. If not exactly the new kid in class, they are certainly not the old guard either. Their tap room, out near the end of Shelby Farms, might be a bit out of the loop, but their beers are hard to ignore.
Final Four voting ended at press time. We know that Meddlesome will take home our Beer Bracket Challenge Cup. But to find out which beer won, you’ll have to check next week’s Flyer.
The Association of Alternative Newsmedia (AAN) has announced the finalists for its annual national writing awards. Three Memphis Flyer writers are among them.
Toby Sells is a finalist in the Long-Form News Story category for “The Brady Bunch,” a deep look at the Brady Law violations and other self-inflicted problems at DA Amy Weirich’s office.
Finalists were chosen as the most outstanding from a field of 821 entries submitted by 70 alternative publications across the U.S. and Canada. The AAN Awards recognize the best in alternative journalism and offer a chance for alt-weeklies to compete directly against the work of their peers in cities across the continent. Judging was conducted by the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.
The winners will be announced July 9 at the AAN Convention in Austin, Texas. Each finalist is assured of no worse than a third-place award.
I am not ready. But I’m going to do this anyway. Those two thoughts were constant billboards in my mind Saturday morning as I waited for the beginning of the St. Jude Memphis Marathon.
I was running the relay, so my part was only around six miles. But I hadn’t run regularly for a while and hoped that my recent efforts at the gym would somehow (somehow) see me through.
Thousands of bodies swelled around the starting line close to Union and Second. Helicopters thrummed overhead. Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” pounded from a tower of speakers.
Runners took selfies. Runners checked Facebook. Runners steeled themselves with banal jokes. (“I’m running the half marathon so I’m only ‘half’ crazy!” Waka, waka.) Mostly, runners talked constantly about running.
I said a quick goodbye to my relay teammates, mentally checked my claustrophobia and security concerns (mass shootings, bombings, etc.), and wandered into the massive crowd at the starting line.
The tall(ish) buildings on Second gave the race a big-city feel. The huge race clock and the great announcer, the music and the sidewalks teeming with a cheerful crowd, set a stage for an impressive race start. I’m not sure if the other 20,000-or-so runners felt this way. But I did, and I swelled with pride because my city was looking so damn fine.
The huge crowd counted down — 3, 2, 1! — and I got fired up with my mind set on the biggest reward for anyone who has run the marathon — the quarter-mile stretch through the St. Jude campus.
The race turned east onto Court, and once my eyes adjusted to the rising sun, I saw something amazing. Down the street’s gentle downward slope ran a dense parade of brightly clad bodies from Court Square to Danny Thomas.
My legs hurt. My breathing was off. My gloves were too hot. My music wasn’t right. People pushed by me. It sucked. This was close to the Happy Mexican, not even to the second mile. I was in trouble.
I was unhappily juggling all of this around the corner of Georgia and Carolina when I got a shock. An older woman was cheering on the runners when her body suddenly went completely rigid, and she fell stiffly to the ground. I ran toward her and in the split second before I got there, two people were already by her side and another was calling 911.
The situation was well under control, so I rejoined the race. It made me reconsider my health as a gift and be thankful that I could be out on a racecourse at all. My thoughts turned to St. Jude’s patients, many of whom would love to complain only about sore legs, dumb music, and rude runners.
All of it silenced my inner crybaby. I pressed on with a renewed strength.
I got dozens of high fives and heartfelt encouragement from random strangers. A guy dressed as a Stormtrooper held a sign that read: “May the Course Be with You.”
A turn down Shadyac in the Pinch brought the St. Jude gate into focus. I turned my music off and yelled (like a maniac) to everyone around me: “Pay attention! This is the best part!” And it was.
Running through that campus on that day is a Memphis moment that’s incomparable to anything else and indescribable to anyone who hasn’t been there. If you can, do it. Pride and joy will melt your face off.
I handed my belt off to my teammate, grateful I hadn’t let my team down. But more than that, I felt a joy for my city and its amazing institutions. And I was proud that even though I hadn’t felt ready for the race, I did it anyway.
About Toby Sells’ cover story, “Engaging the Big Muddy” …
Toby Sells and Brandon Dill captured the mystery, the magic, and the majesty of the big river, not to mention the good-time fun. And Joe Royer is the Mississippi’s greatest Memphis protagonist!
The only thing not covered were details about safety, e.g., when to go and when not to go — and the myriad considerations paddlers need to make when approaching such a powerful force of nature. Fortunately, there is an excellent guide available on the internet: The River Gator’s Paddler’s Guide.
Anyone considering safe paddling in the Memphis area (and beyond), please visit the River Gator. Some of the Memphis routes described in the River Gator were pioneered by Joe Royer and his wife Carol Lee. Many Memphians were consulted as experts for the River Gator (including the editor of the Flyer!).
There are dozens of pages covering the many choices for paddlers in between Shelby Forest State Park and Memphis, including the main channel, and enticing alternate back-channel routes such as those behind Brandywine, Hickman, Loosahatchie, and Redman. There is a very detailed safety section describing the specific skills paddlers should know before attempting the challenges of the biggest river in North America.
John Ruskey
About Bianca Phillips’ post, “State Bill Would Allow Religious Clergy to Deny Same-Sex Marriage” …
I’m trying to remember anywhere in all of the arguments over this where gay people said they wanted to force ministers and other clergy members to marry them. Everything I’ve seen has been they wanted the government to allow them to marry and for the government to recognize it. That is all.
Charlie Eppes
I am pretty sure that religious clergy already have the freedom to refuse to marry two individuals regardless of the reason. The only purpose of this proposal is to score political points.
Barf
Today’s ruling clearly stated that no minister was going to be forced to marry a same-sex couple if they did not choose to do so. Again, this is a way of wasting Tennesseans’ taxpayer money on frivolous bills rather than working to decrease our uninsured or create jobs, neither of which the Republican majority has shown any interest in.
Lane Scoggins
This is just the first step toward man-turtle unions and the death of Christianity. I firmly believe that although Christianity survived the Roman empire, it is helpless in the face of gay marriage.
Jeff
About Bruce VanWyngarden’s Letter From the Editor, “Black is the New White” …
VanWyngarden conveniently failed or refused to admit the lost war on poverty has much to do with the policies of the Democratic Party. Poverty, strife, and divisiveness will continue to swell until politicos stop rewarding bad behavior.
By his own admission, President Johnson’s “Great Society” entitlement programs were created to cement constituents to the Democratic Party. This nefarious scheme damaged the African-American communities most. Instead of the government concentrating on how to get citizens out of ghettos, the entitlement programs too often kept them there.
Victimization has become the key to successful Democratic election results. President Obama’s policies and that of most democratic strongholds in American cities have resulted in the greatest degree of black poverty and black-on-black crime in recent history.
There are no easy answers, but a strong economy fueled by less taxation and a healthier business climate will go far toward creating opportunity for all.
William Pollack
Many whites exist in a poverty of compassion that is compounded by the illusions created by what Douglas Adams called the “Somebody Else’s Problem” effect (SEP). SEP is a psychological effect where people choose to dissociate themselves from an issue that may be in critical need of recognition. Such issues may be of large concern to the population as a whole but can easily be a choice of ignorance by an individual.
My knees quivered. My stomach flipped. Fear rose in my throat. Did they have some kind of bucket truck that could lower me safely and comfortably to the forest floor? Nope. Even though I wanted to, I was not coming down, not like that.
Friday was media day at the brand new Go Ape Zip Line & Treetop Adventure course at Shelby Farms Park. It’s a beautiful overhead ropes course that blends perfectly into the forest around Pine Lake. I willingly signed up for media day and I was representing The Memphis Flyer. But, no, I was not coming down.
I’d climbed a wet rope ladder and stood on a wet, wooden platform that ringed the tree trunk. My job, then, was to unhook two safety ropes (tipped with heavy, red and blue carabiners) that attached me to the rope ladder and hook them to a red safety line that attached me to the tree. My hands shook, clacking the carabiners loudly, embarrassingly. I wasn’t that high up, but I knew taller trees were coming, and I have a bad track record with heights.
To calm myself, I listened to the rain patter softly on the canopy. Then I looked down and remembered Texas. A decade ago, I collapsed while high inside the dome of the Texas State Capitol building. I got close to the fourth-floor overlook and my legs quivered, stopped working, and I just sat down.
Then I came back to the present and looked down at the grinning faces of Go Ape staffers and other media types. Suddenly, the native machismo of my rural Southern upbringing took over. No, I was not coming down, by god, not like that. I took a deep breath, gritted my teeth, and wobbled across a one-foot beam suspended between two trees. Then I attached myself to the zip line, and sailed about 20 feet, scooting to a stop on a ramp of soft mulch. Alright, that was fun.
Station two (there are six) required climbing a 40-foot ladder up a tree. At that height, remembering to attach my safety lines came easy. I waddled around another treetop platform, clipped on to a dangling rope, lowered the weight of my beer-and-fried-chicken-loving body onto it, and swung Tarzan-style to a net ladder 40 feet away. As I climbed the ladder up and over to the next tree, I wished I had done more push-ups in the past two years. Or one.
I stared at the path of the next zip line — right over the smooth waters of Pine Lake. I clipped in, now trusting myself and the equipment, and let fly. Cool air whipped around my face. The cable buzzed and whined as I sailed across the quiet lake.
From somewhere deep inside came a long and involuntarily whoop of joy. At the ramp, I spurred the mulch landing strip and came to rest with a thud. Breathing heavily, the only words I could think of were “holy shit.”
Greg Cravens