Kanye karate-chopped by The King!

Guess what, Kanye? You ain't The King.

At best, you're an inflamed boil on the buttocks of society. And that's being charitable.

Elvis fans and people of goodwill everywhere breathed a sigh of relief yesterday when Lisa Marie Presley, E's daughter and executor of his estate, dispelled a rumor that Graceland is for sale in a USA Today article.

Earlier this summer, a British tabloid rag reported that West, best known for making an ass of himself at every opportunity, was interested in purchasing the Memphis mansion for (an expression I hate) his "baby mama" Kim Kardashian (another name I wish I had never heard).

Forget it. These gates are closed to you, Kanye.

"Sometimes there are rumors about it (Graceland) being sold," Presley told USA Today, "and that is NEVER going to happen. There's always a rumor. It is NOT getting sold. Graceland was given to me and will always be mine and then passed to my children," she says. "It will never be sold."

Thank God and thankyouverymuch!

I take great comfort in knowing that my nieces and godsons will still be listening to The King when Kanye is reduced to the ash heap of cultural irrelevance.

Graceland has also been named the Best Iconic American Attraction in the 10Best Readers' Choice contest, topping the Grand Canyon, the Statue of Liberty and The White House.

Long live The King!

'Nightwoods' worth a look

Had something of a "circle of life" moment over the weekend, at least in a literary sense.

Read Charles Frazier's new novel, "Nightwoods," while enjoying R&R out of town at the lake for the final trip of the season.

(P.S. I am still thawing out. Thirty-degree mornings will do that to you in lieu of central heat. But I digress.)

I flashed back to spring 1998 -- incredible as it seems, 13 1/2 years ago -- when I spent a week at the lake reading Frazier's breakout first novel, "Cold Mountain." I found the book by chance, before the hype. Back then I used to read USA Today while on campus at UT. A reviewer had raved. So, I put it on my Christmas list and saved it for spring break.

"Cold Mountain" was one of the first books I ever read for pleasure that I had to fight with. ("For Whom the Bell Tolls" is the other that comes to mind.) I needed a dictionary through half of it, looking up words on the internet in those quaint dial-up days.

Even though I thought Frazier was hitting the reader over the head with the Homeric parallels, I loved "Cold Mountain," though he tended to write like Thomas Wolfe on speed.

Over the weekend I finished Frazier's latest. Compared to "Cold Mountain," "Nightwoods" is downright slim at 250 pages. Unlike his Civil War-era novel and his somewhat disappointing follow-up, "Thirteen Moons" (to which I'm going to give another chance later this year), "Nightwoods" is set in the 20th century. Sometime in the early '60.

It focuses on Luce, short for Lucinda, who has been beaten down by small-town life and a traumatizing event from early adulthood. Her mother left her years ago, her father is a distant, deadbeat deputy, and her sister has just been murdered.

Luce is living a hermit's existence as the caretaker of a rundown, shutdown lake resort. It gets lonely, the 3 a.m. kind of lonely, but she has her freedom and the glow of the late night radio. That life is shattered when the state shows up with her dead sister's kids in tow.

She gets another unexpected guest in the person of the grandson of the guy who owned the resort. It's his inheritance and he's thinking of selling. But he does a double take when he sees Luce, suddenly remembering the teenage girl at a swimming pool who briefly but brightly stirred his pubescent soul.

Meanwhile, her sister's husband, who is also her sister's killer, shows up, thinking Luce might have some cash he thinks should be his. Then he learns the kids are around, too. Can't leave any witnesses.

The last thing I was expecting from Charles Frazier was a page-turner, but that's what he delivers with "Nightwoods," in the best sense of what that means. He reels in his literary flourishes long enough to craft a taut little thriller. Frazier fans will find plenty to cheer, as will any newbies.

I enjoyed spending the better part of Saturday with him, even if it also stirred up memories of a long-gone spring, and a novel I enjoyed a little better than this one.

'McPaper' still gets it...

Stumbled across a copy of Peter Prichard's "The Making of McPaper," a 1987 look at the founding and early days of USA TODAY. Read it a couple of weekends ago and had a good time.

Which wasn't a surprise. I've always enjoyed the newspaper once derided as "McPaper." Founder Al Neuharth just seemed to "get it." He read the surveys that said readers rarely made the "jump" whenever a front page story was tagged to an inside page. So he forced his writers to write concisely. But he also made sure they jammed the stories full of information.

OK, so maybe the graphs are basically pointless, but USA TODAY was the perfect paper for the TV generation. Heck, Neuharth even had his circulation guys design USA TODAY paper boxes to look like TV sets.

I made it a habit to read the paper when I was in college. You could get it anywhere on the UT campus in those days. It was always a quick, fun read. Plus, it gave you a nice summary of the news in the days before the internet really got going.

The other day I picked up a copy of USA TODAY at the gas station. And, I noticed what I thought was a mistake.

In a story about Betty Ford's funeral, the writer appeared to be saying that Mrs. Ford's husband, former president Gerald Ford, died in 2007. I remembered that he'd died in December 2006, so I sent an email to the corrections editor.

About a day or so later, I got a personal response from somebody on the news staff saying that the writer had constructed an awkward sentence, thereby "creating" an error. She thanked me for the email and said a clarification would run in Friday's edition. Sure enough, it did.

Not only was I impressed with the newspaper's commitment to accuracy, but I was blown away by the personal response. Over the years I've sent letters to reporters, editors and writers at newspapers of much less reputation and significance than USA TODAY -- and never heard a peep! And yet, despite all the correspondence Gannett's national newspaper must receive daily, here came the note.

Quality customer service is hard to find. Getting that email made me feel good about forking out a buck to spend valuable time with the USA TODAY. The paper's smartphone app is the best one of its kind. Its website has gone interactive with polls, video, bells and whistles. I hear its iPad version is pretty cool, too.

After all these years, McPaper still gets it.

UPDATE: After I posted this blog, USA TODAY's social media team found it on Twitter and responded with thanks and kind words. USA TODAY, you have a reader for life! As I said in the tweet, reading your paper is like spending time with an old friend.