Random Awards

So, I’m giving The Quotable South a break for a bit. This morning, I’ve decided to share with you some random bits that deserve, in their own perverse way, an award.

So, apparently John Travolta and his wife are night-owls. And Scientologists, in case you just fell off the turnip truck. As reported in the article, Travolta not only tends to go to bed very, very late every evening, but he also flies his personal plane several times a week to the Scientology Center in Clearwater, FL where he “gets his thetans cleared out through the practice of auditing.” Now, if I were the author of this article and I had to pick which of these practices is weird enough to serve as the tag for my piece, I think I would have chosen the thetan-auditing. But then again, I would have never thought to describe a night-owl as someone who “spurns daylight.” And that’s why msn.com gets the award.

I’m still re-acquainting myself with Memphis politics, but this week I had a not-so-rare opportunity to dive back into those murky waters head-first. Our Mayor, Willie Herenton, was (allegedly) the vicitim of a “sex scandal conspiracy.” But it’s even better than that, becuase it was a thwarted sex scandal conspiracy. (Memphis must be the only place outside of Hollywood where you can get “sex”, “scandal” and “conspiracy” in one pop.) One of Herenton’s opponents supposedly hired an ex-exotic dancer to lure the Mayor into a sexual encounter, which she was encouraged to videotape, presumably for the purpose of diminishing Herenton’s chance of being reelected in the upcoming mayoral elections. Good thing for the Mayor, she was an ex-exotic dancer with a heart of gold, and told Herenton all about the conspiracy ahead of time. No word on what happened to the videotape.

I really overheard this conversation a couple of weeks ago when I was in D.C. Two guys, early-to-mid-twnties, got on the Metro and took the seats behind me. It went like this:

Note to the kids out there: if the first thing that you guess about your friends is that they had to register as sex offenders, then either (1) you need new friends, or (2) you need to immediately set up your own fortune-telling business. Let’s hope for the second.