• Vice President Mike Pence will be in town for a fundraiser during rush hour at the Music City Center Thursday, August 3, so plan your traffic nightmares accordingly. If it is anything like the last one, plan to just stay home.
• Can we talk for a second about this tourism video from the late 1980s? Nashville, you’ve changed a bit.
• The Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office has released photos of the suspected mosque vandals and is asking the community for help identifying who is responsible.
• Metro government employees can now take paid family leave after the Metro Civil Service Commission (look, we have a lot of committees around here) voted to approve the benefit.
• Fresh off last week’s tractor protest, the guy who owns and runs a multi-million dollar HVAC installation company is going to ride around Tennessee on a tractor to talk to folks about his gubernatorial bid. We suppose it will make him very folksy.
• The Nashville Scene has opened their annual photo contest for the shutterbugs out there. Gonna guess the “I Believe In Nashville” shots don’t have much of a chance to win the $300 prize.
• A recently passed metro ordinance appears to make homeowners liable for adding or replacing sidewalks in front of their house when making major rennovations. Bill sponsors say that was not the intention.
• Hackers defaced the Tennessee Comptroller’s website on Friday warning of nuclear peril, calling the current US president an idiot and praising North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
• A hotel near the airport was struck by lightning Saturday morning and caught fire on the roof. No one was hurt.
• The Nashville Zoo speculates at how animals will react to next month’s full solar eclipse. Zookeepers speculate that the animals will simply mistake the brief darkness for nightfall and then go on about their day.
• Fort Nashborough, or at least a re-creation of what it might have looked like in the 1780s, has reopened off 1st Avenue downtown after a $1.2 million renovation. The original “tribute”, built in the 1960s out of retired telephone poles, was torn down because it had fallen into disrepair.

Photo by Erik Przekop.