BBQ Thursday: JB’s Smokin Pig

I like to play golf.  I am not very good at golf, but I enjoy playing the game.  Moreover, I enjoy being outside on a beautiful day (where it doesn’t involve yard work), drinking a few cold beers, and shooting the bull with the guys.

With work and family responsibilities (and limited funds), I don’t get to play as often as I would like.  Playing on a Saturday is especially tough.  So, a group of us figured out it would be easier (and cheaper) if we all just took a random weekday off work and hit the links.  It would be cheaper, and we wouldn’t take any time away from our wives.

So that is what I did earlier this week.  The golf game left much to be desired.  Like I said, I am not good.  At all.  I hit a few good shots, but I have the consistency of UGA Special Teams.  The golf swing earlier this week when we ventured out to Lane Creek was especially erratic.  Nevertheless, it was a great time by all, and thanks to my partner who was striking the ball very well, I came away with a few dollars.

We finished up around 2:00, so we decided that we would hit up the newest restaurant in Watkinsville, JB’s Smokin Pig BBQ.  I didn’t go in with the mindset of doing a review; I was just going to get a sandwich to hold me over to suppertime and get in and get out quickly.

But after one look at the sandwich, I felt this place was definitely review worthy.

I didn’t take a picture of the place, but for those familiar with the area will know where it is.  It’s located at the corner Main Street and Experiment Station Road, right next to Chicken Express.  This is in the former Floyd’s Restaurant building, and Google Street View hasn’t even been updated yet.

Like I said, we went at an odd time, and I just wanted to try it out more than anything else.  So I just ordered the regular sandwich, a bag of chips, and a sweet tea, so this will be an abbreviated view.

As soon as I got my sandwich, I could just tell it was going to be good.

And boy was it ever.

Great tasting meat, and what we should appreciate, the sauce wasn’t mixed in.  My only quibble with the meat was it was not warm.  I wouldn’t call it cold, just room temperature.  I will give it the benefit of the doubt since we weren’t eating at a peak time.   Regardless, it was very good.

Speaking of the sauce, there were many combinations to choose from.  There were hot and mild choices of red (tomato based), mustard, and vinegar sauces.

Many of my tee shots may not have gone past the ladies’ tee box, but that doesn’t mean I wore a skirt.  So I manned up and got a a sample of the hot varieties of the sauces.

I didn’t care for the red sauce.  It was OK, but a little too much tomato.  The mustard sauce was good, but I’m not a big mustard sauce person and just sampled it.

But y’all, the hot vinegar sauce was outstanding!

My sandwich was so good, I ordered another one.  Eating two sandwiches for a late lunch and skipping supper was the best decision I made that day.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get any of the sides.  One of the guys in our group got an order of the baked beans, and they looked good.  He was kind enough to let me try them.  They weren’t traditional baked beans, but still very good.  Many different types of beans, and the beans were full of meat mixed in.

The party that ordered in front of us got the stew, and it looked suspicious, appearing eerily similar to hash.  Hash isn’t good, and it certainly isn’t stew.  But, I’ll withhold judgement until I can go back again, which I fully intend to do.

If you are in Watkinsville, do yourself a favor and stop by.  Be forewarned, they are closed on Sundays and Mondays but open for lunch and dinner the rest of the week.  Apparently Wednesdays are rib nights.

Corbindawg

 

 

 

 

 

When Kirby Smart Meets The Georgia Way

This is going to be a combination of two posts, one I wanted to do last week.  But I was on the road traveling a lot, and never got a chance to sit down and hammer it out.

Last week at G-Day, it was an awesome day.  A beautiful day to tailgate, eat fried chicken, drink some beer, play some tailgate games.  It was fun to connect with the tailgate crowd and, for a few hours, get a taste for the Fall before we descend into the long, hot days of summer.

I took my three year old daughter to the game.  We’ve been to a few basketball games and a gymnastics meet, but this was her first trip Between the Hedges.  We lasted until halftime.

Change, so far, has been a good thing for UGA.  Not only can you feel it,  you can see it.

It was time for a change at the head coaching position, and if anyone still had any doubts, then Saturday, April 16 should have been all the confirmation you needed.  At least 93,000-probably several thousand more-joined me Between the Hedges.  There were more people there than for the kickoff for the Kentucky game.

And what you saw was Kirby Smart coaching.  I never bought into the “Mark Richt didn’t care about winning”  mantra that was so prevalent, but it’s hard not to think that when you see Kirby out on the field, running around and actively coaching.   Combined with this story on that was up on ESPN this weekend, and it is easy to see that the winds of change have provided a breath of fresh air to the program.

Being around him last year, he wasn’t a very happy person,” offensive coordinator Thomas Brown said. “He didn’t have a lot of fun. He was still himself, but he didn’t seem like the same old coach. Being down in South Florida and being back at his alma mater and having the chance to call plays again and coach the quarterbacks gave him new life. He’s taken 20 years off his life. He shows more energy, more passion. He’s re-energized.

There is excitement, enthusiasm, and unity in the program and the fan base.  This is all positive.

But it won’t matter unless other things change.

Over the weekend, we all heard the news that cornerback Juwuan Briscoe was arrested for misdemeanor traffic charges for-gasp-not wearing a seat belt and not having a driver license.  

Nick Saban wants to ask why Georgia has been good but not great, and why the program hasn’t won big?

The biggest reason is the lack of attention to detail in recruiting and game preparation.  All that fell squarely on Mark Richt.

Another reason probably was, as the ESPN article alluded to, was Mark Richt took the hands-off CEO approach he learned from Bobby Bowden.  He said in his farewell press conference that was something he regretted.  When you do that, you are only as good as your assistants.  When you have Willie Martinez and Brain Schottenhiemer, things can turn south.  Not being able to realize that, and not doing anything to fix it, also falls squarely on Mark Richt.

Mark Richt was held accountable for his role in the team not winning at a high enough level.

But there are deeper, institutional issues that affect the team’s success, both ways you can see and ways you can’t.  Challenges at UGA that Mark Richt couldn’t overcome, and I wonder if Kirby can too.

We know all about Butts-Mehre being tight with dollar.  Hopefully that is changing.

A drug policy that is burdensome and stricter than all others in the SEC.

Having football players constantly arrested for petty offenses hurts your reputation, and it also keeps the players off the field.

Especially for ticky-tack driver license issues.  Look, I don’t think football players (or any other athlete) should be held to a different standard in terms of law enforcement.  You break the law, you should be punished.  A lot of college kids get arrested.  I never was.  I was lucky.  I probably should have been at some point.  I had several good friends that got arrested for typical “boys will be boys” situations.   It happens on college campuses.

I got pulled over once for not wearing my seat belt.  I was not taken to jail.

I left my wallet at home yesterday.  I didn’t realize it until I went to put some cash in the collection plate at church.  If I had gotten pulled over, would I have been taken to jail for not having my license?

I have three questions.  Three, hard questions that Kirby Smart needs to be asking Greg McGarity, and ones that Jere Morehead need to be asking also.

1.  How come the Athens-Clarke County Police Department is never the arresting agency on all these driver license issues?
2. How come football players at other institutions are  not arrested for driver license issues at the same rate they are in Athens?
3. Do football players at other schools not have driver license issues and are somehow simply just better than what we have at Georgia?

 

I would like to answer the three questions I posed above.

1. The ACCPD arrests their fair share of football players, and students as a whole.  But you only hear of UGA Pd making the driver license arrests.  I worked for Campus Tranist while in college at UGA.  I drove the buses.  We were told to be extra careful on River Road.  For some reason, I was always told,  the UGA PD could only set up for speed traps on River Road.  River Road is where the East Campus Village Dorms are.  The East Campus Village Dorms are where the athletes live.  You don’t hear of driver licenses arrests occurring on Prince Avenue, Barnett Shoals, Lexington Road, Lumpkin Street, Milledge Avenue, etc.  You hear of it occurring where the UGA PD can set up check points.  That is also where a high concentration of football players live.  I would bet you the arrest took place somewhere around River Road.
2. This has been a problem that has plagued Georgia for quite sometime.  Check out this article from 2010: On the other hand, four of the arrests in the last calendar year and six of them over the three-year time frame have involved license violations of some kind.

   That was in 2010.  There have been more.  I am not a real journalist.  I am only speaking anecdotally.  I’m not paid to dig deep in the issue.  I do this as a hobby.   But I have a feeling that if a real journalist dug deeper in the research, they would find my suspicions to be true.

   Just scratching the surface, I think it bears out.  Last year, seven University of Alabama football players were arrested.  None for issues relating to driver licenses.    Since 2007, LSU has not had a single football player arrested for a driver license related issue.   Urban Meyer, who infamously had a lot of players get arrested when he was at Florida, only had two get arrested for diver licenses issues.

3.  Let’s talk real for a second.  I came across this article from the L.A. Times:Black drivers were found to be arrested at higher rates than whites for driving with licenses suspended because of unpaid tickets, the report said. The highest suspension rates in 2014 were found in poor neighborhoods with large percentages of black and Latino residents.

   The majority of football players here and at our peer institutions are African-American.  If you read this article by L.A. Times, which takes it from a different slant, this is not just a problem here in Athens.  I would assume many African-American players across college football are in a similar situation.  Again, unscientific, but I would wager that our issues with driver licenses are not unique to Athens.   But the arrests for these violations make it appear so.

I don’t think any 19 year old-football player or not-should be arrested for a ticky-tack offense such as this.  Having that stain on your record can follow you around forever.

If you think that the law is the law and that is it, fine.  You can feel that way.

But you can’t honestly admit that this issue isn’t made more an issue here than at other places.

Why?

Someone needs to ask the hard questions.

Corbindawg

Lewis Grizzard Wednesday: A fan of the ’93 Phillies

October, 1993 

I’m just as much a Braves fan as the next Atlanta chop-chop yahoo, but I’ve got to admit I’ve come to like the Philadelphia Phillies, too.

You know why? Because the prissy pots don’t.

They quoted this woman at a hair salon in the Atlanta papers recently. She was asked what she thought of the Phillies after watching the first two games of the National League Championship Series.

She said, “The tobacco chewing was pretty gross … I’m an environmentalist and so I just can’t understand the tobacco in terms of putting it into your body. There was also some pretty bad hair out there.”

Go shampoo a goat and leave the Phillies to look as they damn well please.

You hit something white with a stick and then you run and slide around in the dirt. You sweat and you spit and you curse.

In “A League of Their Own” Tom Hanks was trying to explain to one of his female baseball players about the game. She was crying.

“There’s no crying in baseball,” he said.

Of course there isn’t. There’s yelling and screaming and belching and John Kruk of the Phillies reminds me of the kind of guy who probably still thinks it’s funny to make escaping gas sounds by cupping his palm under his armpit.

That is still funny. It’s funnier than “Married … With Children.”

What to do with the prissy pots?

“I’m an environmentalist, so I just can’t understand the tobacco in terms of putting it in your body.”

That’s why they invented chewing tobacco, lady, so baseball players could spit in color. Take Len Dykstra of the Phillies.

Here’s a guy who would put up with Somalia for about as long as he would a hanging curveball. Len Dykstra is trying to win ball games, not get a GQ cover. He doesn’t care if tobacco juice dribbles out of the side of his mouth and onto his uniform. He wants it to do that. He wants to gross you out. It’s what he lives for.

Back to John Kruk. Ol’ John Kruk from West (by-God) Virginia. You look at this guy and you think outdoor plumbing.

He gets a raise, he buys a new satellite dish to put outside the trailer, so he can get all the stations when he isn’t making sounds with

his armpit. There was a quote from him once in Sports Illustrated. A woman saw him smoking a cigarette in the dugout during a spring training game.

She said something like, “Aren’t you ashamed? A professional athlete smoking.”

He responded, “I ain’t a professional athlete. I’m a baseball player.” The man’s a p-l-a-y-e-r.

I like that crazy relief pitcher, too. Mitch Williams. He’d give Queen Elizabeth a hotfoot. Hair? He styles with Kruk’s cigarette lighter.

I’m not on the sports pages anymore, so I can be a homer and root for the Braves.

But I would take the Phillies in a fight, a riot, a war. Send those guys to Somalia.

The only thing wrong with the Phillies is their name. Calling that crowd Phillies is like calling the corner barbershop, Christophe’s.

Call ’em the Muds or the Bloods. Or the Nightmare from the North.

I just happen to like my baseball teams a little on the trashy side.

And it was well worth it

Look, I’m a realist.

Do you really think that Ludacris was going to show up to do a show in Athens out of the goodness of his heart?

Well, in this week’s tale of the offseason college football news cycle, the its a major news item that, for the first time in a while, the gang in Butts Mehre has the audacity to *gasp* actually SPEND some of its financial intake.

Is $65,000 a lot for 15 minutes of work? Sure. It’s on the level of NASCAR teams that collect last-place prize money for running 10 laps and loading up on the trailer.

The anti-football communists and ones who are ok with UGA reverting back to the Goff era may not like the idea of throwing $65,000 around, but that’s a small price to pay for its already proven impact.

The atmosphere at G-Day created an unreal atmosphere for recruits – either in Athens or watching. The program grabbed the attention of the college football world by the horns – oh, and has also reaped immediate windfalls on the recruiting trail.

$65,000? A small price to pay.

Go Dawgs!

Lugnut Dawg

 

BBQ Thursday: Community Q BBQ

Yesterday, life took me to Decatur, GA.  One thing I pride myself on is my ability to navigate around Atlanta, not being native to there.  My brother has lived all around Atlanta, and I feel like I know my way around pretty well.  Getting off the interstate and driving around the side streets doesn’t bother me, like it might some folks.

But the Decatur area is a place I am not all that familiar with.  I spent a good deal of time there about ten years ago when my mom had an illness that required an extended stay at Emory, but I was mostly confined to the hospital and the surrounding area.

I got finished up with my work around lunch, and contemplated driving home.  My yard is in desperate need of attention, but just for the heck of it I looked up nearby BBQ places.  I saw that Community Q was very close, so I decided to give it a shot.  I had heard good things.

To say I was skeptical when I pulled in was an understatement.  There is a certain standard of which a BBQ joint must meet, and the outside tells you a lot about a place.  Community Q is not far from the Emory Campus on Clairmont Road, and it was nestled in between some Asian restaurants.

As I walked up, I could smell faint scents of smoked meat, but it was hard to discern what exactly I was smelling.  It was around 1:00 when I got there, and the line was very long, which was a good sign.

I only had to wait in this line for about ten minutes, so it wasn’t so bad.  And I waited in line longer than I waited to get my food once  I ordered.   The fellow at the cash register was talking about the Braves’ move to Cobb County was stupid, so I knew I was with friends.

This was a place I’ve never been to before, and likely won’t get back to anytime soon, so I should have ordered a sampler of many different items.  There were lots of options to choose from.  Brisket, ribs, sausage all looked good.  But this ain’t Texas and it ain’t Fox Bros., and I wasn’t in a rib mood.  When I review a place for the first time, I like to get pulled pork to keep it consistent. Plus, I wasn’t all that hungry, so I just stuck to a pulled pork sandwich and two sides.  Throw in a sweet tea and at tip, my lunch was $16.00, so not exactly a cheap place.

I ordered my sandwich, and asked the guy at the register taking my order which sides to were good.  He said the mac n’ cheese was really good, and also recommended the stew.  Not one to argue with the experts, that is what I got.

First off, the mac n’ cheese was good.  It was fine.  But it wasn’t anything special, in my opinion.  I didn’t even finish it.  The stew was good.  I enjoyed it, but again, it wasn’t anything special.

That takes us to the main attraction, the meat.  This was some of the best barbecue I’ve ever had.  It had a nice char on it, had a great flavor, was tender.  It basically was everything you want in barbecue.   The sauce was pretty good too.

The only regret I have about Community Q is I was by myself and couldn’t share more meat with someone else.

Though not a traditional kind of place, I would rank the pork at Community Q right up there with some of the best I’ve ever had.  If you are in the area, forego the sides and just get meat.  You won’t go home disappointed.   Can’t say enough on how good it was.

Corbindawg

Community Q is located at 1361 Clairmont Road in Decatur.  

 

 

 

In Honor Of Opening Day…

Guys, the Braves are going to be terrible this year.  Some out there are optimistic that the fire sale will pay dividends.  I am skeptical, but the jury is still out.

I personally think that the Braves and Freddie Freeman should have parted ways.  I love Freddie, but if you are going to sell off every piece of your team, might as well finish the job.

We have a new (old) Brave in Jeff Francoeur.   Since we can’t enjoy the product on the field this season, let’s sit back and enjoy this funny prank from a few years ago we have all already seen, but it is too funny not to watch again.

 

 

Corbindawg