Election Night Annals
City Councilman-elect Danny Mayfield's family in New Jersey is proud of him, but Mayfield plans to be phoning in a congratulatory call of his own Saturday night to his cousin, Imamu Mayfield, who will be fighting for the world cruiserweight crown on pay-per-view. The other Mayfield will be on the card as a preliminary to the Evander Holyfield-Michael Moorer heavyweight title bout.
And then there's Carlene Malone who will be starting on her third and last term. The only sitting council member who didn't endorse William Powell, the sitting councilman unseated by Mayfield, Malone greeted the new councilman-elect with a big hug, causing a shudder of fear among assembled onlookers at the JFG Coffeehouse. The M&Ms? A brash young Mayfield mentored by a lame duck Too-Tall Malone?
Malone chuckled ominously about her future (and final) term: "Bad as I want to be."

Maybe He's on City Council
We ran across an unexpected reference to our fair city in the London Sunday Times last week, in a review of Anglo-American humorist Bill Bryson's new tour of the Appalachian Trail. Under the heading Humour [sic], the review by Sue Townsend, the British novelist best known for the Adrian Mole diaries, makes some dangerous allegations. "This being America," Townsend alleges, hiking the trail includes "the very real danger of being murdered. He [Bryson] will pass through Deliverance country. I was in Knoxville once, and in idle conversation, said to a colleague of my husband, a handsome Tennessean, 'Whatever happened to that hideous, toothless albino that played the banjo in Deliverance?' A shadow crossed his face. 'Nothin' happened to him,' he said, 'he still lives jus' down the road some. He's ma cousin,' he added. 'Well,' I said, mortified by my faux pas, 'he's very good on the banjo.' But, of course, it was too late. I had insulted his kin. A murdering offence [sic]." We suspect the mysterious handsome Tennessean was pulling Ms. Townsend's leg—but then, you never know.

The Metro Pulse Society
We have it on good authority that all the news media that ignore Metro Pulse are the ones in Knoxville. In the November-December issue of the national New York-based magazine Audubon, Jon R. Luoma's feature story, "Whistling Dixie," quotes Glynn Wilson's July 3 cover story about chip mills. "As the Knoxville weekly Metro Pulse recently put it, trees are suddenly being cut in eastern Tennessee 'with a determination not seen in this area since the cut-and-run logging days of the early 1900s.'"

Island Homes in the Stream
South Knoxvillian Brian Griffin's new novel/story collection, Sparkman in the Sky, gets a full-page review in the current New York Times Book Review, which compares Griffin's stories about a boy growing up in southeastern Tennessee to Ernest Hemingway's "Nick Adams" stories—and speculates about why so many fine writers come from the South. Griffin's book earned last year's Mary McCarthy Award before its publication.

Marked Territory
Maybe it's just a coincidence, but some odd grafitti has shown up recently near the road construction project on James White Parkway. On a concrete barrier abutting the massive grading and paving undertaking—part of Mayor Victor Ashe's riverfront development plan—are three Spanish words in orange paint: "Aqui estuvo Victor," or, as we Anglos say, "Victor was here." Anybody know which language hizzoner studied at Yale?