She lives in the doorway of an old hotel

More pictures from Sunday's trip with Meathead out to Mount Olivet - and this set only has 16 photos for you to wade through. Enjoy!

xo-

get my money, buy my medicine

There's a castle-like house that pops up at 2:35 appears to be a house that belonged to (and was maybe built by?) my great-great uncle, who was a bootlegger. If I'm correct, I believe it is now a recording studio. Verification from The Tatie is needed.

UPDATE: The house did, at some point or other, belong to my great-great uncle Walter Blankenship, a man of dubious occupation.  It's now Castle Recording Studio, from whose website I gleaned the following interesting information:

The Castle is one of the truly unique recording studios in the world in that its' physical plant was once a rest stop and hideout for one of the Roaring Twenties' most notorious figures, Al Capone. Built between 1929 and 1932 on 34 cedar-covered acres just 15 minutes south of Nashville, Tennessee, the stone edifice housed Capone bookmaker John Welch. During Welch's residency, the building was served many purposes, including serving as a bootlegging site, and local gambling house. Since that time, The Castle has seen various incarnations, including a rather elite restaurant whose clientele reportedly included Spencer Tracy and Bob Hope.

I'm still trying to get more info from The Tatie, which is proving to be difficult as she is generally too busy for anything that involves me. *insert tune from world's tiniest violin here*

Turn Signals Optional

Check out the "Nashville Driving Instructions" over at Nashvillest.  #10 is my personal favorite.

Welcome To Nashville, We’ve Got Bad Drivers

If someone actually has their turn signal on, it is probably a factory defect.

Yellow Matter Custard Dripping From a Dead Dog's Eye (Sorry! Had to!)

Found this by way of Nashvillest:

To whoever dumped the dead dog wrapped in plastic on Miami Ave.... (Donelson, Miami Ave)

Thanks a lot you colossal idiots! I was walking my dogs today and came across the hideous scene. Vultures were attempting to feast on this thing wrapped in plastic by the side of the road. Did it not occur to you that wrapping your huge fucking dog up in plastic and dumping it would look suspiciously like a dead body?! I had to call the cops to come investigate. The police officer thought it was a body at first. Then she was left to the gruesome task of unwrapping this thing [...]

Metallica plays secret show at the basement

Metallica plays secret Nashville show for audience of 175

Crazy!

Way to go, Board of Education!

Metro's Board of Education has extended their policy against discrimination of employees to include sexual orientation, and is apparently one of the few school systems in Tennessee to make such an inclusion.

Metro BOE updates policy to protect GLBT people

Coyotes, oh my!

Nobody believed me when I came home one night about two weeks ago and said I'd just seen one right around the corner from my house - well the man in this story lives about five minutes from me:
Man opens door to find coyote in yard

JQP to New Yorkers: Your shit stinks, too - and your rats are a hell of a lot bigger!

It's a little after 3 a.m. now and I have to be at work in five hours. As was somewhat expected, the new computer has held me captive for hours, which has led to some random website hopping.

Somehow I got it into my head that I needed to look up the recipe for Magnolia Bakery's cupcakes [for the record, they are dry, but the tasty icing more than makes up for it]. Somewhere along the way I stumbled upon this blog post about the bakery being briefly shut down by NYC's health department last summer. Out of boredom, I got sucked into reading what turned out to be a very long vitriolic mess of comments posted below the original blog.

I have no doubt in my mind that there are plenty of nice New Yorkers - I've met a few and also never felt an iota of rudeness in my visit there. So it is for those amiable citizens that I feel very sorry.  A few miserable, elitist dickheads can cast a nasty shadow over everyone.  I guess it's kind of how a lot of Nashvillians resent being seen as rednecks who love Big & Rich.

The thing that bothered me most in this commentary was the attitude toward tourists, ranging from vaguely irritable to outright venomous. I will be keeping this in mind next time I want to snipe about one of the tourists here in Nashvegas. New York City owes a great deal of what it is today to tourism, and they would do well to remember that when bitching about "fat Midwesterners." Where would they be economically if all of us fat ass lowbrow commoners quit visiting?

Anyhow, I don't recommend reading the whole thing unless you have a lot of time.  I've pulled a few select citations from the commentary to share, and those are below.  Click here to see the entire piece.

This was a fun one - you could pretty much apply this comment to all the hipster kids out there, too:

24.
Obligatory snarky comment to affirm that I would certainly never engage in something that so many other people seem to "enjoy". Man, I'm so much better than everyone else! I'm so glad I know about that other better (secret) place to get cupcakes, like all the real New Yorkers... pretty much just me and my friend, Keifer. None of you can know about it. The cupcakes are the source of my immense and immeasurable wit.

I'm pretty sure there is some very deep-seeded insecurity behind this:

45.
And so it was that thousands and thousands of fat Iowans had their Sex and the City tours ruined.

Don't know what the obsession is with Midwesterners. Had they started in on Southerners, Mama might have had to whoop an ass or three. But I've gotta stick up for the denizens of Middle America when it comes to this kind of crap. If they do it to Iowa, it'll be Tennessee next...

57.
thank heavens there won't be 400 midwesterners clogging up bleeker tomorrow. the cupcakes are way too sugary, and they taste and look like the ones i made for bake sales in elementary school: from the box.
cupcake cafe's cupcakes are so beautiful, and they're the ny originals.
i live on the block and there are, like 55 &56 said, tons of rats every night outside the joint. it is so gross.

Seriously. Points for the "condescending cupcake derision" thing.

60.
OMG, Snark, #24, TOOO EFFING FUNNY!
I totally agree-Jesus, people, calm down..nobody knows who you are, none of you are on real life Sex and the City and how pathetic and lame that you have to put people down with your condescending cupcake derision. I happen to think MB cupcakes are overrated, but it's a cupcake, not a kidney transplant. Who gives a shit? So don't go there. It's not like Billy's or Eleni's or Sugar Sweet Sunshine or Crumbs or the next supertrendy knockoff/joiner/newbie is going out of business.

This guy (or girl) had the right idea. I was sitting there getting pissed off at the elitism, but s/he had a sense of humor about all of the "condescending cupcake derision."
83.
I'm having a lot of fun imagining dozens of adults across NYC sitting behind their computers in their underwear getting really worked up and angry about cupcakes.
Life's hard in the big city.

And the award for most pretentious douchebag goes to...
106.
Magnolia's success derives from its tapping into a vein of regression to earlier stages of development; to regression of the object relations to infantile objects and to regression of ego achievements to a lower level. Take a few minutes to watch the childlike behavior of the people standing in the queue and you'll immediately see what I'm talking about. Magnolia fits perfectly with the ethos of Sex in the City - 4 little girls who don't want to grow up. The fantasy plays wonderfully to the hick from the sticks who wants to experience NY in a sort of Disneyesque cocoon - deluding themselves in the fantasy like the kindergartner eating library paste that it actually tastes good. Bad things (thank you BoH) may lurk behind those pretty colored cakes but if you don't look (or taste) too hard the fantasy can live on. If they close this place down can we focus our attention on the next stop in the idiot express - the stoop on Perry St.?