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As promised, here are the photos from Sunday’s Pub Olympics at Hoop’s Bar/EP Delta Kitchen. The list of winners can be found here.

The first-place trophy

Three of the four judges (I was the fourth) and Mikey the Camera Nazi

Tricycle races

Beer pong

Here’s a link to the complete photo album.

Scroll down to the previous post to catch the BBQ Fest rumors. Also, check back today if you’re an Obama supporter. Got an announcement about some major names speaking at Saturday’s Downtowners for Obama event.

New feature coming to this blog: “Dear Health Guru AL.” You can e-mail me your questions for health guru AL, and her answers will be posted on this blog. I had sushi with her last night and she told me all about healthy Japanese eating. Send in your questions and you can learn about healthy eating too. Disclaimer: AL is not a doctor, so you’re best off sticking to nutrition questions.

AL, by the way, was the inventor of the BFF of the Month concept. While we were eating, I went over the major candidates for July. “There’s Melissa, who was pictured in that hot tube top dress yesterday,” I told her. “Then there’s Stephanie, who organizes the Downtown Alive events. Or I could bring Meghan back.”

“Paul, please tell me you aren’t stupid enough to bring Meghan back,” said AL.

After sushi I joined the trivia team at the Saucer. A cute girl asked if she could come to TubeTopalooza. “Sure, I’ll add you to the evite,” I told her. Another girl asked why she hadn’t been invited to TubeTopalooza. “My fault, I’ll add you to the evite,” I said. Then I was asked, “A buddy of mine is going to have a bunch of guys with him for his bachelor party, and they were wondering if they could come to TubeTopalooza.” HELL F’N NO!!!

Time to get to work. Going to make a second attempt to run the car through inspection today. After $1,000 worth of work it damn well better pass. Check back later today for Downtowners for Obama details.

All right, below are the rumors I’ve heard about BBQ Fest. Keep in mind that all of the below are RUMORS and not anything I’ve confirmed with Memphis in May:

– The festival will be downsized next year. This one is almost certainly true, as construction will begin on Beale Street Landing, and that will cut into the amount of space they have available at Tom Lee Park.

– In order to compensate for the reduced space, the rumor is that MIM plans to reduce the number of teams. I keep hearing that they intend to eliminate some of the smaller teams. Not sure if that means just the Patio Porkers, who are by definition smaller teams, or if it extends to the smaller teams competing in the Big Three (shoulder, ribs, whole hog) as well.

– Another rumor is that they plan to make it more corporate, and one way they plan on doing this and also getting rid of the smaller teams is to raise entry fees considerably. I’ve heard the number $5,000 thrown around more than one time, but again, that is all hearsay. In one case I heard $15,000. The idea, I’ve been told, is to raise it to a number high enough where it would be very hard to enter without heavy corporate sponsorship.

– Another rumor is that they want to make it more of an international competition, with teams from the US and around the world. Therefore, it’s been rumored that the competition will become an invitation-only event, with some current teams grandfathered in and with teams who finished near the top in previous years’ competition receiving automatic bids.

– There’s also a new governing body that sanctions the contests, Memphis Barbeque Network. Prior to the first of 2008, Memphis in May was its own sanctioning body. Rumor is that since MIM wants the event to be more reflective of a world championship, they’re going to start inviting teams from other circuits, e.g. KCBS, FBA, etc. Problem is those circuits are a completely different format, don’t do on-site judging, and don’t cook MIM-style BBQ anyway.

Again, all just rumors, but I’ve heard this so many times (and a couple of times, from people connected to the aforementioned Memphis Barbeque Network) that I figured it deserved to be posted. If these rumors are incorrect, Memphis in May deserves the chance to refute them.

If this turns out to be true, it sounds like MIM is going to royally screw up one of the best festivals ever. Hate to see it happen to one of my favorite tube top-watching events of the year. Perhaps Memphians will react by boycotting their other events, Music Fest and Sunset Symphony, en masse.

Will keep you posted as I hear more. E-mail me at paul@paulryburn.com if you’ve got anything.

I got more than 10 for the rumors about BBQ Fest.  Many of them had heard the same things I had heard, and a few heard additional details as well.

Here’s the deal.  I will post the rumors.  Promise.  I just need a little time to compile them all together into one post.  Which I don’t have time to do right now, because I’m swamped at work with file imports AKA The Most Boring Project Ever.  Also, this Downtowners for Obama rally at the Majestic Grille has turned into a huge deal and I may have to post about it before getting to the BBQ Fest rumors.  The Obama event started out as a guy wanted to get a few of his friends together to discuss the campaign, and a week later it’s attracting prominent speakers who are flying in to attend and has the potential to fill the Majestic.  Plus, I’ve got other stuff going on, like writing more lenses for Squidoo, having sushi with my health guru AL, and going out to bars to look for tube tops.

BBQ rumors will be online within 48 hours.  Promise.

Check out Thaddeus Matthews’ blog this morning for the latest scoop on the investigation into corruption on Beale Street.  It’s public knowledge by now that Performa Entertainment head John Elkington is being scrutinized, but read Thad’s latest post to find out who else may be in hot water.  Let’s just say that this new guy Thaddeus names, an owner of several business on Beale and elsewhere Downtown, may be SOL if the information is correct.  Looks like the shenanigans on Beale Street may not be limited to drunk girls in tube tops.

Edit:  Thanks to Otto for finding a permalink to the story.  Here it is – read Thad’s post titled Elkington’s former bookkeeper wants to hide his records.

The results are in.  Find out who won Pub Olympics at Hoop’s Bar/EP Delta Kitchen.  Thanks to all the teams who entered and sorry I got so drunk and tried to be judge.  Hoop/Tony, I owe you a stopwatch.

So, people are still asking about the rumors I heard about the “downsizing” of BBQ Fest next year.  Let’s make this interesting.  If I get 25 e-mails by noon asking for it, I’ll post what I have heard.  MIM people, it’s too late for you to e-mail or call asking me to hold up posting the rumors.  You had an entire week to tell me what’s really going on and you didn’t do it.

If you haven’t made it to Itta Bena on the 3rd floor of BB King’s yet, let me give you two new reasons to go:

New bartender as of this weekend.  Also I’ve heard they have plans to put an end to this “closing at 10 every night even if we have a full bar” bullshit.  Good.  You need to.

Home from the Saucer at 12:40 PM.  Guess I’ll get some sleep now.

I did some redesigning to the left menu pane of my blog yesterday morning.  I wasn’t happy with WordPress displaying lists of links in alphabetical order. Usually, this is the best way to do it, but it didn’t work so well with my list of photo albums.  I wanted them displayed in reverse chronological order starting with the most recent, not alphabetically by title.  So I split the photo albums out and re-ordered them the way I wanted them.  I also added the more recent photo albums to the list, since previously it displayed Stumbling Santa (12/1/07) as the most recent.  I got the list up to date through the last photo album I made, which was the Big Foot Lodge birthday party on 6/16/08.

Two more photo albums will be added to the list soon.  I’ll have photos from yesterday’s Pub Olympics at Hoop’s Bar as soon as I get my camera back from Mikey the Camera Nazi.  Also, I’m sure there will be a large photo album from TubeTopalooza after that event occurs.

I also rearranged the “places I hang out” section.  I wanted those to represent my ranking order of the places I hang out, not alphabetically.  So I fixed that too.

Hopefully this week I’ll start work on my “Downtown Memphis Info” section as well.  It needs to be ordered some way other than alphabetically, and I plan to move some of those pages over to Squidoo along with my new restaurant guide where they will have a wider audience.  I also need to get the happy hour and Wi-Fi sections up to date.

Pub Olympics at Hoop’s Bar turned out to be a much bigger event than I had thought.  They had something like 20 teams entered.  I was a judge, and as promised I got free beer, which along with the hot sun and the 3 hours sleep I got the night before did me in… I judged a beer pong tournament which seemed to take forever, then between events I went home to get extra camera batteries.  I realized I badly needed something to eat.  So I stopped in Big Foot.  Former BFF/bartender Meghan said, “I’M NOT SERVING YOU ANY ALCOHOL, PAUL” before I even sat down, and for once she was absolutely correct to do so, even if she said it out of a desire to get one up on me rather than out of genuine concern for my well-being.  So I ordered Paul’s Drunkass Burger to go and she tried to upsell me on sweet potato fries, bacon, etc. to increase her tip.  Didn’t work.  I was so busy arguing with her that I forgot that part of the reason I went in there was to invite her to TubeTopalooza.

Came home, ate the burger, checked my e-mail.  Next thing I knew I was lying on the couch and it was 12:47 AM… sorry, Hoop and Tony, didn’t mean to miss the entire second half of Pub Olympics.  I’ll get the stopwatch back to you this week.

Soon as they update their blog announcing the winners I’ll link to it here.

Back to work today.  Meeting a newspaper reporter at the Saucer after work… she asked if I’d give her a Downtown orientation, so she can learn how to sniff out good news stories down here.  Sounds like fun, always happy to do stuff like that.

I never did make it out tonight.  If you read my last post, you know that I signed up for Squidoo earlier in the day (check that post for a more complete description of what Squidoo is).  Around 8 PM I got done with my first article, or “lens,” for Squidoo, a tutorial on left and right English in shooting pool.  I planned to blog for a few minutes after that, then hit a friend’s party at a condo on South Main, then go to a bar and do some tube top watching.

Instead, it’s 12:15 AM and I’m still sitting here at the computer.  When I signed up for Squidoo, I was warned that it is terribly addictive, and it must be, because on a beautiful summer night in Downtown Memphis, I find myself inside my apartment at the laptop.  That doesn’t happen very often.

(Hmmm, it just occurred to me, I have 180 beers in the fridge.  Hang on, I’m going to pop open an Old Style.  *POP*  That’s better.  Can you believe this is the first beer I’ve had all day?)

So anyway… I decided to start work on my second lens, and for that one I chose a topic I know well… my recommendations for restaurants to visit in Downtown Memphis.  It’s divided into four sections:

• Where to go if you only have time for one meal
• Best places to eat dinner
• Barbecue
• Best places that serve breakfast/lunch only

If it’s well received I may go back at a later date and add more sections.  I can think of at least two more, burgers and places that deliver.  I have a feeling a lot of my Downtown Memphis Information pages may be migrated over to Squidoo sooner or later.  They’ll reach a wider audience there, and it will bring more traffic back to my blog too.  Plus I get paid for ad revenue on my Squidoo pages… I think I finally see a way to monetize my writing on the Web without subjecting my blog readers to a huge barrage of off-topic advertising.  For the past year or so, I’ve had this feeling that my writing and other creative Web ventures would one day pay my way in life… but I never could figure out how that would happen.  Now, I think I’m starting to see the light.

12:37 PM:  Maybe I’ll go out to a bar now.  Or maybe to bed.  Or maybe I’ll start work on my third Squidoo lens.

Over the past week, I’ve been turned on to Squidoo, a social networking site founded by author/marketing expert Seth Godin, who wrote Purple Cow, Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers, and Small Is the new Big, among others.  Squidoo members (or “squids”) create lenses, which are articles focused on a particular topic.  Then other Squidoo members can rank the lens you created, and choose to add it to their favorites.  Writing lenses is a great way to get your name out there as an “everyday expert” and drive traffic to your sites.

You can also make money with Squidoo.  Squidoo displays ads on its members’ lenses (members can choose to opt out if they want).  The revenue is shared as follows:  5% is donated to charity; 50% goes to the creator of the lens; and 45% goes to Squidoo.  Lensmasters have the option of donating their 50% to charity as well, and have over 65 charities to choose from.  The more interesting and well-written a lens is, the more it will get viewed, and the more ad revenue it will generate.

Bloggers are natural candidates to be Squidoo lensmasters, since writing is the primary skill in use.  Since one of the sites I run is a store that sells items related to learning to play pool, I decided to surf through Squidoo’s lenses on that topic.  There really weren’t any.  There were pool articles, all right, but most of them were just crappy “buy stuff” lenses full of affiliate links to sites selling pool tables, cues, etc.  So I decided to sit down and create some content that was actually useful… a tutorial on how to learn left and right English in pool.  “English” is when you strike the cue ball off center.  Hitting the ball with left or right English puts a spin on the ball that causes its angle to either be widened or narrowed when it comes off the rail.  There are also top English (follow) and bottom English (draw); didn’t cover those but maybe that’ll be the next article.

I have a feeling I’m going to be writing a lot more Squidoo lenses in the future… not only to promote my stores but for fun.  I already have several Memphis-related lenses in mind.

If you’re into pool, check out the tutorial.

Now if I can only figure out how to write an interesting Squidoo lens on tube tops.

Went liquor and beer shopping today to get the supplies I need for TubeTopalooza.  I had several people give excellent suggestions on where to buy liquor, but in the end I decided the thing was to do was to shop locally.  So I headed to the Corkscrew on South Front next door to the new Blue Monkey.  Scott gave me excellent advice on how much liquor and wine to buy, based on expected number of party guests.  He also helped me pick out vodka, rum, bourbon, chardonnay, sauvignon blanc, and pinot grigio to serve.  And, he gave me a discount because I bought so much.  A great shopping experience and I’d recommend the Corkscrew to anyone planning a party.  I got out of there for about $100 less than I expected, thanks to Scott’s liquor estimates and his recommendations of inexpensive white wines.

Then I headed over to West Memphis Walgreens to get beer for the party.  I went with Miller High Life Light (Mikey the Camera Nazi serves it at his trolley tour porch parties – it’s not half bad) and Old Style (the PBR of Chicago, and we have Max from Calhoun’s to thank for turning me on to that one).  They’re not exactly the finest beers ever made, but I’d take either one over crappy Bud Light.  (John D: “Wha?… You’re not serving Bud Light at your party?  I’M NOT COMING!”)

Last night I hit the Rooster to catch Snozberry.  Got there at 9:30 right as they started.  9:30 is really too early to go to the Rooster… there were a grand total of six customers there when I walked in.  I ordered some nachos, and the place started to fill up by the time I was done eating.  Ended up hanging out with “Flo” (of “Glo” and “Flo” who agreed to be guest bloggers 4 months ago but never submitted anything).  We talked about how to get involved in promoting Memphis, the BFF candidates for July, all kinds of stuff.  “Flo” didn’t have a clear favorite for the July BFF, but she did have one suggestion:  “Don’t bring BFF 1.0 back!”  Yeah a lot of people tell me that.  I forgot to invite “Flo” to TubeTopalooza, and she pointed out that she’d look hot in a tube top and needs to be there.  So I invited her.  “Glo” can also rock a tube top and is also invited as well.

After that, a friend of ours got us into The Shadows, the swanky club above 152 on Beale Street.  First time I’d been in since they converted it.  Very nice indeed… they did a good job.  I was told we got there early (1:30), that the place starts to get packed later in the evening and is still going strong at 4:30.  I didn’t stay up until 4:30 to find out.  Had a PBR at Hoop’s Bar, discussed what I need to do to be a Pub Olympics judge tomorrow, came home.

Woke up today about 10, threw yesterday’s clothes on, stumbled to Jack’s for Mountain Dew.  As I passed Court Square, I heard, “Sir, can I ask you something.”  Oh no.  Not even awake 5 minutes and I already had my first bum of the day.  Although, I was a little surprised because I saw the bum patrol in the park on their bikes.

I soon wished the woman who approached me was a bum.  She wasn’t there to ask for money… she wanted to know, “Have you been saved?”

I waved her off and kept walking, never breaking stride.  “I’m just walking to the store,” I said to her.

“Do you know what ‘born again’ means?” she said.  “Do you know where you’re going to spend eternity?”  I walked faster and faster, hoping she’d get the hint.  She didn’t.  By this point she was running after me.  When she caught up with me and said, “Can I give you some literature?” I lost it.

“I DON’T WANT TO TALK TO YOU!  I’M JUST TRYING TO WALK TO THE STORE AND GET A DRINK!!!” I yelled at her.  She looked at me like I had just run over a kitten.  I kept walking.  She didn’t follow but she stared at me the entire next block until I made it to Jack’s.  By the time I walked back she was engaged in conversation with people on park benches.  I crossed over to the other side of Main Street Mall and avoided her.

While on the Main Street Mall, I snapped a photo of this poster listing the schedule of Memphis Farmers Market dinners for the summer (click to see the image in a size large enough to read the detail):

Every month a local chef holds a special dinner at his or her restaurant, featuring fare bought at the Memphis Farmers Market, which runs from 7 AM to 1 PM every Saturday next to the train station on GE Patterson.  In addition to the dinner at Circa tomorrow night, there will be MFM dinners at Restaurant Iris, River Oaks, Felicia Suzanne’s, and Interim between now and October.

No idea what I’ll end up doing tonight… it’s after 8 PM and I haven’t made any plans.  Oh, crap, I just missed the party at Shelton Clothiers!  Sorry, Tom.  I got so wrapped up in stuff I was doing online today (more on that in the next post) that I forgot about the party at 6 PM.  The rest of the night is free… I’ll probably start at the usual place and migrate from there.

Brunch tomorrow at the Blue Monkey at 11, then Pub Olympics at Hoop’s Bar at 1.

With July 4 quickly approaching, and with this being an election year, I decided to go in a completely different direction for the creation of my next Amazon.com storefront. This time, I decided to focus on an item we see every day, the American flag.

AmericanFlagMerchandise.com carries a full line of not only flags and flagpoles, but men’s, women’s, and kids’ flag-related apparel, and a full line of novelty items.  I learned while building this store that there are a lot of really popular flag-related items I never knew existed… belly rings, Zippo lighters, and bicycle bells to name a few.

So, if you need any flag merchandise for Independence Day or anytime, give it a look.  By the way, I don’t really expect that my blog readers buy stuff from most of these stores (although females should check out the tube top store).  The main reason I mention them here is so Google will see a popular site linking to the stores, and deduce that the stores must have useful content.  It’s what we in the biz call “SEO” or search engine optimization.  The more links from popular sites, the better a store or site tends to do in Google search results.

The next store I launch (which I thought would go up before the flag store, but I decided the flag store was more time-sensitive) will have massive appeal to my blog’s readers.  Check back.  With a lot of events to attend over the next week (Pub Olympics, dinner meetings, TubeTopalooza) it may take me another two weeks to get it done.

These stores better hurry up and make me some money… the car sure took me for a ride today, and not on a road.  It needed an oil change, new valves, a new radiator, and multiple leaks in the air conditioning unit fixed.  Total: Just over $1,000, but “we rounded it off to an even grand for ya,” said their service guy.  Hey, thanks.  To add insult to injury, their courtesy van wasn’t available after 2:30 today, so I had to spend another $35 to cab it out there.

At least it blows cold air, which is good because I want to be comfortable tomorrow as I drive around and make beer and liquor purchases for TubeTopalooza.  And next week I get to sit in the inspection line a second time.  Yay!

Got about an hour to kill before Snozberry takes the stage at the Red Rooster… maybe I can find someplace on the way there that has cold beer.  And waitresses in miniskirts.