It’s time for another food festival this weekend, one that is very appropriate for winter. The Memphis Grilled Cheese Festival happens Sunday from noon to 6 at the Hi-Tone on North Cleveland. This is a competition event and teams will compete in five different categories: Most Ridiculous, Most Cheesiest, Best Tomato Soup, Fan Favorite, and Grand Champ. You can vote for your favorite grilled cheese by putting a donation of any amount in that team’s donation box. All donations will go to ALIVE Memphis pet rescue. The team that raises the most donations will receive the Fan Favorite award. Live music in the Hi-Tone, grilled cheese eating competition at 3:30, two bars.
I wonder if food festivals have a Life Champion award the way college football does?
Wassailing for Water happens Saturday from 8 to 11 at the Brass Door. This is a charity event to help build wells for water in communities around the world that need them (donation page here). There will be raucous caroling led by Michael Rhodes and the Brass Door Wassailers.
Halima Morafa, currently a junior at Houston High, went home to visit her family in Nigeria in 2014. The vivid memory of the problems she saw there connected her to problems Memphis faces, including hunger, crime, and racial disparity. She expressed her feelings about that connection the only way she knew how: through art. She founded ArtRevival as a way to spread the salvation art gave her to students who were not otherwise able to receive resources and education for the visual arts. She wanted to empower those students, to show them that through art everyone has a voice. On Saturday from 1 to 4, Kingsbury Middle School students who have completed Morafa’s ArtRevival program will showcase and talk about their work at Art Village Gallery at the corner of South Main and Huling. The event is free and open to the public.
Donald Trump tweeted that the new Air Force One plans that have been ordered from Boeing are ridiculously expensive. “Cancel order!” All that proves is that President-Elect Cheeto is a stupid idiot. The current Air Force One fleet has been in service since the first Bush was president. Those planes are getting old and it is getting very hard to find parts because companies flying the commercial equivalents of the current Air Force Ones are retiring their planes. As a result, it now costs nearly as much per flight hour to operate current Air Force One as it does to operate a B-1 stealth bomber. Fitting the cheeto’s private 757 jet with presidential security measures won’t work because the plane isn’t big enough. Canceling the order would endanger the safety of the cheeto as well as future presidents.
I bet I will be sent to a re-education camp sometime next year…
Ptohographer Frank Chin was on the scene for Stumbling Santa. The Flyer has his photos.
Claybrook Farms has announced its December discount bundle. Get four 12 oz. ribeyes, two 8 oz. filets, four 12 oz. strip steaks, and four 1.5 lb. packs of ground beef, a $185 value, as a bundle for $150. Their beef is naturally raised and humanely handled, with no added hormones or antibiotics. It is dry-aged for 21 days.
Air Canada will start offering direct flights between Memphis and Toronto starting May 1. These will be the first international flights out of MEM since 2012.
Booze news: Buster’s has added online ordering and pickup
That’s it for now, outta here, I’ll be out after work, blah blah blah, the usual stuff I wrap up a post with.