Nashville - Nashville Scene - Pith in the Wind - Hargrove Archives

Posted November 19, 2008 at 11:14:28 AM by Brantley Hargrove

What is this--a mountainous L.A.? Not that Smoky.

Prepare to see the Smokies through a pall of smog.

Unless a petition for reconsideration goes through--leaving the final say-so to Obama--the EPA is going to make it a hell of a lot easier for coal-fired power plants, lead smelters and oil refineries near national parks to vomit pollutants with abandon, according to a report by The Washington Post. Ever since the passage of the Energy Policy Act, W. has turned the gatekeepers of our wild lands--particularly the Bureau of Land Management and the EPA--into rubber stamps.

I saw it happen firsthand in Wyoming. The BLM issued permits to drill out there like candy on Halloween. The effect: Destruction of sagebrush habitats and the dependent species, and the ruination of ranch land and the ephemeral creeks the high country ranchers so depend on.

This is brazen, though. Bush sneaking in an 11th hour pass on pollution. EPA regional administrators are raising a shit-fit. Now when the EPA starts bitching about energy-related policy decisions, you can rest assured it's egregious. Here's what they plan to do, or not do, rather: Spikes in pollution near national parks during peak energy demand used to be illegal. Instead, pollution levels will be averaged over an entire year. Just imagine what energy company math whizzes can do with an imaginative statistical analysis.

You know The Who song, "I Can See for Miles?" It hasn't been true for a while in the Smoky Mountains, and if this goes through it probably never will be.

Category: Hargrove

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Posted November 14, 2008 at 05:30:25 AM by Brantley Hargrove

Share the love, guys

Going to the dealership sucks. If you drive a Ford, you may get specific Motorcraft parts, but damn they're expensive. That's why those of us with less than supple incomes go to local repair shops. But here's the problem:

The big automakers must have missed that kindergarten class where teacher proclaimed the virtues of sharing. None of us who buy vehicles recall ever signing any kind of agreement that forbade us from visiting service shops outside the dealership lot. We can go to whichever shiny or slummy place we please.

But in the age of cars run by computers, it's not as simple as taking an engine apart and putting it back together. One bad computer signal in an engine is like a string of light bulbs. It requires a hell of a lot more detailed information than before. Most shops pay an information service that provides the repair particulars, but independent shops say the automakers are providing these services with incomplete information. Some wonder, with an economic downturn hitting automakers worst of all, if they aren't trying to get more business into the dealership.

"I think it stair-steps all the way down," said Bruce Conder of Conder's Automotive in Mount Juliet. "Automakers don’t want to let go of (the information) because they want customers to come to them. The technicians are leaving right and left and left to after-market shops because they can make more money."

The dearth of information on technologically advanced models isn't just a pain in the ass; it's a drain on the financial solvency of a shop.

"When you’re charging people by the hour to work on a car and you can’t get the info you need and you need to do a lot of research, that’s lost money out of my pocket," Conder said. "Because I don’t think it‘s right to charge the customer for that."

The Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association is pushing new legislation to mandate automakers to provide safety alerts and information and software required to repair customers' vehicles. Conder and his brethren would simply ask that the Big Three and all the others remember this: If independent repair shops get pushed out of business, dealerships can expect a deluge they aren't equipped to service.

Category: Congress, Hargrove, Legislature

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Posted November 12, 2008 at 05:31:15 AM by Brantley Hargrove

Duanna Johnson, transgendered woman shot dead in Memphis

Another transgendered Memphian is dead: Identified initially as Dwayne Johnson, Duanna Johnson is the very same woman who was savagely beaten down in a Memphis jail by two cops. Johnson was initially picked up for prostitution back in February. When the Chicago native didn't respond to a nasty name regarding her sexual preference and gender identity while in the intake area, a cop used his handcuffs as brass knuckles and punched her repeatedly in the face. Fortunately, the beat-down was caught on tape and Johnson sued the city for $3.1 million. Unfortunately, she never saw a penny. Someone shot her to death on Sunday. PITW would like to believe Memphis police would pursue her killer(s) as they would any others, but that may be naive.

And let us not forget a death of our own in January 2007--Nakia Baker. Baker was a transgendered woman from Murfreesboro found dead from some unknown trauma to the back of her head behind Club Adventura and Billiards on Nolensville Road. According to Metro Nashville Police, the case is still open, though initially there were few witnesses and even fewer leads.

When the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act passed through Congress in 2007, President George W. Bush vetoed the bill. President-Elect Barack Obama has pledged to support the bill. The transgender community, however, would still be left in the cold should it pass. The Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition is pushing a Hate Crimes Enhancement bill that would add gender identity and expression to the definition. We remain cautiously optimistic about what effect, if any, hate crime legislation would have on the actual act itself, but if something like this could pass in Tennessee, well, who knows?

For more information, or to make a donation, hit the "post continues" link.

Continue reading "Transgendered in Tennessee--Dangerous Enough For New Legislation?"...

Category: Hargrove, Law and Order, Politics

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Posted October 08, 2008 at 05:44:18 PM by Brantley Hargrove

No Nobel for you, JCO!

Once again the Swedes have wrinkled their noses at American literature. Today the Swedish Academy announced that the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to France's Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio.

The Nobel Prize is perhaps one of the highest honors bestowed upon a writer, yet also one of the more irrelevant. It's not that any one of us wouldn't give our spleen for a Nobel, but how many recent Nobel laureates’ works make the New York Times Bestseller List? Or how many of them would you even recognize? How about Dario Fo, an Italian, who won in 2007? Or Kenzaburo Oe of Japan? Then there’s Gao Xingjian, the Chinese playwright and novelist who won in 2000.

I guess the pattern emerging here is that it’s been a while since an American writer has won a Nobel Prize—the last being Toni Morrison back in ’93. Could it be that we simply haven’t produced anything Nobel-worthy? What about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or even his enviable body of work--Blood Meridian, Suttree--,etc. which have been so unceremoniously snubbed year after year? I would argue that no other work in recent memory rivals McCarthy’s creation—a beautifully wrought, gray and desiccated world without all the Mad Max leather, conceptualized in an El Paso motel room in the wee morning hours, when the city was dead? I mean, really? Doris Lessing, the Brit?

These aren’t just the idle ramblings of a Cormac McCarthy fan. Here’s proof, as reported by the AP:

"Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world, not the United States," said Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which chooses the winners. "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining."

Ouch. And they're not even talking about our foreign policy this time.

Category: Hargrove

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Posted September 30, 2008 at 04:58:14 PM by Brantley Hargrove

Local Wiccan after running into the Green Train

Nashville’s Green Train, an eco-educational non-profit run by Merle Haggard and restaurateur Bob Wolf, had a witch in its ranks until recently. Or, to be more precise, a pagan. Not the kind historically drawn and quartered or burned at the stake, but rather the contemporary tree-hugging, Birkenstock-wearing, vegan variety.

That was until Wolf charged this Wiccan ordained minister, Susan Hunter, with creating Green Train’s MySpace page. The personal networking catastrophe that followed-- replete with online earthy salutations and pentagrams--saw Hunter canned in spectacular fashion back in mid-September. She’s crying discriminatory foul. He’s got his hands up, as if to say, “Hey, read our mission: We’re a-political, a-religious, a-everything except the environment.”

Hunter created Green Train’s MySpace page to get the word out about a train laden with musical greats like Vince Gill, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard set to hit the rails in 2009. Their glowing celebrity will, Wolf hopes, attract crowds at whistle-stops across the country, who could then be proselytized on the greener side of life.

Any MySpace neophyte knows that a personal page is pretty lonely without a bunch of friends to festoon it. To address this dearth, Hunter sent out “friend invitations” to 40 of her friends who also happened to be earth-loving hippies and pagans of various stripes. When the messages started flowing in—“Blessed be” or “Faerie blessings,” usually accompanied by a pentagram and pictures of ivory-skinned ladies identifying themselves exotically as Asterope Morgaine and Feryia—Hunter says Wolf blew a gasket, ordering that all pentagrams be deleted. She says she deleted the Christian symbols too, out of spite before being summarily dismissed.

Continue reading "Witch Hunt or Woman Scorned at the Eco-Minded Green Train?"...

Category: Crazy Crap, Hargrove

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