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Roadside News: August 2, 2009

August 2, 2009

• Barker Vs. Bear Pits: Bob Barker — animal activist, part-Native American, and former host of The Price Is Right — visited Cherokee, North Carolina this week, demanding that its Indians close their bear pits. The pits have been tourist attractions in the Smokey Mountains even longer than photo-op Indian chiefs, and the Indians of Cherokee were reportedly “insulted” by Barker’s request. Perhaps Cherokee simply needs to give its pits nicer names, such as the new bear pit in Sitka, Alaska, which has been labeled a “habitat” and called Fortress of the Bear.

• Sisters Frown on Wax for Great Blacks: Members of the Alpha Kappa Alpha national sorority are suing to oust their president, Barbara McKinzie, after she reportedly spent $900,000 on a wax dummy of herself that will be displayed at the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. McKinzie, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, says that she only spent $45,000 — and $900,000 does sound like a lot, considering that Madame Tussauds in Las Vegas only charges $300,000 for a personal vanity wax dummy.

• Music and Hair – Inseparable?: The struggling attraction formerly known as Hard Rock Park in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, can’t seem to catch a break. Now renamed Freestyle Music Park, it has spent this year battling apathy from potential tourists, and now is being threatened with a general boycott led by “the leading social network website dedicated to raising public awareness about hair loss issues.” The site claims that the park is cruel for airing a TV ad in which the park’s roller coaster moves so fast that it blows off a man’s toupee. “They would never have shown someone’s prosthetic leg or arm falling out of the roller coaster.”

• James Bond Vehicle Museum: The popularity of spies and flashy cars makes the thought of a James Bond Vehicle Museum seem reasonable. But instead of being located in England or in any of Bond’s exotic locales, it would be in the small town of Momence, Illinois (which is midway between a Big Abe Lincoln in Kankakee and a Giant Lady’s Leg Sundial in Indiana). According to the Kankakee Daily-Journal, many vehicles from the Bond movies are actually stored in Momence, and a local postal worker wants to open the museum in an old car dealership because “the number of people that are familiar with Bond is very large.”

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