Scruffington Post

01/07/2024

First, there will be destruction, then chaos will take form…

The 150 million dollar Clayton Science Museum will take shape like a Phoenix from the ashes.

27/06/2024

Just days after leading Tennessee Volunteers baseball to the program's first ever national championship,head coach Tony Vitello was tabbed as the America Baseb

26/06/2024

CNN Travel’s America’s Best Town’s to Visit

(loads of personality and plenty to see and do without the elbow-to-elbow crowds)

Knoxville is No. 9 on the list thanks to great live music and food, plus stunning scenery on its doorstep.

Knoxville residents have a slogan for their city: Keep Knoxville scruffy.

Market Square, Knoxville’s most popular gathering place, is a pedestrian plaza in the heart of downtown that offers eclectic boutiques, restaurants and rooftop bars. There’s a farmer’s market here from late spring to early fall, free concerts in summer and an ice-skating rink in winter.

“We are not the next big thing, we are our own thing.”

“This is a cool place to be.”

by Katy Koontz, CNN Travel

20/06/2024

Tonight's the night, babies! Jamie Shriner hits the stage at Scruffy City Hall as part of this week's SPRINGBOARD open mic comedy night - and, featuring a special secret guest 🫢
As always, free to attend! Seating and bars on two floors. Show starts around 8pm, and features comedians of all skill and experience levels.

C'mon out and laugh! 😄

13/06/2024

Excerpt from the Scruffington Post
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News of the Weirdly Scruffy:
Is Bernadette Following in the Footsteps of Her Idol Dolly?

(but without the singing voice...)

Although some argue that Bernadette is a Queen B of sorts here in Scruffy City, there is a much bigger kingdom with a much more famous queen in these parts... Bernadette's idol, Dolly Parton has been the Queen of Country Music and the Queen of Tennessee for many years. And these days the whole dang world seems to know about it. Just last month, England ranked Dollywood the "number one attraction in the world people want to return to." Just last week, the National Amusement Park Historical Association rated Dollywood as our favorite theme park in the United States of America. Following in the Appalachian footsteps of her mentor, Bernadette's LunaVerse Knoxville is off to a fascinating start, only with about a light year in running shoes to go to catch up to Mrs. Parton's barefoot sensation of a theme park in the Smokies, and Bernadette's five-story Alice in Appalachia "mushrooms and cowboy hats" themed bar at 413 S. Gay Street is itching to "drink this" and crawl out of its rabbit hole to grow to a much bigger size. Bernadette is well aware that although she might book about 1,000 artists a year on her stages in Scruffy City, Rolling Stone Magazine just announced Dolly's Jolene as number one on its list of 200 greatest country songs of all time.

Scruffy City was abuzz like a hive of honeybees recently when Dolly was in town, filming a docuseries and a new album called Smoky Mountain DNA in Knoxville's Historic Bijou Theater. The album and docuseries trace both the Parton and Owens sides of her family from their origins in the United Kingdom in the 1600s to present day Sevier County in the Smokies. They will include stories about how Dolly got her start with her Uncle Bill Owens driving her from Sevierville to Knoxville to be on the Cas Walker show as a child. Even as Bernadette crafts her own Moonrise in the City concert series and weekly festival vibe at LunaVerse Knoxville, she and the rest of Downtown were still on a Dolly high last weekend when the Old City celebrated the annual Dolly-themed Rhinestone Fest.

As far as good spirits go, Bernadette better get her Yonderland Fermentarium cranking out Moon-Honey-Mead, LunaShine Cherries and Bernadette Beers soon too, since just last week Dolly announced her new line of Dolly Wines and a new musical about her life in East Tennessee. (At the same time, Bernadette's husband Scott is publishing his fictionalized novel, Smoke Rings, about the West Family's inglorious days of moonshining and ma*****na smuggling in the hilltops and hollers near the one were Dolly grew up, set to print later this year, so there's that as an interesting tangential connection between the one name ladies, as well.)

19/05/2024

Sure, we we can watch these in our backyards every summer, but there is something special about the fireflies in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park at Elementfor about two weeks in May or June...

"These are not your average lightning bugs that brighten up backyards around the world with their bioluminescent lanterns.

Out of more than 2,000 firefly species in the world, only about a dozen can coordinate their flashes, including Smoky Mountains’ synchronous species, Photinus carolinus...

Together, the fireflies glow in a series of synchronous bursts before plunging everything into darkness—a pattern that repeats for hours as the fireflies search for their mates...

Fireflies have organs under their abdomens that combine oxygen with a chemical called luciferin to produce a yellow, green, or blue glow. But each species has a unique flashing pattern that plays an important role in firefly courtship, helping individuals identify their mates...

Floating, flying male Photinus carolinus fireflies light up in a series of four to eight rapid bursts then go dark all at once. As more males join a swarm, the flashing grows faster and with greater synchrony...

In the brief periods of darkness between bursts, flightless female fireflies respond from their perch on the ground. With two quick flickers, they let the males know where to find them.

Mating season for Photinus carolinus typically lasts about two weeks around the beginning of summer when evening temperatures in the forest have risen above 50 degrees... in areas of the park with small clearings where fireflies would be able to see one another and with moist leaves on the ground where their pupi can develop."
~ National Geographic

16/05/2024

The 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville opened on May 1, 1982. Did you go to the fair?

The 1982 World's Fair opened to a crowd of 87,000 with the theme "Energy Turns the World." A six-month pass to the fair sold for $100.

The fair was constructed on a 70-acre site between Downtown Knoxville and the University of Tennessee campus. The core of the site primarily consisted of a deteriorating Louisville and Nashville Railroad yard and depot. The railroad yard was demolished, with the exception of a single rail line, and the depot was renovated for use as a restaurant during the fair. The Sunsphere, a 266-foot steel tower topped with a five-story gold globe, was built as the main structure and symbol for the exposition. Today, the Sunsphere stands as a symbol for the city of Knoxville.

The fair closed on October 31, 1982 after after receiving over eleven million visitors in six months.

View the '82 World's Fair collection at American Retro Apparel: https://americanretroapparel.com/collections/retro-1982-worlds-fair-apparel

15/05/2024

Excerpt from the Scruffington Post
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Lost Tales of Scruffy City:
Were the Secret Tapes of George Jones Payment for Drugs?

George Jones is one of the greatest country music stars of all time. His outlaw antics rivaled or exceeded some of the insane antics for which infamous rock stars are best known.

In 1966 George Jones and his band ended up at Nugget Studios, a backwater building just north of Nashville. The songs they recorded there were recorded under a contract with a little-known and very shady producer and promoter named Donald Gilbreth and his business partner, known as Snoddy. Truth be known, David L. Snoddy and Donald E. Gilbreth were also partners in the drug trade. This was most likely their basis for working with Jones, who had a particularly bad drug habit at the time of the recording. Jones was a hit-maker by then but broke just the same, struggling with alcoholism and addiction. It’s not clear from the court record if Jones gave Gilbreth and another partner named Klein the rights to his recordings, sold rights to them or traded them for drugs. A 1982 affidavit that Jones – dubbed “No Show Jones” during his turbulent drinking years – surrendered all rights to Klein and Gilbreth. The tapes they recorded were never released.

In 1983, federal agents in Louisiana came a calling with handcuffs and a drug-trafficking indictment.

A judge offered freedom pending trial, but only if the pair could come up with a combined $1 million in bail. They didn’t have the cash, but Gilbreth told the court he had something even better: master recordings of a country music legend. “Gilbreth does hereby pledge … master tapes of recordings of George Jones.” Gilbreth claimed the five reel-to-reel tapes he offered the court as collateral contained 35 songs performed live by Jones and his band and – in 1984 – were valued at $1.2 million.

For 30 years, eight boxes of reel-to-reel tapes bearing the label “George Jones albums” rested abandoned and forgotten in a bank vault in New Orleans.

Meanwhile, Gilbreth was arrested again a couple of years later for allegedly being part of a ring linked to the Medellin cartel that the authorities said had imported $1 billion worth of co***ne from Colombia. Gilbreth got out of prison in 1992, after testifying against a cartel member. Snoddy was released in 1993, but unfortunately got involved in some more trouble and landed back in prison.

George Jones died on April 26, 2013, just weeks after a performance at the Knoxville Civic Coliseum as part of his farewell tour.

Even now, many years and a court battle spanning two states later, those same boxes sit in a bank vault in Benton County, Tennessee... boxes containing the Master copies of live performances of George Jones and the Jones Boys, recorded in 1966 by drug dealing music producers, who later used the recordings of an outlaw country star as collateral to post bail...

14/05/2024

16/11/2023

08/11/2023

17/10/2023

Maria Cornelius and Leslie Bateman host Pint Night for Front Page Foundation

Front Page Foundation to host ‘Pint Night’ at Scruffy City Hall on Oct. 19
Maria M. Cornelius and Leslie Wylie Bateman will serve as celebrity bartenders for the Front Page Foundation’s “Pint Night” from 5-8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 19, at downtown Scruffy City Hall.
Cornelius and Bateman will help the nonprofit Front Page Foundation raise money for journalism and electronic media scholarships for the University of Tennessee and Pellissippi State Community College as guest bartenders at 32 Market Square in Knoxville. Scruffy City Hall owners Scott and Bernadette West will donate a portion of each drink sold to the Front Page Foundation.
Cornelius, a former reporter and assistant managing editor for the Knoxville News Sentinel, serves as president of the East Tennessee chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (ETSPJ). She is a full-time editor and writer for MoxCar Marketing + Communications and also a freelance sportswriter for 247Sports Tennessee and Knox TN Today.
Cornelius is the author of “The Final Season: The Perseverance of Pat Summitt,” which was selected as Book of the Year in 2016 Foreword INDIES’ sports category and was in the top three among hundreds of entries for Nonfiction Book of the Year in all categories. She earned a journalism degree from the University of Memphis.
Bateman co-founded Knoxville Magazine while in college and became editor-in-chief of Knoxville’s former alt-weekly Metro Pulse at age 24. She led equestrian sports media company Nation Media, LLC, for 10 years, developing it from a single blog into a network of websites with 1.5 million unique visitors annually and covering major events, world championships and Olympic Games. Additionally, Bateman used her platform to promote diversity and inclusion within equestrian sport and address issues such as safety and equine welfare.
She is now an account executive for MoxCar Marketing + Communications. Bateman earned a bachelor’s degree in English and master’s degree in journalism from University of Tennessee.
“Leslie and I have deep roots in newspapers and journalism and now share a workplace at MoxCar, where we continue to apply our writing and communication skills honed from years in the business,” Cornelius said. “We are not sure how adept we are at making drinks, but we promise to be entertaining behind the bar.”
The Front Page Foundation is a nonprofit chartered in 2015 to raise funds benefiting journalism in all news media through scholarships, professional development activities, and educational programs for the public on vital issues in journalism.
Chartered with the support of the East Tennessee Society of Professional Journalists, the Foundation partners with ETSPJ in supporting programs that educate the providers and consumers of news, encouraging professional excellence and public understanding of the role of the press. The Foundation advocates for First Amendment rights, which protect freedom of the press, as well as for open meetings, transparency, ethical reporting, and quality in the journalism profession.
# # #

Cornelius (left) and Bateman will host Front Page Foundation’s Pint Night, 10/19, 5-8pm, Scruffy City Hall on Market Square.

04/10/2023

🎥 We are beyond excited to announce that today is FINALLY the day that we get to announce the FULL festival lineup for FILM FEST KNOX!

🎥 This first year festival is taking place November 9-12, 2023 at the Regal Riviera in downtown Knoxville. FILM FEST KNOX programming includes the previously announced six feature films for the American Regional Film Competition, an exciting array of international currents and revivals, the Elev8or Pitch, Made in Tennessee films, panels, networking opportunities, and more.

🎥 That's the teaser - head here to see the full lineup! https://www.visitknoxville.com/articles/post/film-fest-knox-complete-lineup-announced/

🎫 And if you haven't bought your festival pass yet, what are you waiting for? Get yours today here: filmfestknox.com

23/09/2023

As we get closer to the festival we want to share more details on programming with you! If you missed Thursday's announcement, we've got the American Regional Film Competition films lined up. Here's today's film feature:

Somewhere Quiet (Dir. Olivia West Lloyd)
98 minutes – Thriller
Follows a woman as she readjusts to normalcy after a kidnapping. Her sense of reality begins to deteriorate when she travels to her husband's family compound. Nominee for the Founders Award Best U.S. Narrative Feature at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival. Shot in Cotuit, Massachusetts. Starring Jennifer Kim (The Bourne Legacy, Mozart in the Jungle), Kentucker Audley (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Her Smell), and Marin Ireland (Hell or High Water, Light from Light).

12/09/2023