February 2007 Archives

A couple of photos sent by my Uncle John. The first is of him and my grandfather presenting a Jimmy Fund check to Ted Williams. Taken next to the Red Sox dugout at Fenway right before a night game against the Yankees, September, 1954.

The second picture was taken right after World War II. Nobody knows who the sailor on the right is, but the guy on the left in the Air Force uniform is my great uncle Billy. The guy in the middle is some dude who used to play for the Yankees. I think he, like, hit a lot of home runs or something.

The pooch and I went for a walk this morning down to Samuel Square park and got to see Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett filming a scene for whatever that movie is that they're filming here. It was fun seeing all the early 60's cars driving up and down Loyola St. in the background, and the little kids on the playground who must have been told "just keep going down the slide til I say 'cut'".

Afterwards Brad got his kid and got in his car and Cate went to get her hair redone. No Angelina that I could see, but having finally seen Brad from a distance of about 20 yards, I have to admit that I'd do him.

[Peeps me. It makes Charlotte happy: 25Peeps]

If somebody sees me shaking my fat white butt to Rebirth in the middle of the day, so be it.

If the only way I can stay awake late at night on I-10 is to play air guitar to "Marquee Moon" over and over right out in plain sight of anybody I pass, well, then, I do what it takes.

But no matter how much I want to, and no matter how private it is up here in my third floor office, I should never, ever, ever, ever try to sing along with Al Green. I annoy even myself. God I'm embarrassing.

I just got back from a four-day weekend back in Austin, having Chris Trevino put the first eight hours worth of ink on my other sleeve. This one is cardinals, and will work around the existing celtic cross that Freddy Corbin did for me many years ago. I'll have pictures up by Thursday, hopefully.

I didn't really do much in Austin, other than loiter around the tattoo shop during the day, and lay in my room twitching at night. And eat lots and lots and lots of Mexican food. I told the guys in the tattoo shop that Mexican restaurants in New Orleans charge for chips and salsa, and they all agreed that that there is some fucked up shit. Hiromi showed up to watch on one day so we got to chat for a bit. It's fun watching her and Chris interact; they're both used to being the only person in the room who knows a lot about Japan, and neither has a very high bullshit tolerance, so they circle each other warily in conversation for a while before they figure out the other one is legit and then the conversation starts going way over my head.

I also managed to miss the social event of the season: they finally blew up the Intel building downtown. Intel started construction on their new trendy downtown Austin headquarters during the Internet bubble, and then when the Clinton boom turned into the Bush bust and the Austin economy tanked, Intel just walked away and left a big stinking hunk of blight on the city skyline. Because, you know, they're Intel and they really just don't give a fuck. Somebody took a time lapse of the implosion and has it up in a flickr set here, if you want to make a flip book out of it.

And thus died my dream of turning it into a four-story-tall Liberty Lunch. Sigh.

More work on the tattoo in September. Hopefully I won't have to do that drive again any time soon; anything grueling enough to make the twinkling lights of Kenner actually look good to me can't be emotionally healthy in the long run.

[Peeps me, baby: 25Peeps]

Mardi Gras afternoon, the Perfessor and I, in our matching stripey PJs:

are crashed out on the couches in my living room, drinking beer, listening to a Treme CD and discussing which is harder to give up for Lent, caffeine or starring in gay porn. My feet are bloody stumps, my belly is full, I'm having my fifth sugar crash of the day, and I say to him, "Man, this was maybe the best Mardi Gras ever". And he looks at me and thinks and says, "Yeah, it definitely ranks."

I had a 100% Uptown Carnival this year. I don't think I ever made it past Gen. Taylor. All week the routine was pick the kids up from school, eat a quick dinner, and walk down to the parades. Endymion was suckier than I remember, just because this was my first Endymion in almost 15 years and thus my first relatively non-mobile one. Y'all are right, the Endymion crowds are obnoxious. Bacchus was nicer, camped out at Napoleon & Prytania. Must remember: neutral ground sucks. Sidewalk side rules.

And it was a Mardi Gras of firsts. My first Krewe du Vieux. My first Muses. My first Chaos, first d'Etat, first Barkus. Really, my first Mardi Gras as both an adult and a local. A Mardi Gras full of family:

and friends:

and kids:

and lots and lots of food. Of which there are no pictures, because it is all in my belly.

And after it was all done and the crowds went home, I sat on my front porch and put my feet up and gazed out at the lovely mess:

until the OPP came and took it all away, while I contemplated 40 days of not seeing Ashley do any gay porn.

Easter promises to be an interesting time.

I was grubbing around looking up volunteer search and rescue stuff and ran across a whole pile of pictures taken at the training simulation we did in Austin right before I moved here. If you've been reading my blog since then you probably remember reading about it here.

The photos from the US-HERO training site are here (4 pages worth). I'm in about six or seven of them (green shirt, green vest, green helmet), but the three below are the only ones approximating macho action shots. As usual, the photos don't convey the whole story since the camera guy was using a flash but it was frickin' dark in there if you didn't have a helmet light.

[Peeps me, preeze, before I disappear: 25Peeps]

I tried to get over to northwest Carrollton on the way to the doctor this morning, but traffic was so jammed on Carrollton Ave. due to all the power outages that I gave up.

This afternoon I managed to get in, and found Karen, whose family and house is OK but who needs a new windshield on her car. She fared better than a lot of her neighbors. It looks bad there, but just in spots. Four out of five houses look OK, and then the fifth house looks like something you usually see in the Lower Ninth Ward. A lot of folks over there are looking pretty shell-shocked, thinking that they have to do the whole insurance/FEMA thing over again, and are wondering where they'll live now. The Salvation Army is out in force. FEMA is nowhere around. C-Ray and Shelly and Mitch have all put in appearances and then ran off, but right now it's mostly a couple of debris crews and Entergy crews and a whole lot of depressed people over there.

SELA Task Force 1 came through after the storm and so people have fresh orange X's on their houses dated 2/13.

Laureen has some good pictures here. It's weird, we've become so numb, so immune to pictures of destroyed houses, it's hard to remind yourself that these houses were fine just yesterday, and today the neighborhood looks like 2005 all over again.

Update: Another flickr set from howieluvsus.

We marched in our first Barkus yesterday. Perfect weather, and a fun time was had by all. The prisoner motif was dictated by Beezus, who couldn't find anything else that fit her. And we ran out of throws in the first 20 minutes, when we got to the bottom of the bag and realized that a lot of the beads we brought were those crappy retro ones from the 70s with the plastic clasp on them. Nobody wants that stuff any more. People these days are spoiled, they're all about the long beads, the frosted king cakes...

Most of my pictures came out pretty crappy, but this great shot is courtesy of Dr. A. Thanks!

Update: At the moment, Beezus is on the front page of the WWL TV web site.

[Still doing the 25Peeps thing, but I think I'm about to drop off. Click preeze: 25Peeps]

At least one thing seems to be back at least as good if not better than before. It's the end of Day Three of parade season and the stretch of Napoleon between Tchoupitoulas and St. Charles is cleaner than I've ever seen it.

Last night we saw the street cleaners and scores of OPP inmates in their orange jumpsuits wielding brooms and rakes.

Baby steps...

Lolis Eric Elie has a moving editorial in the Washington Post today:

If, say, Cuba or Venezuela had seized 24 square miles of American territory, the call to arms would have been immediate and decisive. But because coastal erosion is an enemy neither foreign nor domestic, we seem willing to surrender to it. We've retreated behind the excuse that New Orleans can't be saved. We've abandoned our can-do pride. In the Netherlands, the Dutch have managed to craft a flood-control system that protects the huge percentage of that nation's land that lies below sea level. These days Americans lack the money, the ingenuity, the patriotism, the humanity of the Dutch.

Rice CS professor Ken Kennedy dead at 61.

My time at Rice during the 80's was an exciting time in computer science, with Comp Sci finally coming into its own as a department distinct from mathematical sciences or electrical engineering.

I took one class from Ken, my junior year. One of the advantages of a Rice education has always been the access that mere undergrads have to influential researchers. Thanks to Ken's leadership of the department, I had a great grounding in networking and distributed computing by the time I finished my master's degree and went off into the working world.

He will be missed.

Finishing what Mrs. O'Leary's cow started.

I just got these pictures up finally. These are from the big Uptown house fire on Dryades Street right after Christmas. I smelled the smoke from inside my house on Napoleon six blocks away and took pictures until the rain chased me away. Yeah, I'm kind of a wimp like that, plus the flu was coming on.

The T-P reports that the owner claims to have lived there for 40 years, but according to firefighters quoted in the paper, and comments I overheard from the scene commander, the house was abandoned and the fire was started by vagrants. Neighbors said nobody lives there. Certainly the yard doesn't indicate anybody taking care of the property.

More pictures in my Flickr set.

[Click preeze: 25Peeps]

I would totally have ten of Dan Savage's babies:

“When Heather and I decided to have a baby, I knew it wasn’t going to be the most popular decision,” Ms. Cheney said, referring to her partner of 15 years, Heather Poe. She then gestured to her middle—any bulge disguised by a boxy jacket—and asserted: “This is a baby. This is a blessing from God. It is not a political statement. It is not a prop to be used in a debate, on either side of a political issue. It is my child.”

Nice try, Mary.

Yes, it’s a baby, not a prop. My kid isn’t a prop either, but that never stopped right-wingers from attacking me and my boyfriend over our decision to become parents. The fitness of same-sex couples to parent is very much part of the political debate thanks to the GOP and the Christian bigots that make up its lunatic “base.” You’re a Republican, Mary, you worked on both of your father’s campaigns, and you kept your mouth clamped shut while Karl Rove and George Bush ran around the country attacking gay people, gay parents, and our children in 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006. It’s a little late to declare the private choices of gays and lesbians unfit for public debate, Mary.

Read the rest here.

[Click preeze: 25Peeps]

I ran across some of Jeff Lamb's photos on flickr last fall, and he has some great shots of random places in New Orleans during the 70's and 80's.

I like this one especially, of the old D&J Sweet Shop on Louisiana.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fej/231287486/

I got curious and went by there in December to see what had happened to the old place. Some PRC documents from a few years ago indicated that it had been closed for a long time and that somebody was trying to renovate it. Here's what it looks like today:

It's a lovely house, and I'm glad that they preserved the building, at least. But there's a lot in this picture to make you sad. The corner seems lifeless now. Compared to twenty years ago, the sidewalks are cracked and broken, and the stop sign is leaning over at an angle (from Katrina's winds, or just neglect?) And the oak canopy, although somewhat thinned due to it being winter, is definitely not what it once was.

I think that's one of the things about post-flood New Orleans that weighs on my psyche. The light is all wrong. There is sunlight where there used to be shade. There is empty where there used to be thick green.

Think about this: there are no longer any living magnolia trees between Freret and the lake.

It's coming back, but it will take decades before it approaches what it once was. And no amount of neighborhood meetings or grant money or community willpower or (god forbid) government leadership can make a tree grow any faster than a tree grows.

[P.S.: I'm bowing to pressure and doing the 25Peeps thing. Don't let me drop like a rock the way Karl did.]