Which big Midtown show should you go see Saturday night? Noise Choir with Vending Machine and Spread Eagles at Murphy's, or the always-memorable Harlan T. Bobo Christmas show at the Hi-Tone? Surely, if we can put a man on the moon, and buy gifts via the wireless Internerd, we can figure this one out. (Both shows will start around 10, and $5 is the cover at each.)

Andre Allen suffered a concussion at Friday's practice after colliding with Jeremy Hunt. I didn't have a great angle to see it, but the consensus was that they bumped heads.

It was a pretty scary scene because they were both down for about 10 minutes, with Hunt finally getting up and rubbing his head. I talked with him after practice, and he seemed cogent and said he'd be fine.

Though it's standard procedure, it's always a little unnerving to see somebody taken out of practice on a stretcher with their neck immobilized. Luckily, it appears he'll be OK.

On another note, I've heard from multiple people with knowledge of the situation that J.P. Prince will transfer to Vanderbilt, and that it's basically a done deal.

That's not really surprising, since his final two schools were Arizona and Vandy. It was odd that Prince chose Wednesday -- when the Tigers played at Arizona -- too announce his transfer given that it had been rumored for at least a month.

Memphis wasn't at all interested in Prince, the former White Station star. Vanderbilt is kind of a mess right now -- they've already lost to Furman and Appalachian State -- and Kevin Stallings will be happy to take a chance on a player of Prince's talent. (Assuming Stallings is still at Vanderbilt next year).

What better way to head into the Christmas weekend than with one last update on the John Ford saga?

According to a story in today's local news section, Ford wants to make sure he gets back his $40,000 Rolex watch that was confiscated as evidence for his upcoming (some day) bribery trial.

To which I can only say: Maybe if he's been good, Santa will bring him another one for Christmas.

(Merry Christmas, everyone! I'll be back to blogging next week after the holiday.)

For John Ford, the hits just keep on coming.

As our reporter Marc Perrusquia wrote in today's newspaper, federal prosecutors are alleging that Ford received a $40,000 diamond-studded Rolex Masterpiece wristwatch from developer Rusty Hyneman. The prosecutors say Ford once boasted that he got the watch in exchange for using his influence to try to get state pollution fines against Hyneman reduced.

Neither Hyneman nor Ford has been charged in connection with the high-priced jewelry changing hands, but prosecutors apparently hope to use the watch transaction to support their case that Ford had a history of influence-peddling.

If Ford gets convicted and faces a tougher sentence as a result, I guess you could say that watch keeps hard time.

Here's the short answer: No.

Yet over the years I've probably enjoyed "Holiday Inn" as much as any other movie.

Because WREG-TV Channel 3 used to rerun the 1942 Irving Berlin musical every Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, it was the one movie my sisters and I routinely enjoyed together, even after we'd become adults. (For most of that time, we didn't realize the musical had a huge local impact: When Kemmons Wilson founded his hotel chain in Memphis in 1952, he took the name "Holiday Inn" from the movie, at the suggestion of architect Eddie Bluestein.)

Watching "Holiday Inn" became something of a family tradition. It helped that it's a funny, quotable ("A gentle smile often breeds a kick in the pants," says Astaire) and thoroughly entertaining film, yet with several elements that encourage a running viewer commentary. (The somewhat simpering Marjorie Reynolds character particularly bugged my sisters, while the frenetic talent agent played by Walter Abel was everybody's favorite.)

Keeping up with "Holiday Inn" broadcasts on cable television can be confusing, which is as good a reason as any for fans to purchase the recently released "Special Edition" DVD edition of the film from Universal Studios Home Entertainment. The disc includes a pair of informative featurettes about the production of the film and a feature commentary from Ken Barnes, a film historian and music producer who worked with "Holidy Inn" stars Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby on recordings near the ends of their careers. Barnes isn't stingy with superlatives: He calls Berlin, Crosby and Astaire "three of the most important talents of the 20th Century," and refers to "White Christmas" as "the most popular pop song ever written." (Barnes also rather shakily warbles the original, wisely unrecorded opening verse of "White Christmas," which refers to palm trees and Beverly Hills, establishing that the song initially was supposed to have been introduced by the Crosby character near the end of the film, after his reluctant relocation to Hollywood.)

Directed by Mark Sandrich (who helmed five of the best Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals), "Holiday Inn" is the story of a singer-composer (Crosby) who abandons the rat race of big city show business to run a rural inn that's open only on holidays ("That gives me about 350 days to kick around in," he explains). The premise is slim but sturdy enough to support 14 tremendous Berlin compositions, including a pair of oldies (1924's "Lazy" and 1933's "Easter Parade") and a dozen new songs: "I'll Capture Your Heart Singing," "You're Easy To Dance With," "White Christmas," "Happy Holidays," "(Come to) Holiday Inn," "Let's Start the New Year Right," "Abraham," "Be Careful, It's My Heart," "I Can't Tell a Lie," "Let's Say It with Firecrackers," "Song of Freedom" and "(I've Got) Plenty To Be Thankful For."

The most famous of the new songs, of course, is "White Christmas," which Bing introduces at the piano. (Remember how Bing reaches over the top of the piano as he's playing and rings the bells on the Christmas tree with the stem of his pipe? It's a perfect illustration of Crosby's lazy savoir-faire.)

But as important to the film's success as its music is the depiction of the comic rivalry between Jim Hardy (Crosby) and dancer Ted Hanover (Astaire). Their relationship is the most important one in the film. The women they vie for - Linda Mason (Reynolds) and Lila Dixon (Virginia Dale) - are not only easily won but essentially interchangeable, as their similar-sounding, almost rhyming names suggest.

The surnames make the connection even more obvious: Mason-Dixon. Linda may be sweet and sincere and Lila loose and devious, but they're only a hyphen apart on the desirability scale. What keeps the plot moving is Jim and Ted's desire to con each other. (The girls might have been more proactive if they'd been played by bigger stars: According to the DVD commentary, Sandrich wanted to hire Ginger Rogers and Rita Hayworth as Linda and Lila, but cost-conscious Paramount nixed that plan because Crosby and Astaire already were expensive enough.)

After the opening musical number, which features both Jim and Ted, the film is structured as a sort of competition in which the two men use deceit and double-crosses to get their way while also taking turns showing off their abilities.

Astaire is presented as the show business sophisticate, graceful even during the solo dance in which his steps are punctuated by exploding "torpedo bombs." Sandrich respects the integrity of Astaire's performances by shooting them with an almost stationary camera that keeps the dancer's entire body in view, with few cuts.

Crosby's character is the country mouse to Astaire's city mouse (the agent even refers to Jim as "a poor country cousin"). Interestingly, Crosby is not only associated with the so-called simple pleasures of rural life but he is presented as a person comfortable with all races and social strata. This is demonstrated by a blackface number about Abraham Lincoln that celebrates freedom; Jim's relationship with housekeeper Mamie (Louise Beavers); and the jazzy, typically Crosbyesque slang that peppers Jim's speech ("Have a slug out of the mug,'' he says, handing a hungover Ted a cup of coffee). Mamie actually proves to be an important figure in Jim's life: She solves his romantic woes when she inspires him to follow Linda to Hollywood by verbally abusing him for moping around "like a jellyfish with the misery... because some slicker stole your gal!" Modern viewers may find much of this admittedly stereotypical material discomfiting, but there's not a trace of condescension or disrespect in Bing's performance.

"Holiday Inn" also can be viewed as a sort of rewrite of the fable of the tortoise and the hare, with Jim (who sings a song about the glories of being "laaazy") the slow-and-steady contender who eventually overcomes the frantic Ted, whose hyperkinesis becomes literally explosive during the "Let's Say It with Firecrackers" number. (Ted almost admits the story's connection to Aesop when he sarcastically comments that enlisting Jim's support is "going to be easy - like peeling a turtle.")

Near the end of the film, Sandrich does some peeling himself, removing the shell of artifice from his musical romantic comedy by following Jim to Hollywood, where the songwriter visits the set of a movie inspired by his Holiday Inn concept; of course, this set is also the set used for the sequences that take place at Jim's "real" Holiday Inn. Sandrich shows viewers the cameras and lights and the machines that drop fake snow upon the actors; inevitably, we're reminded that everything we've seen in the film was a Hollywood illusion. Perhaps this is why the sequence seems somewhat melancholy even though it establishes the expected happy ending (which the movie-within-the-movie's cynical director, played by Val Lewton regular James Bell, refers to as "the usual hoke"). When Jim reprises "White Christmas" on the set of the "fake" Holiday Inn, he seems almost like an animal in a zoo exhibit.

According to Barnes, "Holiday Inn" was "internationally the fifth-biggest moneymaker of 1942." (Its clunky 1954 revamp, "White Christmas," which teamed Crosby with Danny Kaye, was even more successful: It was the biggest hit of its year, Barnes says.) Sandrich's film was embraced by critics as well as audiences. "In a month without a holiday, 'Holiday Inn' offers a reason for celebration not printed in red ink on the calendar," wrote the New York Times in its August, 1942, review. A more succinct newspaper recommendation can be found in the movie itself, when Sandrich gives viewers a close-up of an entertainment column item that reads: "Holiday Inn: Opens tonight; don't ask why; just go and God bless America!" As young Vanderbilt says in the movie: "Yeah, man!"

Earlier today, I ran across this nice story in The Washington Post about the 1977 "Little Drummer Boy" duet with David Bowie and Bing Crosby. Since then, the tune hasn't left my head. I finally had to turn on some Internet radio before I lost my mind.

It turns out that Bowie didn't even want to sing the song, so the Christmas special's producers found a piano and hammered out from scratch the "Peace on Earth" counterpoint tune for the Thin White Duke. The rest is history. Check out the video here.

And in this case, credit goes to my CA colleague, Clay Bailey, who tipped off the Juvenile Court to some illegal doings by Germantown and Bartlett. And he did it in just one paragraph in a Sept. 13 story about three G'town teenagers who were vandalizing cars in Kimbrough Woods.

All three 17-year-olds - two students at Houston High, the other from Christian Brothers High - were given misdemeanor juvenile summonses and will be handled through Germantown's youth offenders program, where everything from service hours to retribution to letters of apology are possible as punishment for the crimes.

When Juvenile Court officials read this story, they realized that Germantown was dodging the Juvenile Court system - through which all juvenile offenders must be processed, by law. That led to Juvenile Court Judge Curtis Person's cease-and-desist letter to Germantown's youth services programs and a letter to Bartlet, which was committing the same offense.

Why Germantown and Bartlett authorities thought the law didn't apply to them is still under investigation.

The Guest Diva and metro columnist,
Wendi C. Thomas