Several years after a single, offhand comment by then-Mayor Phil Bredesen to Sports Illustrated about Vanderbilt University’s reputation as an “800-pound gorilla,” the university is still smarting. In an address to faculty members last week, new university Chancellor E. Gordon Gee called for the institution to have a new, more community-oriented outlook. In his first substantive speech to the faculty, Gee called for Vanderbilt to renew “its covenant with the community.”
Democrats whine
It’s unclear why diehard Democrats attending a Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce meeting last week were surprised when Republican pollster and pundit Kellyanne Fitzpatrick cracked a few jokes at the expense of Al Gore. Among the apparently offending Fitzpatrick comments were, “I don’t understand how you can do a telephone poll on a telephone pole.” The whining started before guests even left the meeting room. Vice Mayor Ronnie Steine, for example, said he was “totally surprised the Chamber would put on this kind of programming.”
The sicko's nabbed
After searching for more than a year, police finally have found the man who’s been posing as a good Samaritan, then brutally raping elderly women on Interstate 65. Hickman County’s Mark Anthony Clark, a married father of two, confessed last week to raping five women and trying to rape three others. Bond for the 34-year-old truck driver, who spent time in prison after beating an elderly woman with the handle of a claw hammer in 1992, was set at $2.9 million.
