Paul Ryburn's Journal

Thaddeus Matthews. I know I’ve posted his name before but he has new posts up tonight. He posts multiple times in a 24-hour period so make sure you read all of them. I make no claim as to whether he says is true; that’s up to you the reader to judge and decide.

Thursday, December 28, 4 pm: Liberty Bowl parade on Beale Street. Yes, I know that’s during the workday, just tell your boss you need to leave early because you’re sick. If you feel guilty about lying you can stop by Wet Willie’s on Beale Street and order a large Call-a-Cab, then you really will be sick.

Friday, December 29, 3:30 pm: Liberty Bowl football game, Houston (10-3) vs. South Carolina (7-5). I won’t be present at the bowl, but will likely be at the Flying Saucer watching the game. And the waitresses. And I’ll be drinking beer. And the game will end just in time for me to walk to the next event:

Friday, December 29, 6-9 pm: South Main Trolley Art Tour, with many of the galleries in or near the South Main district open to the public, and most importantly of all, many of them will be serving free beer, wine, or drinks. The good thing about winter art gallery tours is that they don’t attract crowds as large as spring and fall, which means more booze for the people who do show up.

Sign of the times: I need to mail a letter and I don’t know how much a stamp costs anymore, because I pay all my bills online. I guess I’ll have to look it up on the US Postal Service’s website…. 39 cents, that’s what I thought. Haven’t bought any stamps since they were 37, guess I’ll have to stick two of them on there.

I’m back in town. Going to take it easy and get everything put away this afternoon, then head out in time to make it to trivia night at the Saucer at 7.

I work as a contractor at the Board of Education. Every year around Christmastime, the Board has a competition involving holiday-themed door displays. This year, one our office neighbors down the hall did a display based on reading and children’s books. This is one of the books they featured:

I have a BIG problem with this book. Just take a look at the front cover (pictured above) and I think you’ll see why. Now, on the cover, we see Froggy reading a bedtime story to his doll. I have no problem with that. But look more closely, over to the right.

Look at the owl. Look at him peeking through the window, staring at Froggy. That owl is teaching our children that it’s all right to be a peeping tom!

Furthermore, I’m assuming that Froggy is a young frog, given that adults usually don’t read bedtime stories to their dolls. So, the owl is not only a peeping tom, but a pedophile as well. Who knows what disgusting and perverse thoughts he’s having about young Froggy as he watches the bedtime scene from the window. If I were Froggy’s parents, I’d head to court first thing in the morning and get a restraining order against that owl.

Normally I don’t support book banning, but I might be able to see the need for it in cases like this, where perverted owls like this one use children’s books as a vehicle to corrupt our nation’s youth.

Shame on you, Mr. Owl. Shame.

In my last post I talked about the wild animal cam on a South Africa game reserve that I’ve been watching. Things have been getting good on the cam. Saturday night when I got home, I turned it on and they had a close-up of a zebra drinking. Sunday morning when I woke up, there were wildebeest and zebras grazing, and about an hour later a giraffe showed up at the watering home. The camera was able to zoom in so close that you could see its tongue moving as it drank.

Then things really heated up last night. Several lions were asleep near the watering hole. After about an hour, the camera panned around (it is mounted on a tree and can pan a full 360 degrees) and we could see a herd of wildebeest approaching. Uh-oh, I thought, those wildebeest don’t know what they’re about to step into. The cam panned back around to the watering hole for a close-up of a lioness. About 30 minutes after that, it panned back around to a shot of three more lions standing over a dead wildebeest. They rested for a while, then began to feast. Surprisingly, no vultures showed up.

8 to 10 AM our time (Central time) seems to be a great time to view the camera, as that’s right before sunset at the game reserve. Sun comes back up around 9 PM our time, and that’s a good time for viewing too because all the animals come for a morning drink. The camera is active during their night/our day, with black-and-white night vision images. As of right now the lions are still working on the wildebeest.

I got mostly books for Christmas, including trivia books, a bartender’s guide, a 2007 World Almanac, and Barack Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope.

I’ll be back in Memphis tomorrow night in time for trivia night at the Saucer. In the meantime, I have Internet access here in Little Rock and will continue to post if I think of anything.

Over the years I’ve been addicted to a site called Africam, which has live webcams focused on watering holes in Africa, where wildlife come to drink. Since discovering the site in 1999, I’ve seen zebras, elephants, leopards, antelopes, and other critters on the cams, in their natural habitat.

Well, now they’ve added a live cam with streaming video at one of the watering holes. I’ve been watching it for the past 10 minutes or so. South Africa is 8 hours ahead of us, which means it’s about 4 AM there as I type this. The cam has night vision, but things have been pretty dead so far. I did see one animal wander by, possibly a hyena or wild dog. Things should liven up in about an hour, at 9 PM our time – that will be 5 AM their time, and given that it’s just past the summer solstice there the sun should be coming up around then. That should draw some herds of animals for their morning drink. If you’re at your computer tonight, pull it up and take a look. The streaming video feed has sound too and I’ve heard some unusual animal calls.

Thursday night at the Big Foot party, I snapped a couple of pics of regular blog readers. As soon as I snapped one of the pics, I looked at the image on the screen and told them, “That’s a good picture!” To which they immediately replied, “A good picture? Is it blog-worthy?”

This is my favorite of the animals mounted on the wall at Big Foot Lodge. It’s a bobcat swatting down dinner. The cat is a little bit larger than a large housecat.

Thanks to everyone at Big Foot for a great Christmas party Thursday night. Good food, good drinks, good people, good times. Big Foot always seems to be able to hit upon the magic formula for great parties.

I will buy you this T-shirt, if you promise to wear it to your next meeting with your boss:

– Sleep Out Louie’s now has the ability to plug your laptop or iPod directly into their sound system and play your tunes. Just create a “Louie’s mix” and show it to Smokin’ Lemon or whoever the bartender is. Assuming the songs are all bar-friendly, they can then plug it in and play the mix.

– The Tap Room has removed their stage and I hear they won’t be having any more bands there. That’s both good news and bad news to me. On one hand, they had some damn good bands there – Starunner is the one that comes to mind but I know there were a lot of others. And the funny thing is, the Tap Room was hardly a high-paying gig for them – most of the bands who came there just wanted to play on historic Beale Street where their heroes, and their heroes’ heroes, played. On the other hand, The Tap Room is my favorite bar on Beale because it’s not flashy, it’s not glamorous, it’s just a place where you can have a good conversation. And it’s easier to hear the conversation when a band isn’t playing. Still, though, one of the other regulars predicts the bands will be back by summer.

– Heard a rumor today that Las Margaritas, in the Artesian hotel on McLean that used to be a Ramada and before that a Holiday Inn, will move into the spot that is currently The Happy Mexican on South Second.

– FreeWorld (unplugged) at the Saucer tonight, 9:30.

– I have more pics from last night to post, but the people involved weren’t wearing tube tops so it isn’t a priority.

For the past two years, I have declared June to be Tube Top Month in my blog. I have used the month to raise awareness of the tube top as an essential clothing item. It has been a very successful endeavor, as several of my readers have told me they wear tube tops more often now.

I will probably do Tube Top Month again next summer. This morning it occurred to me… Tube Top Month ought to have a retail sponsor. I could partner up with a local women’s clothing store/fashion boutique, and make a deal that customers get 10% (or some amount) off tube top purchases for the month of June, if they mention my blog.

Anyone know of a clothing store that might be up for it?

In other news: I’m sitting here at the Union Avenue branch office, and Josh (aka Smokin’ Lemon) has confirmed that there will NOT be a cover charge at Sleep Out Louie’s on New Year’s Eve.