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Monday, July 01, 2013

Catching up

Sorry. I took the weekend off to fix a bicycle and watch a bunch of nature documentaries. Did some random other stuff.
 
Saturday night we went to City Putt for the first time.  As one would expect, it's pretty crowded there once the sun goes down and it's possible to endure the outdoors for longer than five minutes at a time.

 There are two courses. One is themed after the streets of New Orleans and the other is places in Louisiana.  Because New Orleans only cares about New Orleans, the line for the "streets" course was substantially longer.  Frankly, I didn't see what the big difference was anyway since the "theming" is mostly in the signage.

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Oh and they also play a lot of Mardi Gras music for you while you putt.

Back on the plus side, though, they sell beer. But then, minus, you're technically not allowed to bring it on the course with you.  But, plus again, we discovered they aren't very strict about enforcing that.  Would be nice if they put some more trash cans out, though. That way you won't have to carry flattened beer cans around in your pockets while you play.

Let's see what else? Well I tried NOLA Brewing's new Mecha-Hopzilla.  It's probably not as bad as the name makes it sound... but I couldn't get past the name. It was pretty hoppy, just as the Mecha-Zilla on the can promised it would be.

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Oh and here's something fun.  Mayor Landrieu spent the weekend at the Aspen Ideas Festival exchanging "ideas" with some of the world's most important people.  In 2011 Salon's Alex Pareene called for having Aspen "nuked."
The Atlantic discovered not long ago that putting on little parties for America’s ruling elite — carefully disguised as important intellectual gatherings to ensure the attendance of the most self-important members of the political and media classes — is a much better way to make money than “producing a magazine full of good journalism.” From that knowledge, the “Aspen Ideas Festival” was born. The festival, happening right now, is like South by Southwest for people who are willing to pay Thomas Friedman money for his thoughts.

Sadly, no such action was taken and thus Mitch Landrieu has had an opportunity to participate in the last two.  Here he is on stage with Goldman Sachs criminal Lloyd Blankfein,  Former Bush administration Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, and celebrutante media parasite Ariana Huffington.

The topic is "public-private partnerships" which, depending on your point of view, are either the new model of responsible governance and corporate citizenship or the new way political patronage and corporate welfare circumvent transparency and democracy in the 21st century.  This may spoil the video for you but no one on the panel represents the latter view.  If you want to watch it anyway, here it is.



This morning it was pointed out that Walter Isaacson lays out a real whopper of an unintentional punchline at about 35:30. So you might fast forward to that.

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