December 2005 Archives

Unless you've been sleeping under a rock, you know about Austin's first First Night celebration going on today and tonight. I have no idea what to make of it...it's huge and it's complicated and it's the first year so who knows.

At the very least, we will take in the Grand Procession from 5:30-6:30 since our kids are part of "The Pink", an art car they've been working on for the past few months. And the Flaming Arrows Mardi Gras Indians, recently emigrated from New Orleans, will be performing at City Hall later in the evening

Have fun, and don't drink and drive ('cause now that I don't drink any more and can get a good look at you people, you drive like idiots, man, and you're way easier to spot than you think.)

On The Line in New Orleans is a fantastic blog, written by New York food writer Betsy Andrews. She's what you'd call an embedded journalist...she volunteers as a line cook in New Orleans restaurants in order to cover the story of the rebuilding of that industry.

She chats with the Brennan matriarchs. She listens to Dickie Brennan's ideas about a FEMA village for hospitality workers. She dices avocado and debones salmon in Bayona's kitchen. She helps salvage Cuvee's wine collection, with bleach water and Dawn liquid.

It's a fascinating blend of behind-the-scenes foodie tales and post-Katrina survivor stories.

Harlan sends a link to a Flickr series of about 70 photos taken in the parts of the Lower Ninth Ward that were still closed when Gina and I were there last month. These were all taken in the past few days.

You have not seen pictures like this anywhere.

Please go through all of them (they get worse as you work your way through the set) so you can understand what it's like there.

If you're an Austinite, and you want to put it in a local perspective, squint your eyes and pretend that those homes are in East Central Austin. Pretend that every building from I-35 to Airport, and from MLK down to the river, is squashed flat, and all the people are gone, living in exile in Mississippi and Tennessee and Oklahoma. That's the scale of the disaster just in the Lower Ninth.

Ashley Morris is my fucking hero.

For this.

Fuck you New York. You lose a neighborhood and get scads of federal aid. We lose an entire FUCKING COAST, and the freespending W administration finally decides to become fiscally responsible. And fuck you all for taunting the New Orleans Saints fans, who have to deal with playing a home game in the Meadowlands. Fuck you, you classless motherfuckers. New Orleans donates a fire engine to the FDNY after 9/11, and you give us shit. Fuck you, fuck your town, fuck your residents, fuck your politicians. You. All. Suck.

And then this.

Fuck you, motherfuckers, we'll secede and join OPEC. Then we'll build our own fucking levees with help from the Dutch.

Mail, call, email your representatives. You do not want to fuck with pissed off New Orleanians. We're the murder capital, bitches. We will rain that shit down on you. We do not play fair when you do not play fair.

That's DOCTOR Ashley Morris to you.

I got a lot of cool stuff for Christmas this year. But nothing as good as the music that everyone in my family knew I needed to have. Music that is at once uplifting and bittersweet.

Yeah, it's all New Orleans music. Duh.

The Benny Grunch 12 Yats of Christmas CD is mostly novelty tunes. Things that are hilarious to a native, but probably meaningless to anybody else.

"...A dozen Manuel's tamales,
Eleven Schwegmann bags,
Tenneco Refinery,
Lower Ninth Ward,
Ate by ya mama's,
Seventeenth Street Canal,
Dix pack o' Sixie,
Frrrriiiiieeeeeed Onion Riiiiiiiiings,
Before ya drive me nuts,
Three French Breads,
Tujague's recipe,
For the crawfish they caught in Arabi"

The whole Benny Grunch phenom happened long after I moved away, so it didn't have a huge pull on me like it did other people who had to hear "The 12 Yats of Christmas" on the radio every frickin' year, but any guy that can write a song lamenting the closing of the old Bridge Bowl in Algiers...that guy gets it, y'know?

But the other two items are heartbreaking in the way that they recall what was lost, they way they focus your grief for the New Orleans of old and fear of the New Orleans that may come.

Doctors, Professors, Kings and Queens is the four-disc box set that was designed by Chuck Taggart of The Gumbo Pages. I hinted around last Christmas that I wanted it, but I didn't get it. This Christmas, the family just knew. It is superbly packaged, immaculately researched, and thorough in both breadth and depth, capturing every nook and cranny of New Orleans music old and new, from Sidney Bechet to Galactic, from piano professors to Cajuns to pub rockers to New Orleans-style klezmer. The music, the book, the pictures are a joyous, raucous, soulful feast for the senses.

And taking it all in now, after what has transpired...your heart breaks right in two. Just splits right down the middle.

So much of it is gone. So much of what remains is in tatters.

Which is where the third gift comes in. Our New Orleans is the jazz funeral to end all jazz funerals. A benefit CD recorded in the weeks after the storm, featuring probably the greatest collection of living Louisiana artists ever assembled. Dr. John, Allen Toussaint, Irma Thomas, Buckwheat Zydeco, the Wild Magnolias...

There is a small thread of hope here, but honestly, there is mostly grief, and pain, and loss. It's still too early to party.

Allen Toussaint plays "Tipitina" in a minor key and the angels weep. Davell Crawford does what all of us have been thinking, taking a gospel song about the river and the water and making it a song of sorrow rather than baptism and renewal. The Dirty Dozen's "Feet Don't Fail Me Now" is no longer about dancing, it's about fleeing your home.

Everything about this CD is perfect. I've cried twice listening to it. I'm feeling a little teary right now just talking about it. Even the title. Our New Orleans. Not the media's New Orleans, or the tourists' New Orleans, or the politicians' New Orleans. Our New Orleans. The one we loved, and lost, and will rebuild.

Gina forwarded this to me, and suggested I inform Karl immediately.

Busty Mousepads have a built-in wrist rest in the form of gel boobs.

Ergonomics have always been very important to me. My birthday is in April.

Send the Federal Government a message via their backdoor channel, the spooks at the NSA:

martyr jihad c4 assassinate osama al-jazeera potus karachi shi'ite chalabi sinn fein peta overthrow dailykos dirty bomb genocide fallujah oil tanker FIX THE GODDAMN LEVEES ALREADY syriana michael moore cheney novak ied troop movement rpg anthrax.....

Inspired by Cosy Alcove. Pass it on.

I had no idea that Festivus pre-dates the Seinfeld episode.

Many people learned of Festivus through "Seinfeld," but its roots actually go back several decades, when writer Daniel O'Keefe's father started it. He was looking for something more from the holidays, something that wasn't political or religious.

O'Keefe wrote "The Real Festivus: The True Story Behind America's Favorite Made-Up Holiday" and co-wrote the "Seinfeld" episode.

I'm gonna change religions.

Oh, wait, I don't have a religion. Even better.

Although my mom is in town this year, so I've been getting a whole season's worth of airing of grievances as it is.

I'm still in town but I don't know how much time I'll have for posting until next week, so everybody have a Merry Christmas or whatever else it is you celebrate.

Don't forget that you can still pre-order Do You Know What It Means until January 6, and all pre-order profits will go to Katrina relief.

Don't take your tree down til January 6th. Then put up your Mardi Gras decorations. Tis the season and all.

Finally, I leave you with a new Night Before Christmas, Post-K style, swiped from the legendary Gulfsails blog, who got it from who-knows-where. What it lacks in meter it makes up for in pure heart. Thank you, Unknown Author.

Update: The author is Stephany Lyman of UNO. Thanks Stephany!

Have a merry one, y'all.

'Twas the night before Christmas and in the Faubourg At the edge of the crescent, no creature stirred.

Under the shroud-like blue plastic from FEMA
That flapped in the wind in the wake of Katrina,

Nothing was hung by the chimneys with care
Since chimneys and roofs were no longer there.

The houses, abandoned for trailers or Texas,
Were circled with watermarks, branded with Xs,

And in them no sugarplums danced in kids' heads,
For no little children slept snug in their beds

On this night before Christmas in Faubourg-St John
Where time had stopped dead, while the world carried on.

Then, lo, from the depths of what once was my garden
(Now a wild cesspool of strange hydrocarbons)

Up drift some voices from out of the dark
To compete with the flapping of my FEMA tarp:

"They all axed for you, dawlin'. How did you do?"
"-Nine feet of water, and how about you?"

"Do ya know what it means to miss New Orleans?"
"-Not enough ersters-or rice and red beans!"

I'm certain of whom this can't possibly be:
It's not the adjuster; it's not Entergy;

With looters gone elsewhere, this can't be a stick-up;
And who can remember the last garbage pick-up?

It's surely not someone from Capitol Hill
To tell me, at last, whether I can rebuild.

I lift back what's left of my old cypress shutters
And peek past the tangle of phone lines and gutters,

And what to my wondering eyes should appear?
Not Santa Claus and his team of reindeer

But, costumed in rubber attire and gas masks,
A long second-line, waving hankies and flasks.

Rather than coconuts, beads and doubloons,
This krewe carries gear (and, just barely, a tune).

With wet vacs and power tools, sheetrock and nails,
Brawny and Brillo piled high in their pails,

They're Superdome faithful, survivors of attics,
Mardi Gras maniacs, Jazz Fest fanatics,

Carnival trackers (from Allah to Zeus),
Believers in Saints (whether St. Jude or Deuce),

Joined by a couple of Dutch engineers,
Some out-of-town builders and church volunteers.

They pause at the dead Live Oak next to my door
In T-shirts declaring Make Levees Not War.

Since ditching my mold-ridden fridge at the curb,
MREs have become the hors d'oeuvres that I serve

So I pass them around with Abita's new ale
When a wrench taps, "Clink! Clink!" on the side of a pail:

"To Blanco," they cry, "She got contra-flow down!
To Nagin-he sure told those Feds and Mike Brown!

To NOLA dot com, CNN, and the Times
Who cut to the quick of the Superdome crime!

To all those who took in our downtrodden folks,
Or ferried them out in their flat-bottom boats!

To Tennessee... Texas... Jackson... Atlanta...
Our Baton Rouge brothers ... and Lou-i-si-ana!"

I notice no Rudy steps up as their leader,
Yet something unseen guides this flock of believers,

A force that transcends rich or poor, black or white,
A light that can steer this brigade through the night.

In a twinkle they've finished the last of the ale
And they hoist their equipment, their masks and their pails:

"On, Comet! On, Borax! On, on Spic 'n Span!
"Come (Yule) Tide and Cheer! Come, All, let us plan!

Up, Mildew! Off, Mold! Out, out, Toxic Waste!
Come, Shout! Away, Wisk! Come, let us make haste!

To the top of the water mark! Up, past the stair!
Let the City that Care Forgot know that we care!"

Then to Lakeview, Gentilly, Chalmette and the East,
Away they all marched to a Zydeco beat.

Ere they rose past the tarps, I heard a voice say
"Merry Christmas-and Laissez les bon temps rouler!"

He doesn't know it yet, but when he wakes up he's going to find that one of his favorite baseball players in the whole world just sold out to the Evil Empire.

Yankees sign Johnny Damon

We even bought your book, you dick.

Carrying a scanner,
Carrying a scanner,
The animal dies with fear in his eyes
With a scanner
Don't touch him, don't touch him
Stay away from him, he's got a scanner...

I've been threatening to post mohawk pictures for a long time, especially since Karl went and did it, and now somebody fucked up and bought me a scanner.

These are the only pictures in existence from that era. Mohawk Ray was kind of like Bigfoot...didn't come out much during the day, ran away when people approached, that sort of thing.

Artsy photo, in my room, 1984-ish:

My good buddy Alex and I engaged in our favorite sport, tequila endurance racing. Note how his girlfriend is not amused. She pretty much hated me 'cause I was a bad influence on her boyfriend.

Costume ball, 1985. Mohawk panda in tie and boots.

Unlike Karl, I won't be posting any mullet pictures any time soon, because I never had a frickin' mullet.

In March of 1990, I went to work in Germany for a few weeks, and after work was done, Gina flew over and we travelled for a couple of weeks. And the first place on my list of must-see cities was Berlin. It had been only a few months since the Wall had fallen, the previous November. The Wall was still there, East and West Germany still weren't unified (and the terms and conditions and even the wisdom of reunification were being debated in the news constantly), but you could now travel freely out of Eastern Europe for the first time in decades. It was too exciting to miss.

I was digging through our big crate of photos looking for good stuff to try out on our new scanner, and this was one of the first envelopes I found. It's not all of the photos from the trip, but it's got most of our Wall photos in it.

I put some of the most interesting ones in a flickr set here.

Personally I think this one where Ray takes on the totalitarian state armed with nothing but a hammer and chisel is just badass as hell:

The out-laws bought us a new printer/scanner, so I'm finally going to get to torment all of you with pictures from the pre-digital past.

Here's a sample. Rice Class of '86, Gina's second degree, my first.

While you're giggling at that goofiness (I had to clean up for mom for graduation, obviously), I found a bunch of Berlin Wall pictures, so hopefully a post about that in the next day or so.

I've removed all of you from my blogroll. Fucking whiners.

Just kidding.

Actually, Karl is monkeying with the MT Blogroll install so they're temporarily down. Don't fret, you'll all be back soon.

I took this video of Liam on Sunday. He didn't exactly know that the still camera could do video, so I got some uninhibited dancing on film before he figured it out.

I'm trying out a new site called YouTube, which looks to be like a Flickr for videos. Not sure yet how well it works with MT, or whether it'll look right in your browser, but let me know.

Coincidentally, this is the same song that Hiromi was dancing to earlier this evening. I totally love this song.

I've had this Mardi Gras post rolling around in my head for the past few days, but Chris Rose beat me to it and of course did it so much better than I could have.

You who have never been to Mardi Gras, or you who went to Mardi Gras and never left the French Quarter, you don't know what Mardi Gras is.

Mardi Gras is not showing your tits for beads. Mardi Gras is not getting falling down drunk and puking in the gutter. Mardi Gras is not hordes of screaming drunken crowds committing acts of debauchery.

Those things happen in the French Quarter. In Epcot d'Orleans. But all over the rest of the city is where the real Carnival happens.

It's a feast. It's a party. It's a kids holiday. It's like Christmas, only instead of sneaking down the chimney in the middle of the night, Santa shows up in force, with a legion of funky elves rolling and marching through the streets, throwing presents from the top of every float.

All over town. In every neighborhood. Every day. For two weeks.

And people eat. And people party. And people put their kids up in these ladder contraptions so that they can see, and the guys on the floats throw all their biggest and prettiest and shiniest beads at the kids on the ladders.

And if you grew up with that, then every year around Carnival, if you can't make it home, you get a little hole in the pit of your stomach. And you get lonely, and you get desperate to try to capture it, somehow, wherever you are.

Karl remembers the time a bunch of us went to some faux-Cajun restaurant in Palo Alto on Fat Tuesday, because I couldn't go home that year and I couldn't just let the day pass, so a bunch of us got together and we were the only people in this joint, and the staff didn't even know it was Mardi Gras. But we ate and we tried real hard to pretend, and then we went back to work because in California it was just Tuesday and people work on Tuesday.

There are two things I want you to read this morning.

The first is one of a series of essays, by the author of the Wet Bank Guide blog. His series is called Flood Street, but the one I want you to read today is called "The Last Mardi Gras", about a New Orleans ex-pat taking his kids to his hometown so they can see what Mardi Gras is like from a kid's point of view, before they're too old to get it. I did the same in 2002, and the kids thought Mardi Gras was better than Disney World. Better than Christmas.

The second one is Chris Rose's piece in the Times-Picayune this morning. He settles the argument about what kind of "message" it sends to hold Carnival after the levee disaster, and he settles it once and for all. Because the rest of the country never understood Mardi Gras in the first place. They won't get the message anyway. So we need to do this for ourselves. Because we need it, and we need it bad.

But we can't turn off the lights and keep the costumes in storage and ladders in the shed for another year just because we are beaten and broken and because so many of us are not here.

In fact, we have to do this because we are beaten and broken and so many of us are not here.

Katrina has proved, more than ever, that we are resilient. We are tougher than dirt. Certainly tougher than the dirt beneath our levees.

The social and celebratory nature of this event defines this city, and this is no time to lose definition. The edges are too blurry already.

Our new friends from New Orleans who we met this past weekend? They're going to Mardi Gras.

Remember Jonathan from Lakeview? I met him in Austin, six days after the storm hit. Rescuers pulled him out of the attic of a house on this block:

And when I mentioned to him that Mardi Gras might not happen next year, but that we're definitely going in 2007, he pounded my chest and said, "No, bra. 2006! We have to do it!"

Goddamn right. We have to do it. My family will be there, camped out on St. Charles for the duration. Y'all come down. It'll be fun.

Every year we go out to Elgin to cut down our Chrismas tree. And every year we stop at the Cafe 290 in Manor to get their heart attack appetizer, the Chicken Fried Universe: fried green tomatoes, onion rings, and deep fried zucchini, green beans, and mushrooms, with bowls of ranch for dipping (and I guaran-damn-tee you, Karl, this ranch was not homemade):

And every year, we see somebody who looks suspiciously like Santa, sitting at the breakfast counter in civilian clothes, drinking his coffee and reading the Sunday paper. I realize this is as blurry as a Bigfoot photo, but I didn't want to spook him by using a flash...I swear to God, it's really him:

And every year I say we are going to get a tree tall enough to touch our 9'3" living room ceiling, and every year the family overrules me and picks out a tree based on shape and aesthetics instead of pure height:

Six-and-a-half. Sigh.

Cassidy tells me "size isn't everything, Dad." And you know, a lot of smart-ass responses immediately come to mind, but none of them are ones you want to say to your 11-year-old daughter.

Last night was a big dinner party at our house. Some random old friends and family, and some new friends from New Orleans. Twelve adults, five kids, two new twin babies. A big pot of redfish courtbouillon with lots of sides and snackies and red wine and Ellen's peppermint brownies for dessert.

The folks from New Orleans were evacuees from the neighborhood around the Fairgrounds. I first met this woman at the Speedway Grocery, said hi because she was wearing a sweatshirt from Tricou House. We got to talking, naturally mostly about Katrina and moving back vs. not moving back, we swapped phone numbers, and one thing led to another and they ended up coming over for dinner: wife, husband, son, and their other friend from the 'hood who was in Austin taking a break from cleaning up.

The friend is moving back. He's single, no kids, was renting, he works with underpriviledged kids and wants to be there when they start moving back.

The family is staying in Austin. They just can't handle the instability in New Orleans right now with a four-year-old. They don't have power yet in the house they own there, they don't have jobs there any more so they don't have a lot to move back for, they can't imaging moving away for 3+ months every time another hurricane hits, they have no idea what will happen with schools and levees, and Austin has been good to them. So their house in New Orleans is up for sale, and they're rebuilding their lives here in Austin.

They're fantastic people. We hope to see a lot more of them. And I gave them directions to Gene's for a sloppy roast beef, dressed.

A few food pics in the flickr page. And here's what I had for dinner tonight...leftovers:

There have been a lot of words written about the brilliant Richard Pryor over the past 24 hours, but nobody has delivered the perfect, succint, to-the-point eulogy like Trent:

Can we please have a moment of silence . . .
For the funniest motherfucker on the planet.

I can't really add a whole lot to that without ruining it.

One of the greatest American cities has been written off. Like a dog that was hit by a car and is waiting to be euthanized. Like an elderly relative who has become too difficult to deal with, except that instead of even shipping her off to a hospice, we're leaving her to die of neglect by the side of the road.

We can spend $95 billion in tax cuts for the wealthy. We can spend $300 billion waging war in the Middle East. Yet we can't afford $32 billion to start rebuilding the levees that are the necessary prerequisite for the city to come back.

Bush stood on the steps of one of the most historic cathedrals in America, and he lied. The God-fearing president lied on the steps of a church. Bush pledged to protect American cities from all enemies, foreign and domestic, but when our greatest city was under siege, he turned tail and fled.

Read this New York Times editorial.

Write your elected representatives.

And then throw every single one of the greedy cowardly bastards out of office, by any means necessary.

Never piss off a computer scientist, 'cause they move fast.

Visit the Save Tulane Engineering website, leave comments, and sign their petition.

I didn't graduate from Tulane, but I went to what is roughly its equivalent in Texas, Rice University. Can you imagine a world in which Rice had to permanently dismantle its engineering departments?

I realize the University is in a tight spot, but this is the wrong direction, it is short-sighted. There must be a better way.

There goes my productivity for the rest of the day.

Use your keyboard arrows. My high score is 512.

Via Poppy.

I heard this on the radio last night but thought I had heard wrong. I knew that most Tulane students were expected to return, so I thought they would be able to carry on reasonably close to normal after some adjustment. But another blogger I know who works there said this was coming, and she was right.

The T-P article is here.

Despite attracting 85 percent of its Hurricane Katrina-scattered students back to campus in January, Tulane on Thursday announced an unprecedented restructuring of one of the nation's most prestigious universities, including layoffs, cuts or consolidations in colleges and academic programs, and the elimination of eight sports as the institution grapples with $200 million in storm-related losses.

...

About 230 faculty members will be laid off, 50 at the Uptown campus and 180 at the medical school. Those faculty cuts represent almost 4 percent of Tulane's pre-Katrina work force of about 6,000 people, said Yvette Jones, the university's interim chief operating officer. The university previously laid off 243 support workers -- those it deemed least essential to operations in the next 12 to 18 months -- as well as hundreds of part-time instructors and other workers.

...

-- All engineering majors except biomedical engineering and chemical engineering will be eliminated. Students in discontinued programs will be allowed to continue if they can finish by May 2007.

So much for me trying to re-enter academia as a way to get back to New Orleans. The radio report last night said that they permanently eliminated the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering departments.

They kept football and baseball, though. Thank god. Where would we be without the Green Wave? (Yes, that was unnecessarily snarky. Fuck you.)

We get a full-blown schools-closed snow day in Austin like once every two or three years. All it takes are enough icy bridges to shut down the freeways.

So I would have told the biggest Red Sox geek in the house about Mirabelli when he woke up this morning, but he's already up at the golf course using a plastic bin lid as a sled.

Meanwhile, on the "oh that's so precious" front:

We have lots of trees on our lot, which means we have lots of squirrels, which means that our dog Beezus spends a lot of her time going nuts trying to catch one. Sometimes it's cute, sometimes when she's got one treed in the back yard and starts barking when she's supposed to just be having her 7:00am pee, it's annoying. But we always joked, of course, that if she ever caught one she wouldn't know what to do with it.

Well, today Beezus finally got her squirrel:

She didn't actually catch it. She found it dead. Frozen stiff. And she didn't tear it up like a plush toy or a chewie. She gently picked it up in her mouth, carried it over and laid it down on the ground in front of Gina. Then nuzzled it a little and looked up at her as if to say "Please, can you make it go?" And then she nuzzled it some more.

The Red Sox have traded Doug Mirabelli to the Padres for yet another power hitter.

Not that I'm a big fan of Dougy. He can't hit, for one thing. And for another, he was the only player who was embarrassingly uncomfortable around the Queer Eye guys during their Red Sox episode last year. And I don't know many things more pathetic and sad than a guy who's so goddamn macho that he thinks he's gonna catch cooties if a gay man helps him pick out a tie.

But who will catch Wakefield's knuckleball? Certainly not Varitek. I love Varitek, but he's a mess when Wakefield is pitching.

It's sleeting outside. The Saints, God bless 'em, still suck. Burnt orange roses are just stupid. Nothing left to do but think about baseball.

Read yet another brilliant Chris Rose piece from the T-P.

It is shattering.

He was from Atlanta and had moved here to be with her because she is a New Orleans girl and New Orleans girls never live anywhere else and even if they do, they always come back.

That's just the way it is.

For the hurricane, they fled to Atlanta. His city. His people.

Meantime, her house was destroyed, her car was destroyed and within days, she was laid off from her job. And, of course, the wedding here in New Orleans was canceled.

When all settled down, he wanted to stay in Atlanta. But she is a New Orleans girl and you know the rest. Equanimity courses through our blood as much as platelets and nitrogen -- it is part of our DNA -- so she was determined to return, rebuild, recover.

So they moved back here....

I though the women Taiko drummers at Epcot were kind of hot.

But my eyes have been opened, thanks to Brett and Hiromi, who have located, not just hot taiko drummers, but hot naked sweaty tattooed taiko drummers.

Looks like the page for pre-ordering Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans? is now up here.

New Orleans is a complex American city that is in dire need of help. Katrina and corporate greed threaten to wash away its nuances, and that is why Chin Music Press decided to gather the voices of the Crescent City in a special volume of essays, art and information. Inside Do You Know, you'll find the rage of a people treated by their own government like an "ugly, unwanted stepchild," as Toni McGee Causey puts it, but you'll also find laughter as boy scouts navigate a Mardi Gras parade or as a rather bookish professor steps onto Bourbon Street for the first time. Do You Know takes the reader back to the New Orleans of yesteryear with 19th century engravings of the city and musings from writers, such as British geologist Charles Lyell's reflections on the 1846 Fat Tuesday: "We saw persons armed with bags of flour, which they showered down copiously on anyone who seemed particularly proud of his attire."

You can support Katrina relief, support a small publishing house, and also support my very first published work, all with one purchase.

WWL is slowly returning its airtime to its pre-Katrina schedule, and last week Rush Limbaugh was back on the airwaves.

And on his first day back, he claimed things were getting back to normal in New Orleans. That the main problem that still exists is that Democratic leaders are worried that their constituents won't be back in time for elections. That high-paying reconstruction jobs are going unfilled because lazy welfare-recipient refugees won't come back and live in the French Quarter to be able take these jobs.

The French Quarter?!!

If there are still dittoheads in New Orleans after Katrina, I will hang my head in shame. If there are still die-hard supporters of the Bush administration in New Orleans after Katrina...I don't know. I just don't know.

Read the NOLA.com entry here.

We took this picture in Metairie a couple of weeks ago.

My nephew planted some pumpkin seeds for the fall planting season in late summer, and look how they've flourished, after spending over a week under four feet of water.

But the weird thing is, he didn't plant them here. He planted them at the other end of the yard. The flood moved them, then nourished them. We took pictures, we laughed about it, we wondered about whether it was safe to eat anything growing in their yard this year (they also have an orange, a lime, and a satsuma tree), and then I forgot about it.

Well, night before last, I was listening to WWL in my car, and apparently this sort of vegetable migration has happened all over the city. One caller said she saw dozens of healthy-looking watermelons growing by the side of the road in St. Bernard. I wish I had pictures of that.

I will try, really try, to think of this as a metaphor for something. Something nice.

The preliminary parade schedule with adjusted routes is up here. Looks like Endymion will roll Uptown due to Mid-City being such a wasteland.

This is a Mardi Gras not to be missed, for pure emotion if nothing else.

We will be there this year. February 28 is the day, but we'll arrive Friday, leave on Ash Wednesday, as usual.

Who's with us?

Benny Grunch got washed out da parish and is stayin' over by his mamma'n nems now in Metry, but he's got an updated version of "The 12 Yats of Christmas" CD, the "Afta' Da' Storm" edition.

Makes a great stocking stuffer for your local Yats in exile.