Cherokee casino expansion
WLOSers said at 11 that Harrah’s Cherokee Casino will announce on Wednesday a $650 million expansion that will nearly double gaming space and add a third hotel tower to the property. More details on Wednesday.
Bele Chere’s future
WLOSer Holly Headache stood downtown to say that there was a forum Tuesday night for people to come and discuss the future of the biggest party in Ashvegas – Bele Chere.
Holly said the summer party drew 300,000 last year and had a $20 million economic impact. Holly quoted Bele Chere hater John Cram, an art gallery owner, who says he shuts down every year at Bele Chere time because he doesn’t have customers. Holly said “some” business owners – namely Cram and Vic Trantham, the other downtown business guy Holly talked to – don’t like that Bele Chere vendors compete with established businesses.
The city’s festival director, Melisssa Porter, said the festival is experiencing some “growing pains.” Porter says people want more local musicians, more local artists, more local everything.
Clemson kids in blackface
The big story that WLOS has ignored, as noted by loyal readers of Ashvegas, is the story about all the controversy over a party at Clemson University where some kids showed up in blackface.
The party was held the day before the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. The theme of the party was “Living the Dream,” but some Clemson students are calling it a nightmare.
Pictures of the party were posted on facebook.com, showing at least one person in black-face paint, with others dressed in knitted caps and jerseys and some girls with stuffing padding their pants to make their behinds look larger. There’s an image of party-goers holding 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor.
Clemson officials said that the images were taken at an off-campus party thrown by some university students. University administrators said the behavior at the party is unacceptable and they met with hundreds of angry students on Monday night to discuss the situation.
Big snow a’coming?
Chief Mike Cuevas says there is a darn good chance of frozen precip. Here’s the latest from the National Weather Service:
SNOW WILL BEGIN AROUND SUNRISE ON THURSDAY ACROSS THE NORTH CAROLINA MOUNTAINS…THE UPSTATE AND NORTHEAST GEORGIA. SNOW WILL DEVELOP LATER IN THE MORNING OVER THE NORTH CAROLINA FOOTHILLS AND PIEDMONT. SEVERAL INCHES OF SNOW IS POSSIBLE IN THE MOUNTAINS OF THE WESTERN CAROLINAS AND NORTHEAST GEORGIA AND IN THE NORTH CAROLINA FOOTHILLS BEFORE PRECIPITATION MIXES WITH SLEET AND FREEZING RAIN.
Two charged in death of homeless man
Ashvegas police have arrested and charged two men in the death of a homeless man found underneath the Smoky Park Bridge on Sunday. The cops said James Lovin was stabbed. WLOSers said cops said there was a fight over the right to sleep in the spot under the bridge.
Macon man charged with rape
A 50-year-old Macon County man has been arrested and charged with rape after he used a date rape drug on a 14-year-old.
WLOSers said the girl was having dinner with the man and his wife and the dude slipped the drug into the 14-year-olds dessert. The wife was drugged, too, WLOSers said.
At 11, WLOSer Carolyn “Little Red” Ryan spiced up the story with more details. Ryan said the 14-year-old came to the suspect’s home to “help him with a project.” The suspect was a drug counselor, but Ryan didn’t say where. The suspect slipped a tranquilizer, benzo-something, into a bannana cream pie, according to Ryan.
Langdon Raymond trial date pushed back
Langdon Raymond, the Fletcher police chief charged with assault two men in his police department, has his trial date re-set for Feb. 28, WLOSers said.
Raymond was charged this past October and has been suspended from his job pending the outcome of the trial. WLOSers said there’s a new SBI investigation into the case.
In other news…
A BMW got stuck under a tractor-trailer on I-26 and dragged down the interstate for a couple hundred feet. Nobody was hurt in the wreck… People who live on Beaucatcher Mountain are pissed about four big new developments going up. The city says the developers have met all the rules and regulations, despite the fact that some residents say builders are disturbing graves in a historic African-American cemetery… Dickson Elementary School was closed Tuesday after a water line break on Riverside Drive left the school without water… Woodfin Police Department has two new cruisers. They’re Dodge Chargers and they look bad-ass. They’re black and white and handle well and get good gas mileage… Sheraldo says that Blue Cross and Park Ridge Hospital down in Henderson County are battling over a contract. The contract will end March 3, and after that the hospital won’t be “in network.” Patients are pissed, but Blue Cross says there are plenty of other health care providers that are in their network… The SBI is investigating some $50,000 in tax fraud discovered in an audit in Polk County. Tax bills were being improperly lowered, and somebody with the county was skimming the rest… The nonprofit Mountain Microenterprise Fund announced its new name on Tuesday – Mountain BizWorks… Jodi Grabowski and her husband say they’re lucky they had a carbon monoxide detector in their home because it went off and said they had harmful levels of the deadly, odorless gas in their home… The folks refurbishing the old Ghost Town in the Sky amusement park removed the two old incline trains to fix them up. They’re also fixing up all the old rides, including the Red Devil rollercoaster and ay they’ll all be safe… And John Le had a story about the WNC Nature Center moving some snakes into a new habitat, but the story didn’t run at 5:30 like it was supposed to.
8 Comments
A to the P — maybe like Media Chatter? Their message board makes this site look like a glowing review.
http://www.mediachatter.com/
don’t you think "the news… on meth" is better than "the news is now" for a tagline?
banana… not bannana….
not that i’m counting 😉
I almost worked at WYFF. It’s okay. They’re not like fox carolina, which is essentially the news on meth.
They do a decent job, but I have a feeling if you lived in greenville…a suspiciously similar blog would soon arise…
Ron, we hear ya.
marc, you may have hit the nail on the head – it’s the inconsistency. WLOSers zoomed down to South Carolina a month or so ago when a suspected "tornado" turned over a few cars in a school parking lot. And they were all over the alleged "bikini strangler" who killed a Clemson student.
so why not cover an issue that’s making national news? we don’t get it. and if they’re not covering it, they’re ignoring it, because the story’s everywhere.
While the Clemson story is certainly interesting, I don’t know if it’s quite right to say the ‘LOSers "ignored" it. They generally cover news (I know, using those two words to describe the nightly infotainment is stretching it) from WNC, and leave the SC stuff to the SC stations. My guess is that all it takes is one 15 second story about something in Greenville or Spartanburg to light up the switchboard with idiots complaining that ‘LOS is "only showing news from South Carolina." So (while they’re not always consistent with this), a story from Clemson not involving any specifically named students from WNC is not going to warrant driving down there, just to tick off the "loyal" NC viewers.
Of course, they’ll show any house fire from Podunk, Nebraska, if the video shows up on the CNN feeds, so the argument doesn’t really hold water.
Ash, I think the tax fraud story is in Polk County.
As we in Hooterville come to the end of the fourth week without WLOS on our cable system, I notice that the world has continued to turn and that my mood at 6 and 11 pm is much better. Maybe it’s because Mish and I have been watching WYFF, the NBC affiliate in Greenville for our news fix. They feature a fairly unphotogenic news crew with weird hair styles, but they also produce a newscast that is far more professional and polished than WLOS. For one thing, their reporters actually understand how to approaach a story and cover all the necessary angles, unlike our friends in WLOS, who usually forget the who, why, how and/or where of a situation. And the anchors actually have the gravitas that one needs for the job; at WLOS, they seem to be in the throes of emotional crises and/or serious substance abuse. WYFF demonstrates how local news should be reported on television. If WYFF can do it, why can’t the bozos at WLOS? Unfortunately, WYFF doesn’t follow any aspect of the news up here in WNC, so we may as well be watching a Des Moines station.
As a meteorologist with interests on WNC weather, it looks like this week’s storm might be the one everyone has been waiting on. Latest model runs, of course subject to change based on later model runs, now indicating possibly 3-5 inches of snow before a changeover to freezing rain and sleet. Could be a fun beginning to February for WNC! I miss it!