VOL. 133 | NO. 26 | Monday, February 5, 2018
Last Word
Bill Dries
Last Word: Super Bowl From A Distance, More School Plans and DACA
By Bill Dries
Eagles over Patriots 41-33. Also at the Super Bowl – no Prince hologram in the JT halftime show but plenty of choreography and a nightclub beneath the stage … the NFL catch rule has its last hurrah – probably … Patriots-haters have the offseason to become Eagles-haters. And Philadelphia Police use hydraulic fluid to stop Eagles fans from climbing utility poles. Irony lives.
Around here, it is on to NCAA March Madness with the rest of the Grizz season without the playoffs to fill in the gap. Oh and the gold lame Elvis at Poplar and Highland is gone with the move-out of Spin Street.
At what point does the Super Bowl – just the actual four quarter football game itself -- take a back seat to the collective weight of all of the other things that take place on and near the field? Can any centerpiece for all of that really live up to that? Could you do all of this, not have a football game and still draw roughly the same audience?
To quote John Madden: “It’s time for a game to break out.” The NBA All-Star game certainly has a considerable sideshow in tow. But that’s the reason it takes up several days. The World Series has the seventh inning stretch, the national anthem and the ceremonial first pitch – pretty economical. Major League Baseball also has a Home Run Derby held the day before the All-Star game. Despite the distance from the game itself, it remains an abomination and probably the product of American League thinking.
Plans for charter schools are starting to surface and there are more moves -- charter and noncharter -- than just the plan by a new local charter group to take over the nine Jubilee Catholic Schools at the end of the 2018-2019 school year. Also look for changes in the ASD and a new fine arts academy as part of Arlington High School.
As new charters surface, seven Memphis charters are in danger of closing per Chalkbeat and the relationship among the state, Shelby County Schools and the charters remains a work in progress.
The Week Ahead finds ET getting the Elvis-with-a-live orchestra treatment – the Memphis Symphony Orchestra no less – at the Orpheum and Orpheus through the eyes of Eurydice at TheatreWorks.
The local face of DACA is the cover story by Andy Meek in our weekly, The Memphis News. The story takes in Latino Memphis, the organization that has evolved as the issue of immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children comes to a head. It also includes efforts by Republican as well as Democratic state legislators to provide in-state tuition for undocumented Tennessee college students and the college campuses where DACA students are already a fact of life – albeit a very uncertain fact of life dependent on what happens in Washington D.C.
The follow-up to last week’s news that the Target “fulfillment center” in the Lamar and Holmes Road area – owned by a third party logistics company that got a PILOT -- is closing is followed up by Target announcing it will be doing same-day deliver in Memphis using Shipt – the company known for delivering groceries that Target bought last year for $550 million.
You watched Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam’s final State of the State address. Here is a basic review of the legislation now in the hopper in Nashville that goes with the sentiments and goals Haslam set out in State of the State.
The Arkansas lawsuit over the herbicide dicamba and the impact of dicamba drift is one of 11 across four states now combined and set for trial in federal court in St. Louis. The centralization was opposed by the companies that make dicamba.
AP’s economic writer Christopher Rugaber on the role wage growth for a smaller pool of workers played in last week’s Wall Street sell-off.
Best Buy goes for bonuses over pay raises from its tax reform windfall.
And new penalties from the Fed for Wells Fargo pending proof of internal reforms.
On the “Around Memphis” reading list: Fodor’s on 48 hours in Memphis, a Memphis expatriate takes her first trip to Chucalissa on a return to the city, Zandria Robinson’s new book and Malik Rhodes’ suspension.
The Memphis News Almanac: Rezoning Frayser and Cooper-Young and Grand Duke Alexei in Memphis.