Memphis Farmers Market starts this Saturday, plus tons more news

This Saturday is opening day for Memphis Farmers Market. Here is an interactive map of the vendors. For those not familiar with the market, it runs from April to October under the pavilion at Front and G.E. Patterson. It is so much more than a place to buy produce. There’s live music and pet adoptions every week, and there are often chef demos and activities for kids. Besides fruits and vegetables, you can buy locally grown meat, seafood, jellies and preserves, pottery, coffee, and much, much more. There are usually a few food trucks there serving breakfast and lunch items. Most definitely worth checking out if you never have. The market runs from 7 AM to 1 PM every Saturday. You will find many of the city’s best chefs there right at 7, which in an indication of the high esteem in which food lovers hold the market.

LYFE Kitchen is about to open its first restaurant in Memphis. The first will be in East Memphis, but a second one is coming Downtown in the Chisca not long from now.

Some of your favorite bartenders and servers may not be around this week. There’s a big bar and nightclub expo in Las Vegas. Bardog sent Melissa, Panda, Bloom and James out there. That sounds like trouble with a capital T right there. Club 152 is also sending people to Vegas.

From Gizmodo: A simple design tweak may help prevent drunk people from falling on train tracks. For some reason I’m tempted to mention one of my BBQ teammates here.

The Flyer’s Frank Murtaugh has a preview of Friday’s Redbirds vs. Cardinals game.

NPR has an article about compression clothing including tube tops. We are less than two months away from the beginning of Tube Top Month.

What an awesome weekend of college basketball. I hate it that I missed the Kentucky-Notre Dame game. It’s looking more and more like John Calipari will become the first head coach in men’s basketball history to vacate 40 wins in a single season.

Wow. Eric Clapton turns 70 today.

I’ve had the same weird dream two nights in a row. I had to travel to Nashville for work – odd because in real life my job almost never requires travel, and the few times it has Nashville would’ve been an unlikely destination. I decided to check out two bars in East Nashville, Red Door East and 3 Crow Bar, that my friends have told me are really cool and fun and awesome. So I pulled up the Maps app on my iPhone to try to find them. Unfortunately the app was completely unreliable, and I found myself driving down roads east of the city, confused, frustrated, no idea where I was going, wasting my time. Both times I woke up before I either ran out of gas or found one of the bars. Most strange that I’m dreaming about being in a city to which I have very little connection.

Epic, awesome Sunday Fun Day yesterday. I told B-RAD I wasn’t doing any Fireball shots, and he bet one of his regulars a beer he could get me to take one. He enlisted the help of the Saucer girls, who were there for brunch after their monthly meeting. One of them came over and said, “Paul, do a shot with me” and I had to say no 15 or 20 times before they realized I was serious.

It’s hard to leave the Bear on Sundays because Brad has such a great group of regulars. I started the day up there with members of my BBQ team. Later I got to hang out with Rahul and Tony (amazingly, Rahul didn’t hit on me) and then got into a tickle fight with one of Brad’s regulars (female, although I’m sure Rahul dreams of having a tickle fight with me). I left the Bear at 5, and after a little grocery shopping at City Market (needed dairy products), I went over to the Flying Saucer to drink some Modelo and look at the girls’ beautiful faces. I had the pleasure of meeting new manager Adrienne, and I can already tell that I am going to be one of her favorite customers. I watched WrestleMania on my phone, for a while at the Saucer and then back at the Bear. Seth Rollins cashed in and won! Absolutely the right move. Hoping Brock Lesnar turns face now. Weird seeing John Cena and Daniel Bryan holding second-tier titles.

Since Melissa is out of town, my regular Melissa Monday stop is off the calendar and I’m free to lead off wherever I want for happy hour. Since you can’t go wrong with the classics, I am going to start with a classic tonight: Pint Nite at the Saucer. Almost all drafts on the wall $3. I’ll be there around 5:45.