Backlog of stuff

Man... I still didn't publish the second half of the Mardi Gras posts I had been working on.  I wrote up a whole bunch of stuff about the Zulu blackface controversy which, I suppose, can sit until next year when I'm pretty sure people will be talking about that again.  I also had some things in there about the drunk driving accident which is still relevant and will probably get dumped into something else I'm trying to finish.  Meanwhile, here are some quick notes from this week before that stuff piles up on me too.



It's city-wide investment property open house season. We used to call that Jazzfest. But things are kind of different now in the "year of enforcement," as the mayor likes to call it. Also the steady stream of people I keep seeing drive slowly through the neighborhood with little notebooks says more about what goes on now. Anyway I heard a rumor that City Council is about to take up the Short Term Rentals thing again soon... as early as next week, perhaps. There are a couple of different bills  before the legislature right now that would impose new taxes on STRs as one instrument in the sprawling and sputtering search for a grand bargain between the city and the tourism industry. If lawmakers successfully tie the fate of STRs to the prospect of infrastructure revenues, it follows that City Council would be even more positively inclined to their proliferation than they already are.  Which means we can look forward to seeing even more long time residents displaced by investment properties. Nobody will live here but at least we'll be able to pay for nobody's drainage.



The "Together For Parks and Recreation" moneywad is putting out on an all-out media blitz this week in favor of hooking Ron Forman up with a dedicated millage for twenty more years.  They've got  mailers, TV ads, all sorts of endorsements from elected persons and editorial writers.  It's pretty disgusting.  What's worse is even the more skeptical notes I've read are reserved in their criticism of this measure which, pretty obviously, should be rejected. But there's too much wealth and political status sitting behind it and nobody really likes to challenge the money power in this city.

Basically there are three kinds of people who will vote for this thing. They are:

1) Cynical allies of the con-profit oligarchy who have a direct financial interest and/or adjacent political interest in helping them win something.

2) Cynical political actors who have an interest in having been "on the mayor's side" of something in case they want to ask her for something else later.

3) Idiots. I like the idiots. At least they're honest.

In any case, since those are pretty much all three categories of voter that exist in New Orleans, I'm pretty sure the millage is going to pass in a landslide. Oh well. On to the next disaster.

Let's see what else? I knew there was something I wanted to mention.

Oh yeah it was CCC last weekend.



I did a slightly more robust Mardi Gras this year than last so my training was a bit behind schedule. During the Lenten season I ran a full 6.2 miles only three times coming in at or about 56 minutes. That's fine, I guess. But also there were a number of outings when I had to stop altogether after 4 or 5 miles. So I wasn't sure what to expect coming in to race day. And this is why I made the stupid mistake of neglecting to lie about my estimated time so I could sign up for the green corrall instead of the red.



It wouldn't have even been that much of a lie. 56 is just a minute over the dividing threshold. But your starting group makes a huge difference in the lived experience of this race.  The reds are ostensibly joggers but the group is loaded up with baby strollers, walking clubs, bunny costumes, and all sorts of obstacles that end up making the first mile as much a lateral run as it is forward. It's fine that all that stuff goes on. But for some reason I always forget it's going to happen and I've only been doing this thing for twenty years or so. Maybe next time I'll know better.

Anyway I managed to finish. In 53:40 at that, so I could have signed up in the green group and that wouldn't have been dishonest in the first place.  Still, the trend is not good.  Last year was 52:13. The year before that was 48:31. But let's not worry about that too much just yet.  See, I won one of these participation trophies.



They also give you one of these at the post-race festvial.  But be careful. If you are trying to drink your water from it, you only get a couple of sips before you are prompted to subscribe.



Not this site, though. The Yellow Blog will always be free... if we can manage to keep it updated.  Until Google decides to shutter it, of course.

Public space, private space

Wisconsin Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner had a novel solution last week for constituents upset over his vote to allow Internet Service Providers to scan, record, and sell information about all of their online activities.

In the video, first made public by the liberal super PAC American Bridge, Sensenbrenner responds to a woman asking about Congress’s decision to roll back Obama-era internet privacy laws.

“Well, you know, nobody has got to use the internet,” Sensenbrenner told the woman.

It's hard to imagine anyone would find this credible in 2017.  Of course people have got to use the internet. At least anyone who wants to live anything resembling what we would consider a normal modern life has to use it. We use the internet to do our work. We use it to apply for work. Even the most menial jobs hire via online application. We use it to apply for loans. We use it to apply for benefits. We use it to apply to school. We use it to do our taxes. We use it to talk to our friends, family, and neighbors. We use it to read the news.  We use it to watch TV. The internet is in our TVs It's in our phones. It's in our cars, our speakers, our air conditioners and microwaves (sort of, maybe).

Look, this is stupid. It's a self-evident fact that the internet is a necessity, not a luxury for anyone expecting to engage in even the most modest of lifestyles. Unless you are a retired Jedi living off the grid in a cave, you're gonna have to use it for stuff.

The implication thrown around by people like Sensenbrenner or by Jason Chaffetz who wants you to choose between your iPhone and health insurance, is that not everyone deserves even the most modest of modern lifestyles and that it's fine if our public policy actively excludes people from that.
Sensenbrenner's iteration is a direct denial of the notion that the internet should be regulated as a public utility. Republicans especially, are heavy into denying that even public utilities should be regulated as public utilities these day. The disastrous results there should be a clear enough warning against further privatizing the public commons on the internet.

Under the regulatory regime signed into law this month, ISPs, the police, advertisers, and anybody who can pay for it, get to know everything about what you do on the internet... which is to say, they can know pretty much everything you are up to ever. Even day to day activity as passive as reading and searching, is fodder for commercial exploitation or state inquiry. Meanwhile, it isn't quite the same the other way around.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — The White House announced Friday that it would cut off public access to visitor logs revealing who is entering the White House complex and which officials they are meeting, breaking with the Obama administration’s practice and returning a cloak of secrecy over the basic day-to-day workings of the government.

So even as the private lives of individuals are exposed to a wider scope of surveillance and commercial exploitation, the public records of the public's business conducted in the public's spaces becomes even more opaque. This is what happens when we abandon the idea of public goods and services. Everything that can be appropriated by the rich and powerful will be.

I thought about all of this again when I saw this weekend that the AZ story about Tom Benson's theft of La Salle Street had been picked up by WWLTV. Remarkably, a security guard tried to run the TV station's photographers out of the space as they tried to shoot some footage there.

Meanwhile, public access to the street has been blocked at times, usually for private or special events run by the LSED’s property management contractor, SMG. That has added to confusion about whether the 1400 block of LaSalle remains a city street. When WWL-TV set up a camera this week on what used to be the LaSalle Street roadway, a security guard from the Zelia-owned Benson Tower office building told the photographer he couldn’t shoot video there.

“Actually, all this is private property. It’s not a street,” the guard said, his voice captured on video.

Even if any of the pretense were true, if the street was clearly Benson's private property, that's some high level arrogance. The open air environs of perhaps the city's most iconic building are gonna draw photographers. Here are runners lining up for Saturday's Crescent City Classic just aiming their little camera phones any old direction. Hopefully they didn't accidentally land on anything classified.




By the way, I finished in 48:31. That's my best time in over a decade. Maybe not entirely relevant information, but it was bound to come out sooner or later given the realities of today's internet. Race organizers fit each runner's number with an RFID tag and post the results on their website even thought Jim Sensenbrenner keeps telling them they don't have to.

Plain white T-Shirt

Or maybe it's blue and black. Either way, they didn't seem to try very hard with this one. I haven't tried very hard training this year so I guess that fits.

In other news, the best album ever recorded by anybody turns 20 years old on Saturday. You can listen to it on the YouTubes but it's one of those playlist deals that keeps playing ads in between the songs. That would take something away from any album but it especially messes this one up as the glossy sounding commercials break up the wall to wall hiss and fuzz atmosphere.

Oh well, here it is anyway. I have a cassette of this I bought at Paradise Records in Baton Rouge back in nineteen something and five. I'll let you listen to that some day.

Aspirin for breakfast

As much as I hate to admit it, I'm getting to the age where I need to dope up with performance enhancing pain killers before taking on the Crescent City Classic these days. Despite the chemical advantage of two Walgreens brand aspirin, I somehow didn't win the race today. Probably because I forgot to lay a bounty on these guys.

On the plus side, I did manage to finish in 54:39 which is the first time in a while I've run the race in a better time than my most recent training runs. We can probably thank the weather for that. Either way, I'm undeniably slower and fatter than I used to be. On average I've lost about 5 minutes off of my typical time over the past ten years.

The most recent race time I recorded was 55:46 two years ago. Incidentally, that post ends in a Gumbo Z'herbes recipe which I put back into practice yesterday... for training purposes, of course. Probably should have used more aspirin, though.

Big foam fleur de lis

I'm not sure if I'm going to lose to the giant flower this year but I am taking the CCC a bit more seriously than in recent attempts. Actually dropped 10 pounds since Jan 1. I fully expect Carnival to mess this up all kind of bad but it's something.

Update: Digging through some old Flickr stuff I came across this rarity. It's Lee de Fleur on Fat Tuesday 2006, before his CCC debut.

Easter Weekend

It's not anything so dramatic as having been laid away in a tomb before rising again or anything but the weekend was so event-heavy as to cause me to unplug a bit for a few days. So I missed a lot of stuff, I'm sure. Anyway here's what happened in the meantime.

• On Good Friday, I spotted State Senator Ed Murray exiting the Sheraton Hotel downtown. Murray had just picked up what I assumed were his and two other people's Crescent City Classic race numbers at the pre-race health and fitness expo. I had a moment where I could have asked Sen. Murray if he was entering this race to win it but I had to go pick up my number so I just let him duck out. Sort of like he did a few months ago.
  
  Here's a lame phone picture of the official artwork from this year's CCC which I was fond enough of to snap a photo but not quite enough to buy a poster.
  
  
  BTW, the artist's name is Christy Works-Boutte. Here's her site.



• Besides, you are saying, aren't the participants supposed to "win" these posters through some feat of athleticism or something? Well, kind of. A few years back I was athletically feated enough to finish at or near the times at the end of this list of Top 500 Finishers (PDF) who qualify for free posters. But I'm getting a bit too old, slow and fat to take that challenge very seriously anymore. I will admit to one tactical error, however. I forgot to lie.
  
  In my self-consciousness about my deteriorating athleticism, I momentarily forgot that a great majority of unseeded race participants either haven't trained very hard or simply don't plan to finish the thing running anyway. And while there is a dedicated registration category for "walkers", many of these people just lie about their expected finishing times so that they can start further up the street. And so you have walkers, baby strollers, people with canes, people in giant chicken suits all lining up with or in front of people who expect to run at an 8 to 10 minute per mile pace.
  
  One way to manage this problem is to lie about your own time. Even if you're like me and have been running 6.2 miles in 55 to 58 minutes consistently for weeks ahead of race time, it's a good idea to inflate your grade and register in the 45 to 50 minute group. Otherwise, you'll spend the first mile and a half of the course covering as much ground laterally as you do moving forward. Think Reggie Bush trying to bounce an off-tackle play outside and losing six yards in the process. This was me on Saturday.
  
  Because I had forgotten to lie about my time, I had to push hop and spin through a forest of waddling old ladies, invalids, rejects from the cast of Biggest Loser, and I think the Philly Phanatic before I finally found room to hit a reasonable stride somewhere on Esplanade Avenue. This was, I think, maybe my 17th or 18th Crescent City Classic and here I had made just the dumbest rookie mistake possible. At least I didn't park my car in an obviously illegal spot and then whine about it in the newspaper.
  
  I ended up finishing in 55:46. Not terrible for an old fat guy but it was harder than it had to be.



• In other sports news from the weekend, Donovan McNabb is almost as old as I am (but maybe a little bit fatter). I will never understand the why Eagles fans seem to hate their future Hall of Fame former quarterback so much. Good luck in the Kevin Kolb era.



• In other news news from the weekend and early this week, I've been enjoying the spectacle of various members of Mayor-to-be Mitch's NOPD task force realizing that they've been used as cheap political props and walking out the door to save themselves further shame. I most enjoy following these developments at The Lens where Eli has a pretty good bead on the situation.

  The police search largely has been delegated to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which has a contract to consult the Landrieu transition. The organization is screening the candidates and will whittle down the applicant pool before the task force will have an opportunity to weigh in on any specific individual. For some task force stakeholders, the police chiefs group has been far from forthcoming about the methodology used to whittle down the list. Some task force members appear to be more in the loop than others.
  
  I can respect the desire to be sensitive about the current positions of potential candidates. I’m not sure that I necessarily object to the IACP serving as the first filter for the task force. Frankly, I was never sold on the need for an official task force to help the Mayor-elect in the first place. Mitch Landrieu has said that this decision – who will lead the NOPD at its time of greatest despair – is his top priority.
  
  He’s right. The success of Landrieu’s administration absolutely hinges on his ability to curtail crime while restoring the community’s faith in the NOPD. The credibility of the department is, at this point, absolutely critical to the city’s national and international reputation and will in large measure determine the pace at which tourism and other investment can grow, or slow.
  
  If Landrieu had come out from the onset and said that he would consult privately with whomever he wanted to and that the selection of the new police chief would be his decision and his alone, perhaps he would have avoided this early headache.

  Basically what's happened here is Landrieu, who I agree has every right to just pick the damn chief himself, thought he could steal a tacit endorsement of his choice from as many "community leaders" willing to have their names printed on a list of Task Force participants as possible. Most "community leaders" are just self-important enough to fall for this. But at the same time, they're also sensitive enough to get their feelings hurt when they realize they aren't being listened to. And when that happens you end up with a situation where the people you brought in to create a fake air of consensus are now creating a fake air of discord as they have their individual temper tantrums. Overall it looks worse than if Landrieu had just ignored these people altogether.



• In other news that really isn't news, Scott Cowen is your 2010 Times-Picayune "Loving Cup" recipient. Oyster and Ashley and and Fake Ashley from "Treme" are right. Scott Cowen is a mook. And the T-P's Editorial Board (Or Ashton Phelps' committee of one or whoever cups out the loving) is the mookiest mookfest in all of mookville.




• In further news that really isn't news but is at least further along the line toward being news than the previous item and which involves smaller furrier animals, we... um... we got a new cat on Saturday. In June, it will have been a year since we lost Sovreign and, well, it was just time. This is Biscuit. He's about 8 weeks old.
  
  

And in the best news of the weekend, I made a Gumbo Z'herbes on Good Friday and took some photos of it while it happened.

Gumbo Z'herbes is a bit different from most of what people typically call Gumbo in that 1) It doesn't usually call for a thickening agent like file or okra. 2) Because it is a traditional Good Friday meal, practicing Catholics are encouraged to not put any meat in it. Because I did not check the practicing Catholic box on my Census form, I get to ignore item number 2 and add ham anyway and nobody will send me to Hell.

• The first thing you do here is bring together as many different sorts of greens things you can pull out of your local Rouses. There aren't any hard and fast rules about which greens you use although some of these are fairly standard. Clay made one of these a few weeks back that included dandelion greens. I didn't have anything quite so exotic on hand. You are supposed to have at least seven and your total is supposed to be an odd number. I count eight in mine but, again, didn't check that box either. Try and damn me if you want to but it won't hold up in court. The important thing to remember is that most of these like the mustard greens in the photo below usually have a lot of sand and grit on them so they have to be cleaned thoroughly before use. This could take a while so it's good to have beer on hand.
  
  



• This is my biggest stock pot stuffed as full as it will go with Turnip Greens, Collared Greens, Mustard Greens, Cabbage Leaves, Beet Tops, Green Onion, Leeks, and Parsley.
  
  
  
  Once everything is clean, add it all to the pot with maybe 1/3 or 1/2 cup of water and turn the burner up on high. When the water starts to boil, turn the heat back down low, cover the pot and let it simmer for maybe 20 minutes or so.



• Strain the cooked greens, reserve the liquid and set it aside.
  
  
  
  Chop the greens up as fine as you can and set them aside as well.
  
  



• In a great big cast iron pot, make yourself a nice roux. I won't bore you with the fine points of stirring and waiting on a roux. Just make sure you have more beer on hand to pass the time. When it's ready to go, you can start building your gumbo. Most Gumbo Z'herbes recipes call for just onions here, but I went ahead and threw in some bell pepper, celery and garlic too because... I was afraid somebody might send me to hell if I didn't.
  
  
  
  Add that to the roux and let it cook for a couple of minutes. Then go get your reserved stock and stir that in too.



• Here's where all the rest of us sinners get to make this part of a complete breakfast by adding meat. Pickled pork or pickled tips would probably be great with the greens but I didn't have any so I just went with regular old ham seasoning which works just fine.
  
  
  
  Oh and three humongous ham hocks too. Here's all that heretical ham browning in the roux.
  
  



• All that's left to do now is add the those chopped, cooked greens.
  
  



• I probably could have used a bit more cayenne in this than I did so don't hold back. I also used black pepper and salt (obviously) as well as thyme (which really should just be automatic anywhere there is pork) and also some allspice and a couple of cloves which don't typically belong in a gumbo but then neither do all those greens.
  
  Yes, obviously, there's plenty left. I wonder if it freezes OK. Would be an appropriate item to resurrect, right?
  
  

Jumpsuits

There's always a guy in a jumpsuit.

Conditions were optimal for this year's CCC. At least the weather conditions were, anyway. Personally, although I had worked pretty hard at training from January through the end of March, the trip to France put an extra five to ten pounds on me that I didn't shed in time for the race. On March 21, I ran 6 miles in 46:20. Today I did the 6.2 in 51:24.

Not too embarrassing but nothing to be too proud of either. At least I beat the crap out of Coach Soupy (and the Easter Bunny as well).

Update: There's also always a guy in one of these get-ups

I dare not say...

...the way I feel
about your inability to
suck it up and win the race


Good news and bad news from this year's Crescent City Classic. The good news is that I got into any shape to run at all given the degree to which I had allowed myself to lapse over the preceding months. I've only been back on a regular training schedule since the beginning of March. And prior to Saturday I had only run six miles once this year. March 19 I made it in 47:48 according to the Tweeter Tube record. But in those few weeks time I had gone from congested suffering and chronic knee pain to feeling pretty good at the end of a run so it's not time for my athletic career to go the way of the Favre just yet.

The bad news is Saturday was harder than I expected. When you're not in peak condition, your body notices things like a drastic change in your run from 6:00 PM to 8:30 AM. On a day that you give it no breakfast, your body seriously misses the previous week's training diet of peanut butter chocolate eggs and wonders what it will use for fuel. It begins wondering this around mile three right after you pass the guys standing on the sidewalk in their high school band uniforms offering you a choice of light beer for free or water for $4.75. By mile four when you pass the guy dressed as the devil offering you hot dogs, your mind is too whipped to form a sentence much less a friendly comment. Failing to form the words, "One with yellow mustard, please" you offer a pained grunt and trudge on.

I've been running this race since I was a teenager and I've been in pain by mile five before. But this is the first time I've actually had to stop at that point and walk for a minute. I had made the five miles in 41:20 so I was running a pretty good pace. (At or about last year's pace, in fact) Given my lack of training, I was probably pushing it a bit too hard. I felt bad. And after walking about two hundred feet I felt guilty so I sucked it up and finished the race on a jog. 55 and a half minutes total (really not bad after having stopped for a few minutes).

As always it's worth the struggle for all the free beer and Chee Wees waiting in Tad Gormley stadium. But while I've managed to rationalize it in several ways here, I can't help but feel like this race was a setback. Nothing a good 12 months of penance can't fix, though. Next year I want a poster.

Just ate 4lbs of crawfish

That ought to be enough to get me all 6.2 miles tomorrow morning. With Carnival following so close upon the holidays this year, I was more out of shape for a longer period of time than usual. But I think I've done a better than usual job of sticking to a training schedule once I finally got going.

So I'm maybe a bit heavier for this race than I am in a typical year, but I think I'm a bit stronger and in better condition overall. I'm still figuring on finishing in a sucktastic time between 48 and 52 minutes.

NEXT year I'll finally have this thing licked. Just you wait.

Mysteries of the Universe

Despite my resolution to take CCC training seriously this year, I managed to finish in a... um.. pedestrian time of 48:42. Since the race has finished.. and now that my official serious training period has ended for 2007, I have not only improved my time to 44:11 (as of this afternoon) but I have also lost five pounds. Explain this.

48:42

My official CCC time this year is much better than last. While this may be due as much to the cool weather than anything else, I'll take it.

The weather had a general muting effect on the mood of a usually festive pre-race crowd. I got to the Quarter way too early yesterday morning and had to wait an uncomfortably long time on the street while the bitter morning wind gradually deprived my extremities of sensation. I was surprised to find that Harry's Corner was closed.. leaving me nowhere to hide from the wind other than a storefront doorway. After this harsh test of endurance, the race itself turned out to be more of a relief than anything else. At least it gave us all a chance to warm up.

CCC is always a good time. The spectators make as much sport of it as the participants. Several bands line the route. I noticed a man dressed as a rat for some reason playing a trumpet on his porch. On Rampart Street some guys were offering donuts to the runners as they passed. Nearer to the finish, the devil waited with hot dogs.

T-P photo

Costumed runners I noted included a Superman, the obligatory Easter Bunnies, and one runner dressed as Governor Meemaw (ironically actually running this time). No Fleurs-De-Lis this year, though.



While the expression on this participant's face (the dork in red) isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of the experience, believe me CCC is a worthwhile event, if only for the beer...and the Chee-Wees.



Check out the NOLA.com slideshow for more.

46:41

My time last night in my final 6 mile tune-up before Saturday's Crescent City Classic. I had planned to take this seriously this year but my mind has been on... other things for the past week or so. At least I'll come away with lots o'beer and yet another snazzy t-shirt.

Training!

Determined to improve on last year's embarrassing career-worst time, I'm taking CCC preparations a little more seriously this year. Not too seriously, mind you, just.. you know.. eating less ice cream. Oh and I bought a new stopwatch in order that I may make myself feel as inadequate as possible by simply glancing at my wrist as I complete my daily run. So far, however, some improvement is evident.

CCC Training Results:

Feb 26: 4 Miles 34 minutes 57 seconds

Feb 27: 4 Miles 35 minutes 39 seconds

Feb 28: 4 Miles 34 minutes 3 seconds

March 1: REST

March 2: 6 Miles 47 minutes 6 seconds

March 3: 4 Miles 33 minutes 35 seconds

Decent progress considering the training table thus far has included (but has not been limited to)

Ten inch hot sausage po-boy

One half package frozen taquitos

Bag of Tostitos with a bowl of melted cheese and salsa

Leftover Red Beans with lots of sausage, pickle meat, and butter

One half of a large pepperoni pizza

An undisclosed quantity of ice cream

Someone cue the Rocky theme.