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Singnatures
Is it time for a girl to win American Idol? Look at the names of the four past female winners: Kelly Clarkson, Fantasia Barrino, Carrie Underwood and Jordin Sparks. Now look at the list of the six male winners: Ruben Studdard, Taylor Hicks, David Cook, Kris Allen, Lee DeWyze and Scotty McCreery. Which ones do you hear on the radio? Which ones do you even remember?
Idol has a good crop of finalists this year. The top four are all deserving of the title. When she sang “I Will Always Love You,” I thought Jessica Sanchez would win but I’ve become more of a Hollie Cavanagh fan over the course of the season. Her cover of “Rolling in the Deep” made me think she had a real chance at the title. Of the men, Joshua Ledet has impressed me, especially with his cover of a Bruno Mars song a few weeks back and his version of “It’s a Man’s World” last night. Phillip Phillips is my least favorite of the four, but only because his style reminds me of the Dave Matthews Band. He does seem to have a lot of fan support. One of the final four gets sent home tonight.
Last month Fox VIP group members were offered the chance to win one of five posters autographed by the Idol top 12. I entered the contest and was lucky enough to win. Oddly, the finalists signed a picture of the judges. The hard part will be deciphering their penmanship.
No Doubt
Susan Seals of BoneZones.com asked me to arrange for “one of my Catholic people” to surprise Jon Jefferson and Dr. Bill Bass at the New Hope Center in Oak Ridge last night. Susan wanted a member of the clergy to give a blessing to the authors as they embark on the publicity tour for their new book, “The Inquisitor’s Key.” The plot of the seventh Body Farm novel involves religious artifacts, 14th century Popes and a zealous evangelical preacher.
Choosing from among the priests whose numbers are stored in my phone, I called Fr. Christian Mathis, the pastor of St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Lenoir City. He is a blogger and podcaster in addition to being active on Facebook and Twitter. When I introduced Fr. Christian at the end of last night’s presentation, I told the audience that Thomas was the apostle who wanted to forensically examine Jesus’ wounds after the Resurrection. He needed to see and feel the nail marks of the crucifixion before believing.
Jennifer Alexander and I were the co-emcees for the fundraiser. We introduced representatives from United Way of Anderson County and Friends of Literacy before introducing the authors. Jennifer also handled advance ticket sales through her website. I arranged for a few members of the FBI Knoxville Citizens Academy Alumni Association to serve as ushers. During the question and answer period, we took our wireless microphones into the auditorium.
One of the attendees was Walter Lambert, who is now known as Chef Walter on WVLT-TV. Instead of a question, he recounted a story from his days as a University of Tennessee administrator. When President Ronald Reagan visited the campus, the administration chose three people to have lunch with him. The lucky ones were the student body president, the student newspaper editor and the faculty member of the year, which was Dr. Bass. The three were told to arrive one hour early in order to pass through the Secret Service checkpoint and to be in place at the table before Reagan arrived at the building. Dr. Bass told Lambert that he couldn’t make it because he had a class to teach. When Lambert informed the Secret Service that the teacher of the year refused to miss class just to be an hour early for the president, the conversation was overheard by a reporter for Newsweek. The Secret Service made whatever arrangements were necessary for Dr. Bass to arrive after class and for him to be whisked to the lunch table before the president arrived.
In our recent radio interview, Jon Jefferson mentioned that he will fly to Phoenix today for a book-signing event at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore. Dr. Bass will join the fun via Skype and the event will be webcast on Livestream starting at 10:00 p.m. Eastern Time.
Warm Memories of Chigger Hardin
In addition to writing his own blog and preparing for the publicity tour that starts today, Jon Jefferson has been writing guest posts for several blogs. He was kind enough to contribute one for my site too. His entry mentions the crematory that I toured two years ago. After recording another good interview last week, I’m looking forward to seeing Jon and Dr. Bill Bass at the New Hope Center tonight for the official book-release event.
Warm Memories of Chigger Hardin.
Guest blog by Jon Jefferson, the “Jefferson” half of Jefferson Bass, whose new Body Farm novel, The Inquisitor’s Key, is available May 8.
The older I get, the smaller the world becomes.
A month ago I was writing a magazine profile of a San Francisco lawyer – a woman who’s one of the nation’s most successful plaintiffs’ attorneys. How successful? She’s part of the legal team that wrangled a $7.8-billion settlement out of BP for spewing 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Her list of clients read like a who’s who of people who have been wronged: Women who got faulty silicone breast implants. People with chronic lung disease from asbestos exposure. Victims of Nazi slave-labor camps and death camps. Native American villages in Alaska whose fisheries were damaged by the Exxon Valdez oil spill two decades ago. Suddenly, as I scanned the list of cases, a name jumped off the page at me: she had also represented families harmed by the Tri-State Crematory scandal.
Most readers who follow Frank Murphy will remember the case, because Dr. Bill Bass played a prominent role: Environmental Protection Agency officers, investigating a complaint in February 2002, found a human skull and other bones on the grounds of Tri-State. As the search of the property broadened, investigators were stunned to find human bodies and bones spread across the facility’s buildings and pine woods. Bodies were scattered in the woods, stacked in junked vehicles, tucked into concrete burial vaults. By the time the property had been thoroughly searched, 339 bodies in various stages of decay had been recovered. One of those bodies was thought to belong to an East Tennessee farmer named Chigger Hardin. When Chigger died in 2000, his family arranged for his body to be cremated; they thought they’d gotten his ashes back from the funeral home, but when they read about the gruesome discovery at Tri-State, they contacted an attorney, who asked Dr. Bill Bass to examine the contents of the urn. He did, and found a mixture of burned bone, debris, and filler material. The plot thickened when the Georgia Bureau of Investigation found a body matching Chigger’s description.
The Hardin family asked Dr. Bass to confirm the identification; they also asked Dr. Bass to oversee Chigger’s cremation – for real, this time – to make sure it was done right.
The large male body seemed to fit Chigger’s description, and the clothing matched what the family said he’d been buried in. One key question, though, was this: Was there a bullet in the body? As a teenager, during an argument over a poker game, Chigger had been shot and wounded by his brother, and the bullet—which lodged close to his spine—couldn’t safely be removed, so it was left in place. If the body was indeed Chigger’s, the bullet would provide final confirmation.
The cremation was scheduled at East Tennessee Cremation Services, a reputable establishment, managed by Dr. Bass’s longtime friend Helen Taylor. After the body had been cremated, Dr. Bass and I searched the cremains (the incinerated skeletal material) carefully, but we found no trace of a bullet, even after the cremains had been pulverized. Could there have been a mistake? Nervously, we sealed the cremains in two one-gallon Ziploc bags and hotfooted it to the UT student-health clinic. There a helpful radiological technician x-rayed the bags. Sure enough, in one of the bags – though we hadn’t been able to see it or feel it – was a quarter-sized disk of melted lead: the bullet Chigger’s brother had fired into him three decades before.
As I wrote my magazine profile of the high-powered San Francisco lawyer who’d sued on behalf of families like the Hardins, I smiled at the smallness of the word. And I lit a mental candle in memory of Chigger.
Sheet Cred
One of the members of the Knoxville Choral Society forgot to bring his sheet music to an important rehearsal for the group’s Spring Concerts, which were held on Saturday and Sunday. He was able to solve the problem with two iPads.
The forgetful baritone was able to quickly download a $4.99 app called For Score, which displays sheet music and allows singers and musicians to make their own marks on the page. One of the sopranos sent him a PDF file of the Duruflé Requiem from her iPad via Bluetooth. The KCS has over one hundred members, one of whom is my wife. About a dozen of the “Kasey Essers” now use iPads instead of old-fashioned paper sheet music. From the balcony of the West Hills Baptist Church, I could spot them sliding their fingers across their screens while the others turned pages during Sunday’s concert. I have a feeling that my wife is going to start saving up for an iPad to store and view her music.
During a recent trip to Northern Virginia, a family member told me about his use of an iPad to view sheet music during his gigs with The Next Big Thing. Because he plays the trombone, his hands are not available to turn the pages. He uses a Bluetooth foot pedal to do the page turning for him.
Cruci Fiction
In the latest Body Farm novel, “The Inquisitor’s Key,” one character refers to “The Da Vinci Code” by the common expletive for bovine manure. It made me laugh because the publicists for Jefferson Bass seem eager to capitalize on some of the success enjoyed by Dan Brown’s controversial book. For example, the press release for “The Inquisitor’s Key” reveals a major plot point right away:
Miranda Lovelady, Dr. Bill Brockton’s protégé, is spending the summer helping excavate a newly discovered chamber beneath the spectacular Palace of the Popes in Avignon, France. There she discovers a stone chest inscribed with a stunning claim: inside lie the bones of none other than Jesus of Nazareth. Faced with a case of unimaginable proportions, Miranda summons Brockton for help proving or refuting the claim. Both scientists are skeptical—after all, fake relics abounded during the Middle Ages—but evidence for authenticity looks strong initially, and soon grows stronger.
In Catholic school, we were taught that Jesus ascended into heaven, which means that His bones would no longer be on Earth. A discovery of His skeleton would question the divinity of Jesus. The book, of course, is fiction. Brockton is asked to determine if the bones are from the first century or the fourteenth century.
The story jumps back and forth between the 1300s and the present. In the flashback chapters, the action centers on an inquisitor who later becomes pope and on an artist who creates a portrait of a crucified man on a shroud. The skeleton under the Palace belongs to a crucifixion victim who bears a strong resemblance to the image on the Shroud of Turin. The novel cites real science to explain how the image on the Shroud could have been created by a medieval artist.
Saints known as the Incorruptibles, specifically Saint Bénézet, get mentioned in chapter five. I first heard of the Incorruptibles in 2008 and asked Jefferson and Bass about them during an interview in 2009. Certain unusual conditions make it appear that those saints’ bodies did not decay. Their flesh turned into adipocere, also known as grave wax.
Admittedly, I am a fan of the Body Farm novels. I was a little anxious about the press release, fearing an anti-Catholic slant. Without ruining the story’s suspense, I will say that I found the mystery of the bones and the shroud to be exciting and satisfying. There are some evil characters who are Catholic but there are some evil non-Catholic characters too. The non-religious Brockton questions his own beliefs along the way.
“The Inquistor’s Key” hits stores on Tuesday. If you can’t wait, download the short prequel “Madonna and Corpse” from Amazon.com for 99¢. As a bonus, you get the first six chapters of “The Inquisitor’s Key.”
The official book release event will be held at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, May 8, at the New Hope Center in Oak Ridge. Tickets cost $31 with proceeds benefiting United Way of Anderson County, Friends of Literacy and the William M. Bass Forensic Anthropology Building. Jon Jefferson and Dr. Bill Bass will give a presentation and will sign books for those present. Jennifer Alexander and I are co-emcees for the evening. More information can be found at BoneZones.com.
Using an old NPR trick, Jefferson and Dr. Bass recorded an interview with me to promote the new book and their upcoming appearances. A podcast of the thirty-minute program can be found at the bottom of this blog post. If you’re a completist, you can find my seven previous Body Farm podcasts at these links:
- “Carved in Bone” podcast
- “Flesh and Bone” podcast
- “Beyond the Body Farm” (non-fiction) podcast
- “The Devil’s Bones” podcast
- “Bones of Betrayal” podcast
- “The Bone Thief” podcast
- “The Bone Yard” podcast
Small Things Considered
The public-affairs show that airs early tomorrow morning uses a bit of audio trickery. In order to get the first interview on the publicity tour for “The Inquisitor’s Key,” I recorded the program last Tuesday, a week before co-author Jon Jefferson will travel to Knoxville. He would be on the phone from his home in Florida while Dr. Bill Bass joined me in-studio.
Years ago, my friend Maureen told me about NPR’s “tape sync” technique. They would record the host’s voice as he or she conducted a phone interview with a guest who was hundreds or thousands of miles away. Back then, the guest would go to a local NPR affiliate or other studio where their half of the conversation was recorded. The tape got shipped back to headquarters where the two tracks were synchronized to make it sound like the host and guest were in the same room.
For tomorrow’s program, Jon spoke into his phone while simultaneously speaking into a digital recorder. When the half-hour interview ended, he popped the memory card out of the recorder and into his computer. He uploaded the MP3 file to Dropbox.com and shared the folder with me. In the book, an artist from NCMEC shares a large image file with Dr. Bill Brockton via Dropbox.
My file had the studio microphones in the left channel and the sound from the phone in the right channel. I deleted the phone track and replaced it with the file from Jon’s recorder. I used a still-working version of Cool Edit Pro software to amplify and compress Jon’s voice and to combine the tracks into a monaural file. I’ll post it as a podcast tomorrow.
Pony Express
Gay Lyons invited me to be a judge at an unusual event. The “Pimp My Pony” contest was held last night during a Scarecrow Foundation benefit called Party in the Park. Some downtown businesses decorated brooms or mops as horses in honor of Downtown Derby Week. A fanciful unicorn from Crass Couture won the people’s choice award. A papier-mâché horse from Girl House Productions won the judge’s award. Erin Donovan and Red Hickey were the other judges.
Local restaurant servers competed in the Run for the Rosé. They had to open a bottle of wine, pour it into four glasses and then run around the perimeter of Krutch Park Extension. Points were based on fastest time and least spillage. The winner was Sam Stallings of Cocoa Moon. His time was 1 minute and 1.87 seconds. His remaining liquid was 3.24. I don’t know what system of measure they used. My best guess is cups.
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