Grizzlies ticket deal and more news

The Grizzlies, fresh off a win over the L.A. Lakers, return to the FedExForum tomorrow night to host the Sacramento Kings. It is the first of the Thirsty Thursdays nights for the 2014-15 season. For $50, you get a club-level ticket, a flight of beers and food in the First Tennessee Club Draft Room. There are over 20 domestic and import beers available in the Draft Room, and there are also food pairings. I’ve been to Grizzlies games on tickets that are food and beer inclusive, thanks to poker wins at Bardog several years ago, and let me tell you they are a SWEET deal.

Tonight at 5:30 at the Cotton Museum, there will be a Cocktail Hour and Book Talk with R. Scott Williams about his new book The Forgotten Adventures of Richard Halliburton: A High-Flying Life from Tennessee to Timbuktu. I bet the talk will be of particular interest to my fellow Rhodes College alumni, because there is a tower on campus named for Halliburton. “Like a modern-day Icarus, he flew too close to the sun.” The museum will provide cocktails and light snacks for the event, which is free and open to the public.

If you’re a WWE Network subscriber, a new episode of Rivalries dropped yesterday: Rhodes vs. Flair. I watched about two-thirds of it yesterday and it is a can’t-miss. It starts out with rookie Ric Flair in the AWA in the early 1970s, idolizing flamboyant heel Dusty Rhodes who was in a tag team with Dick Murdoch at the time. It goes on to discuss Dusty’s 1974 face turn in Florida, the development of his “American Dream” character that connected with the fans, and his 1979 and 1981 world title wins. The episode then gets into Flair’s development of the equally flamboyant “Nature Boy” character that became the most hated heel in the Mid-Atlantic territory, leading up to his 1981 title victory over Rhodes that established him as the top man in the NWA for the 1980s. I was just getting to the Four Horsemen years when it was time to go to bed. Based on what I have seen so far, this is one of the best documentaries WWE has put on the Network.

In case you missed the news this morning: Humankind has landed a probe on a comet 317 million miles away.

Ride the Roo will offer a Downtown lunchtime shuttle during Downtown Dining Week next week.

Correction from yesterday evening’s blog: The Tennessee Brewery sold for $825,000, not $825 million.

Congratulations to my opponent at Blind Bear who knocked me out of poker last night not once, but twice. Well played indeed.

Back to work… I’ll be out at the usual spots in a few hours. I think it may be a Shorty pasta bowl kind of evening.