Are you in the market for BisonPro? I can’t quite afford it yet, so I may wait ‘til they release it with an Open Source license. Then I’ll re-write it in PHP and host it on Halfass Hosting, charging a monthly fee. I’ll be the first in the new BSP (Buffalo Service Provider) segment. From there: Bison vortals!

Speaking of Bison. This is a true story.

I was dining in Ted’s Montana Grill on Peachtree Street in Bucktown (Atlanta) a few weeks back. For those who do not know or know and have not yet visited, go eat a bison burger at Ted’s Montana Grill. This is Ted Turner’s outlet for all those Bison he has on his ranches up in the Big Square States. I know it’s a chain, but it’s a great, great burger. Plus, it’s low in fat! Being an old Colorado boy, I’ve had many bison and beef burgers, and Ted’s pretty much tops the list. But I digress.

While the food at Ted’s is always awesome, the service is—I’m not going to say bad, it’s just—weird. Flamboyant gay black men named Sedric. Dominican mothers. European hotties. Just the diversity on its own is a bit out of the ordinary for chain restaurants. But the other side of the coin is that they are encouraged to be simultaneously helpful and informal (just like, well, Montana and the West, come to think of it), so they’ll do things like sit at your table or talk to you about the weather for a long time while, when the opportunity arises, rattling off their spiel about the lean, protein-pumping, fat-reducing free range organic flesh they’re peddling.

Several slightly bizarre things happened to us while we were waiting for our food. For example, the door to the patio wasn’t working. It wouldn’t stay closed, and a freezing wind was blowing in from outside. We asked our server to fix it, and she got a manager, who promptly rounded up the entire staff and made them gather on the patio for an impromptu meeting that seemed really serious. As she ushered them out the door, she assured us that they were “on it,” and gestured to the door.

I told my wife that it was weird that what is probably Ted’s flagship restaurant was so oddly managed, especially considering the fact that Ted Turner was likely to pop in at any given moment as he stomps about his, well, stomping grounds. Then I excused myself to use the restroom.

The Buckhead location of TMG always has something wrong with the bathroom. This particular time, a host was in there beating the fabric towel-on-a-roll dispenser with a wrench—while smiling. I’m not sure what to make of that. So I turned from the stall to the sinks, which feature old school powdered Borax dispenser like we had in my elementary school. I washed my hands and pondered the strangeness, foregoing the towel due to the apparent assault on the dispenser occurring to me left.

“If Ted could see this, I thought,” and pushed through the door.

I looked to the right, to glance at the Remington sculpture in the reception area and then turned to face forward while maintaining my forward momentum. Just then, a man in a suit, who was sitting on the corner of the bar, stepped in my path and turned to look straight in my eyes.

It was Ted Turner.

Since we were in each other’s way, we stopped. We looked each other in the eyes, and then he opened his mouth. The Mouth of The South was getting ready to speak to me.

“I need to speak to the Proprietor.”

He looked to the host stand and began wandering in that direction. “Where’s the proprietor?”

When I got back to the table, the door was still broken. My wife was freezing. But my burger was there, and it was fucking excellent.