Paul Ryburn's Journal

Congrats to The Rapscallions, who took second place at trivia last night. That raises our total gift certificate stash to $70, to be spent in conjunction with two upcoming plate parties at the Saucer. As you can see from the picture above, Pete the Trivia Guy was mightily impressed with our knowledge.

With the other Downtown team disbanded, Cliff Clay-vin and Yoko officially joined the Rapscallions. They proposed changing the name to “Rapscallions for Gay Polygamy,” an idea shot down in about 0.1 second.

In other news… discovered the website of one of the best blues bands in the city, The Eric Hughes Blues Band. Check it out if you enjoy the blues.

Dead Elvis Week starts this Saturday and runs through Sunday, August 19. Check out the official website for a calendar of events.

Wondering what Adam “Pacman” Jones will be doing while he serves out his year suspension from the NFL? Turn on Spike TV Thursday night at 8 and you’ll find out. He’s signed a contract to be part of TNA Wrestling, the pro-wrestling company that is the closest thing WWE has to a competitor. There are conflicting reports as to whether he will be wrestling. TNA co-founder Jeff Jarrett says Pacman will wrestle (and has been training Pacman in the ring), but the NFL says wrestling would violate his football contract.

The Dempseys play the Madison rooftop tomorrow night. Always a great show, but with a predicted high of 101 I may skip this one.

I’ll post some pics of National Night Out later today.

Every Tuesday in August, RedHook beers will be on $2.50 Fire Sale at the Downtown Flying Saucer. In addition, every time you order one, you can ask for a slip to enter into a contest to win the guitar shown below.

Drawing will be held for the guitar on Tuesday, August 28 and I’m told that you must be present to win. I plan on entering a whole bunch of times between now and the 28th.

I was out at the other Saucer, the one on East Bumblefuck Parkway, just an hour ago… after a meeting with a client, we needed a Wi-Fi connection to go over some stuff.

Back Downtown now, preparing to head to National Night Out in Court Square for a little while. A few hours of sweatin’ with the cops, then I’ll head down the street for trivia night.

FOX 13 did a great job with their panhandling story. In addition to myself, they interviewed Handling-Panhandling co-moderator Mike King and Center City Commission security director Larry Bloom. The report went a long way toward getting the message out that donations to panhandlers generally don’t help the homeless and in fact enable people’s addictions.

Many thanks to Lauren Johnson and her videographer for a fantastic story.

I’m heading out to Bartlett for a client meeting this morning, but will be back Downtown for National Night Out this afternoon in Court Square.

Here is a public display of flowers, located at the trolley stop near Main and Peabody Place:

… and here’s a bum who has picked one of those flowers and is trying to sell it on the street for money. We watched him do this all day yesterday. He’d pick a couple of flowers from public planters, sell them, and then come back to pick more.

And here’s another bum who has also been to the same flower planter:

I bet I saw the “flower man” gimmick being applied at least 30 times last weekend. It’s a wonder there are any flowers left Downtown.

There are flower vendors on Beale who have permits to be there, but they don’t acquire their flowers by picking them from public displays. They also have vendor permits – a standard panhandling permit does not entitle the bearer to sell stuff on public streets.

The Westin is doing its usual post-Orpheum movie party Thursday night August 9 (NOTE: This one’s on a Thursday not a Friday as usual), and this looks like an especially good one.

The Orpheum will show Caddyshack at 7:15. Following the movie there will be a theme party at the Westin’s lobby bar, and they’re encouraging people to dress up. Best dressed golfer wins a $50 bar tab.

This may be of particular interest to fellow bloggers Philip and East Bumblefuck Kat. Their Ptolemy organization did a “golf pros and tennis hoes” party about a year ago (one of the “pay-to-play” parties that Kat yaps about in her blog) with attire pretty much exactly the same as the upcoming Westin event. Some of the people who attended the Ptolemy party may already have the clothes needed to win that bar tab.

There’s also the chance to win a stay in an NBA suite at the Westin, with extra-high doors and extra-long beds, or dinner at the Daily Grill.

Interview with FOX 13 went well. We met them at the Elvis statue at Main and Beale, and wouldn’t you know it, we picked the one day when there weren’t any bums out. I think they found some Downtown before they interviewed us though. Looking forward to seeing it on TV tonight.

FOX 13 is meeting Mike King and me today at noon. They will interview us about Downtown’s panhandling problem and what the Handling-Panhandling online forum is doing about it. We’ve arranged to meet them at a place Downtown where there are just about always people panhandling.

If you’re home tonight, be sure to check out the story. If they put it online, I’ll post a link to it.

Thanks to my friends at Circa for providing the info below on their first wine and food tasting. This sounds like a heck of a deal for $25. If you haven’t been to Circa yet, this might be the perfect excuse to try it out.

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Wine & Food Tasting Circa Style – On Wednesday, August 8, at 7:00 p.m. we will hold our first Circa-style wine event, led by general manager Randy Caparoso. Randy has more than 25 years of experience in the intense art of wine and food matching (check out his best stories www.wineloverspage.com/randysworld).

Please RSVP by calling (901) 522-1488. For only $25 you will be able to try each of these wines paired with our featured dishes:

Dan McGuinness Pub in Downtown Memphis is making a serious play for the football-watching crowd this fall – and I’m talking American football, not soccer. They are getting the NFL Sunday Ticket package, they’ve bought 6 new HDTVs and I’ve been told they’re buying one more.

Pretty cool… with Sleep Out Louie’s no longer an option for football, McGuinness stands to pick up a fair amount of business from Downtowners. They’ve also added a new bartender on Sundays, a familiar face who may cause the brunch crew to fit an extra bar into Sunday plans.

Speaking of football – this Thursday I’m going to have to do something I thought I’d never do – root for the Dallas Cowboys. They play the Colts this Thursday at 7 (on FOX) and at this point I’ll cheer for anyone who plays the Colts. Maybe Peyton will get taken out with a season-ending injury in the first preseason game. One can only hope.

Happy first day of work to my favorite blogger/MILF. Her daughter starts soccer this month, so my favorite blogger/MILF is now a soccer mom. She already lives in the ‘burbs of East Bumblefuck… she should just go ahead and buy a minivan and go all the way with it. Although, if she took the back seats out of the van and put a mattress back there, that could be kind of cool. Don’t come a-knockin’ if the Dodge Caravan be rockin’!

Also congrats to my friends Otto and Ken on finishing their 200th beers at the Saucer. They’ll be joining me in the Ring of Honor.

All right, time to get some work done… gotta type up an estimate for a new project, spend some time on a WordPress site I’m working on, and upload a bunch of new pictures of bums to the Handling-Panhandling group. I’d wish everyone a happy Monday, but who in their right mind would be happy about it being Monday?

Just wanted to give an update of some of the accomplishments of the Handling-Panhandling online forum over the past week. If you are fed up with panhandling in Memphis, you need to be on this forum.

• We learned the identity of one of Memphis’ most aggressive panhandlers, the woman pictured below. Having a name for her will make it easier to file criminal complaints and authorizations of agency against her. We also learned a little bit about why she behaves the way she does. Hopefully, the next time she’s picked up on criminal charges, she can be funneled to Environmental Court which will get her the help she needs.

• We sent out letters to six business in front of which Sharp Dressed Bum commonly panhandles – McEwen’s, LoLo’s Table, the Rendezvous, the Holiday Inn Select, the Peabody Hotel, and Peabody Place. We have his name as well, and we know that he has an outstanding warrant (mug shots from that arrest below). Again, we’re hoping that sharing information will lead to more criminal complaints and authorizations of agency against him, disrupting his “business” on the streets of Downtown.

• We printed business cards, featuring the URL of the Handling-Panhandling forum, to hand out to interested parties. If you want some of these cards to hand out, let me know. (Pic is a little bit fuzzy – the print on the cards is not)

• We sent invitations to three of the top police officers in the city, including the head of the Downtown Precinct and the head of the Entertainment District Unit, to join the group. We hope to get the police involved to make this a true police-community partnership.

Group currently stands at 126 members and we’re just getting started… we plan on having a presence at National Night Out at Court Square Tuesday afternoon 4 to 7, so come on out and join us.

WMC-TV channel 5 ran a story this afternoon about the Memphis Police Quality of Life Task Force taking action to clean up Downtown.

One of the things we’ve learned on the Handling-Panhandling list in the past two weeks is that the river bank near the Downtown Visitor’s Center is a popular place for vagrants to camp out. As a result, the first thing that happens when tourists arrive in Memphis is that they get panhandled outside the Visitor’s Center. MPD says that the people who camp there are also known to commit crimes, breaking into cars and trading whatever they can find for drugs.

An MPD officer was interviewed, and he commented that there are places in town for the homeless to stay that are not out in the open on the river banks. Most likely he meant the Union Mission. Vagrants choose to camp out rather than stay in the Mission for a variety of reasons – they don’t want to hand over $6 of their “hard-earned” money; they don’t like having to be in the Mission by 6 PM, causing them to miss evening hours outdoors which are prime-time for panhandling; they don’t like having to sit through the Mission’s chapel service; they can’t use alcohol and drugs at the Mission.

I applaud the police on recognizing there’s a problem with panhandling Downtown and doing something about it (heck, I didn’t even know we had a Quality of Life Task Force). I question, though, whether what they did today will really help. The vagrants will return to their camp to find their toothpaste, spare clothes, bedding, and other necessities of life are not there. Are they really going to go, “Well, I guess I better go to the Mission, can’t stay here anymore”? I doubt it. Now they’re going to have to panhandle more aggressively than ever, to get new necessities to survive as well as money for alcohol and drugs. They’ll likely set up camp right back in the same spot. And if they decide the area is no longer hospitable, they’re not going to go to the Mission to get help – they’ll relocate to another area. Hey Midtown, want some more bums?

If the police really want to put a dent in panhandling and car break-ins Downtown, I have three words for them: walking police patrols. That’s what we need. The panhandlers and criminals will be a lot more skittish about doing “business” Downtown if they see a cop every time they turn around.

I thank them for what they did today, but it’s a Band-Aid and it strikes me as more of a publicity move to show that they’re doing something (maybe in response to the media coverage Handling-Panhandling has gotten in the past week) rather than working to come up with a long-term solution to the problem. Nevertheless, I hope to learn more about the Quality of Life Task Force and get them active on the Handling-Panhandling forum.

If any of the cops that participated today are reading this, I invite you to e-mail me and start a dialogue. Not trying to attack what you did today; I just think you might be able to come up with some more constructive solutions if you partner with the Downtown community.