Paul Ryburn's Journal

I have a widget called My Earthquake Watch on my personalized Google homepage that shows all earthquakes over the past 24 hours on a world map, with different icons for different magnitudes. If you don’t have a Google homepage, you can visit the Earthquake Watch site.

Today I noticed that there have been a LOT more earthquakes than usual. Not only that, but there were some in parts of the world that don’t often experience earthquakes. There was a 5.6 magnitude one in the Gulf of Mexico, a 5.7 in the North Atlantic, and two smaller ones in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. There were also a lot of earthquakes in the Pacific Basin – it’s common to see a few in that region every day, but today there were twice as many as usual.

Wonder if “the big one” is about to happen in some part of the world.

I’ve been in BBQ Fest booths for several years as a guest, and now for one year as a team member. Team captain Chuck asked me several times, “Paul, what do we need to do to get some hot women in here?” As I walked around the park last weekend, I thought about that question – how DO you get your team’s booth to be the “party booth” where all the gorgeous women want to hang out?

I came up with the list below. This is one case where I really wish Blogger would let me enable comments on a post-by-post basis: I’d love to hear additional suggestions from readers. You can always e-mail them to me at paul.ryburn@gmail.com and maybe I’ll do a followup post.

Have a cave-like entrance to your team’s booth. This arouses curosity: People can’t see all of your booth at once, so they wonder “What’s going on in there?” and they want to come in to find out.

Build a double-decker (or triple-decker). There’s some kind of subliminal signal sent there. “Those people are higher up than I am, they must be having more fun than I am. I want to come up there and party too.”

Be prepared to really blow it out on Wednesday (“Friends & Family”) night. Make sure your sound and lighting systems are in good working order and your booth looks like a million dollars. Team members from other booths will come visit and get a great first impression, and by Thursday the word on the street will be that your booth is THE place to be.

If you use wristbands to hand out for guest access to your booth, write your booth’s number on the bands. I’m not talking about the offical Memphis in May team-member wristbands, that get you in the park for free. I’m talking about ones you buy on your own, specifically to control access to your booth.

Why is it important to write your booth number on the bands? Well, several times last weekend I had people tell me, “Paul, stop by (booth number), I have a team!” And you know what? In every case, I totally intended to go visit, but forgot which booth. If you write the number on the band, they CAN’T forget.

This means that it’s better to buy paper wristbands that you can write on, rather than plastic ones.

If you have a ribs team, invite lots of people who live/work on or north of Beale Street; if you have a hog or shoulder team, invite lots of people who live/work in South Main or South End. Ribs teams are typically at the north end of the park. Hog and shoulder teams are usually at the south end. This means that if you have a shoulder team like we did, and you invite people who work north of Beale, they’ll likely use the Beale entrance and have to walk past a half a mile of ribs teams before they get to you. Guess what will probably happen? They’ll get distracted and may never make it down to your booth.

Luckily, my team has some new condo owners in the South Main district, so if we do shoulder again next year they’ll know lots of people in the area to invite – and those people will probably use the Butler Street entrance, which is the one nearest to our booth.

Related: If you invite people from other parts of town who aren’t familiar with BBQ Fest, tell them the entrance nearest your booth is the best one to use. Scope out the parking situation near this entrance beforehand so you can make recommendations.

Use the velvet rope to your advantage. Quick story: I have some friends who loved Raiford’s. But if they went down there on a Friday or Saturday night and didn’t see a line, they figured nothing was happening and didn’t go in. It’s counterintuitive – who wants to have to stand in line? But that’s a sign that your place is the most popular.

So, station someone from your team as the door to act as the gatekeeper (this is also necessary to keep freeloaders out). The person controlling the velvet rope doesn’t have to be mean and confront every person who asks to come in; rather, he/she can simply engage each person in conversation for a few minutes, holding up the line.

Make sure your tent is amply stocked with beer and/or liquor. Well, DUH. If you run out of booze, people will go elsewhere.

Keep the Porta-Potties in your team’s booth clean, make sure there’s plenty of toilet paper, put a light in there, maybe a scented candle. Women appreciate these things. If your bathrooms are dirty, they’ll leave and won’t come back. If on the other hand you go out of your way to make them pleasant (at least as pleasant as a Porta-Potty can be), they’ll remember you for that and you’ll have repeat visitors.

Make sure there’s lots of activity near the entrance to your booth, with a good light and sound system. There may be a huge party going on in the back room, but if the front of your booth looks deserted, people on the sidewalks won’t know about it. Put the dance floor as close to the entrance as possible.

One caveat: I DON’T recommend placing your food, beer, or liquor where it’s visible from the entrance to your booth – it will attract freeloaders.

Get invited to more popular booths than your own. This isn’t hard to do – just go by there on Friends & Family Night and arrange reciprocal access to your team’s booths. Then you can go back on the party nights, and when you see a group of cute girls who have been there a while and are ready to see what else is going on at the festival, you can suggest YOUR booth.

Hire popular service-industry workers to bartend at your booth. All their hot friends will stop by to see them. Usually this won’t even cost you anything – you can probably get them to work just for tips, of which they’ll make plenty if your booth is good.

If a mixed group containing attractive women, not-so-attractive women, and guys asks to come in, invite the ENTIRE group in – not just the hot women. I’ve heard of booths where the guy at the door will say, “Okay, you and you (the good-looking females) can come in and party all night, but you and you (guys/not-so-attractive females) have to stay outside.” For a girl to go on in and party it up while her friends have to wait outside on a muddy sidewalk – that’s just SENSATIONALLY rude. That kind of girl, I wouldn’t even want in my tent. Inviting the entire group in is the respectful thing to do.

Wear your team shirt every day. This way, when you’re walking around the park or visiting other tents, you’ll get asked, “Oh, you’re on a team?” and you can tell them, “Yeah, I’m headed to my booth right now, come on!”

Don’t have a sponsor. For most teams that have one, Thursday night is “sponsor night” where they have all their corporate people and clients at your booth. That’s one less night you have to build your booth’s reputation as the place to party. Of course, for a lot of teams it’s cost-prohibitive not to have sponsorship, so this may be a suggestion you can’t afford to take. And it’s actually contradictory advice, because if you do the other things I suggested (cave-like entrance, double-decker, well-stocked with alcohol) you’re going to be more likely to run up costs that will make a sponsor necessary.

Come back next year. Some of the known “party booths” at BBQ Fest are so popular because they’ve built up that reputation over YEARS. Do the things outlined above and you’ll get there too over time.

One word of caution – are you sure you WANT your booth to be the party booth? Because if it becomes one, you’re going to have to deal with a lot of freeloaders – you’ll definitely need to station someone at the door to keep people out who don’t actually know anyone on your team, but try to say they know “Mike” or “John” or some other common name.

Last Friday evening when I got to the booth, I saw a couple of my team members putting security measures into place – asking everyone if they had a guest wristband, putting a rope across the booth’s entrance to restrict access. “Isn’t this a bit excessive?” I asked. But as the evening went on, it became more and more clear that they were completely correct to take the steps they took. Lots of people came by who obviously didn’t know anyone on the team, and they would’ve eaten and drank us out of house and home if we hadn’t stopped them.

Those are my thoughts as a freshman BBQ team member… maybe in future years I’ll add to the list. I’ll definitely bump this post back to the top a few weeks before BBQ Fest ’08 for my readers who are on teams.

Al Gore’s new book The Assault on Reason is available today. In the book Gore discusses how the 30-second television spot has become the most powerful force shaping public opinion. That’s not a good thing, he explains, given that the current administration seems to be less interested than any previous one in sharing the complete truth with the public.

Gore summarizes how we got to this point, and he makes the reader more aware of the forces at work shaping public thought. He goes on to explain what we can do, individually and as the American public, to perform a reality check on ourselves.

Click the link below to order it from Amazon at 40% off the retail price.

Got drunk to-go food from The Flying Fish tonight, and while I was waiting I snapped a pic of their board listing their specials. So here’s how to get some cheap food at the Fish:

The Friday deal (2 lb. of snow crabs) is particularly good, that’s like $8 off.

I got the grilled salmon plate to go. When it came out I shook habanero sauce and green sauce all over it and then cut it all up (salmon, beans, rice, zucchini, squash, pico de gallo) and mixed it all together with the hot sauces all over it. You gotta try it that way. Don’t be scared of the hot sauce. In 2002-03 there was a bar at the corner of Fourth and Gayoso that had “Hot Fish and Cold Forty Fridays.” So, see, put hot sauce on your salmon and you’ll be respecting your Downtown heritage. Jack’s at Main and Jefferson has 40s if you want to go even more old-school than I did.

There’s a major event downtown tomorrow (Tuesday) night – so major that I’m NOT going to blog it, for fear that my own readers might prevent me from getting in. If you want to know what’s going on e-mail me.

This morning, I surfed the Memphis Daily News site and came across an interesting article: The Daily News is going green. That means that they committed to buy 25 “blocks” a month of green power, which is power from renewable energy sources such as solar energy, wind power, and methane gas. “Green” power sources do not produce the emissions associated with traditional fossil fuels.

Residential customers can buy “blocks” of power as well. Each block costs only $4, added to your MLGW bill as a line item. Using one block of green energy per month over the course of a year will produce environmental savings equivalent to recycling 7,661 cans, planting half an acre of trees, recycling half a ton of newspaper, or not driving a car for 2 months. Signing up to buy blocks of power takes about 1 minute to do online – here’s the link to more info and to sign up.

This morning I got online and signed up to buy a block of power a month. They say each block delivers 150 kilowatt hours, which is about 10-12% of a home’s average monthly power consumption. Since I live in an apartment (and therefore have lower bills) I just signed up for one block, but may increase it in the future. As you can see above, even one block makes a tremendous difference.

So, I’d like to invite all my readers to sign up for the program as well. Working together we can fight back against global warming. If you decide to sign up, send me an e-mail after you do (paul.ryburn@gmail.com) and tell me how many blocks you bought… I’m just curious to see how much of a difference this blog can make.

I’d be pleased to see other Memphis bloggers take this idea and run with it as well.

Going to delay my one remaining BBQ Fest post for a day… this is more important.

This year’s BBQ Fest pics are ready! Here’s the link to the Picasa photo album. 255 pics of the team and the festival.

A few random pics:

Me leaning against a post in the booth and drinking a beer. Definitely not my first beer.

Members of the Ques Brothers representing at the awards ceremony. I stayed behind to watch the booth, but I sent my camera to the awards with Mikey the Camera Nazi.

No caption necessary.

A lot of beautiful girls walked past our booth and this definitely wasn’t one of them.

This was a problem. This sign was on the path to our tent (S 158), but you’d never know it because it indicates that only hog (H) teams are straight ahead. The first day, I stumbled upon our booth quite by accident, thinking I was still a couple of blocks away. Last night, some of my invited guests told me they walked around for close to an hour before they found our booth. Memphis in May needs to improve the accuracy of their signage.

Team leader Chuck, who celebrated his 34th birthday Friday. (Note: The previous sentence may contain some factual inaccuracies)

As always, you can get full coverage of the weekend’s activities – and of the Ques Brothers in particular – on Skippy Blank’s excellent blog on the Commercial Appeal’s website.

The results were posted last night and our shoulder competition team The Ques Brothers finished 12th out of 72 teams. That’s a very good result for a first-year team, and better yet, the cooks know what they need to change to get better scores next year. Last night as the event was wrapping up, everyone was saying how we had formed the perfect team – people who know how to cook, people who know how to construct, people who know how to party, and everyone gets along well. This looks to be a team that will be around for years to come and will hopefully bring home some top-10 trophies.

A couple of videos:

This one was taken about 2:30 PM Thursday afternoon when not many people were around. It’s just a quick tour of all areas of the booth. Nothing real special here, just a memory of our booth for those of us who were on the team. It’s also a good introduction of what a BBQ booth (correction: one of the best BBQ booths) looks like, for those who have never attended the festival.

This is the second video, taken about 7 PM Thursday night after the park got busy.

I was able to edit and upload all the photos in about an hour using Google Picasa, which is part of the Google Pack of free software. Last year, using Paint Shop Pro and Coppermine, it took me 3 times as long to edit and upload half as many pictures.

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Got one more post to come – observations on how to attract lots of hot women to your BBQ Fest booth. That one will probably be ready tomorrow.

Hope all the links work. Enjoy!

Thaddeus Matthews has a new post about Ophelia Ford that is absolutely hilarious. Earlier this week, she was taken to the hospital when she fell off a barstool at a hotel bar in Nashville. She claimed later in an interview that she was at the bar to get soup. Um, yeah, okay. Just the picture Thad posted of “Cream of Ophelia Soup” is reason enough to check it out.

Just checked the camera and found that Thursday-Friday I took an additional 126 photos, as well as 2 videos of the booth. I’ll add those to the photo album to be created Sunday or sometime thereafter. A few preview pics:

I’m inviting this person to join our trivia team. My T-shirt, by the way, reads “I LOVE ROMANIAN GIRLS.”

Speaking of trivia, here’s the trivia master himself, Pete.

Josh and Mikey working security at the front of our booth.

Our pork shoulder, which hopefully will win us a World championship this afternoon.

Night-vision shot from the rooftop deck of our booth.

The judges will come by our booth sometime between 11 and 12 to inspect our pork shoulder this morning. Since I don’t know a thing about cooking, I’m staying out of the booth until afternoon.

I think I’ve finally figured out where I can best contribute to the team in future years. I definitely should not be allowed anywhere near the cooker. I’m too lazy to help build the booth. My disdain for corporate America makes me a poor choice to set up hospitality for the sponsor (although, I will say once again that our sponsor Terex has been awesome to work with). My role, as I see it in future years, will be advising the team on how to attract the right kind of booth visitors (i.e. hot girls). I see a lot of elements – booth design, booth location, lighting, music, distribution of booth invitations – that contribute toward this goal. Once the festival is over I’ll type up my observations on this subject in a post. Maybe it’ll help other teams too.

I just realized I did something DUMB last night though… Friday was payday and I stuck my paycheck (for the past two weeks’ work) in my wallet, forgot about it, and walked all over BBQ Fest with it on me.

High point of the evening last night: Hanging out on the rooftop deck with my friends Shane, Leigh, Todd, Ed, and Vivian. Great night.

I’m still exhausted but I feel a lot better than the past two mornings, probably because I got to sleep until a reasonable hour for a change, without the demands of the rat race interrupting my BBQ and sleep schedules. I’ll probably stop by the Saucer to drink a beer and say hello to my waitresses around noon, then head down to the festival after that. It’s gonna be a beautiful day, so come on down!

Best random conversation I had last night at BBQ Fest: A woman told me that she and some friends were walking around in the area of Fourth and Beale when a homeless man approached. He asked for money and proudly told them, “I’m Downtown’s #1 homeless person.”

I know the Memphis Business Journal does their Top 40 Under 40 voting, but I must have missed the poll for #1 Homeless Person. Then again, I don’t subscribe to the print MBJ, I just read the online version, so it’s possible I missed it.

Hmmm…. last week a reader sent me info on how to do polls within a blog… one of these days maybe I should do a vote for #1 homeless person right here. After all, where would there be a more appropriate place to cast such a ballot?

And this may bias the proceedings if I ever do, but my vote would be for Scratchy.

More BBQ Fest notes and pics to come.

– We’ll start with a few items I noticed as I was flipping through the current issue of the Memphis Flyer. Styx and Foreigner are playing Mud Island on June 22, and tickets went on sale this morning. They’re available through Ticketmaster so you’ll no doubt have to pay a hefty convenience fee if you decide to go.

– I see that the Charlie Wood Trio will be playing the Madison rooftop for next Thursday, May 24’s party. Downtowners used to be able to listen to the smooth, mellow sounds of Charlie Wood anytime – he had a regular nightly gig at King’s Palace for years. He gave it up to move on to other projects though, so this is a rare chance to catch Charlie without leaving the 38103 zip code.

– As i perused the real estate listings in the Flyer, I came across what appears to be a great deal on a house in Cooper-Young… a 2 BR, 2BA house with central heat and air at 2044 Elzey for $87,500. You almost never see a house in probably the most desirable quadrant of CY for under six figures, especially one that doesn’t say anything about being a fixer-upper. So I MapQuested it and found that the location is either great or lousy, depending on how you look at it. It’s great because you’re about a 4-block walk away from Celtic Crossing, Cafe Ole, the Young Avenue Deli, Dish, Beauty Shop and all of CY’s other hotspots. It’s lousy because 2044 Elzey appears to be less than half a block from the train tracks. So this definitely isn’t a house to buy if you want quiet. But if you can handle a little noise, might be worth investigating – you’re not going to see a bargain like this in CY very often.

– BBQ Fest report: By mid-afternoon yesterday I felt like my old self again, and walked down to the tent. Hung out on the rooftop deck with Mikey and Clay for about an hour, then walked around the park and took pics of the most interesting tents. Made a quick trip to the Saucer to hand out some wristbands for access to our booth, then headed back. Last night was “Sponsor Night” so we had guests from Terex in the booth for much of the evening, where they enjoyed Willie’s smoked chicken, ribs, and beef brisket. About 9:30 my body just gave out – I just got a sense of, “you better get home right now or you’re going to be so exhausted that you have to call in sick again.” So I actually did the responsible thing and walked home. Hard to believe, right? I hated it that I left so early, since I had invited a lot of VIP guests (meaning: hot girls) to the booth, and some of them surely showed up after I left.

Willie’s pulling the first of the pork shoulder off the grill for lunch at the booth, and I hate it that I won’t be there… but I can’t make it until after work.

CA writer Skippy Blank continues to do his usual excellent job blogging about our booth. The guy definitely has a way with words.

Skippy also snapped a pic of me in my new T-shirt, which I’ll post later this weekend. Let’s just say it’s a very appropriate shirt for me to have on, although it has little to do with this year’s Memphis in May theme of Spain.

I’ll be down there a little after 5, and tonight I will have enough energy to keep going until the park closes. Happy BBQ Fest weekend everyone.