01651 km

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

If you’re reading this on LiveJournal or an RSS feed, which StatCounter and the lopsided distribution of comments suggest that you are, you may not have noticed all the lovely new changing Route 96 banners. Oooh. Aaaah.

Did you know you can force Firefox to reload cached images (in order, for instance, to cycle through the lovely new changing Route 96 banners) by holding down the Shift key while pressing Reload? To do the same thing in Internet Explorer, um, let’s see. How about you grab the keyboard and smash it between your eyes real hard? That could work.

Fools Rush In

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

Of course we went to Graceland.

I sang a medley of Elvis favorites (also at maximum volume) to get Petey and the still hung-over Derek in the mood, and we stopped on Elvis Presley Boulevard for a kingly brunch of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, biscuits, gravy, and a small side order of lard. By the third helping I think Derek was really communing with the Big E’s burnin’ love.

I tell you, friends and neighbors, Graceland was like the United Nations, with people from all over the world and all walks of life: from blue-haired old ladies (”Elvis was a bad postured hooligan, if you ask me, but he did love his mother.”) to green-haired young punks (”I wanna see the toilet where he died. Do you think they flushed it?”). There were busloads of Japanese tourists with cameras, as per the stereotype, plus a carload of old drunks who see something amazing, think they’re hallucinating, and throw away the bottle. A number of minibike twins were also in evidence.

Instead of tour guides, they have cassette tapes of Priscilla Presley leading you through the house. It only heightened the quasi-religious atmosphere of the place to see everybody shuffling through the Jungle Room in complete silence, listening to their little walkmans. If you took your earphones off, you could hear a dozen out-of-synch Priscillas whispering, “I remember one time Elvis ate nothing but meatloaf… meatloaf… meatloaf… for six months straight… straight… straight…”

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Treasure Type “E”

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

Elvissian Artifacts and Relics

All these items were available at the Elvis gift stores across the street from Graceland. If you wanted the really awful stuff, like vials of his sweat or X-rays of his sinuses (I’m serious) you had to go to the unauthorized dealers downtown.

01-13 Elvis Records (Duh.)
14-21 Elvis Silverware and Fine Elvis China
22-25 Elvis Needlepoint Samplers
26-29 Elvis Keychains
30-33 Porcelain Elvis Bells
34-37 Elvis Swinging Hip Clocks
38-41 Dollar Bills with Elvis’ Picture
42-47 Elvis Style Karate Clothes
48-53 Elvis Presley Blvd. Street Signs
54-57 Elvis Lingerie (ok, technically Priscilla Lingerie)
58-61 New Age Elvis Wind Chimes
62-65 Elvis Cuff Links
66-69 The Eye of Vecna
70-73 Elvis Bowling Accessories
74-77 Elvis Linens
78-81 Foods Shaped Like Elvis
82-85 Elvis Stamps and Inkpads
86-89 Elvis Jigsaw Puzzles
90-92 Elvisopoly, the Game of Elvis
93-96 “Where’s Elvis” Book
97-99 Laser Elvis Holograms
00 Elvis Cabbage Patch Kid (in the gold lame suit, a steal at $300)

Pyramid Power

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

Memphis’ other star attraction is the Great Pyramid of Memphis–a mammoth pyramidal -shaped object in the city’s downtown core.

I guess the idea of the Great Pyramid was to link Memphis on the Mississippi with Memphis on the Nile, ancient capital of Pharaonic Egypt. Memphis on a sweltering Sunday afternoon did a passable impersonation of an extinct civilization–nobody but Canadian tourists were stupid enough to venture out into the clambake heat–but the evocation of the distant past would have been more convincing if the Pyramid weren’t built out of mirrored steel.

Like many of the people we saw in Tennessee [2006 Edit: Well, that’s just mean.] the Great Pyramid was big and ugly and weird, but it didn’t really do anything. We tried to run up its sides but the soles of our shoes were cooked by the heat radiating off the mirrors. We admired the three-story-tall statue of Ramses II (looking a little like Elvis, circa the 1968 Comeback Special, if you squinted). We discussed what the Great Pyramid might contain: Templars? A SMERSH base? A collector for telluric currents and magic ley line energy? Sonny West and Charlie Hodge, buried alive in their master’s booby-trapped theft-proof tomb?

Maybe Memphis will start a trend. Maybe other run down industrial cities will try to lure tourist dollars for their stagnant economies by borrowing from the wonders of the ancient world: the Hanging Gardens of Hamilton. The Colossus at Flint. Hey, it could happen.

Next stop: The Ozarks.

Clap. Lurch. Testify. Repeat.

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

When the excitement of standing in an sweltering parking lot looking at a big featureless triangle began to pale, we shuffled off towards Beale Street, helpfully designated by the Tennessee State Legislature as the Official Home of the Blues.

En route we passed a black Baptist church that was having some kind of outdoor gospel concert thing. Wow. The whole congregation was clapping, lurching, and testifying, and with good reason. The band rocked, as did their threads, and the singers were just going crazy–howling, yowling, falling down and jumping up again, basically kicking Satan’s horny red ass. Powerful stuff for three white secular humanists from suburban Ontario.

After hitting Beale Street for cold beer, hot gumbo, and official Tennessee State Legislature approved Grade A blues, we quite literally rode off into the sunset, Jenkin hauling us across the mighty Mississippi into Arkansas just as the blazing sun went down.