The paragraph above is from an article about former CA editor Angus McEachran and his interactions with MLGW regarding his utility bill.

The notoriously crusty McEachran says he didn't ask for any favors, and we believe him. We just wonder how long it was before Morris got the nerve to unpin the note from his suit.

Read it quick, before they correct the typos.

UPDATE: It's now been changed to "penned." Whew. Got it.

The email sent visitors to a countdown clock, which at 2 p.m. broadcast Herman Morris' announcment that he would be running for mayor.

The "Bring Back Our City" site now links to the campaign site of Morris, the currently beleaguered former MLGW head.

Interestingly, Morris is shown repeatedly turning over a sign with the letters "H" and "M," — or is it "H" and "W"? — which read one way is for Herman Morris, and read the other stands for Willie Herenton, the incumbent mayor and Morris' major opponent in the upcoming race.

"But considering Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore are two of the world's highest-paid actresses, you'd think they could afford a "roll-up" each instead of having to share.

"Chilling out on a beach in Hawaii, the Charlie's Angels pair celebrated Drew's 32nd birthday with friends and appeared to be enjoying a cannabis joint.

"Laughing and giggling, the girls didn't seem very upset over their recent breakups -- Cam from singer Justin Timberlake, and Drew from Strokes drummer Fabrizio Moretti. You could say they were having a high old time."

A "cannabis joint"? A "high old time"? Who wrote this -- Walter Winchell?

That moniker couldn't be more fitting today.

Japanese automaker Toyota will announce this morning that it is building an $829 million manufacturing plant on the 1,700-acre site, which is adjacent to U.S. Highway 78 near the Blue Springs interchange 10 miles west of Tupelo.

Gov. Haley Barbour has scheduled a "major economic development" announcement at Tupelo High School this morning. He'll be joined by Sen. Trent Lott, Rep. Roger Wicker, state and local officials and Toyota representatives.

And a Toyota vehicle - likely the SUV that will be built here - will be unveiled during the announcement.

While it was a Japanese newspaper that initially broke the news on Monday, other sources close to the matter confirmed that the automaker will be selecting the site, which has been developed and promoted by the PUL Alliance, comprising Pontotoc, Union and Lee counties.

Read the rest of the Daily Journal story.

"Then there's this: Frank and JT both started in cheeky boy bands the Hoboken Four, 'N Sync and silly variety shows (Major Bowes, The Mickey Mouse Club). Sooner, rather than later, these scrawny, winter-born white boys from humble origins went solo, relying on African-American maestros - Quincy Jones, Count Basie, Pharrell, Timbaland - to inject crossover soul into their sound.

"And don't forget: They both famously hooked up with femmes fatales -Ava Gardner, Britney Spears - and used well-publicized breakups (whether they were the dumper or the dumpee) to make their best music: 'In the Wee Small Hours,' 'Cry Me a River.'"

We have to respectfully disagree, though they both have/had a fondness for cute little fedoras. Read more if you dare.

It is a vintage acoustic Silvertone, and the seller claims (somewhat vaguely), "This type of guitar was used by Elvis Presley during the early years of his career." Note that he says "this TYPE" of guitar, and not this EXACT guitar. And we’re really not convinced that Elvis played that many Silvertones.

But what's really interesting is what the seller says next: "I received this guitar from Elvis in 1956 when I was twelve." We tried to contact the seller to get more information about this unusual gift, but have so far received no response.

The whole thing sounds a bit iffy, and paying the "Buy It Now" price of $1,000 may be risky, but hey, the seller offers the high bidder a "noterized affadavid", so what more could you need? Take a look at the guitar here.

A former editor at the The Commercial Appeal and scores of other influential and prominent people in Memphis were flagged for special attention by former MLGW CEO Herman Morris in 2002.

E-mails and other documents released by MLGW on Tuesday, the day MLGW head Joseph Lee was testifying before a federal grand jury, cast a new light on the story which has been breaking piecemeal over the last week.

Ironically, the trigger for the special attention e-mail from Morris was a personal note from the wife of a former editor at the Commercial Appeal, which has been leading the charge against Lee and ran a headline on the front page Tuesday which said, "CEO Lee stopped utility cutoff of nonpaying Ford."

That is only part of the story. In fact, dozens of documents from 2001, 2002, and 2003 show that MLGW was continuously coping with Edmund Ford's overdue bills and granting him numerous extensions while Morris was CEO. Ford is a City Council member and formerly chaired the committee that oversees MLGW.

Mayor Willie Herenton appointed Lee to succeed Morris in 2004. Morris is considering a possible mayoral race against Herenton this year.

In the 2002 e-mail, Morris worries that a billing matter involving an unnamed "editor of the CA could set editorial policy toward MLGW for years and must be handled with touch." Morris urges vice president Curtis Dillihunt and Mark Heuberger, who was then manager of corporate communications, "make sure we handle this matter with sensitivity."

Then Morris suggests that MLGW develop a list of customers "that require my special awareness, attention or staff intervention when they have problems." He says that "customers who can call me or the mayor at home should be on the list," which he says should include all city council members, county commission members, state legislators, television news directors, and several prominent businessmen.

No member of the Memphis Flyer or parent company Contemporary Media made the cut.

There is no documentation to show that anyone other than Ford got preferential treatment. In Ford's case, MLGW released several cutoff notices going back to 2001. In some cases the service was "booted" off but in most cases, according to handwritten notations, Ford either made a partial payment or promised to make one and the service was not cut off.

Ford is under federal indictment for allegedly taking bribes from lobbyist Joe Cooper.

“It’s a small market. In fact, I’m happy about it,” she told Richard Thompson of Mediaverse-Memphis.blogspot.com, adding that “it’s never been about market size.”

Indeed, she's worked in Tulsa, the 62nd market, as well as Chicago (#3), Boston (#7) and Miami (#16). “The bigger the market size, the more egos there are to get in the way,” said Phillip, who just turned 50 and is looking for a greater sense of purpose.

Read the whole story at Mediaverse.

Sharky's Billiards owner Joe Piagentini says a promoter assured him that Timberlake had been paid $25,000 to make an autograph-signing appearance at the bar after a March 13 concert at Rosemont in the Chicago suburbs.

One of Timberlake's Los Angeles-based lawyers, Gary Stiffelman, issued a statement saying it's not going to happen.

Stiffelman said he hasn't discussed a Timberlake visit to Sharky's with anyone -- and he's never heard of Piagentini.

Piagentini told the (Arlington Heights) Daily Herald that the appearance is still a "go." He said he has not sold any tickets, although they've been advertised on some Web sites for $100 a pop.

Hmmmm. Sharky's Billiards. A guy named Piagentini. Chicago. Sounds to us like JT might be sleeping with fishes soon. Or signing autographs with a few broken digits.

According to the article, Ricci — who's has plenty of experience playing sexually adventurous women, to put it nicely — is a prude.

From the story: "I'm a prude and I do not like walking around naked and I was in my bathroom about two months after the movie finished and I was brushing my teeth and I was in my underwear and I looked down and was like, 'Oh, God, put something on.'

"Then I just stopped and thought, 'Oh my god, I was half naked for two months and my a*s was on camera.' "I called my sister and I was like, 'Is it OK to wear nothing around the house? I'm freaking out.'"

"I learned of this list last week. After investigation, I learned that council members, and others, did not know that this list existed and that they were on it. This list is years old, done prior to Joseph Lee's appointment in 2004. On the list are people who are responsible for contacting elected officials and others on the list regarding the possibility of their services being disconnected. How and why certain people were selected to be on this list, none of the new people at MLGW know.

"A few examples of how old the list is: Ken Cole was responsible for contacting several people -- he's been deceased several years now. Pat Van der Schaaf is on the list and she has been off of the Council since 2003. Frierson Graves was the responsbile party for himself -- he was the attorney for MLGW years ago.

"P.S. Mayor Herenton did not know this list existed either and he certainly didn't know that he was on it."

"Performa CEO John Elkington thinks Birmingham's district could outdo Louisville's Fourth Street Live! and Memphis' Beale Street, perhaps attracting as many as 6 million visitors a year.

"He said he reached that estimate by tallying the 2.5 million people who already attend events at the BJCC annually plus outside tourists and area residents who, Elkington says, will be attracted by the well-known restaurants and retailers Performa plans to court.

"In addition, Performa plans to capitalize on the attention Birmingham has received as home of two American Idol winners and a runner-up, plus court participation from famous entertainers born in the metro area, said Cato Walker, a Performa executive who handles development of its districts outside Memphis."

The folks in Birmingham might want to chat with the folks in Jackson, MS, Shreveport, and Cincinnati before getting too excited about the "next Beale Street." They would tell you these things seldom develop as smoothly as advertised, and the original is pretty hard to duplicate. But hope springs eternal, as does Performa, apparently.

Read the rest of the Birmingham News article.

While the comments of DiScenza and state prosecutor Amy Weirich were general in nature, they contrasted starkly with the views of guest speaker Stuart Taylor Jr., the headliner at the Rhodes Institute on the Profession of Law. About 100 people, most of them lawyers fulfilling a continuing education requirement, attended the event.

Taylor is legal affairs columnist for the National Journal and a contributing editor for Newsweek. His topic was "The Duke Lacrosse Case and What It Says About Our Criminal Justice Process, Academics, and News Media."

What it says, he suggested, is mostly bad: Durham N.C. prosecutor Mike Nifong made an "outrageous rush to judgment," most of the media botched the story because of their political correctness and general shadiness, and Duke professors and administrators were spineless and all too eager to join Nifong’s side.

The point of this column is not to comment on the Duke lacrosse scandal. All that most of us in Memphis know is what we read in the papers and see on television. What was interesting to Memphians was the role reversal at Rhodes, with Taylor, a New York Times reporter from 1980-1988, bashing the Times and the press in general and DiScenza, a career prosecutor, saying, basically, that it isn’t that simple.

"Nobody has been more attacked by people who are politically correct and race-obsessed than I have," said DiScenza. All of the Memphis and Shelby County politicians indicted so far in Tennessee Waltz and Main Street Sweeper are black Democrats.

DiScenza said that based on what he has heard, Nifong "violated every prohibition we have about disclosure of evidence" and would probably have been fired by now if he were a federal prosecutor. But he said the rules for state prosecutors in North Carolina may be different than the federal rules. And he praised the role of journalists and noted that the print news business has aggressively been policing its own on such charges as plagiarism.

He and Weirich also took issue with Taylor's claim that prosecutors are political creatures and blind to the other side and that grand jurors are mere rubberstamps for prosecutors.

"Just wanting to win a case is not the prevailing view in this office," said Weirich, who has been with the DA's office since 1991. She said the office has a responsibility to see that cases are "tried cleanly or disposed of fairly."

DiScenza said that when a case goes to a federal grand jury – one of which was recently led by crusty former Commercial Appeal editor Angus McEachran, a demonstrably independent-minded sort – the prosecutor must have personal certainty of the defendant’s guilt and "believe that a conviction is what justice demands."

The Rhodes panel would have been even more pointed had the focus been on Memphis instead of an alleged rape case 1000 miles away in North Carolina. DiScenza’s higher-up is U.S. Attorney David Kustoff, a former Republican Party activist, and Weirich's is District Attorney General Bill Gibbons, an elected official who formerly served on the Memphis City Council and Shelby County Commission and ran for mayor of Memphis and has been publicly accused of ducking some cases. Unfortunately, neither attended, nor were there any practicing journalists on the panel (other than Taylor) to defend the Fourth Estate.

For someone supposedly outraged by outrageous conduct, Taylor said a few outrageous things himself. He said that a DNA evidence kit "is so sensitive it will pick up my DNA from 20 yards away" yet it did not find anything from the accused Duke lacrosse players. And he said the lacrosse players, who were at an off-campus party with a stripper, were "bonding" and "they maybe had a beer." The lacrosse scandal, he said, is "the most egregious case of prosecutorial misconduct to unfold in real time in the history of the United States."

He later clarified that he was exaggerating about the DNA kit.

Over at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., it’s , where you can sign up for the “School of Scribes” to learn how to write your name in hieroglyphs and design your own Egyptian jewelry.

The Flyer recently spoke with Anthony Field, the Blue Wiggle, about the show, Elvis Presley, Greg Page’s condition, and being on guard duty with an Uzi machine gun.

by Greg Akers

Flyer: What should audiences expect to see with “The Wiggles: Racing to the Rainbow Live”?

Anthony Field: It’s a brand new show, beautiful, colorful, inflatable sets, lots of beautiful costumes, new songs, and a lot of Wiggly favorites. Lots of dancing and slapstick humor.

How does a show like this come to be? Who writes it, and what level of participation does the group members have in creating it?

We [the Wiggles] write the show ourselves and write the music. The audience members are writers themselves too, as the show progresses, because we go off the script and go where the children want us to go in the show. Sometimes they yell out requests for songs or crazy things like asking you to fall over or do a handstand. [laughs] The show can go anywhere.

Do you enjoy that kind of spontaneity?

Oh, totally. It’s never the same show for us. If we go on a tour and do 50 or 60 shows in a month, no show is the same, because you don’t know where [the audience is] going to go with it, don’t know what they’re going to say. Which really keeps you on your toes.

How much of your year is devoted to touring versus being in the recording studio or taping shows?

We tour about six or seven months a year, either in the States, Canada, England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, or Asia. The rest is in the studio writing songs and we do TV as well. Then about a month is holiday.

What do you do when you’re on holiday?

I live in Sydney on the water, and I go kayak out in the ocean [or] go fishing. I spend time with my family: getting out at the beach, really doing the coastal sort of lifestyle thing.

I read that you work in your wife’s café as well.

Well, we just folded because my wife’s expecting our third baby. I got married when I was 40, and we’ve had a baby every year. We had the café, and every year was harder because my poor wife had two children right in the café. Now, with the third one on the way, we just said, that’s too much. But, I used to go in after we’d toured, I’d go help her in the shop, pour coffees and teas like that, which made me realize that that’s really working. Working in the café, that’s work! [laughs]

Do you get recognized in Australia a lot?

All the time. We’ve been on television there for 15 years, and people know us. They’re a very laid back bunch, so they just say, “Hey, here you go, mate.” It’s really nice.

Describe what it’s like to tour for six months out of the year all over the world.

It’s very hard to be away from your family, that’s the only downside of it. The upside is, you get to meet lots of great people all over the world, and you realize that the world’s a big place. But it’s also not that big, because you can go all over the world and within a day you’re on the other side of the world. It’s very exciting going to places you’ve never been to before or even revisiting places. Also, we’ve got such a great camaraderie, all the Wiggle guys and all the dancers. We’ve stuck together for all that time, and we’re all mates and help each other out. If anyone gets down, you try to help them out. It’s a good life, because we surround ourselves with good people.

You have a background in early-childhood education. How does what you learned in college inform what the Wiggles do?

It’s the reason we came to be. We wanted to use what we’d learned at university for theater for children. Everything we learned at university comes back to us all the time. If something doesn’t quite gel with the audience, we analyze it and go back to what we learned at university and say, why didn’t the children understand what that was about. Was it aimed too high above their level? In everything we do, we try to be positive and encourage the development of their self-esteem and their cognitive development, all sorts of things we wouldn’t have thought about if we hadn’t gone to university.

How does having children of your own affect your work?

I’ve had two little girls so far, both under three, and it has affected what we’ve done. We’re just filming and recording new material, and I think we’ve got a bit more ballet in The Wiggles now. Dorothy [the Dinosaur] is getting into tutus and [other] things that I’ve seen my little girls get into more.

Name some music in your iPod or CD player that you listen to regularly./p>

I listen to a lot of really old music and a lot of Latin music. I’ve got Carlos Gardel, the king of the tango, from Argentina. Of course, Elvis, the Memphis man. A lot of Julio Iglesias, I love Julio, his Spanish stuff is fantastic. There’s a lot of stuff, but not much contemporary. But if you ask Murray for his iPod, he would give you every band you’ve ever heard of. I love John Fogerty too, so a lot of Fogerty, Creedance, things like that.

What did Elvis’ music mean to you growing up?

Elvis meant everything to me. I can’t believe how talented he was. He had everything: looks, talent. He was so musical, his whole body responded to the music he was making. I loved his arrangements and in the ’70s when he had the big band and orchestra as well as 10 or 12 singers behind him, Elvis was the greatest. It’s great when we go to Memphis. We’ve been to Graceland every time we go there. I love that Graceland is not as big as you’d think it would be. The guy was the king of music, and I’m he sure he could’ve gone to a bigger place. It’s a nice place, but he obviously wanted to stay with his roots.

How’s Greg Page doing?

Greg is coping with what he’s got. Some days are better than others: Some days he can be walking around and other days he has a hard day. Occasionally I get a text message from him saying, I’m going all right today. I think every day is a different day for Greg, he’s just learning how to cope with it.

What’s it been like touring without him?

It’s been strange, really. You expect him to be in the dressing room, and then he’s not there. It’s very sad. The other side of it is that Sam [Moran], his replacement, is such a nice guy and has been so good. He’s a friend of Greg’s too, and he’s got the right attitude, and he’s just brilliant. He’s also younger than us, and it’s injected a sort of youthful exuberance into us. There are two sides to it. One side is, [groans] I miss Greg, and the other side is, Sam’s been fantastic. It’s a strange time for us. The audiences in Australia, when we did a tour with [Sam], they loved him and of course missed Greg at the same time, just like we do.

Tell me about your time as an infantry soldier.

That actually was inspired by Elvis, believe it or not: [the 1960 film] G.I. Blues. Crazily, I thought, it’s going to be like that. We’re going to be on a train singing “Frankfort Special.” [laughs] But it wasn’t like that when I joined the army. I was 19 when I joined. I was in the regular army for three years as a rifleman. I went to Germany before the [Gulf] war came down. I was on guard duty there once with a fully loaded Uzi machine gun, and I was thinking to myself, what the hell am I doing here? [laughs] There were some good things about the army, nice guys in the army. It taught me about discipline, and I still get up really early every morning and get the hair [cut] short.

Tell me about the Cockroaches [his popular 1980s rock band].

They were a great band, a real surf band in Australia. We used to play the east coast of Australia, just up and down at all the surf clubs. That was in my 20s after the army, so it was a real great time to let off steam. The music we did was not too different from what the Wiggles do, but just different lyrics. More about love and things like that, no hot potatoes. But it was good, mate, it was good.

How long do the Wiggles plan on keeping going?

We’re still loving it. It’s been a new challenge for us, with Sam, to make it all happen. I think that’s been good for us, because we’ve had to really look at ourselves again and say, let’s really get into this. I think we’re rocking. I think we’re going to be going for a while, because we’re still enjoying it.

What do you see yourself doing whenever you do retire?

I’ll be on my boat or on my kayak, fishing; with my kids and my wife, just taking it easy. Put some sunscreen on and just chill out.

Please tell me, for the sake of my 2-year-old daughter, that there’s a regular party where the Wiggles get together with Barney, the Doodlebops, and Dora the Explorer.

Absolutely, we all get together. We dance on stage with the Doodlebops. When we have to go to another place, we ask Dora the Explorer how to get there. When we have to go to another country, we get in the rocket ship with Little Einsteins. [laughs] We have a great time. Sometimes we have to ask Blue for clues, then we end up at Mickey’s Clubhouse, and we have a great time singing, “Hot dog, hot dog, hot diggity dog.” [laughs] I’ve got little girls too, so I watch all the shows. [laughs]

“The Wiggles: Racing to the Rainbow Live!” Saturday, February 24th, 1:30 and 5 p.m. FedExForum. $18-$35. (525-1515)