No foolin’

It’s April Fool’s Day. In the past I have posted gag April Fool’s articles, but I couldn’t come up with anything this year. Everything in this post is real.

However, I do have a programming note: My post tomorrow may be shorter than usual. That’s because I can’t trust anything I see on social media on April 1. If I can’t verify it, I will delay blogging it.

Bill Dries and Chris Herrington have a Daily Memphian headline story this morning that is a must-read: The river defines who we were and who we will become. This is a longer piece but worth your time. I will say it once more: The Daily Memphian sits behind a paywall (after a limited number of free articles) but at $7 a month, it is well worth your money. The writing is superb and the people there clearly love Memphis.

A Southland employee posted yesterday that tables are going live today: blackjack, craps and roulette. No need to drive all the way to Mississippi anymore.

More bad luck for the Grizzlies last night. With half the team already out for injuries, center Jonas Valanciunas went down with an apparent leg injury. I have become a big Jonas fan recently. The Grizzlies PR team tweeted that his 34 points, 20 rebounds, 5 assists, 2 steals, and 2 blocks Saturday was the first game an NBA player put up that combination of numbers since January 1978 (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).

On a better note, Tankathon shows that the Grizzlies remain half a game out of ninth worst. Johnnie Cochran voice: “IF THERE IS A WAY, YOU MUST CONVEY.”

It’s an evening with Bon Iver tonight at the Orpheum at 8.

Grub will be the food truck at Cordelia’s Market tonight from 5 to 8. That’s the truck where I bought my Korean beef quesadilla last Thursday.

Other entrees include Memphis BBQ chicken, Falafel Ain’t Awful, and breakfast, all available in quesadilla, burrito, and sandwich format.

Shelby County Schools students showed off their creative side at the Halloran Centre yesterday.

Please don’t do this to your cat.

I never thought I’d be saying this, but I’m starting to become a fan of Bruce Pearl. Laying down the whoopins’ on both John Calipari and the Tennessee Vols in one month is hard to ignore, and you could see the genuine emotion in his face during the post-game celebration. He’s no longer employed by an athletic department where ethics are a secondary concern, and he no longer wears that ugly Volunteer orange jacket. I guess it’s time to let the hate go. Michigan State and Virginia are the two teams left standing in my bracket, but I won’t mind if Auburn wins its first national title next Monday.

Yesterday I stuck to my plan of staying home and teaching myself the Python programming language. Y’all want a quick lesson that is applicable to real life? I’ll keep this fun and as non-nerdy as possible.

In Python there are elements known as dictionaries (sometimes called associative arrays) that associate a key with a value. So I created a dictionary that associated the names of select 2018 BBQ Fest shoulder teams with their placement in the final standings. Then I looped through the dictionary with

for key, val in dict.items():
 if val <=10:
  print (key, "got a trophy")

By the way indentation is a big deal in Python and it’s hard to do it properly in WordPress. But anyway, the code would get to the {“Moody Ques”, 7} associative pair, see that 7 is less than or equal to 10, and print “Moody Ques got a trophy.” For teams with a value greater than 10, nothing would be printed.

Then I made a second dictionary, the keys again being the names of select BBQ teams, and the second element whether they have sponsor time during prime party hours when paid team members and their guests are encouraged to leave their booth and go elsewhere (True or False).

for key, val in dict2.items():
 if val == False:
  print (key, "loves its members")

This would see the {“Moody Ques”, False} associative pair and print “Moody Ques loves its members”.

Oh, by the way, if you want to be on a team that wins trophies and loves its members, the Moody Ques have a few spots open! Details here. If you want to take us for a test drive before making up your mind, email me at paul@paulryburn.com and I’ll invite you to our April 13 “Meat” & Greet.

That’s it for now. Time to jump back into my Python training. Back tomorrow with more news.