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The Cheat Sheet

More than a hundred customers line up outside the Apple store in Saddle Creek so they can plunk down $499 and be the first people in Memphis to own the new iPhones, which go on sale at precisely 6:30 p.m. Friday evening. We imagine their very first call went something like this: “Guess what I just bought!”

An employee of a vending machine company gets upset when he can’t park his van close enough to the building he needs to service. That building just happens to be the headquarters for the Drug Enforcement Administration. And when he exchanges some choice words (we can’t print them here) with nearby agents, they notice a bag filled with marijuana hanging from the man’s pocket. The man is arrested, and his van is confiscated. No word on just what the fellow was trying to put in the vending machines.

Greg Cravens

Agents with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency — in an undercover sting with the deadly accurate title of “Operation Striking Distance” — make arrests throughout the state and confiscate more than 100 poisonous reptiles. The catch includes vipers, copperheads, rattlesnakes, and even something called a monocled cobra, whose bite can kill an adult in less than 15 minutes. Look, with all the murders, shootings, and stabbings around here, we really don’t need snakes to make our city even more dangerous.

The Memphis City Schools releases the results of an interesting survey that claims that 90 percent of teachers and 80 percent of students actually feel safe in school. That’s good news, we suppose. But looked at another way, 10 percent of teachers and 20 percent of students were probably too afraid to fill out the forms.