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Buy That Kid a Beer!
A seat on the Beer Board is part of the deal when you get elected to City Council, so it is customary for aspiring City Council members to talk about what they propose to do to merchants who sell beer to minors. Candidate Nick Pavlis was one of the toughest-talking beer-busters ever, with his "Three-strikes-and-you're out" TV commercials, which pointed out the fact that no permits had been revoked during the preceding 12 years. He promised to revoke permits of multiple offenders, was elected in a landslide, and then chosen chairman of the Beer Board.
Although most of us barely noticed, another city election came and went last month. Another thing we've barely noticed is post-election Beer Board action.
The Dairy Mart on Dutch Valley Road (adjacent to the Christenberry Heights housing project) had already been before the board in January for a revocation hearing due to multiple sales to minors, and was fined $2,000. New offenses landed them back before the board in November, and after a Carlene Malone motion to revoke died for a lack of a second, the board levied a fine of $1,000.
Also in November, Kwick Fuel on Strawberry Plains Pike had a revocation hearing on multiple violations. Police witnesses testified that under-aged cadets were able to buy beer each and every time they tried. They got a $500 fine. Once again, a Malone motion to revoke failed whereupon she unsuccessfully moved to fine and suspend them; then finally to fine them a buck fifty ($1.50).
Spelling It Out
Thank you for your interest in last week's "Ear" item "Give 'em a Hex-agonal Sign." In the item, Knox County Engineering and Public Works chief Bruce Wuethrich was mulling over a request for a sign marking the "adoption" of the stretch of Central Avenue Pike between Emory Road and Callahan Road. Such adoptions are pretty routine and done all over the county by groups who pledge to police up the roadside. In this case, Wuethrich was concerned because the group requesting the sign is an organization called Knoxville Area Pagans and Wiccans (KAPOW).
Wuethrich said the group had already qualified for the sign by doing the required clean-up, and suggested he might just use the group's acronym, KAPOW, on the sign. He also speculated that the cleanup might have been affected with a couple of nose-wiggles.
The result has been a flood of calls and emails protesting the insensitivity of "Ear" and Wuethrich alike. They pointed out that it was hard work cleaning up the roadside, and that KAPOW deserves to be treated the same as any other group making such a request; that MAP (Mid Atlantic Pagan Alliance) has a similar sign in New Jersey; that when the Ku Klux Klan went to court over its right to participate in the Missouri Adopt-a-Highway program, a federal judge ruled in their favor.
Local pagans won't have to take such drastic measures to get their sign, Wuethrich says: "You can rest assured we're gonna put that bad boy up and we're gonna spell it out. We even got spell check down there in the sign shop so we won't mess it up."
The Mommarazzi
The most sentimental moment at the record-breaking Backstreet Boys "Millennium" concert at Thompson-Boling Arena the other night was when the guys each invited a mother and her starstruck daughter up to the stage and serenaded them with a song extolling the virtues of mothers.
One of those virtues, unmentioned in the song, is that moms take pictures of absolutely everything. However, leaflets passed out at the door had warned that photography of any kind was strictly forbidden during the show, and bouncers had spoken sternly to several people who attempted to take photos from their seats during the concert. But you can't stop moms. When these five lucky moms were seated on the brightly lit stage, each serenaded by a different Backstreet Boy, each mom immediately yanked an instamatic camera from her purse and snapped away at her personal troubadour throughout the song, frantically changing the film during the chorus.
We figure the photo-police didn't intervene because they were intimidated by the sheer numbers of moms with perhaps 20,000 illegal cameras. And we wonder what the Boys themselves thought, singing a gooey tribute to these ladies who were each emptying their rolls at them.
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