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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 3h

Nashville history is always so weird. So, there's this guy--Sherman Begley, who was suspected of killing a white guy in Clarksville. A lynch mob forms and harasses his neighbors, but he's not around. He's eventually caught and they decide to try him in Davidson County, because he'll be in danger

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 5h

Well, I have just come across the stupidest reason I've ever seen anyone in Nashville be arrested.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 14h

I don’t think the state should execute people, but in a state as violent and drug addled as this one, there’s also an element of humiliation that we’re so bad at it. Like, you don’t have one drug dealer in prison who knows how to overdose someone?

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

There's a legend that William Edmondson made a headstone for a guy who worked at a quarry and died in an explosion in Newsom Station. The Newsom Station quarry (where we got the stone for the Seigenthaler bridge) closed long before William started carving. So, even though the story says that this

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Reposted by Betsy Phillips

Nashville Scene @nashvillescene.com · 30/09/2026

This week on The Aunt B Radio Hour: Betsy gets Braden to admit that he is making his own UT mythology. Plus, Nashville's feats of engineering, and Braden tries to have a hopeful conversation about Tennesseans coming together to thwart tech bros, grifters and conspiracies.

nashvillescene.com

The Aunt B Radio Hour

Nashville culture, music, news, history and hilarity with Betsy Phillips and Braden Gall

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Tell me you’ve got a secret stash of pizza without telling me you’ve got a secret stash of pizza.

A medium long dog sleeping next to a slice of pizza.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

If Cornell had run a proper investigation, they’d have an idea of how many times similar messages had been sent before that night. Which, I guess, is why they didn’t.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Paint chips acquired. Now I need to figure out how to clean them, whether they’ll stay reflective, and that’s it!

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Okay, I hesitate to ask this, because it’s exactly the thing that ends up opening the story about your death in the local paper, but I’ve noticed that all the reflective paint on Clarksville Pike is crumbling and coming loose and I could collect that, drop it into a medium and paint with it, right?

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I’m fighting a mouse in my bathroom wall. I think. I mean, it’s leaving mouse turds and eating mouse poison out of the trap. So, it seems like a mouse. But tell me why I opened my bathroom closet just now and it smells like cigarettes?

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Here’s a thing I love about Ben. If that dude has an answer for you, he has an answer for you. So, today I’m listening to Willie Dixon’s I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man and I notice that the bass line is weird. I listen three times in a row. It doesn’t get any less weird. I text Ben.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I'm sure animals don't check Bluesky very often, but I'd just like to let whoever ate my ancient spider plant know that, ha ha, motherfucker, it's growing back.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I genuinely don’t understand how people are making it. I have a job. I have a couple of paying side hustles. And my grocery bill jumped $40 this week. I need to fill up my tank today and gas is $4 a gallon. I already shop at Walmart. I already don’t buy new clothes. I already don’t do things that

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

After listening to @bradengall.bsky.social going on and on about how awesome Paris is, I took my parents today. My mom was blown away by the Eiffel Tower.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I’m not normally one too comment on other people’s bodies, but seeing Jeff Bezos’s wife in a bikini is watching a woman cosplay having big boobs. She is not living the actual experience.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The poor fools have started trying to fix the elevator that goes where it wants when it wants and decides for you what floor it will open on. If there's not a Catholic priest involved by next Tuesday, I'll be surprised.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Oh man, I just stumbled across a way to make all my Power BI reports look like cartoons. I'm not mature enough for this knowledge.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

And this question is for the real Nashville history buffs: What was the stated purpose, a selling point even, of putting the Seigenthaler bridge right where it is?

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

So, here’s poor Howard Jones, designing the Seigenthaler Bridge back in the first decade of the 20th century and his design is so cutting edge that local civil engineers are like “Hell no! Don’t use that bridge!” So he builds a smaller scale version of the bridge and has men start stacking bricks

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Sorry, men. I’m taking Orange back from you. You can’t be trusted with it. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

podcasts.apple.com

How does Metro work?

Podcast Episode · The Aunt B Radio Hour · September 23 · 58m

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

It’s so great when I get to repark in the middle of the day and get a spot right by the door so I can walk by my car twice looking for it in my usual spot.

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Reposted by Betsy Phillips

D. Patrick Rodgers @dpatrickrodgers.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Hi! Going to be on my guy Jerome Moore's PBS show 'A Slice of the Community' talking media Thursday night. Free taping at 6:30 — it will air that night at 8, and a couple more times over the weekend.

eventbrite.com

A Slice of the Community – Who Gets to Speak for Nashville?

Jerome Moore and other Nashville media figures discuss access, power and responsibility in telling the community’s stories.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Nashville, if you haven’t left for work yet, consider waiting another half hour. You’re going to be waiting another half hour, but if you choose it, you won’t be stuck in your car.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Does anyone know if the city has, before now, let a property on the National Historic Register that the city owns fall off the Register?

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

On the one hand, publishing is like if people in the 1800s wanted a carriage that could go 45 miles an hour, so the auto industry developed mechanical horses instead of the car and we were still all sitting around trying to develop a mechanical horse that could get us to the moon.

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DJcontraption AKA Dahron J @dahron-anneliese.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

What's the poetry antipathy? Why treat rhyme so churlishly? True as Kilmer's line may be re. poems as poor subs for trees, I beg you speak less hasitly on "random" verse editorially placed 'midst reports you see. Tho superfluous meter-ly line in prosaic places seems, I say—there attempted beauty be.

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Reposted by Betsy Phillips

D. Patrick Rodgers @dpatrickrodgers.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Cool story that gave me the opportunity to write a rhyming headline.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

It's such an honor to have a kid talk to you about the shit he's thinking about. Today Del was trying to fix the word "flood," because he thought--rightly, that f l o o d looks like it should be pronounced like "food." That's not the cool part. The cool part is that he immediately tried to fix it.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I will never give up my dream of seeing Line Street's name restored to Line Street from all the crap we've thrown on it lately.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

All I have to do this weekend is goof off with people I love and I’m kind of worried I’m forgetting some obligation.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Too bad I already mostly have my column for the @nashvillescene.com written, because this story is right up my alley--Thomas Jefferson, digging in the city cemetery (or not), and the underestimation of little old ladies. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

chronicle.com

Sally Hemings’s Oldest Descendant Gave the Smithsonian Her DNA. She Says It Lost Her Trust.

On the eve of a new book that promises to settle the debate about Thomas Jefferson, a Hemings relative is raising alarms that its science hasn’t been vetted.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Between Target and Converse, I think we have to presume that this is a bunch of people using AI to come up with images for their product campaigns, not realizing just how deeply, deeply racist so much of the United States's cultural production is racist, which means AI is going to throw racist shit.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Book publishing is so stupid. So very stupid. You might as well just grab a pile of books, throw them down the road, and who ever can throw them the farthest in the fewest tosses gets to have their books in their local bookstores. It would practically be the same result as now.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Nashville in the 1860s was just fining women left and right for drunkenly laying in the streets.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

A nice thing about the whole Ed Sheeran thing is that it's a really clear illustration of how neutrality puts you on the side of horrific people. Between this and the newest Elephant Graveyard video, it should give folks here a lot to mull over.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I find it charming and hilarious how many crochet patterns insist that all waviness issues will be fixed by blocking. But, allegedly, these waviness issues will be fixed by blocking.

A giant crochet multicolored circle that is really not laying flat at the moment.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Sometimes I dwell on how genius it is that Frankie and Joe dance with Maria to “Night of the Johnstown Flood.” Like, before you know how the song ends, you know how the song ends. And without realizing it, you’re just waiting to find out how broken the survivors are.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I’m a Gen-Xer. I know better than to love anything with my whole heart, but I still ended up crying after the Metro Historical Commission meeting today.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Just convinced my niece that I’m a witch that controls an army of spiders. “So that’s why I have so many spiders in my room,” she declares. Sure. Then I say that I have to go home and write my column. She asks, “Why don’t you have the spiders write your column?”

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

After my weekend of dealing with incredibly competent and capable people both at Xfinity and Hiller who easily diagnosed and fixed my problems, I'm convinced that the future belongs to people who know their shit.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

When I get rich, I want to run a company that fucks up all the time, doesn't tell you anything's wrong, and then has no human beings you can talk to to get things straight.

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Amazon's just going to Amazon, I guess.

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Nashville Scene @nashvillescene.com · 10/09/2026

This week on The Aunt B Radio Hour: Betsy and Braden talk historic sex work and its potential economic benefits today. Plus, Betsy is surprised and delighted by a series of good customer service experiences, and Braden admits his hatred of water bottles.

nashvillescene.com

The Aunt B Radio Hour

Nashville culture, music, news, history and hilarity with Betsy Phillips and Braden Gall

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Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

There is a guy in a truck with his kid on his lap a toddler who is steering while his dad works the peddles and the kid is staring out the side window and I know it’s dangerous and illegal, but it made me homesick in a way I can’t explain.

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