Month: January 2012

Started the day at the Majestic Grille for brunch. This legal Tennessee moonshine was sitting on the shelf and I speculated whether it was a call to 1-800-BAD-IDEA. Air Traffic Mike reminded me that, other than a period last year when the Downtown Monkey did karaoke, he had a trademark on that phone number. I decided to leave the moonshine for another day.

Next stop was the Flying Saucer. They had the NFL playoffs on with sound.

Don’t eat the yellow snow. Rogue Yellow Snow IPA. Very hoppy.

Blind Bear opened at 3 for “Hung Over Like a Bear” brunch. This is their sausage and egg burrito.

The Memphis Jazz Orchestra conducts their weekly rehearsal every Sunday night at Alfred’s from 6 to 9. This is probably the best time of the week to be in Alfred’s and is a good way to chill out and slow down as the week ends. Unfortunately chilling out was not in the cards for us…

Professional dancer BBQ Steve shows the Mad Hatter a few new moves.

Why is Joe racking? Because the Mad Hatter beat him at pool.

Photo of me with the Hatter. She had to be taught to position the PBR logo toward the camera. Also, she just (forbidden verb)ed a pickle, where (forbidden verb) is a proper noun which among Downtowners means “to eat off other people’s plates.”

Bums workin’ it on Beale Street

The Hatter at the Absinthe Room

So about 10:30 the idea came up to do a venue change to the Saucer.

“Is the Saucer a dance club?” asked the Mad Hatter.

“Yes,” I replied. Here’s a pic of the Hatter tearing up the dance floor of Club Saucer with Joe. Thanks to Cayla for putting up with us for the last hour of her shift.

Anchor Liberty is the $3 Fire Sale.

One of the most-asked questions at Downtown bars is “What channel are the Grizzlies (or Tigers) on?” I’ve watched bartenders and managers spend 5 minutes or more flipping through channel guides, trying to find Memphis games.

Well, now there’s an easy way to get an answer to that question. Follow @MemphisOnTV on Twitter. They tweet the channel and time that local teams will appear on. It’s powered by MemphiSport, who you can follow on Twitter at @MemphiSport and who you can listen to live every Saturday from 11 AM-1 PM on AM 560. Very nice use of a niche Twitter account, and it reminds me of what I do with @firesale. Twitter is the Swiss Army knife of the Internet.

Speaking of sports on TV: Last night I went to the Flying Saucer, and they had the NFL playoffs on, with sound, on the big screen. They’ve been putting playoffs and Tiger games on with sound, and you know what? They’ve been drawing much bigger crowds than usual. I’m glad to see management is finally realizing that if you put the sound on for games, customers will come in and spend money. It’s very simple really. I hope they do it consistently. When the sound is on there’s no place better in the Downtown core to watch a game (if you’re on the South end of Downtown, Max’s is the place to watch).

While I was watching the game, an iPhone commercial came on – the one with the little girl with the umbrella. It caused me to discover a feature on my iPhone I never knew existed. If you open a photo in your Camera Roll on your iPhone 4S, there’s an Edit button. One of the options at the bottom of the screen in edit mode is a little magic wand called Auto-Enhance. I decided to play with it, and pulled up a photo I took of the new, clean, improved Bardog that I took two weeks ago. Here’s the photo as I took it:

Not a bad photo by any means, but I always felt it didn’t do justice to how clean and shiny Bardog looked when they re-opened after renovations. So I ran the photo through Auto-Enhance and this is what it looked like:

WOW. Quite a difference, and that’s how Bardog actually looked! Auto-enhance really improves photos that were taken in less than ideal light. I played around with other photos on my camera roll. It made them much better about 50% of the time, somewhat better 40% of the time, and about 10% of the time it made photos slightly worse and I had to undo the changes. Overall, though, this is a feature I will be using a lot, especially when I want to post a photo directly to my blog or social media account from my phone, without taking it home to run through image editing software first. Surprised I’ve had my iPhone 4S for two months and am just now discovering this. I guess this illustrates why it’s a good idea to read the manual!

We have another bar anniversary to celebrate this week. The Silly Goose has announced their third birthday party for this Thursday night, January 19. Party starts at 9 PM. Drinks, party favors.

Question for my readers: A number of months ago I posted about a service which would send you fake phone calls and text messages at your request. You could text it commands like “CALL 3” and it would call your phone 3 minutes later. Very useful when someone has you trapped in a boring conversation in a bar, and you need a way to escape without appearing outwardly rude. Someone asked about this last night, and I searched both my old posts and Lifehacker (where I heard about it) but couldn’t find it. Does anyone remember the info? Just the name of the service would be enough. I can find the rest from there. If you can help shoot me an email at paul@paulryburn.com.

Best Twitter quote of the day comes from @jesus: “Sorry, I wasn’t ready for some football.” I guess we’re done hearing about Tebow until fall.

My plan for today is as follows: Mimosas at the Majestic at 11, beer at the Saucer at 12, Hung Over Like a Bear brunch at the Blind Bear at 3. If Saucer does indeed do big screen/sound for NFL I’ll update Facebook and Twitter with that info. Heck, I guess I could put it on the blog too, since I have the WordPress app on my phone.

The Phoenix Club has set the date for their annual Mardi Gras party. It will be Saturday, February 11 at the Cadre Building at Second and Monroe. A $40 ticket gets you beer, wine and specialty cocktails from Silly Goose, Dan McGuinness, and other sponsors, as well as entertainment by The Covers and DJ Mario. They’ll have a full casino sponsored by Harrah’s, where you can buy Phoenix Bucks to gamble at blackjack, craps and roulette tables. At the end of the night you can use your Phoenix Bucks to enter raffles for prizes provided by Harrah’s, Oak Hall, the Redbirds, and others.

They’ll also have a VIP section for $35 more. It will be on the Cadre’s mezzanine, and there will be a premium stocked bar, wine, appetizers, beer and gaming tables. Budweiser has agreed to unveil new products in the VIP section before they’re released anywhere else in Memphis.

The Phoenix Club does a lot of good work supporting the Boys & Girls Club of Memphis, and so proceeds from your ticket price will be put to good use. You can buy tickets here.

Sorry for the late notification about this, but I just found out myself. Tonight is Max’s Sports Bar’s 4th anniversary party. There will be live music inside at 10 PM, and $2 Bud and Bud Light bottles.

If I remember correctly, they opened New Year’s Eve 1997, but why quibble about a couple of weeks’ difference? Cheap beer.

I’d like to ask a favor of all my readers. If you’ve heard of a bill in Congress called SOPA, but you don’t know exactly what it is, please click this link and read about SOPA now.

Up until today, I’d heard that it was something that a lot of people opposed, including big tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter, and that I should oppose it too. Now that I’ve read about SOPA, I realize how much it could limit people’s freedom on the Internet. Honestly, if someone showed me this proposed law and asked me to guess which country was trying to put it into effect, I would guess China, Syria, or Iran. Please take the time to read about SOPA and make up your own mind, but to me it seems like it would send social media into the Dark Ages.

Okay, on with the news. Grace Askew plays an acoustic set at the Blind Bear from 8-11 PM tonight. Should be a good show and I plan on being there.

Congratulations to the Union Mission. Their expansion was approved by the Land Use Control Board yesterday, so they’ll soon have more space to serve those in need.

I’ve posted this once before, but in case you missed it, @RealTimeWWII is a great Twitter account to follow. It’s tweeting the Second World War day by day from 1939 to 1945. Today it’s tweeting wartime news as if it were January 13, 1940. Things are starting to heat up: Belgium is mobilizing its forces at the German border in preparation for an invasion, and Jews in Poland are being sent to labor camps. Berliners are required to get an ID card for their half-pint daily ration of skim milk. The account lets you learn about the war in a way not possible with history books. There are often links to photos or historical documents in the tweets.

This is really cool: Amazon now provides software to make documents available to Kindle devices. The documents are converted to PDF and then sent to Kindle. Over the past three years, I’ve typed up a lot of notes on poker books I’ve read. I’d love to have those notes on my Kindle Fire and iPhone Kindle App. The downside: I’m going to have to fire up my rarely-used netbook to get the files transferred, because the transfer tool is not yet offered for Mac OS.

All right, time for lunch. I’ll be at the Bear for Grace Askew’s show. Plans before and after TBD.

The Land Use Control Board has approved a proposal to rename Linden between the river and Danny Thomas as Dr. Martin Luther King Avenue. Most cities already have a thoroughfare honoring the civil rights leader, and it’s fitting that Memphis now has one too, 44 years after he was shot at the Lorraine Motel. Why Linden? It’s a high-traffic area because of Beale and the FedExForum, and it’s near the Clayborn Temple where Dr. King rallied sanitation workers.

The Memphis Daily News has a great article called Preserving the Magic about A.Schwab’s, the “dry goods” store that has been on Beale since 1876. The new owners want to hang on to what made the store one of a kind, while adding new things like live music and possibly a coffee and soda bar. “What does the street need A. Schwab to be? That’s what we’re trying to respond to,” said one of the new owners.

Are you fluent in a foreign language? A recruiter I stay in touch with needs bilingual help desk analysts. It helps if you have a background in IT, but more than anything she’s looking for bright, motivated people with excellent communication skills. It’s a 6 month contract to hire gig. Email me at paul@paulryburn.com if you’re interested, and I’ll put you in touch with her.

Fried chicken lovers: WKNO’s show Local Color will discuss the best places in Memphis to get fried chicken. The show airs tonight at 6:30.

This next link, Worst use of social media in 2012 by Scott Stratten, the author of UNmarketing, should be required reading for anyone who owns or manages a restaurant, or a retail business for that matter. The owner of a restauant in Atlanta called Boner’s BBQ reacted VERY badly to a negative customer review on Yelp. He posted her pic to the restaurant’s Facebook Wall, publicly insulted her, and generated a ton of negative publicity. When he finally realized he needed to apologize to curb the public’s anger, he did so in such an insincere way that he made an already-terrible situation even worse. Business owners: If you tend to react with anger when a customer posts a negative review, you need to hire a marketing consultant to run your social media presence so you don’t do something as stupid as Boner’s BBQ’s owner did.

AutoZone Park will install a new video board in right field before the start of the Redbirds’ season. At 60×60 feet with 1,440,000 pixels, it will be the largest HD display in minor league baseball. It will show field action replays, stadium promotions, fan cameras shots and sponsor recognition. Daktronics, a video display maker, will install the board. It’s said to be a larger display than ones Daktronics has installed in several NFL stadiums.

All right, time to go out in the snow and get lunch. They say this crap won’t stick to the roads. It better not. This snow has failed to meet my definition of a “good snow,” which happens overnight and comes in massive enough amounts to close the office (but not the bars).

If you’ve made it a goal to attend one Grizzlies game this season, but you haven’t picked which one yet, may I offer a suggestion… how about the Wednesday, February 29 game? That night the Grizzlies will partner with MIFA, with proceeds going to their Plus-1 program that helps families in need pay their utility bills. The Grizzlies host the Dallas Mavericks that night, and it’s possible that Z-Bo could be back by then. To buy tickets:

1. Click here to visit the Ticketmaster purchasing page
2. Click “find tickets”
3. Type MEMPHIS into the “special offer code” box, and click “verify”
4. Create an account or login if you already have one
5. Select your seats, complete your purchase, and your tickets will be emailed to you

Nothing like watching a little NBA basketball while helping Memphis families keep the lights on. Nice to see the Grizzlies forming these kinds of community partnerships.

In other FedExForum news: The Red Hot Chili Peppers concert, scheduled for February, has been rescheduled for April 12, according to Fox 13 reporter Lauren Lee. Frontman Anthony Kiedis is taking some time off to recover from foot surgery.

A&R Bar-b-Que has a special going on today and tomorrow, January 11 and 12. Purchase any BBQ sandwich and receive a free side item and fountain soda. Follow their Twitter account at @arbbq to keep up with specials.

Memphis Farmers Market is seeking a Market Manager. View this PDF for details. This appears to be a paid position. Really awesome opportunity for someone with business management skills who wants to make a difference with one of Memphis’ finest nonprofits.

In the news: Gwin Scott is resigning as the president of EmergeMemphis, the small business incubator on Tennessee Street. He’ll stay on approximately four more months while the board finds a new president.

Usual Wednesday night stuff going on tonight: Poker at Bardog (7:30), trivia at Blind Bear (8:00), Jeremy Stanfill plays the Silly Goose (9:30), Glass Night at the Saucer (7:00), Pint Night at South of Beale. Tigers host Southern Miss at FedExForum at 6:00. I’ll be out somewhere, plans as of yet TBD.

Wired Magazine posted an article today that I want to recommend to all my female readers, particularly those who hang out in Memphis’ nightclub scene: Check Your Drink for Roofies.

In my 10 years Downtown, I’ve known two women personally who believe they had been “roofied,” and have heard of a third case. To “roofie” someone means to add a drug to their drink, causing them to lose decision-making abilities and often consciousness within a short period of time. Victims also experience a sense of amnesia upon awakening. The most common drugs of this type include Rohypnol, GHB and ketamine. They are collectively known as the “date rape drugs” because they are used by predators to sexually assault victims. I highly recommend you click through and read the entire article, but here are a few key points:

– Since 1999, an ingredient has been added to Rohypnol to turn blue any liquid to which it is added. However, it can still be disguised in blue drinks. Therefore, be wary if a total stranger tries to buy you a Walk-Me-Down or a drink of similar color.

– The best way to avoid being roofied is to make it impossible for someone to slip substances in your drink. The article lists several “toppers” for cups and bottles.

– There are also items sold that you can use to test for the presence of date-rape drugs. These are in forms such as coasters, straws, and lipstick that can be kept in your purse and pulled out without arousing suspicion.

Fortunately my two friends who had this unpleasant experience were taken care of by friends and got home safely. I hope this article helps keep you safe too.

One final note: I hope those reading won’t take this as a sign that Downtown Memphis is unsafe. Any large city with a vibrant nightlife scene is going to have this happen from time to time. I’d be willing to bet that it happens a lot less frequently here than, say, New Orleans, Atlanta, or Miami.

Be safe everyone. Feel free to forward to anyone whom you think this would help.