Month: January 2011

Last night I attended the first night of a new poker league being hosted by “Poker Jon.” It consists of five poker games, held four nights a week. The locations are

• Silly Goose, Mondays 9 PM and 11:30 PM
• Bardog Tavern, Wednesdays 7:30 PM
• Bar None, Thursdays 7:30 PM
• Bayou Bar & Grill, Sundays 7:30 PM

Players will compete to accumulate points. You get 1 point for showing up, 1 point for bringing someone who has never been to league play before, 1 point for a 6th place finish, 2 points for 5th place, 3 points for 4th, 4 points for 3rd, 5 points for 2nd, and 6 points for finishing first in a league game. Points will be accumulated over 10 weeks. At the end of that period, the top players (top 9 I think he said) will be invited to the final table, where each player will get 20,000 chips and play will be a deep-stacked, slow-blind structure. Prizes are still being discussed, but there will definitely be a gold bracelet for the league champion. Other prizes will be awarded too – in the past, Poker Jon’s bars have given away prizes like a trip to Las Vegas and a cruise.

It’s a fun time with real felt, real chips and increasing blind structure, so come on out and play.

I busted out early in last night’s game… picked up a pair of pocket Jacks and moved all in. Unfortunately Mark from Marks Menus, sitting to my immediate left, had been dealt pocket Kings, and the flop, turn and river failed to produce the third Jack I needed. Oh well. I still enjoyed playing.

Edison Pena, the Chilean miner who loves Elvis Presley, is being treated like a king (should I say treated like The King?) by the Peabody. He’s staying in a luxury suite at the hotel, and he’s been given a $1,000 shopping spree at Lansky Bros., where Elvis bought his clothes.

One of the Memphis jobs accounts I follow on Twitter, @tmj_mem_jobs, tweeted a Service Express Supervisor job at the Westin this morning, if anyone is looking for a job Downtown.

News from Arkansas: Razorback quarterback Ryan Mallett is entering the NFL draft. Hog fans hoped he’d return for his senior year, but you certainly can’t blame the guy for choosing millions of dollars in salary over a fourth year at school. Congrats to Ryan and thanks for leading the Hogs to their first BCS bowl appearance.

Oh – one thing I forgot to mention about my visit to Bar None last night for poker – my Foursquare check-in there made me the new mayor, ousting former mayor the Nuh-Uh Girl. I should have plugged my iPhone into the bar’s speakers and played the Memphis Tigers fight song to celebrate.

Not sure what to do this evening… boring early January night. May just stay home. Happy weekend everyone.

Lately I’ve been working with QR codes a lot at work. They’re the two-dimensional barcodes that can be scanned with a smartphone camera. They can link to web content, text, an e-mail address, or a phone number. They’re a convenient way to tell mobile users, “Go here for additional information.”

As I was working with them, I had a cool idea… what if, in the future, beer bottles had QR codes printed on the label? You could scan the QR code and it would pull up a page explaining how the beer was brewed, what kinds of hops were used, IBU measurement, that kind of thing. Probably not something that would ever be needed on bottles of Bud Light, but for beer geeks who drink craft beers, it would be way cool.

Wow, the Tiger game last night was a disaster. I’ll repeat a comment I made on Twitter last night: Look at the bright side. Maybe we’ll get a rematch against the Vols in the first round of the NIT.

Lots of Pastner-bashing this morning. I’m sure early in the careers of Adolph Rupp, Eddie Sutton, Bob Knight, etc. they all had a game where they coached so badly that half the town was calling for their resignation. Agreed, Coach P needs to take a hard look at what he did wrong last night, but the city of Memphis needs to stand by its coach.

(Edit: I had a paragraph here blasting Local Gastropub for allowing “Rocky Top” to be played on their jukebox post-game, but I’ve since learned it was played on an iPhone. Assuming they didn’t provide amplification to said iPhone, no hard feelings toward them. Sorry for the misunderstanding.)

According to the MemphisWeather.net blog, we have the possibility of what I call a “just-right” amount of snow Sunday night into Monday. A just-right amount of snow is enough to close most office buildings for the day, but not enough that the bars close.

If you have MLK Day (Monday, January 17) off and are looking for somewhere to volunteer, here’s a good opportunity with MIFA.

The band at the Flying Saucer tonight is called “Lamar Ave. Love.” I know nothing about them, but based on name alone I think I want to see them.

That’s all for now… off to do a little shopping in my lunch break.

A couple of weeks ago, Bar None opened. Maybe you went by. Maybe you didn’t make it opening weekend but got to their place (the former Circa location) later. And maybe you saw “haricot verts” as a side.

And maybe you wondered, “WTF is ‘haricot verts?'”

Maybe you were scared to order the haricot verts.

I didn’t know either, and I felt overcome with trepidation. So I looked it up on Wikipedia.

Haricot verts = green beans.

So if you’re scared of green beans, don’t order them. If not, no harm no foul.

Now you know. I have to give credit where credit is due. The green beans pictured herein, er, haricot verts, were not photographed at Bar None. I copied/stole the image, which was protected under the GNU Public License (GPL). I’ve never understood the GPL but it’s mostly about giving credit where credit is due. With that in mind, credit to Wikipedia and also to whoever the fuck uploaded this fucking image to Wikipedia for the photo. I hope that’s within the spirit if not the letter of the GPL.

Drunk. Good night.

Weird… I’ve had very little news to post the past two weeks or so, and now today is so newsy that I had to bust out a second “update” post. Here goes:

Kind of a unique thing going on at Escape Alley Sundry Friday night from 7-9: “Memphis Vic” will spin classic vinyl from the Sun Studio era. Vic works at Sun and loves the music. Sounds like a chance to experience Memphis’ music heritage at its finest. The venue is kid-friendly and does not allow smoking. (They do have beer, though, including PBR.)

When the Chilean miners were being rescued last fall, you probably heard that one of them was a huge Elvis fan, and he entertained his fellow miners with Elvis songs. That miner, Edison Pena, will be the Peabody’s honorary Duckmaster Friday at 5. Come out and see him; maybe he’ll sing you a song!

South of Beale’s new winter menu has been posted to Marks Menus, with pics. View it here.

The Majestic Grille is inviting its customers to vote on their favorite Classic Cocktail. Cocktails include Majestic Manhattan, Strawberry Basil Martini, Berries & Cream Martini, Tangerine Drop Martini, Majestic Irish Coffee. The winning cocktail will be on sale for $5 the week of January 23-29, with the winner announced the morning of the 23rd. Vote on their Facebook page, or on Twitter at @MajesticGrille. I have a favorite but I guess I shouldn’t skew the voting by announcing it here. This is part of a 5-month-long celebration leading up to their 5th anniversary in May.

Stuff is on sale at Shelton Clothiers and Christine by Shelton Clothiers. Men’s suits and sport coats are 30-50% off, and all men’s and ladies’ fall and winter clothing is 50% off. It will still be cold outside for another of couple of months, so plenty of time to wear what you buy. (Although, as far as I’m concerned, the sooner tube top season gets here the better.)

Undecided where to watch the (21) Memphis vs. (unranked) UT game tonight… Saucer is where I’m most comfortable but I’ve heard they’re not turning on the sound… Max’s is a bit cold to walk when it’s this cold… Local will have it on the big screen but there are too many UT fans there… maybe Silly Goose… or maybe I’ll just deal with the lack of sound at the Saucer. Anyway, I have to hours to kill before the game comes on, and what better way to kill those hours than beer? Over and out.

The South Main Association has announced their January meeting. It will be next Tuesday, January 14, at Bar None. It will be an important meeting for two reasons: One, there will be a vote on the proposed slate of 2011 board members. Two, Center City Commission president Paul Morris will deliver the annual “state of Downtown” address. Social at 6, meeting at 6:30. Food by Bar None and happy hour prices.

A&R Bar-B-Q at Third and Court has announced they will start doing “Down Home Sundays” for the month of January. They will be open from noon to 6 and will have baked chicken, fried corn, fried chicken, turnip greens, BBQ ribs, green beans, catfish, mac & cheese, cornbread, cornbread, rolls, candied yams, and all kinds of desserts.

The Flying Saucer is once again giving away a Fat Tire bike on Fat Tuesday. Win the bike pictured below:

Fat Tire will be the Fire Sale every Tuesday between now and Fat Tuesday, March 8. Drink Fat Tires to get entries to win the bike. Be sure they actually record your entry (usually they have you sign your name on a slip of paper, or that’s what they did last year, anyway) to make sure it counts. You have to be present on Fat Tuesday for the drawing to win the bike.

For those of you who use WordPress to blog or as a CMS, there’s a meetup tomorrow night at Republic Coffee. I really need to attend one of these sometime.

Well, I screwed up all over the place in a recent post. I reported that the building at 115 Union is being renovated into apartments, office and retail space, and hopefully Rio Loco and Sawaddii would get a new neighbor on the ground floor soon. I failed to remember that Sawaddii closed over a year ago and is now Bangkok Alley. Also, Air Traffic Mike corrected me about that being the old Union Jax space – that turned into Buckley’s and then Rio Loco. According to ATM, Blue Light Studio was the last business to occupy the ground floor of 115 Union. Oops. Sorry.

I made a beer discovery last night, as I walked down South Main to watch the Sugar Bowl at a friend’s condo. Not wanting to be “that guy” who shows up empty-handed and then drinks everyone else’s beer all night, I stopped at Frank’s to buy a six-pack. I bought Sea Dog Apricot Wheat, having never seen it before. At the watch party we had Indian food – chicken curry and spicy Indian potatoes – and the apricot beer was excellent with it! A perfect match.

Thanks to my friends Stevie G and Sarah for opening up their place for us. Gotta love Stevie G – he yells for the Hogs even louder than I do, and he too owns a vintage ’70s-’80s Hog Hat. Disappointing game. Arkansas receivers really need to learn how to catch a football.

Tonight it’s the (21) Memphis vs. (unranked) UT game at 8:00. It’s an away game, so I’ll be out at one of the bars watching. It will be the last appearance for the Bruchebag for a while, as he has to sit out the next 8 games as mandated by the SEC. Go Tigers! Let’s hand Pearl one more “L” on his way out.

It’s time to CALL THOSE HOGS!!! Ryan Mallett and the Arkansas Razorbacks play Ohio State in the Sugar Bowl tonight at 7:30. Attn trivia team: I’ll be absent tonight, as I will be watching the game with other Hog fans.

Sports writer Doc Hancock wrote a good analysis of how the Razorbacks are viewed nationally. They need to step it up. If Mallett and our defense play like we did against LSU, then we’ll beat Ohio State. If we get sloppy as we did in the fourth quarter vs. Bama, then we’ll continue to be seen as a second-tier football school and it will be our own fault.

If you’re on Twitter this afternoon and are mentioning the game, be sure to mention @ArkRazorbacks and use the #WPS (Woooo Pig Sooiee) hashtag. We’re trying to get the Hogs to become a trending topic today.

In Downtown news today: After 40 years in Overton Square, Paulette’s has announced that it is moving to Harbor Town. The old building became too costly to repair. Paulette’s will take a space inside the River Inn, where it will have access to additional space for large banquets. Once they open, they’ll add daily breakfast to their current lunch, dinner and weekend brunch hours. Expected opening date is March 1.

Deadline to get your Winter Warmer tickets before the price goes up has been extended to 10 PM Thursday night, January 6.

Stuff going on tonight: Grizzlies vs. Oklahoma City Thunder at the FedExForum at 7; the YMCA is offering the first in a series of foxtrot lessons that will be held every Tuesday and Thursday in January (8 PM, $25 for members, $50 nonmembers); trivia night at the Flying Saucer at 7; pint night at Bardog Tavern from 7 to 3, all pints $3; Kirk Smithhart at Bar None, 8 PM. If you’re looking for a place to watch the Sugar Bowl, Max’s Sports Bar on GE Patterson would be a good call – 10 TVs, $2.50 PBR and Max is a Razorback fan.

One quick piece of Downtown news before I head out for the evening… The Memphis Business Journal reports that construction is ready to move forward at 115 Union. That’s the building next to Sawaddii and Rio Loco, once the home of Union Jax pub which unfortunately closed before I moved down here. It’s been vacant for quite a while. In 2008 a plan was submitted to refurbish it into 18 apartments on the upper floor, office space on the second floor, and retail on the ground floor. However, the building’s design was later changed, and it had to be re-submitted to make sure it met historic preservation standards. That step is now complete. Yay for more apartments Downtown, and hopefully a cool new restaurant or store will locate on the ground level.

All right, time to go to the bar for a celebratory beer. What am I celebrating? The neighbors next door with the tiny little dogs that barked every morning at 6 AM moved out last weekend! Finally, I am going to start getting full nights’ sleep again. My regrets to whomever finds themselves living next to those barky little shitdogs. I’ll be celebrating at Pint Nite at the Saucer, with $3 draft pints. Other options tonight include trivia at Huey’s (9 PM) and I think the Downtown Monkey still does trivia at 8; poker at the Silly Goose at 9; half price pizza and wine at Spindini; and, of course, Stanford and Virginia Tech play tonight at the Orange Bowl, so it’s a good night to mosey on down to your favorite watering hole and watch the game. The first week of January through St. Patrick’s Day weekend is the slow season for area restaurants and bars, so let’s get out there and support locally-owned businesses that take such good care of us all year.

If you’re planning on going to the Winter Warmer Brewfest but you haven’t bought your tickets yet, you might want to get it done today or tomorrow. The tickets, currently priced at $33, go up to $36 on Wednesday. You can buy tickets on their website or at the Downtown Blue Monkey.

The brewfest is on Saturday, January 15 at Central Station from 4:00-7:30 PM.

For the past month I’ve written about Beerby, the social network where you can check in the beers you’re drinking, see what beers your friends are drinking, and earn “badgers” for certain beer-drinking accomplishments. Last night, I was reading through Twitter and discovered that there’s a similar social network for people who love tea.

It’s called Steepster. On this network, you can see what teas your friends are drinking and get recommendations from them. You can also write a tea journal. You can view a map on their website of places to drink tea near your current location. You can connect your Steepster account to Facebook and Twitter and broadcast your teas on those networks.

It’s different from Beerby in that there’s no smartphone app, at least that I could find – you manage your account and record your teas via the Web.

Probably not a network I’ll ever join, but I thought it might be of interest to some of you.

Credit for finding this, by the way, goes to an account I follow on Twitter, @abbisiler. I’ve never met her in person but she runs a social media business, Local2Social, in eastern Arkansas. I think I started following her when I missed BarCamp Memphis but was using Twitter to keep up with what was going on there.

In other news: Thanks to the people who invited me to the house party on Main last night. Had a good time, and what a cool apartment on Main.

Up early… my presence has been requested at brunch at the Majestic Grille, as we say goodbye to a friend whose job is moving to another city. Future Sunday Fun Days will be less fun without him here.

In early 2006, an important part of the week for our Sunday brunch crew was sifting through the electronics ads in the Sunday paper. John D, Mikey, Otto and I and whoever else was part of the crew at the time would carefully read the Best Buy, Target and Circuit City ads. Now and then I’d find an especially good deal on a laptop or MP3 player or USB drive, and since I was already writing this blog I’d post a “Deal of the Week.”

After I’d been doing it about a month, I got an e-mail from the Commercial Appeal. They were expanding what they were doing with blogging, and wanted to bring “Deal of the Week” to their site. So we struck an agreement. The money I’d be getting ($10 a week) was inconsequential – for me the big thing was that I could tell people I was writing for the CA! The largest print publication in town! I’d hit the big time. After a couple of years of blogging, I thought, I’d gone legit.

So, for most of 2006, I took my laptop to Sleep Out Louie’s every Sunday, sifted through the ads, and posted a deal. Meanwhile, I continued to write my personal blog, the one you’re reading now, as my own project.

As the year went on, the Deals became just another thing I had to get done on Sunday, and the glamour of writing for a big, important media corporation kind of wore off. On the other hand, I was having a lot of fun writing this blog. My readership went from about 100 a day at the beginning of 2006 to 600-700 by the end of the year (and almost none of it was referral traffic from Deal of the Week). I found out that the Flyer was reading my blog for story ideas. I found out that people at the Center City Commission read my blog. When I complained about crime Downtown, people listened and things eventually got done. This blog started showing up very high in Google results for searches on many Downtown businesses. I placed in the Flyer’s Best of Memphis poll for the first time that year, for this blog, not Deal of the Week. I found that I had a voice, and it was my voice, not my identity as a writer for someone else.

In December 2006 I notified the CA that I was quitting. I didn’t need it anymore.

Why am I bringing this up now?

In the past couple of months, I’ve found some very good Twitter accounts to follow. They’ve tweeted stuff going on in Memphis that would have otherwise missed my radar. Through their retweets I found even more good Twitter accounts. I really benefited, both in terms of stuff to do personally and for content on my blog, for having followed them.

Last night I met the owner of one of those accounts, and found out that her tweets had actually been an audition, sort of an online job interview. The CA had told her, and several others, to tweet for a month, and if the CA liked what it saw, they’d be hired.

The person I talked to last night ended up not getting the job. However, it does not change the fact that she was tweeting EXCELLENT stuff. I want to encourage her, and others like her, to keep it going. Build your own brand and don’t worry about the CA. You’re building an identity. You’re building an asset. It’s frustrating sometimes that it’s not an asset convertible to a full-time paycheck, but it’s still an asset that will benefit you in unknown ways down the road.

Besides, there are a lot of advantages to being independent. I don’t have to get my work approved by a copy editor. If a local business screws up, I can rant on them without being worried about offending an advertiser. I can post sidebar links to my Amazon stores, which are starting to make a significant bit of money. I don’t drop the f-bomb much on this blog anymore, but when I feel it’s necessary I can and I will. I can devote an entire month of posts to the subject of tube tops. I can help a local ad agency create a buzz about a fake bath house supposedly to be located Downtown.

So, in summary, to those Twitterers to whom I’m referring: Keep it up. Don’t give up just because you didn’t get the job you were trying for. You’ve built a valuable asset. Keep going. Keep adding value, and unexpected opportunities will come your way.