Airplanes! Changing The Name Of Forrest Park To Something Less Gross! (News Briefs...)

Airpane! Airpane!

Good Tuesday afternoon, Effin' Memphis readers. We are all recovered from our hangovers from Sunday Funday, which featured some sort of sportsball match, yes? Okay, let's move forward then. Here are some things that are catching our eye this week:

Southwest and AirTran bringing better, low-cost flights to Memphis? Say it ain't so, folks. I mean, Memphians really love being the Worldwide Transportation Whatever, and we really love talking about it while we're driving to the dinky airport in Little Rock so that we might go places, right? Well, maybe that will finally change:

AirTran Airways will grow in Memphis in advance of Southwest Airlines' arrival, adding flights to Chicago, Orlando and Baltimore. The expansion, effective Aug. 11, was hailed Monday as a step toward restoring shrinking service at Memphis International Airport and perhaps a harbinger of more low-cost options to come at one of the country's highest-fare venues. [...] Round-trip fares available for booking Monday at airtran.com showed lows of $254 for Chicago, $196 for Orlando and $192 for Baltimore/Washington. There were indications Delta Air Lines was lowering some of its fares.

Hey, that is a good thing, since we all really hate our airport and anything that might make it better is a welcome development...

If we hadn't named a prominent park after the Confederate general who founded the KKK in the first place, we wouldn't be talking about this: Councilman Myron Lowery is proposing that we add Ida B. Wells' name alongside Nathan Bedford Forrest's at Forrest Park. Although that would be an improvement, why don't we just retire the damn Forrest Park name already? No Memphian who is actually a value-added citizen of this city is particularly proud of the fact that we have a large park named after such a nasty historical figure, but hey, IT'S FUCKIN' MEMPHIS, so let's argue about how he had good qualities too! He was nice to puppies and made really good corn on the cob, I hear. Anyway, yeah. Ida B. Wells was awesome. Add her name to it, and then maybe if we prove we can have nice things, we'll get rid of the Forrest moniker.

Apparently, long-settled Supreme Court cases don't apply to Mississippi: You all should read Hannah Sayle's update on Mississippi's efforts to effectively ban abortion in their little state. They may succeed, for the moment, in putting up so many roadblocks that safe, legal abortion is no longer available in the state, but in typical fashion, they will have done nothing to address the rampant poverty, lack of education and lack of access to affordable health care that are all root causes of high abortion rates. This is how you know that they really, really super totally care about The Unborn, and in no way are simply trying to force women to surrender their bodily autonomy to the control of conservative white men. Nah. It's never that.