Bouquets & Brickbats
Bouquet
To the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, which preserves the history of the legendary Memphis record label through a stunning collection of artifacts that includes a reconstructed Mississippi Delta wooden church from 1906, as well as Isaac Hayes’s peacock-blue, gold-trimmed and gold-plated superfly 1972 Cadillac Eldorado, complete with a white fur-lined interior, a television, and a refrigerator. Trust us, you don’t want to miss a visit to this place, or to the nearby Sun Studios, where rock ‘n’ roll music was born, and where Elvis, Howlin’ Wolf, BB King, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Roy Orbison all recorded.
Listen, Memphis gets a bad rap as a cesspool of crime, which it is. It is the place where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Rapper Young Dolph was killed in Memphis while standing in line at …
American Glossary
Ate and left no crumbs — How Democrats swept the midterm elections.
Crash out — J.D. Vance blames the Joos for losing.
Data Centers — Not in my town.
Demure — Anything but.
Drugstore Cowboy — Go to Nashville to see ’em.
Infinite Aura — What David Foster Wallace would have today, if he hadn’t killed himself.
Louisiana Miracle — Mebbe they ain’t so dumb.
Ossoff-AOC — The couple everyone is watching.
World Series — Annual reminder that God loves America.
Yankees — Annual reminder of how not to play baseball.
Crime Blotter
Palm Desert Flagpole Killing
On Friday, September 4, at 9:47 AM, deputies from the Palm Desert Sheriff’s Station responded to a call for service in the 35000 block of Gateway Drive, a wealthy gated community, where they located a subject suffering from traumatic injuries consistent with a physical assault.
The suspect, 65-year-old Vicky Kim, a resident of Palm Desert, was taken into custody and was later booked into the John Benoit Detention Center. According to court documents, Kim used a flagpole to “inflict great bodily injury” on the victim, her husband, who was pronounced dead at the scene.
According to Riverside County District Attorney’s Office spokesperson Molly Smith, Kim had been charged with a prior felony attack on her husband in 2026 that was reduced to a misdemeanor, which led to her release …
