• PSA: Be careful watching next Monday’s eclipse and make sure your glasses aren’t part of a recall. Looking at the sun with defective glasses or otherwise insufficient protection can cause permanent damage in a matter of seconds.
• If you got the glasses from Metro Public Health, they aren’t safe. Same for the 8,000 or so folks who received them at the Wilson County Fair. Or bought certain pairs from merchants on Amazon. Seriously, double-check with wherever you bought them.
• Better yet, take this tip from NASA and create your own eclipse projector with household materials.
• Third Man Records is having an eclipse event, which Lance summarized for us as “a guy invented a synthesizer that reacts to weather and they’re gonna stick it on the roof at Third Man during the eclipse.“
• TSA inspectors found four guns in four days at Nashville International Airport security checkpoints, with two of them being loaded. Seriously, leave your guns at home!
• Dolly Parton, a universally revered national treasure, is releasing her first children’s album to benefit the Imagination Library, a free program that sends one book a month to children from birth to age five.
• Music producer and now land developer T-Bone Burnett has a beef against critics of his Cloud Hill Partnership project to redevelop the Greer Stadium site. He voiced those opinions during and after Tuesday’s council meeting to present their ideas.
• Also during the meeting the promoters of bringing a Major League Soccer team to Nashville unveiled the renderings of a new stadium that would be built at the Tennessee State Fairgrounds. There is a bit of skepticism on the council, with several members referencing a Deadspin article calling it a “ponzi scheme” and worse.
• Protestors at the capitol building surrounded a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a confederate general and first “Grand Wizard” of the Klu Klux Klan, demanding lawmakers remove it in the wake of violence in Charlottesville, North Carolina. The governor issued a statement repeating his opinion that the statue shouldn’t be there.
• Similarly, a comically bad — look at some up close pictures — sculpture of Forrest on I-65 which has greeted (?) drivers since 1998 is again in the news, with the mayor of Oak Hill asking TDOT to obscure it from view.
• A non-binding resolution condemning white supremacy failed on a procedural vote at the metro council meeting. The sponsor vows to bring it up again.
• Yesterday was the final day for seventh graders at Metro Nashville Public Schools to produce proof of immunization or they would not be allowed to attend classes. A little over half had not completed the requirement by last Friday, though about 600 remain at last count.
• Deadspin took a look back at one of the biggest fouls in sports writing that happened 20 years ago in nearby Gallatin, and oh wow is it a doozy.

Photo by SunnyGoller.