Month: January 2013

Today I start off my post with GREAT NEWS for Downtown and for Beale Street in particular. Yesterday a judge ruled on the situation at Club Crave, where there have been a number of shootings and violent incidents over the years, both under the Crave name and previous names including Plush Club. The ruling was that the operators of Club Crave 1) cannot operate any business at 380 Beale ever again; 2) cannot operate any business under the name “Crave” ever again; 3) cannot operate any event if the event had previously been held at Club Crave. Huge win for the city, and I hope the next win involves the demolition of 380 Beale.

The Flyer has a must-read article if you’re in the future of Downtown. 2013 is likely to be a turning point for Bass Pro Pyramid, the Beale Street Entertainment District, Heritage Trail, and the fairgrounds. The article lays out the reasons why, and explains why Robert Lipscomb is the key man in all of it. Lipscomb, by the way, will speak on the Heritage Trail project involving the redevelopment of the Foote and Clayborn Homes housing projects at next week’s Downtown Memphis Association meeting. The meeting will be Tuesday, January 22, at the Calliope Room, 456 Tennessee Street. 6:00 social, 6:30 meeting.

The Brass Door will have live music tonight. Tim Free, “Bigeasy Freezy” the Piano Man, will perform. The living Louisiana piano legend will bring the sounds of New Orleans blues, jazz, and Mardi Gras to the Brass Door.

Food truck fan? A new truck is about to hit the streets of Memphis and Southaven. Follow the truck at @PopsSmokehouse on Twitter to learn where it will be from day to day.

There will be a segment about Memphis in May BBQ Fest on the Travel Channel next weekend. It will air as part of Exposed: Cooking Competitions to air Sunday, January 27 at 4 PM. Thanks to local BBQ team Too Sauced to Pork for posting the information to their Facebook page.

The Orpheum is conducting a Million Dollar Quartet Giveaway on Facebook. Enter here. Prize package is pretty significant and includes

• 2 Roundtrip Flights to Memphis, TN
• 3 Nights hotel at the Westin Memphis
• 2 tickets for Million Dollar Quartet at The Orpheum Theatre on March 30, 2013 at 8:00 PM
• 2 tickets for the Sun Studios Tour
• 2 Tickets for the Graceland Platinum Tour
• 2 tickets for the Rock’n’Soul Museum
• $50 Gift Card for Hard Rock Café on Beale Street

Cardinals reliever Jason Motte has been added to the lineup appearing at Cardinals Caravan Sunday, January 20 at AutoZone Park. Gates open at 5:30, free admission, first come first served, program starts at 6:30.

Muddy’s Bake Shop will celebrate National Pie Day next Wednesday by giving away pie in the afternoon. Kerry has the details in her blog. Not a Downtown event, but hey, free pie is worth a mention. Wonder if the Nuh-Uh Girl will show up?

Plans for tonight: About 50-50 on whether I’ll play poker at Dancin’ Jimmy’s tonight (8 PM game time). I’ll be out about 6:45, giving me a little over an hour to decide while sipping ice cold beer.

A tidbit for my friends who are regulars at the Flying Saucer, or who have been regulars at the Saucer in the past 3 years or so: Longtime server Jessica starts down the street at the Silly Goose today. She’ll be bartending the happy hour shift every Wednesday and Thursday, from 4 to 7:30 PM. I know she’d love it if you went by and saw her.

In other Flying Saucer news, they are tapping a “one of a kind” Firkin from Lazy Magnolia this Friday night at 7 PM. It’s a cask of Indian Summer Ale infused with peaches, amaretto, and cinnamon. That sounds delicious! I’ll stop by for a pint for sure!

Are you a fan of Brazilian music and culture? Come to the Silly Goose Thursday, January 24 at 9 PM for their first annual Brazilian Carnival Fever Party. From the event the Goose posted to Facebook: “Being Held at the Silly Goose for the first time! Come Experience the Warmth of Brazilian music and culture. Lets bring up the heat on the dance floor at 9PM, the only rule is to have fun… Come ready to play with samba no pe!!”

On Foursquare? Like getting new badges? Here is a list of places near Downtown where you can earn a special badge for participating in events related to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. National Day of Service this weekend.

Plans for tonight: Getting a haircut after work, then I’ll hit the Silly Goose about 6:30 to see Jessica. Come see her!

Back again. I have completed my stays at the Monroe Avenue Branch Office (Bardog) and Second Street Branch Office (Flying Saucer) and have moved on to the Peabody Place Branch Office (Silly Goose). Still have the netbook out with me. This is probably the first time I’ve brought a computer in the Goose in two years. I used to bring computers up here all the time and play on PokerStars, before the government took away U.S. citizens’ right to do that.

I wanted to post a second time today and let you know about a couple of different things Downtown bars are doing tonight due to the weather. First of all, Blind Bear will open at their regular time of 5 PM. They will have $3 shots of whisky, Fireball, and moonshine tonight. They will have $5 caramel macchiatos (needless to say, there’s liquor involved) and hot toddys. $5 chili cheese Bear dawgs. They will also have Texas Hold’em at 8 as usual. Kitchen open until 2, bar open until 3.

Down south at the Double J, only the downstairs bar will be open. They’re closing the loft bar tonight because they don’t want employees who don’t live Downtown to face a late-night drive home on icy streets. They’re also postponing trivia until tomorrow night. If you get to the J tonight though, there’s $2 Fireball and $2.50 domestics.

As for regular Tuesday happenings, Kevin Cerrito will still host trivia at Ferraro’s at 8 with $1 PBR. Bardog will still have Pint Night, with all drafts $3 beginning at 7. Brass Door will have curry night with rogan josh over rice $8 after 5. They’ll also have 2 for 1 fish and chips.

All right, that’ll probably do it for today. Netbook battery is down to 40%, so unless something important comes up I’ll see you tomorrow.

After reading that there’s an ice storm warning (0.25 to 0.40 inch ice now predicted). I had a decision to make. I could A) Drive to work and spend all day getting not much done, as I worried endlessly about the drive home; or B) take a vacation day and go to Bardog.

I went with plan B and am here with the little blue netbook. Aldo has just called and confirmed that it’s a snow day. That means $2 Fireball shots  and $3 New Belgium Snow Day.

If you don’t already have it pulled up, open the MemphisWeather.net radar in a new tab and click the Winterize check box. It’s moving in.

Another good site to have open is the TDOT Smartmap. Zoom in on Memphis and click the Traffic Congestion checkbox. Green means no congestion; yellow means moderate congestion; red means heavy congestion; red and black means stop and go traffic. I like to turn on the Cameras too. Hopefully this will help you plan your escape route from work. I check it every day before I leave Horn Lake.

Let’s get on to today’s news. Ghost River Brewery tweeted yesterday that they are brewing a batch of their Black Magic beer. It will be available for sale at their dock at Main and Crump around the first of February. It will be at bars and restaurants about a week after that.

The Wonder Bread bakery on Monroe may be back in operation soon. It’s part of the sale of the Wonder name and assets out of bankruptcy.

LifeHacker posted a No-nonsense, Non-Alarmist, Essential Guide to the Flu today. If you get sick, this guide will help you determine whether you have the flu or something else, and what to do if you do have the flu.

As of 11:30, it’s being reported that bridges in Mississippi are iced over from Tate county to the Tennessee state line. VERY happy with my decision to call into work today. The frozen precip will be in the Memphis metro within 30 minutes and will ice the bridges here. Leave work now if you can. I’ll have the netbook out with me for a while, may do a second post. Check back.

An ice storm warning has been issued for the metro, including Shelby and DeSoto Counties. Details here.

It’s not doing anything outside as I type this (about 7:30 AM), but freezing rain and sleet are expected to move in sometime between 10 AM and noon. Temperatures will likely remain at or below freezing the entire day. Enough icing on the roads is expected to make a “significant impact.”

Memphis City Schools are open (IDIOTS), Shelby County Schools will have a 3 hour day, DeSoto County Schools are closed.

Check the MemphisWeather.net blog for details. This could be worse than today, when some people I know had a 3 1/2 hour drive home.

The National Weather Service has issued a Winter Weather Advisory for the Memphis metro through noon Tuesday. The MemphisWeather.net blog has a copy of the advisory, but based on computer models they feel it is a very conservative forecast and that conditions could be worse locally. Everyone be careful driving home this afternoon. Don’t tailgate or change lanes suddenly.

The Redbirds have posted a copy of their 2013 schedule to Facebook. You can see game times as well as which nights are fireworks nights.

A new speaker has been added to the lineup for EverywhereElse.co the Startup Conference that will be held at the Peabody next month. Bill Harris, former CEO of PayPal and Intuit, will speak on the topic of “Adult Supervision.”

Do you use Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8? Microsoft is releasing a critical fix for those browsers. A vulnerability in older versions of IE can allow a hacker to remotely run code on your computer.

Grizzlies host the Clippers at the FedExForum at 7. With Rudy Gay away at his grandmother’s funeral and reserve small forward Quincy Pondexter out with injury, Tony Allen is expected to move up to the small forward position to start. Darrell Arthur will also likely spend some time at the 3 tonight.

Be safe getting home everyone.

LOST PET ALERT: Friends of mine are missing a cat on Mud Island. He’s gray, yellowish-green eyes, gray and black striped tail. His name is Frank. If you find him shoot me an email at paul@paulryburn.com and I’ll get you in touch with the owners.

A site I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while is CodeAcademy. Have you ever wanted to learn how to code, how to talk to computers in their own language? This site has hundreds of interactive exercises that will teach you how. I spent some time on the site because so many WordPress plugins and themes use jQuery, a library that “makes magic happen” (slides page elements in and out, makes page elements appear/disappear, move, etc.) I had some familiarity with jQuery previously, but I wanted to be able to read jQuery script as easily as I read the Sunday newspaper. CodeAcademy’s tutorials made that happen. No tutorial is more than 5 minutes long and you can do them at your own pace. Best of all, the tutorials are entirely free.

Besides jQuery, CodeAcademy has tutorial sets for basic HTML/CSS, Javascript, Ruby, and Python. I highly recommend the basic HTML/CSS tutorials if you’re not familiar with those languages. The basics of HTML and CSS are stuff that everyone should know in this day and age. HTML is the language of web pages, and CSS specifies web pages’ look and feel. Next time you’re looking for a job, you’ll have a leg up on the competition with those in your bag of tricks.

Dining with Monkeys reviewed Arepa y Salsa recently. Arepa y Salsa is the new Venezuelan restaurant on Madison near Trolley Stop Market. I’ve linked to other reviews of the restaurant before, but I wanted to link to Stacey’s blog because there are so many good photos. You can clearly see what the difference is between an arepa and a tostone, for example. I want a tostone! I have got to try this place soon. It’s a 15-minute walk from where I live, or a 3-minute trolley ride (plus a 25 minute wait for the f-ing trolley).

In other food news, I visited Bardog last night. I timed my trip around shift change so that I’d get to spend some time at Panda’s day bar, and then at Melissa and James’ night bar. While there, the couple next to me ordered the antipasto platter ($14.99). I had never even seen that on the menu before – must be a new item. When it came out, it looked delicious – big slices of meats and cheeses in Italian dressing along the edge of the platter, with huge piles of olives and peppers in the center. It was presented so beautifully that I thought about asking the couple if I could take a photo before they started eating, but I didn’t know them at all and they seemed pretty into each other, so I chose not to interrupt. I’ll get my own platter soon and take a photo. Only thing is, it’s easily enough for two people, so there’s no way I will be able to finish it. Maybe I’ll eat half and get a to-go box, or order it when the Nuh-Uh Girl is in Bardog and accept her offer of “help” eating it.

Too bad I’m not at Slider Inn right now. They’re filming a commercial and extras in the commercial (including my “DAWG” John D) get free unlimited egg sliders and PBR.

Plans for today: I’m up early enough to go to brunch at the Majestic, so I guess I’ll start there at 11. Later in the day I need to wander over to Flying Saucer and drink my 200th beer. Then tomorrow I can file the paperwork for my 7th plate party. Despite the cold and the rain, it’s still Sunday Fun Day!

A couple of weeks ago Comcast/Xfinity/whatever robo-called me and told me that my cable modem was an older model that would no longer be supported after January 17. So I called their 800 number, and after a bunch of menus and 22 minutes on hold, a lady finally answered. She was very nice and told me a new modem would be shipped to me via UPS, along with a box and shipping label to return my old modem, so it could be taken off my account. The package arrived Thursday, and I did the self-install this morning.

The good news: The self-install worked, and I have a much faster modem. I got all the way through the install without having to call the dreaded 800 support number.

The bad news: The old modem DOESN’T FIT IN THE BOX THEY SENT ME!!!!  So I guess now I get to spend my lunch hour one day next week at a UPS shipping location, trying to get this figured out. Comcast always manages to find a way to make life inconvenient for its customers.

My Foursquare mayorship of Dancin’ Jimmy’s proved to be short-lived. Congratulations to new mayor Wilbur! I still have the Flying Saucer and Blind Bear mayorships.

Blind Bear has a new special: Sofia Saturdays and Sundays. From open (3 PM Saturday, noon Sunday) until 6, you can get $15 Yellow Tail bubbly, or $30 Sofia Blanc de Blancs. They also have their Hung Over Like a Bear brunch menu during those hours.

I’m eating chicken enchilada soup from City Market as I type this. It’s delicious and I highly recommend it. You can find the soup as the same refrigerated case as their prepared dinners. It’s $8.99 but you easily get enough for two hearty meals. City Market has so many interesting foods to choose from. Check out their frozen entree photo gallery.

The Brass Door will have Arsenal vs. Man City on tomorrow at 10 AM.

I’ll wrap up this post with a couple of pieces of beer news. Tickets for Memphis Brewfest, the annual beer festival that happens at AutoZone Park, go on sale Tuesday, January 15 at noon. Attendees can sample all the beers they want for 3 1/2 hours, including samples of many beers not sold in Memphis. The date for this year’s brewfest is Saturday, April 27. Temps should be in the mid 70s by then, so ladies, it’s not too early to start thinking about which tube top you’re going to wear.

If you’re a fan of Brooklyn Brewery beers, or if you don’t know if you’re a fan and would like to find out, mark Monday, February 4 on your calendar. That day the brewery will have a “tap takeover” at the Flying Saucer. Ten beers will be on tap, including

• Brown Ale
• Brooklyn Lager
• Sorachi Ace
• Blast
• The Concoction
• The Companion
• There Will Be Black
• Gold Standard
• Brooklyn Weiss
• Mary’s Maple Porter

The Tap Takeover will take place on a Monday… and loyal Saucer fans know that Monday is Pint Nite! That means you’ll be able to get a pint of any of these beers for only $3. What a deal! If you’re unfortunate enough to live in East Bumblefuck, the Cordova Saucer will have the Tap Takeover out there too.

All right, this post is getting long. Time to hit Publish and go visit my Saturday afternoon bartenders Christina and Panda. Christina will be happy that she’s first on the list today. Keep your eye on this blog, and if you follow me on social media keep your eye there too. Big things to come in the next week.

In my Friday lunchtime post, I totally forgot to blog about my experience playing poker at Dancin’ Jimmy’s on Thursday night. Dancin’ Jimmy’s is in the old Pat O’Brien’s building, and Muruako hosted the game in what is used to be the piano bar, now known as the Napoleon Room. It’s one of several rooms in the building that can be rented out for private parties.

I arrived with two friends about 30 minutes early for the game. As soon as I got there, I checked in on Foursquare, and got an unexpected surprise: I became mayor of Dancin’ Jimmy’s! So it has been added to my portfolio of Downtown bar mayorships that already includes Flying Saucer and Blind Bear.

The Napoleon Room has a giant projection HDTV where the pianos used to be. It literally stretches nearly from floor to ceiling, and the picture is great. If there’s a game on during poker, get there a little early and make sure to get a seat facing the TV.

Another thing at Dancin’ Jimmy’s that is unique among the Muruako-hosted and Blind Bear poker games: It’s the only place where you can get a Big Ass PBR. I started the evening with one and it was $5. From what I saw most of the drink prices were very reasonable.

As for the game structure, it was similar to the other games Muruako runs. 3000 starting chips, first level 25/50, 20 minute levels, latecomers can still get in through the end of the fourth level.

I had a bad beat early in the game. I got dealt pocket Queens, and was delighted to see a Queen fall on the flop. My friend Marty seemed interested in the hand, so I made bets to start moving all his chips toward the middle. By the river there was no possibility of a straight or flush, so I wasn’t too worried about my set of three Queens being beat, even when an Ace fell on the river. Marty went all-in and I happily called. Oops! Marty had pocket Aces and I lost most of my chips. Later in the game my luck improved, and I got all the way to heads-up, where I lost to eventual winner Shane.

There were about 14 players and it was a good first week. The only negative was that with two tables pulled together to make a poker table, the players sitting on the ends were about eight feet apart. It was very hard for them to deal without mis-dealing.

I didn’t get any food but a friend of mine got a cup of gumbo and said he enjoyed it.

Poker happens at Dancin’ Jimmy’s every Thursday at 8 and is sponsored by Fireball Whisky. Free to play, first place wins a $50 gift certificate. “Like” the Bluff City Poker group on Facebook to keep up with the Thursday game and the two other games Muruako runs.