Month: May 2007

Al Gore’s new book The Assault on Reason is available today. In the book Gore discusses how the 30-second television spot has become the most powerful force shaping public opinion. That’s not a good thing, he explains, given that the current administration seems to be less interested than any previous one in sharing the complete truth with the public.

Gore summarizes how we got to this point, and he makes the reader more aware of the forces at work shaping public thought. He goes on to explain what we can do, individually and as the American public, to perform a reality check on ourselves.

Click the link below to order it from Amazon at 40% off the retail price.

Got drunk to-go food from The Flying Fish tonight, and while I was waiting I snapped a pic of their board listing their specials. So here’s how to get some cheap food at the Fish:

The Friday deal (2 lb. of snow crabs) is particularly good, that’s like $8 off.

I got the grilled salmon plate to go. When it came out I shook habanero sauce and green sauce all over it and then cut it all up (salmon, beans, rice, zucchini, squash, pico de gallo) and mixed it all together with the hot sauces all over it. You gotta try it that way. Don’t be scared of the hot sauce. In 2002-03 there was a bar at the corner of Fourth and Gayoso that had “Hot Fish and Cold Forty Fridays.” So, see, put hot sauce on your salmon and you’ll be respecting your Downtown heritage. Jack’s at Main and Jefferson has 40s if you want to go even more old-school than I did.

There’s a major event downtown tomorrow (Tuesday) night – so major that I’m NOT going to blog it, for fear that my own readers might prevent me from getting in. If you want to know what’s going on e-mail me.

This morning, I surfed the Memphis Daily News site and came across an interesting article: The Daily News is going green. That means that they committed to buy 25 “blocks” a month of green power, which is power from renewable energy sources such as solar energy, wind power, and methane gas. “Green” power sources do not produce the emissions associated with traditional fossil fuels.

Residential customers can buy “blocks” of power as well. Each block costs only $4, added to your MLGW bill as a line item. Using one block of green energy per month over the course of a year will produce environmental savings equivalent to recycling 7,661 cans, planting half an acre of trees, recycling half a ton of newspaper, or not driving a car for 2 months. Signing up to buy blocks of power takes about 1 minute to do online – here’s the link to more info and to sign up.

This morning I got online and signed up to buy a block of power a month. They say each block delivers 150 kilowatt hours, which is about 10-12% of a home’s average monthly power consumption. Since I live in an apartment (and therefore have lower bills) I just signed up for one block, but may increase it in the future. As you can see above, even one block makes a tremendous difference.

So, I’d like to invite all my readers to sign up for the program as well. Working together we can fight back against global warming. If you decide to sign up, send me an e-mail after you do (paul.ryburn@gmail.com) and tell me how many blocks you bought… I’m just curious to see how much of a difference this blog can make.

I’d be pleased to see other Memphis bloggers take this idea and run with it as well.

Going to delay my one remaining BBQ Fest post for a day… this is more important.

This year’s BBQ Fest pics are ready! Here’s the link to the Picasa photo album. 255 pics of the team and the festival.

A few random pics:

Me leaning against a post in the booth and drinking a beer. Definitely not my first beer.

Members of the Ques Brothers representing at the awards ceremony. I stayed behind to watch the booth, but I sent my camera to the awards with Mikey the Camera Nazi.

No caption necessary.

A lot of beautiful girls walked past our booth and this definitely wasn’t one of them.

This was a problem. This sign was on the path to our tent (S 158), but you’d never know it because it indicates that only hog (H) teams are straight ahead. The first day, I stumbled upon our booth quite by accident, thinking I was still a couple of blocks away. Last night, some of my invited guests told me they walked around for close to an hour before they found our booth. Memphis in May needs to improve the accuracy of their signage.

Team leader Chuck, who celebrated his 34th birthday Friday. (Note: The previous sentence may contain some factual inaccuracies)

As always, you can get full coverage of the weekend’s activities – and of the Ques Brothers in particular – on Skippy Blank’s excellent blog on the Commercial Appeal’s website.

The results were posted last night and our shoulder competition team The Ques Brothers finished 12th out of 72 teams. That’s a very good result for a first-year team, and better yet, the cooks know what they need to change to get better scores next year. Last night as the event was wrapping up, everyone was saying how we had formed the perfect team – people who know how to cook, people who know how to construct, people who know how to party, and everyone gets along well. This looks to be a team that will be around for years to come and will hopefully bring home some top-10 trophies.

A couple of videos:

This one was taken about 2:30 PM Thursday afternoon when not many people were around. It’s just a quick tour of all areas of the booth. Nothing real special here, just a memory of our booth for those of us who were on the team. It’s also a good introduction of what a BBQ booth (correction: one of the best BBQ booths) looks like, for those who have never attended the festival.

This is the second video, taken about 7 PM Thursday night after the park got busy.

I was able to edit and upload all the photos in about an hour using Google Picasa, which is part of the Google Pack of free software. Last year, using Paint Shop Pro and Coppermine, it took me 3 times as long to edit and upload half as many pictures.

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Got one more post to come – observations on how to attract lots of hot women to your BBQ Fest booth. That one will probably be ready tomorrow.

Hope all the links work. Enjoy!

Thaddeus Matthews has a new post about Ophelia Ford that is absolutely hilarious. Earlier this week, she was taken to the hospital when she fell off a barstool at a hotel bar in Nashville. She claimed later in an interview that she was at the bar to get soup. Um, yeah, okay. Just the picture Thad posted of “Cream of Ophelia Soup” is reason enough to check it out.

Just checked the camera and found that Thursday-Friday I took an additional 126 photos, as well as 2 videos of the booth. I’ll add those to the photo album to be created Sunday or sometime thereafter. A few preview pics:

I’m inviting this person to join our trivia team. My T-shirt, by the way, reads “I LOVE ROMANIAN GIRLS.”

Speaking of trivia, here’s the trivia master himself, Pete.

Josh and Mikey working security at the front of our booth.

Our pork shoulder, which hopefully will win us a World championship this afternoon.

Night-vision shot from the rooftop deck of our booth.

The judges will come by our booth sometime between 11 and 12 to inspect our pork shoulder this morning. Since I don’t know a thing about cooking, I’m staying out of the booth until afternoon.

I think I’ve finally figured out where I can best contribute to the team in future years. I definitely should not be allowed anywhere near the cooker. I’m too lazy to help build the booth. My disdain for corporate America makes me a poor choice to set up hospitality for the sponsor (although, I will say once again that our sponsor Terex has been awesome to work with). My role, as I see it in future years, will be advising the team on how to attract the right kind of booth visitors (i.e. hot girls). I see a lot of elements – booth design, booth location, lighting, music, distribution of booth invitations – that contribute toward this goal. Once the festival is over I’ll type up my observations on this subject in a post. Maybe it’ll help other teams too.

I just realized I did something DUMB last night though… Friday was payday and I stuck my paycheck (for the past two weeks’ work) in my wallet, forgot about it, and walked all over BBQ Fest with it on me.

High point of the evening last night: Hanging out on the rooftop deck with my friends Shane, Leigh, Todd, Ed, and Vivian. Great night.

I’m still exhausted but I feel a lot better than the past two mornings, probably because I got to sleep until a reasonable hour for a change, without the demands of the rat race interrupting my BBQ and sleep schedules. I’ll probably stop by the Saucer to drink a beer and say hello to my waitresses around noon, then head down to the festival after that. It’s gonna be a beautiful day, so come on down!

Best random conversation I had last night at BBQ Fest: A woman told me that she and some friends were walking around in the area of Fourth and Beale when a homeless man approached. He asked for money and proudly told them, “I’m Downtown’s #1 homeless person.”

I know the Memphis Business Journal does their Top 40 Under 40 voting, but I must have missed the poll for #1 Homeless Person. Then again, I don’t subscribe to the print MBJ, I just read the online version, so it’s possible I missed it.

Hmmm…. last week a reader sent me info on how to do polls within a blog… one of these days maybe I should do a vote for #1 homeless person right here. After all, where would there be a more appropriate place to cast such a ballot?

And this may bias the proceedings if I ever do, but my vote would be for Scratchy.

More BBQ Fest notes and pics to come.

– We’ll start with a few items I noticed as I was flipping through the current issue of the Memphis Flyer. Styx and Foreigner are playing Mud Island on June 22, and tickets went on sale this morning. They’re available through Ticketmaster so you’ll no doubt have to pay a hefty convenience fee if you decide to go.

– I see that the Charlie Wood Trio will be playing the Madison rooftop for next Thursday, May 24’s party. Downtowners used to be able to listen to the smooth, mellow sounds of Charlie Wood anytime – he had a regular nightly gig at King’s Palace for years. He gave it up to move on to other projects though, so this is a rare chance to catch Charlie without leaving the 38103 zip code.

– As i perused the real estate listings in the Flyer, I came across what appears to be a great deal on a house in Cooper-Young… a 2 BR, 2BA house with central heat and air at 2044 Elzey for $87,500. You almost never see a house in probably the most desirable quadrant of CY for under six figures, especially one that doesn’t say anything about being a fixer-upper. So I MapQuested it and found that the location is either great or lousy, depending on how you look at it. It’s great because you’re about a 4-block walk away from Celtic Crossing, Cafe Ole, the Young Avenue Deli, Dish, Beauty Shop and all of CY’s other hotspots. It’s lousy because 2044 Elzey appears to be less than half a block from the train tracks. So this definitely isn’t a house to buy if you want quiet. But if you can handle a little noise, might be worth investigating – you’re not going to see a bargain like this in CY very often.

– BBQ Fest report: By mid-afternoon yesterday I felt like my old self again, and walked down to the tent. Hung out on the rooftop deck with Mikey and Clay for about an hour, then walked around the park and took pics of the most interesting tents. Made a quick trip to the Saucer to hand out some wristbands for access to our booth, then headed back. Last night was “Sponsor Night” so we had guests from Terex in the booth for much of the evening, where they enjoyed Willie’s smoked chicken, ribs, and beef brisket. About 9:30 my body just gave out – I just got a sense of, “you better get home right now or you’re going to be so exhausted that you have to call in sick again.” So I actually did the responsible thing and walked home. Hard to believe, right? I hated it that I left so early, since I had invited a lot of VIP guests (meaning: hot girls) to the booth, and some of them surely showed up after I left.

Willie’s pulling the first of the pork shoulder off the grill for lunch at the booth, and I hate it that I won’t be there… but I can’t make it until after work.

CA writer Skippy Blank continues to do his usual excellent job blogging about our booth. The guy definitely has a way with words.

Skippy also snapped a pic of me in my new T-shirt, which I’ll post later this weekend. Let’s just say it’s a very appropriate shirt for me to have on, although it has little to do with this year’s Memphis in May theme of Spain.

I’ll be down there a little after 5, and tonight I will have enough energy to keep going until the park closes. Happy BBQ Fest weekend everyone.

In the news this week: State Senator Ophelia Ford went off on a wild, bizarre off-topic rant during a Department of Child Protective Services hearing. She asked a lot of irrelevant questions about death certificates, and continued to badger the DCS officials even after they told her several times that they have nothing to do with that matter. Here’s a link to the video.

The next day she was hospitalized. Here’s a story about it from WMC TV-5. The story did not specify the exact nature of Ophelia’s illness, but local political blogger Thaddeus Matthews has done some speculating on that matter.

Ophelia was in the news earlier this year for missing 13 of the first 24 session days of the state Senate.

If you live Downtown, you’re in District 29 and Ophelia is YOUR state Senator. Are you happy with the job she’s doing?

If you want to find out what my BBQ team is up to, check the Commerical Appeal… writer “Skippy” Blank is on our team.

When I got off work and got to the tent yesterday, I found out we had received front-page coverage in one of the CA sections. Skippy wrote an excellent article explaining how the team was formed, how we got corporate sponsorship, budgeting for a BBQ team, selecting the type of meat to cook, and so on. If you’ve always wondered how teams get put together for BBQ Fest, this will lay it all out for you.

Skippy is also writing a BBQ blog with ongoing coverage of our team’s progress. Man… he is just a fantastic writer. I had originally planned to do day-by-day coverage like he’s doing, but there’s no need. Skippy’s got it covered.

I also have to pay a couple of compliments to the team. When I joined a team that was thrown together at the last minute, I did it for the prestige of being on a BBQ team and figured I’d get average food and a crappy shirt. What I got instead was incredibly good food and the best BBQ Fest team shirt I’ve ever seen. Grillmaster Willie served us beef brisket, smoked chicken, and ribs last night, and the man clearly knows what he’s doing with that smoker. Can’t wait to taste what he does with pork shoulder, which is our team’s category in the competition.

A few pics:

This is the front of our booth, with our corporate sponsor Terex prominently featured.

The view from our booth’s upper deck

First fruits from the grill: beef brisket.

Got 54 pics total, thanks in part to Mikey the Camera Nazi doing his job. I can’t believe I didn’t get one single pic of the back of the shirt though. Since the featured country is Spain, we have a print of a “Pigasso” on the back.

Sometime this weekend I’m going to put my camera in video mode and just walk around the booth. Still shots cannot possibly do our booth justice.

One of my blog’s regular readers told me that she bought two new tube tops in preparation for Tube Top Month, which is now only two weeks away. Glad to see this blog is making a difference.

Unfortunately I wore myself out last night and had to call in sick to work this morning. I had every intention of following Philip’s advice to “pace yourself” but that plan got flushed down the toilet as soon as I got there. I feel like some of Terex’s dirt-moving equipment ran over me a few times. Going to take some aspirin and go back to bed in a few minutes.

My clothes smell like BBQ. It’s fantastic.