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11/29/2005: The blogger formerly known as South Knox Bubba....
has a couple interesting posts up at Facing South.
In Student newspaper confiscated at Tennessee high school, SKB tells us of the confiscation of the student newspaper at Oak Ridge High School. The reason? The paper had the temerity to publish an article about birth control, including such "news you can use" as the success rates for different contraceptive methods, and the places at which contraceptives could be found locally. SKB also gets off some trenchant observations:
Setting aside the debate as to whether birth control is an appropriate topic for a high school student newspaper, it's sad that the "abstinence only" crowd has driven these students to seek out the information on their own and share it with their classmates. Good for them.And in Associated Press looks South, he reviews a set of stories which ran over the AP wire recently dealing with the South and developments in the area. That post spawned an interesting comment from "Andy", a frequent commentor there:
What's amusing, though, is what the school administration has accomplished by this. Now the school and its backward policies are in the national spotlight, the kids are all talking about sex and birth control, and bonus, they got an unintended lesson in the First Amendment, censorship, and standing up for your rights. I believe the right-wing pundit term for it is "useful idiots."
OK, then.
(P.S. Way back in ancient times when I was going to high school, whenever something like this happened it spawned another hippie underground school paper. Nowadays I guess it spawns a hundred new blogs.)
Tennessee alone would be a good character study in music.There's a reason that I-40 from Memphis to Nashville is dubbed "The Music Highway", and Andy points out that there's a damn good reason for extending that name to the entire stretch of highway from Memphis to Bristol.
Going from Bristol through Nashville on to Memphis, you'd get everything from folk (Jimmie Rodgers) to bluegrass (Bill Monroe) to country (Hank Williams) to R&B (Otis Redding) to soul (Isaac Hayes) to rock (Elvis Presley) to the roots of "alternative" (Big Star).
OK, so Memphis gets a lot of the credit. But damn, there's been a lot of music history hereabouts.
Len on 11.29.05 @ 08:48 PM CST
