Paul Ryburn's Journal

– 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.

In the news this week: State Senator Ophelia Ford went off on a wild, bizarre off-topic rant during a Department of Child Protective Services hearing. She asked a lot of irrelevant questions about death certificates, and continued to badger the DCS officials even after they told her several times that they have nothing to do with that matter. Here’s a link to the video.

The next day she was hospitalized. Here’s a story about it from WMC TV-5. The story did not specify the exact nature of Ophelia’s illness, but local political blogger Thaddeus Matthews has done some speculating on that matter.

Ophelia was in the news earlier this year for missing 13 of the first 24 session days of the state Senate.

If you live Downtown, you’re in District 29 and Ophelia is YOUR state Senator. Are you happy with the job she’s doing?

If you want to find out what my BBQ team is up to, check the Commerical Appeal… writer “Skippy” Blank is on our team.

When I got off work and got to the tent yesterday, I found out we had received front-page coverage in one of the CA sections. Skippy wrote an excellent article explaining how the team was formed, how we got corporate sponsorship, budgeting for a BBQ team, selecting the type of meat to cook, and so on. If you’ve always wondered how teams get put together for BBQ Fest, this will lay it all out for you.

Skippy is also writing a BBQ blog with ongoing coverage of our team’s progress. Man… he is just a fantastic writer. I had originally planned to do day-by-day coverage like he’s doing, but there’s no need. Skippy’s got it covered.

I also have to pay a couple of compliments to the team. When I joined a team that was thrown together at the last minute, I did it for the prestige of being on a BBQ team and figured I’d get average food and a crappy shirt. What I got instead was incredibly good food and the best BBQ Fest team shirt I’ve ever seen. Grillmaster Willie served us beef brisket, smoked chicken, and ribs last night, and the man clearly knows what he’s doing with that smoker. Can’t wait to taste what he does with pork shoulder, which is our team’s category in the competition.

A few pics:

This is the front of our booth, with our corporate sponsor Terex prominently featured.

The view from our booth’s upper deck

First fruits from the grill: beef brisket.

Got 54 pics total, thanks in part to Mikey the Camera Nazi doing his job. I can’t believe I didn’t get one single pic of the back of the shirt though. Since the featured country is Spain, we have a print of a “Pigasso” on the back.

Sometime this weekend I’m going to put my camera in video mode and just walk around the booth. Still shots cannot possibly do our booth justice.

One of my blog’s regular readers told me that she bought two new tube tops in preparation for Tube Top Month, which is now only two weeks away. Glad to see this blog is making a difference.

Unfortunately I wore myself out last night and had to call in sick to work this morning. I had every intention of following Philip’s advice to “pace yourself” but that plan got flushed down the toilet as soon as I got there. I feel like some of Terex’s dirt-moving equipment ran over me a few times. Going to take some aspirin and go back to bed in a few minutes.

My clothes smell like BBQ. It’s fantastic.

A couple of days ago I posted that Jerry Falwell had died, and asked my readers who smoke pot to light one for Jerry. If you can’t deal with Jerry Falwell, light one for Jerry Garcia. I’m sure he’d appreciate it.

That reminds me. Tonight at BBQ Fest “Friends & Family Night” I ran into one of my former students who had me for Computer Literacy during the Spring 1995 semester, which would have been the first year I was full time. I had a test scheduled for a particular Monday (I think – may have been a different day of the week). But, the class period before, typically a “review day,” I learned that the Grateful Dead were going to be in town the night before the test. So I took a poll. “How many of you are going to see the Dead?” About a third of the class raised their hands.

“All right, test rescheduled for Wednesday,” I told them.

I forgot about that for 12 years. I just now realize how cool that was, given that Jerry Garcia died (and thus the band broke up) a couple of months later.

Damn. I rocked as a college teacher. Sorry to toot my own horn but I did.

Normally I wander during festivals, but my BBQ team’s booth is so awesome that I don’t want to leave. So if you don’t see me out much during BBQ Fest that’s why.

Fellow blogger Philip has a great guide-to-BBQ-Fest post on his blog. If you’re coming down to Tom Lee Park this weekend, you definitely need to read it. He created it last year and updated it for 2007.

Tonight will be my first experience as a BBQ Fest team member. Tonight is “Friends and Family Night,” for team members only, and you have to have a special ticket to get in.

It will also be my first time to see my team’s booth. Well, sort of – I saw it from the riverwalk, about 100 feet away, on Sunday, when it was being built, but I didn’t dare go into the park. I knew if I did, someone would hand me a hammer and give me chores to do. Part of my deal when I agreed to join the team was that I wouldn’t have to do any construction work.

Ya know… I wouldn’t have blamed them if they had charged me $100 more than everybody else to be on the team… because I really have done nothing. Most of those guys have been toiling away in the hot sun all week, while I’ve been sitting in the Saucer drinking beer. Then again, I’m the one who’s making sure all the Saucer waitresses and bartenders get invited to our booth, so I guess that’s a valuable contribution in a sense. And I’m loaning the team the disco ball that hung in my office when I taught at the U of M. Unfortunately I don’t have a motor for it – the piece-of-crap motor that came with the thing died about midway through my teaching career. If anyone has a spare disco ball motor that we can borrow, let me know.

Congrats to my trivia team The Rapscallions, who took second place last night, bringing our total gift certificate stash to $195. It definitely helped that Clay’s team, which in recent weeks has been our stiffest competition, was not there. I’m partly responsible for that – I took a couple of our trivia team members aside a couple of days ago, and asked them to find Clay (who is a member of our BBQ team) something to do Tuesday evening. Heh. Bet he hates it that he missed last night… he would have come up with a lot of good team names related to Jerry Falwell’s death. There’s always next week though.

Here’s an idea for anyone brave enough to do it… find a place that rents Teletubby costumes, dress up as Tinky Winky, and show up at Jerry’s funeral.

All right, that’s all for now. Gotta drive downtown and drop off that disco ball.

Rev. Jerry Falwell, the TV evangelist who founded the Moral “Majority” and who brought the so-called religious right to political power, passed away today. He was 73.

Jerry, every time alcohol touches my lips tonight (and believe me, it will, plenty of times), I’ll be drinking in your honor.

And if I convince some beautiful young lady to come home with me and fornicate tonight, I’ll be doing it in your honor.

And if I accidentally knock her up, when I write a check to pay for the abortion I’ll write “in honor of Jerry Falwell” on the check.

I don’t smoke weed, but for my readers who do, I encourage you to light one up for Jerry tonight.

I’m not into guys, but for my male readers who are, pack some fudge for Jerry tonight.

I’m not a woman who’s into other women, but for my readers who are, munch some carpet for Jerry tonight.

R.I.P., Jerry.

“Work is the curse of the drinking class.”

Amen to that, brother. Amen to that.

– Now and then I wander the halls at the Board of Education, and look at the art created by MCS students that has been chosen to hang there. Some of those kids are REALLY talented.

Just curious… I know some of the South Main artists read this blog… has there ever been a program where local artists identify the most talented kids in the district and mentor them? Not talking about going in and doing an art class project with 25 kids, where 20 of them are just going through the motions to get a grade. I’m talking about finding the ones who are truly into it and show signs that it could be a career option, and then having local artists mentor them on a one-on-one or small-group basis. Maybe something like that has been attempted, don’t know. Just wanted to toss it out there, maybe plant a seed in some artists’ heads.

– Here’s a link to a WMC-TV story about Raiford’s closing. They have about a 2-minute video where they interviewed Raiford… he just decided it was time as he closed up shop last Friday night. They have video of the inside of the place without all the couches, which is kind of sad to see.

– Interesting site I found this weekend – The National Organization of Professional Athletes & Celebrities. They arrange speeches and public appearances, and they have thousands of big names. Just browsing through I saw Tony Dungy… Troy Aikman… Barbara Walters… Alice from the Brady Bunch… Jimmy Carter… Donald Trump… as well as his sidekicks George and Carolyn… and Bill who won the first season of The Apprentice… and Omarosa from the first season. They also have business speakers, diversity speakers, cancer survivors and lots of other categories.

Some of these people ain’t cheap though. You gotta be prepared to pony up six figures if you want The Donald at your event. On the other hand, if you want retired professional wrestler “Boogie Woogie Man” Jimmy Valiant, you can get him for a much lower price (it says “call for fee” on his entry – I have a feeling the “the change in your pocket” is in the ballpark for his fee).

– From the Daily News – Sauces, the new restaurant in the New Main block, is suing its landlord.

– Early voting for the Tennessee House District 89 primary is going on right now. In the Democratic primary, my friend Kevin Gallagher is running. I’ve known him for 11 years and I can say he’s a man who will put the public good first at all times. Steve Cohen has also issued a statement in support of Kevin Gallagher. So if you’re in 89 and are a Democrat, please stop by the polls and cast a ballot for Kevin.

– And that’ll do it for this post. I’ll be at Pint Nite at the Saucer tonight for a little while, probably 5:30 to 7:00 or thereabouts.

Picasa is the best and simplest photo software I’ve ever used. It can catalog all the images on your hard drive and manage them for you. Its photo editing tools have allowed me to take digital photos that I thought were unusable due to darkness/contrast issues, and turn them into images that look pretty darn good. The program can upload your photo albums to the Web for your friends or the public to view.

The only problem I had with Picasa is that Google only offered 250 MB of free Web space to store images – after that, you had to pay. Since my camera takes photos that average 500-900K in size, that meant I would run through the free storage in no time. So, although I used Picasa for a couple of photo albums (my birthday party, Rapscallion Party II) I didn’t see it as a long-term solution and went back to Coppermine which I was using before.

Well, the space problem is now less of an issue… Otto told me that Google has significantly increased storage space for Picasa web albums. I checked it out and yep, they’ve increased it to a gig, 4 times the former size. That’ll be enough for a while. Good thing too, because by the end of next weekend I’m going to have a huge BBQ Fest photo album to post. Last year I took 125 pics – this year I’m thinking there will be more like 400. Mikey the Camera Nazi: If you see me at the fest and aren’t satisfied with the job I’m doing snapping photos, feel free to take the camera away from me.

Anyway, if you don’t have Picasa and want to download it, Otto has a link on the right-hand side of his blog. It is indeed the software that should have come with your camera.

Sitting here at the Second Street branch office. It’s been an eventful weekend (and tomorrow will be an eventful day as well) – will have to tell you about it later though.