Local shoe designer Checliss “Big C” Rice landed a deal with the Memphis Grizzlies to market special team logo shoes to fans.

The shoes, produced by Rice’s Gametime Athletics, will be available in five styles and colors by the start of preseason in October.

Earlier this year, Rice released the M-Town line of shoes, bright, multi-colored urban-style shoe styles with names like the Mound (orange and white), the Marley (yellow and green), and the Mayor (black and grey).

For more on Gametime Athletics, read the Memphis Flyer story here.

From the Women’s Playwright Initiative: “The Women Playwrights’ Initiative (WPI) will produce a full-length original play written by a woman playwright living in the Southeast. Playwrights residing in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, or Virginia may submit the first 15 pages only of no more than two scripts.”

Deadline for submission is November 1st, with the selection to be announced in February 2007. The play will be produced in Orlando.

For more information, go the WPI Web site.

Bill Cosby will perform a one-night-only show at the Orpheum on October 21st to benefit Dillard University in New Orleans. Dillard, a historically black liberal arts university, suffered losses of more than $300,000,000 from Hurricane Katrina.

Tickets go on sale Friday.

It’s the last day to vote in this year’s Best of Memphis Readers Poll. To vote, go here. Results will be in the September 28th issue.

Elvis may have left the building, but if Beale Street bar owner Silky Sullivan has his way, the King will have a new place in the solar system.

Sullivan has begun a local campaign to re-name Xenu, the recently discovered pseudo-planet just beyond the orbit of Neptune. He wants to call it Planet Elvis.

The official task of naming planets belongs to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), but Sullivan believes a little grassroots work can convince the agency to take his advice.

“Just imagine when a child opens his textbook and sees the planets in the solar system. He’ll say, ‘Look, Daddy, there’s Pluto. And there’s a Hunk of Burning Love,” says Sullivan.

Stopping in Memphis today is the world’s largest chopper motorcycle — more than 8 feet high and nearly 23 feet long and can sit up to 5. The chopper, created for the Discovery channel show Big, is crossing the country on its way to its new owner in North Carolina, the Wheels Through Time Museum.

The bike will be at Bumpus Harley Davidson, located at 2160 Whitten Road, at approximately 3 p.m., leaving for Nashville around 4 p.m.

To vote in the Flyer’s Best of Memphis, go here. Results will be in the September 28th issue.

Do you think you can? Then head over to the Barnes & Noble at the Avenue Carriage Crossing for Jumpstart’s Read for the Record. On Thursday, August 24th from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Participants of all ages from across the nation will attempt to set a world record for the largest shared reading experience ever. The book is The Little Engine That Could.

To vote in the Flyer’s Best of Memphis, go here. Results will be in the September 28th issue.

This just in: Justin Timberlake says American Idol winner Taylor Hicks “can’t carry a tune in a bucket.” Oh, snap.