On May 1st, 2006 a small home catches fire in Madison.
Fire officials tell News 2: the cause of the fire is electrical.
The family living in this 1100 sq. foot home is not hurt, though they are forced to vacate.
The fire happened 30 months ago.
30 months ago!
Tired of waiting on insurance company’s and the owners and the metro codes dept, residents on Williams valley drive call me to report; this house is messed up.
Residents like James Anderson have been looking at this house.
“It makes the neighborhood look bad. I don’t understand what is going on with it,” The construction worker says.
The house is surrounded by high grass and it is an eye sore.
“A lot of people are hot about it,” he says, with his workers sitting in the back of his truck.
The problem, the front door is wide open, an invitation to trouble.
“We have been calling codes and calling codes and they won’t do nothing about it.”
Residents tell us they have tried to board up the front door, but someone keeps pulling it down.
Inside we find an empty beer bottle. Conditions are dirty, possibly unsafe.
Neighbors tell messed up, they have repeatedly called metro codes, alleging that one inspector told neighbors to board up the structure themselves. I call codes, and within 24 hours, Assistant Codes Director Bill Penn is involved.
Penn confirms to me that codes has sent the property owner a notice to fix the problem or be dragged into court.
Penn clarifies that codes cannot cut the grass or board up the entrance. Only the owner has the authority to do that.
And finally, Penn says he doubts that a codes inspector would tell residents to fix a neighbors house since it is against city policy.
The next day I get an email from a resident who tells me that the yard is cut and the door secured.
That’s great I think to myself.
I talk to Mr. Penn who tells me the home is owned by a single working mother who is now renting an apartment and claims to be caught between the insurance company and the mortgage agency.
She tells codes she pledges to keep the home maintained.
Is it a dangerous speed trap? or a legitimate enforcement zone?
Some motorists question how and where metro police are setting up writing speeding tickets by the score.
The road in question is the junction where I-40, Briley Parkway and Robertson Road all come together in West Nashville.
When officer Terry Pate works this location, the veteran Metro Officer says he can easily write 20-30 tickets a day.
“We are running stationary radar,” He tells me over the roar of traffic.
“Why this area?” I shout.
“Because they lose control” is his simple answer, pointing down the ramp.
There’s no doubt, Pate has found himself a stealthy location for running radar. He is standing in between two Briley Parkway ramps in what is known as the gore. As cars come around the curve coming from Robertson Road, they don’t see the waiting officer wielding his radar gun until he sees them. By then it is too late.
For the most part, Briley Parkway is 55 miles an hour. It’s 55 mph, except for this 1/2 mile section of ramp where the posted speed limit is 40. This is where Metro police have been set up in recent weeks pulling over hundreds of motorists.
“So as far as you are concerned,” I say to the agreeable officer. “You are standing in the middle of the 40 MPH zone and if they are breaking the limit then Boom ticket.”
“Right,” he says without hesitation.
The sound of his radar chirps several times as a procession of motorists swing around the curve and encounter the waiting officer.
Then Pate steps into the ramp, points definitively at a green van and signals the driver to pull over into the striped triangle area between the two ramps.
Pate tells me the driver is doing 55 in a forty.
“A little fast,” he says walking to the window.
Iman Chambers is the driver. She is pleasant as I ask her a few questions. At least as pleasant as one can be while getting a speeding ticket in the middle of a highway.
“I am just rushing to get to another job is all,” she says with a sigh.
Chambers tells me that she didn’t see the forty miles an hour sign. She also tells me that she thought this was an on ramp to Briley Parkway where the speed limit is 55mph.
I assure her that this stretch of the ramp is in deed 40mph.
“I didn’t know that,” she says sadly.
After Chambers pulls off, I ask Pate about the safety of the Gore.
“Do you buy into it the argument that pulling them over here is unsafe where these two lanes come together?”
“No I don’t buy into that. This area is easily wide enough to pull over 3 cars.”
But that is not what motorists have been telling me.
I go to a nearby filling station and I talk to a Cheatham County mother who says she drives this way every day.
“It causes a lot of back up traffic. People are not ready for it and it is not usually just one cop it is usually 2 or 3 undercover cars.”
Rhonda Davis is acutely aware of the problem. She tells me that the traffic enforcement causes such chaos for drivers converging on these two ramps that she has chosen to drive a different way home, to avoid this interchange, even though the new route is longer.
“Normally, when a cop stops you, they pull you to the side, not the center, and it is in the center, in this little triangle, where people are merging onto the same road.”
Davis says when motorists encounter the officers it creates chaos and confusion.
“I immediately slam on brakes and that causes people to slam on their brakes behind me and honking and everyone is irritated and when you are irritated, you don’t drive well. One lane is 40 mph and the other is 60 mph. It is very confusing. People are in the left are trying to merge. It is crazy.”
Metro Police tell Messed Up they have pulled over 434 vehicles at this location since January 1st.
273 citations were issued. The other 161 people were let go with warnings.
For years, metro school students boarded the bus in front of the Blue Bird Inn.
A parent complained to Messed Up, and within a day, the bus stop was eliminated.
School spokesperson Olivia Brown tells us the bus-stop is not technically the official bus stop, but that is where kids have been getting picked up for years.
Regardless: the school system has evaluated the stop, and as of October 23rd 2008, has eliminated the stop in front of the Blue Bird Inn.
Brown tells me that the children will either get on the bus at the stop prior to the Blue Bird Inn or after.
The mother of the two girls tells us she is ecstatic and thanks Messed Up for getting involved.
A Madison beer tavern doubles as a Metro school bus stop.
Two ideas that go together about as well as velcro hands holding a silk tie.
This conflict of imagery comes together 2 times a day, every school day at 606 East Old Hickory Blvd.
That is the metro school bus stop for at least 3 middle school children who reside in the Madison community.
It is also the business address for the Blue Bird Inn, a beer tavern that proudly proclaims you must be 21 to enter this private club that requires membership.
Neon beer signs and youngsters with back packs.
to me, the imagery creates a dramatic juxta-position.
One hand, you have beer signs and broken glass and questionable activity in vans.
On the other side you have cherubic faced school kids, wearing bright pack packs boarding a bright yellow school bus.
The vision conflicts angrily like hurricane induced waves smashing a rickety old pier.
Messed Up visits this location on a Tuesday morning around 8:15 am.
School children are gathering at their bus stop in front of the Blue Bird Inn.
Our cameras witness 3 children standing in front of the bar, and a variety of questionable characters meandering down the sidewalks toward them.
The middle school kids have been taught to avoid strangers. Their eyes look elsewhere as the man wobbles by.
The children tell us they have seen messed up, possibly dangerous things at their school bus stop in the past.
Alyssa is a sharp 7th grader wearing glasses and the typical garb of someone her age.
She eloquently tells me about life at the bus stop.
“One time, there was a guy sleeping in a van on the side of the building. So I went to look. Then a guy raised his head up.” She fumbles for words as she recounts that moment. “It scared me, and I came up here and told them, there was a guy in the van.”
Ashley is her younger sister.
“I don’t like it. It is a bar. At school they talk about not drining or doing cocaine, and we are standing at a bar.”
Her sister chimes in.
“They try and teach you a good example. This is not a good example. Standing at this bar. it is really not that good”
After 11 weeks of playing air guitar in class, we have some good news to report.
The 26 guitar students in Mr. Adams fine arts class at White’s Creek H.S. should be playing actual instruments starting Tuesday October 21st.
This good news, comes because of many charitable messed up viewers, including Samick Music Corporation in Gallatin, which donated 25 acoustic guitars to the school.
John Hawkins is the VP of the musical instrument division.
“We saw the story and felt compelled to help. 25 kids and no guitars. That is messed up.” He says from the show room stacked wall to wall with expensive 6 strings.
“School programs keep getting cut. It’s sad. For us, it helps us build a customer base and give back to our community.”
Outside a fork lift arrives with 25 guitars ranging in price from 250 to 500 dollars.
As the 40 or so employees pull the shiny guitars out of the boxes, you can sense their enthusiasm.
“How do you feel?”
“Great,” a woman responds holding a guitar says.
Another man strums the shiny new instrument he pulls from his box.
“In tune right of the box, “he smiles.
Carol Crittenden arrives with 2 vehicles to pick up the guitars. Crittenden is Metro Schools Visual and performing arts coordinator.
She too is smiling ear to ear.
“This is one of the greatest things to happen this fall. We are so blessed to have a community that believes in kids and music education.”
Now that White’s Creek has its guitars, I ask Crittenden if the donations should stop. She says the school system needs all the instrument help it can get.
“All donations of general use instruments will be put to use. Please donate we have other programs that can use them. A trumpet a clarinet we can put them to use to.”
So there you go Music City and surrounding areas.
I challenged you to respond and you stepped up big time.
You should feel good about keeping the music in music city.
And remember, if you still want to donate, you can, just do it by the guidelines stressed earlier.
If you want to donate guitars, here’s how:
Go to the Metro Board of Education at 2601 Bransford Avenue in Nashville.
Go to the customer service center. Be sure to leave your name and address so the school board can acknowledge your donation.If you want to call: 259-8673 Call Carol Crittenden (Metro Schools Coordinator for the visual and performing arts) Carol’s assistant: Nicole Reed.If you want to email: carol.crittenden@mnps.org
Little Kids Rock is a fantastic site if you want to donate money for guitars.
As little as $50 dollars will put a guitar in the hands of a blossoming student. You can click here to give.
Or you can contact the Executive Director of Little Kids Rock - Daivd Wish at (973) 746-8248 fax (973) 746-8240
Holding the toxic pumpkin began to weigh on my mind.
What chemicals are lurking within the atomic structure of this fiendish plastic gourd?
What is Prop 65? And why do I care if a Chinese made pumpkin light is possibly dangerous to people on the Left Coast?
As I held the potential carcinogen, neatly trimmed in orange and white, I wondered, what toxins are seeping into my skin.
I shifted the potentially poisonous product from hand to hand. I envisioned an invisible virus, infiltrating my pores, attacking my cellular tissue at the molecular level.
Like little combat soldiers from China, I imagine the invisible array of prop 65 carcinogens storm trooping into my blood stream, sneaking up on my white blood cells. These birth defect causing commandoes, knives in their teeth, proceed to attack my entire body from within.
I shake my head like an etchasketch to erase this disturbing image.
I look at the somewhat innocuous Halloween decoration and wonder could this really make me sick?
I read the warning label again: the print is small. I imagine is done this way on purpose. It says: Made in China.
Birth defects? Cancer? Wash hands after use? Are you freaking kidding me?
It’s a plastic light up pumpkin for goodness sakes, not a sample of beryllium.
I suddenly laugh out loud wondering if this pumpkin could be the central plot for the next season of 24.
I see Keefer Sutherland parachuting out of a plane. Quick edits and gun fire. Then the plastic pumpkin is placed in a thick glass case, eventually detonated by a nuclear device.
The pictures are accompanied by a deep voiced announcer: “Jack Bauer parachutes behind enemy lines to locate the poisonous gourd. Jack must destroy the fiendish decoration before blood thirsty terrorists can melt it down in a microwave oven and disperse its toxic venom across the planet. This season the pumpkin panic permeates the planet! Don’t miss one moment of a new season of 24. Only on FOX.
So where did I get this deleterious creation of evil? In the Halloween department of a popular shopping center of course.
There are hundreds of these things. There are smiling faced pumpkins. There are skull and cross bone pumpkins. There are big pumpkins and small pumpkins. They are stacked from the floor to the ceiling.
Jack Bauer is going to need a lot more body bags I think to myself.
I look at my watch: There are roughly 2 weeks till Halloween and I am getting email warnings about dangerous plastic pumpkins lurking among us.
So I go to investigate.
The one I buy costs a mere five dollars.
I take the alleged chemically tainted decoration to the corner of Church and 5th. People stare at the news guy, wondering why the heck he is holding a pumpkin faced skull and cross bone.
A nice family approaches. They have two little girls, ages four and one.
“Let me read this to you,” I say holding the pumpkin in front of the dad. “It says, Prop 65 warning. That is in California. It says this product contains a chemical known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm. Wash hands after use. But buy it for Halloween.”
I laugh out loud as does the man. The warning is really frightening, especially when it is attached to such a seemingly fun item.
“You want to touch it now?” I say extending the pumpkin toward him.
“No. No,” he laughs aloud, putting his hand out as if to ward off evil spirits.
“Want to hand it to your babies?”
The children’s mother intercedes. “No. They shouldn’t sell that.”
Go to the Metro Board of Education at 2601 Bransford Avenue in Nashville.
Go to the customer service center. Be sure to leave your name and address so the school board can acknowledge your donation.If you want to call: 259-8673 Call Carol Crittenden (Metro Schools Coordinator for the visual and performing arts) Carol’s assistant: Nicole Reed.
Little Kids Rock is a fantastic site if you want to donate money for guitars.
As little as $50 dollars will put a guitar in the hands of a blossoming student. You can click here to give.
Or you can contact the Executive Director of Little Kids Rock - Daivd Wish at (973) 746-8248 fax (973) 746-8240
Talk about your sour notes. No guitars in Guitar 101?
Welcome to the Music City Blues.
Josh Hood is a 15 year old boy with a shaggy doo hair cut and a smile that peeks out every so often.
Flanked by his family and friends, this laconic young man stands before the camera, and tells me about the frustration of trying to learn a musical instrument without the benefit of ever holding that instrument.
“Do you even know what that is?” I Joke as his sister hands him an electric guitar.
The Axe is black, reflecting the sun, which is setting through the trees in this campestral Joelton neighborhood.
The sheepish, White’s Creek H.S. sophomore takes hold of the guitar. He nestles it in his arms, almost caressing it like a prized puppy.
“Show me an A chord, dude?” I shout.
There’s that furtive smile again.
I watch as his fingers twitch, beginning their desultory trek along the neck of the guitar. Like watermelons rolling off the back of a truck in a nasty, gooey, mess, his fingers bang into the strings, each digit clumsily searching for the combination of strings and frets and fingering positions that will achieve the note.
He is unsuccessful and all my mind’s eye sees is a quagmire of watermelon guts soiling a musical highway.
“Pop quiz,” i shout, almost snorting, as I focus the camera on the upper quadrant of the guitar.
“I don’t know,” he says, his open palm sliding up and down the neck, like he is petting a baby giraffe.
“Come on dude,” I shout from behind the camera. “It’s an A - Chord. It’s one of the easiest fingering positions, what is the problem?”
He shakes his head, his smile disappearing, his eyes sinking behind a mop of brown hair that waggles down over his eye brows.
“Because we don’t have a guitar to know how to do it,” he says.
And there you have it, a guitar class in Music City without any guitars.
To me, that’s like flying a plane without any wings. It’s like Sea World without Shamu. It’s like Benny Han flipping burgers.
“It’s messed up,” Josh’s dad, David Revell says.
Revell is an even tempered guy who speaks about the problem with a parental concern.
“He has been taking classes for 9 weeks now, and we don’t have any guitars in the classroom. the teacher brings his guitar, but there are 25 kids. Getting to touch it the guitar, is next to never,” he says smiling slightly. “If they are going to give a guitar class, and they give grades, and to keep his GPA up, it’s important, that if you take a class you need to learn it. And hands on, this is a guitar class, so without a guitar you are learning how to read sheet music or something from inside a book.”
Revell is well spoken. He has thought this out. He doesn’t stammer or stray from the point which to him is crystal clear.
“I understand the economy is tight, and getting materials is hard. If you are going to offer it then you need to back it up and provide the materials. If it is not in the budget and you cannot afford it then you should offer something you will have materials for so you can properly learn it.”
I go to White’s Creek H.S. and talk to Ryan Adams, the school’s Fine Arts Teacher.
“Our problem? We don’t have the guitars or the funding for the program we started this year.”
Adams is a young man with an artistic looking veneer. He wears his mustache like an extra on Pirates of the Caribbean.
He has passion and he obviously is yearning to teach his kids how to wield an axe.
“We started the program, to be part of the new academy, for music and fine arts, getting real excited about it, we had a plan and how it would go and how we would get our guitars, and it just didn’t happen. So we have no guitars at all,” he says with a sigh.
I look around the room. It is bright and airy. There are paintings and caricatures on the door. There are musical charts on the wall. The room screams music, except there are no guitars.
It’s arguably a woman’s most special moment. Wedding Day!
The day she ties the knot. The day she takes her vows, for better - for worse, in sickness and in health. Every detail is important. The location, the food, the cake.
But to a bride-to-be, perhaps nothing is more important than her wedding dress.
A man wears a tux. So what? A bow tie, a cummerbund, cufflinks.
I’m yawning here.
Honestly, a guy in a tux is unremarkable at best. The groom could be a waiter or the President of the United States.
A tux is a tux is a tux. But a Bridal Gown?
Hold on to your garter everyone, now you are talking serious!
A bride and her dress are focal point of the entire wedding.
It is the beacon in the light house, the star at the top of the Christmas tree.
When you look at the ubiquitous wedding picture your eye almost automatically gravitates to the bride.
The wedding dress in the wedding photo is the image that people stare at on your wall or on your desk at work.
You might not say it aloud for fear of being castigated and run out of town on a rail, but mentally, you say to yourself, man that bride looks: fill in the blank.
Like a fortune teller’s Ouija board, does the wedding dress dictate the course of the marriage? In other words, if your dress is a mess, is your matrimonial bliss off to a bad start?
I’m not sure Amanda Jones would go quite that far, but she does tell me she has had a lot of miserable, sleepless nights lately.
Why?
Because of what she calls the wedding dress from Hell.
Jones is getting married October 18th. The 23 year old is petite to be sure.
She enters the room, gliding effortlessly across her South Nashville home.
At first glance, the gown is attractive. It is strapless and fits snugly from the chest to the waist.
But from the hips down, there are some issues, like a road under construction.
Poofy and bunched and extra, I don’t know, just extra stuff hanging off the side.
If this dress were a traffic project, orange cones would be sewn into the sides.
“What am I afraid of?” she says, pulling the ample amount of white fabric away from her slender form.
“I feel fat in this dress. It doesn’t flatter me whatsoever”
by
Residents tell us they have tried to board up the front door, but someone keeps pulling it down.
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For the most part, Briley Parkway is 55 miles an hour. It’s 55 mph, except for this 1/2 mile section of ramp where the posted speed limit is 40. This is where Metro police have been set up in recent weeks pulling over hundreds of motorists.
Talk about your sour notes. No guitars in Guitar 101?
I go to White’s Creek H.S. and talk to Ryan Adams, the school’s Fine Arts Teacher.
