There's this collection of woodchips and ink that is delivered to our door every day. It's called a newspaper, but it rarely contains international, or even national news. If the New York Times would do home delivery in Tennessee, I'd order it in a flash, but they don't. Apparently there's not enough interest to make it profitable. Our local newspaper offers a special Saturday supplement called, get this, World News. Yes! For an additional $5 a month, we can have actual news delivered to our home. Astonishingly enough, only 2000 people here make use of it, out of a metro population of half a million. No wonder the NYT wouldn't deliver here. That's beyond sad. That's just plain depressing.
Frankly, it's typical of what I dislike about living in Nashville. The insularity and the pride in the insularity drives me nuts. Here's another example. The guy who runs the very popular coffeehouse down the street has had a field day with the press as a result of a patron noticing his cinnamon bun resembled Mother Teresa. The bun was shellacked, ensconced in a shrine, and got its own web page. It's a cute little bun, and it sort of looks like Mother Teresa. Anyway, this has been going on for a few months. Mother Teresa's lawyer asked the coffeehouse owner to stop calling it the MotherTeresa bun, and he grudgingly renamed it the Nun Bun. Fair enough, really. But it got mentioned all over the nation's talk shows, and he began to sell items at the coffeehouse to capitalize on the Nun Bun popularity. What an astounding astute fellow.
Eventually, Mother Teresa herself wrote to him to ask him to stop marketing t-shirts and coffee mugs as it was capitalizing on her image, and she didn't want anyone to profit from such a thing. The owner boisterously told anyone who would listen that Mother Teresa was just kind of stupid to imagine he's going to stop. "It's not her face on the bun," he said to a Tennessean reporter, "and if it is, then heck, maybe it's a true miracle so she shouldn't mind. I'm not gonna stop marketing it just because Mother Teresa asks me to." What an amazingly ethical man.
Two days later he asked everyone to stop calling him and sending him nasty mail, and said he'd stop selling the stuff. What a horse's ass.
And that, my friends, was front page news in Nashville.