– If you haven’t been to the buffet lunch at Leonard’s BBQ in a while, you may want to go soon… while you still have the chance. A reader told me there’s a For Sale sign in Leonard’s window. He says that the original owners of the Claridge House, at Main and Adams where Leonard’s is located, are selling off the remaining 5% of the building they still own since the Claridge went condo two years ago. Most likely, the reader speculates, someone will buy the restaurant space and offer Leonard’s a new lease, but at much higher rent, which could force them out.
Hope this rumor turns out to be false. Leonard’s is one of the best lunch buffets in town. For $10 (counting the price of a soft drink) you get ribs, shoulder, BBQ chicken, smoked sausage, spaghetti, BBQ beans, corn, bread, several other vegetables (which I can’t remember because I never get them – they take up room on the plate that could be occupied by meat), a salad bar (hey! another place downtown with a salad bar), a couple of desserts of the bread pudding/peach cobbler variety, and soft-serve ice cream.
If you haven’t been, you need to. It’s only open for lunch. If you live Downtown but work out east, it’s worth taking a long lunch and driving down here – just tell the office you have a doctor’s appointment or something. Or, better yet, call in sick for the entire day – you won’t feel like going back to work after lunch at Leonard’s anyway, believe me.
– Another reader e-mailed to let me know that you never have to pay to dial 411 again – Google is implementing a free 411 service that you can call from any phone. It’s in beta in their Google Labs, but it seems to be working pretty well so far. Here’s a link to the 411 on the 411.
Stuff like this makes me think… you remember when Microsoft used to come up with cool innovations like this (or, rather, buy them from people who came up with them)? Microsoft is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the 21st century.
Which reminds me, I downloaded OpenOffice 2.2, a free office suite that competes with Microsoft Office, and installed it this past weekend. I remember downloading OpenOffice 1 several years ago, and at the time it was a bare-bones word processor and spreadsheet that would get you buy if you were totally broke and couldn’t afford anything better. Well, how times have changed. This weekend I did some editing in OpenOffice Writer 2.2, and it’s every bit as good as Microsoft Word, if not better. And it has the ability to save and read files in Word format, as well as its native format. With OpenOffice and Google Docs available for free, I’m wondering why any individual would pay for MS Office anymore.
– And yet another reader sent me a link to this CA article. If you read all the way to the bottom you’ll see that Collervillians apparently don’t want people from Downtown Memphis in their neighborhood.
– It was good to meet fellow blogger Doc Hancock yesterday, while I was out on the University of Memphis campus looking for tube tops and old friends. It was also good to see Mike Hollihan, who writes the Half-Bakered blog, at Otherlands yesterday where he was playing a cool board game about the Cold War with Pete the Trivia Guy. “It’s about the Cold War from 1945 to 1989,” Pete told me. “One person plays the US and the other plays the Soviet Union.” The goal of the game is to set up spheres of influence so you control as much of the world as possible.
“Well, if you get control of Romania, be sure to send me some girls,” I told Pete.
Of course, we’ll see Pete tonight at 7 for trivia night. Hoping for a big Rapscallion win to add another $50 to our total before we have a party.
– Speaking of Romania: My new store The Romania Store is not doing well in the Google search rankings. Which is odd because a week after I opened my previous Amazon storefront, the Tube Top Boutique, and linked to it from my blog, it started getting 20-35 hits from Google search a day. The Romania store is getting nothing from Google – only direct links from my blog.
The difference is that the Tube Top Boutique is on its own domain and has its own hosting account. Whereas, for new online stores/sites, I decided I didn’t want to waste 7 bucks a month for a hosting account for each site – so I bought a domain/hosting account called “profprsites.com” (PROFPR was my old NTN trivia nickname at Sleep Out Louie’s). I figured I’d park all my new sites in subdirectories of profprsites, and then if a site became successful enough to justify it, I’d move it to its own domain and hosting. But apparently Google doesn’t like the fact that The Romania Store is in a subdirectory of another site. If anyone has search engine optimization experience and has suggestions for getting the store’s search rankings up, please let me know. I may just have to break down and but the store its own hosting.
All right. Time to get some work done!