The Early Word: TVA keeps secrets, and Tigers football moves north
Come out, come out wherever you are! It’s Friday, Oct. 11, National Coming Out Day, and Rhodes College will celebrate tonight with a presentation of queer Southern stories. Also tonight, the annual Monster Market pop-up of Halloween oddities and crafts opens at the Medicine Factory.
Saturday brings four — count ’em — Oktoberfests from Crosstown to Cordova, plus an evening screening of “Psycho” at Crosstown Theater. (Is there a better way to spend a Saturday than with beer and a slasher film?) As for sports, the Memphis Tigers will play USF (but not in Tampa), and the Memphis Grizzlies will play the Chicago Bulls in a preseason away game.
There’s more Halloween fun to be had at Magnolia & May’s trunk-or-treat on Sunday, and you can help raise funds for Hurricane Helene victims at a benefit concert at Railgarten. For way more ideas, check out The To-Do List.
The Tennessee Valley Authority offers a program that pays industrial customers to cut electricity consumption when the grid is stressed, and 500 users have signed on. But who those users are remains a mystery. The Daily Memphian tried to find out with a Freedom of Information Act request to the TVA, but the request was rejected. What TVA would say is that those users saved about 2,000 megawatts of power over 2022 and 2023, which translates to about 10% of TVA’s average daily load. The lack of information comes as environmentalists are questioning TVA’s power capacity across the region with the arrival of Elon Musk’s xAI. And we do know how much electricity xAI will receive and how much it’s used so far.
High water came, and the Memphis Tigers will still play USF on Saturday. But the football game originally scheduled for today in Tampa that was then moved to Saturday in Tampa has now moved to Saturday in Orlando. Hurricane Milton hit Tampa on Wednesday night, and there’s quite a bit of water on the field at Raymond James Stadium.
Plus, the Memphis Grizzlies are off to a slow start, Bartlett’s first mixed-use project is rising and we’ve got the tea on boba.
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Bianca Phillips
Bianca Phillips is a Northeast Arkansas native and longtime Memphian who’s worked in local journalism and PR for more than 20 years. She’s a diehard morning person who spends her free time running marathons and ultras. She’s the author of “Cookin Crunk: Eatin’ Vegan in the Dirty South.”
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