Good morning, Nashville. Tennessee has managed to make quite a spectacle of itself in the past few weeks with our strange array of fringe gubernatorial candidates and controversial statements from the not-so-fringe ones, but we’re here to tell you that at least this leg of the journey will be over soon. You have today and tomorrow to take advantage of early voting (which is on track to break some records, apparently) and then the real election is August 5th. Let us hope that things get a little less circus-y from here.

• Foreclosures on the rise. Foreclosures in Nashville and the surrounding areas are up 39% from the same 6-month time period last year. The phenomenon seems to be part of a larger pattern nationwide.
• Flippy-floppies. The kids of Franklin High School are planning to exercise a little civil disobedience on the first day of school by showing up in flip flops en masse to protest a change to the school’s dress-code that would ban such footwear. The protest, as you may have guessed, has been organized on Facebook.
• Bits & pieces. BNA is entering “Phase II” of their big renovation, which basically just means they’re getting some fancy automatic contraptions in the bathrooms … A group of Tennessee lawmakers will be field-tripping in Arizona today to deliver a resolution of support for their recent immigration crackdown … Lane Kiffin had a few things to say to the press about the Titans’ decision to sue him … Metro Police say that graffiti is on the rise in parts of Nashville … A DHS employee was charged with stealing more than $6,000 in food stamps since November 2008.

Photo by WJ11.