Cooler heads in the firefighters' dispute?

I kind of remember the pre-Mardi Gras press conferences about this stuff  had the mayor and the fire chief assuring everyone that, despite the disputes over vacation and overtime shifts, the fire department would be adequately staffed to handle the load of parade season.  Were they?  There was a sick-out one day. And the season didn't exactly go off without a hitch. But without knowing more about how emergency personnel are deployed we can't really say how or when a shortage of firefighters might have made things more difficult.  For most people, the most tangible result was the lack of a fire engine tail unit which made it difficult to determine if a parade was over or not.

At least he Krewe of Druids attempted that problem with this riderless float.




Anyway, it sounds like they're getting along marginally better now. Nevertheless this was interesting.

From the outside, tensions seemed to have lowered when both sides agreed to discuss their differences after Mardi Gras. As signs of good faith, McConnell revoked his order canceling firefighters’ leave, and the union said it dropped its voluntary overtime boycott.

But in a move that largely went undetected by the public until Friday, Mischler sent a letter saying that the union membership had met and authorized him to call for a strike at 7 p.m. on Friday if talks broke down.

It's always a risky play for emergency services workers to actually go out on strike. When they vote to authorize it, that woud indicate the situation must be pretty serious.

Raining on my parades

It is Carnival time and the weather outlook is bleak. There isn't a date left on the parade calendar where there isn't at least some doubt as to whether or not people will be sloshing about in boots and ponchos.  If you are so equipped and hardy enough, it's usually not such a bad deal.  The parades look a bit messier but the crowds are lighter. If you can stay dry enough, it's possible to have a fine time.  This still doesn't stop some of the larger krewes from getting nervous.  So nervous, in fact, that some of them are talking crazy talk.

Jefferson Parish President Mike Yenni said Wednesday that he has had queries from multiple New Orleans Mardi Gras krewes, asking if their parades could roll in Jefferson Parish if necessary. Multiple inches of rain, strong wind and thunderstorm are expected throughout the weekend, according to the National Weather Service.

After buzz about possible rescheduling on Tuesday, New Orleans police announced that all parades would roll on their scheduled days, but times could be changed.

"I've had some discussions with a couple captains candidly, just saying that … 'if we had to move, could we talk to you?' I said 'we're open to anything,' " Yenni said in a press briefing. "I'd have to get with our sheriff's department to make sure we could accommodate that. … but if we can help put on Mardi Gras, we certainly want to do so."

Or maybe it's just Yenni talking crazy.  The krewe spokesmen all sound like they're cooperating with NOPD. Although, the "candid discussions" with Yenni might also be a bit of back channel brinksamanship over rescheduling.  Or maybe they're just looking to pick up some of that sweet JP moolah. 

Wednesday, the parish council voted to give $25,000 subsidies each to Caesar and the Krewe of Centurions.

"Some council members are choosing to give money directly to krewes that will help their efforts," JP Council member Jennifer Van Vrancken said. "One of the things that I do is support the Rhythm on the Route band competition. So my office helps fund all of the winners."

JP President Mike Yenni said taxpayer money given to the krewes is well worth the price when you consider carnival has a $24 million dollar economic impact on the parish.

"So for the small amounts of money that the parish council has allocated to these krewes, to kind of help them out on those prime nights and prime weekends, we're seeing return on that investment," Yennis said. "Hotel occupancy in Jefferson Parish is up to 90 percent."

We've talked at length about the problems of route consolidation already so I don't want to go too far into that right now.  Orleans Parish parades would do well to disperse away from the St. Charles route back into the neighborhoods to spread the celebration more evenly across the city the way it was once not so long ago.  The Jefferson Parish issue is an added layer on top of this, though, having to do with the white flight origins and lingering racial divisions between New Orleans and Metairie.  That dynamic is changing again in the era of gentrification. As the city becomes more desirable to wealthier whites, the suburban lifestyle is starting to change as well.  These trends are beginning to manifest in the Carnival calendar.

Anyway, we'll have to see how that develops in the future.  Right now we're more concerned with the rain since that is definitely affecting things.  It doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to ruin anybody's time entirely, though.  Often a little rain on a parade isn't all that bad. We've seen our share of it already and have come through pretty well. Here are some photos and stuff.

Saturday was touch and go for the five parades that rolled through Orleans Parish. Pontchartrain got off without a hitch.  Captain Sam is one of my favorite Carnival icons.  He and I are the same age and we both lived in New Orleans East for a time when we were younger.



Also it looks like they've done away with the pretense of titling their royalty with roman numerals.  I guess I can get behind that.



I don't have any pictures of Choctaw or Freret. That's when the quagmire began. It was bad. And I felt bad. I had to go lay down for a while, frankly.  But somehow we rallied in time for Sparta.



Because the previous night had been a little too much about straight whiskey when it should have been about Miller Lite, Saturday had to be about Diet Coke when it also should have been about Miller Lite.  (This also may have something to do with being the same age as Captain Sam but never mind that right now.)  The point is, we watched Sparta and Pygmalion without drinking any alcohol.  Yes, it is perfectly fine to do this.

Let's see what pictures look good here.  The intermittent rain didn't make it easy.  Sparta had a Shakespeare theme of some sort. It looked very good. Here is their Taming Of The Shrew float. It had a big ol' pelican on it.



Pygmalion wants to be First Weekend Endymion.  (Tit-Dymion?  End-Mini-on?) This year its captain (some Rizutto or another.. Is it Jack or Phil?) cut some TV ads promoting the parade and ball as a major event.   That's not unheard of but it is unusual. Especially for a first week parade.  I'm not sure why they feel like they have to do this.  Are they worried about being eclipsed by the growing spectacle of Chewbacchus across town?  Anyway, it's funny.

The parade is fine. It really does look like somebody tried to make an Endymion but just didn't have enough parts. Maybe some day they will pull it off. The rain made this attempt appear less successful than it could have been.  Here is what I mean by the comparison.

These maid and duke floats are modeled on the long procession that Endymion typically begins with.  The riders are supposed to have big headdresses suspended from the rigging behind them.  But the rain must have messed that up Saturday.  Anyway you see what they did there.



They've also developed a couple of gaudy, led-covered signature floats.  The Jester here is a reference to the French Quarter daiquiri shops the Rizuttos also happen to run.



They try to bring in a lot of cool marching clubs as well. The Krewe de Lune is in either its third or fourth year now.



The theme was.. sea creatures or something... I forget. Here is a 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea float.  The floats in both Sparta and Pygmalion looked good despite the rain.



It's actually a pretty nice parade. The wanna-be-Endymion air of it only makes it seems smaller by comparison.  In any case, both of these parades were fine examples of how persisting through a little rain can pay off.

Wednesday was an even clearer case in point. It rained so much during Druids and  Nyx that the Pelicans even had to stop playing their indoor sport. 

You guys wanna catch a parade or something? @Pacers

— New Orleans Pelicans (@PelicansNBA) February 8, 2018

We are hosting out of town friends this week and these were their young children's first Mardi Gras parades. So the weather wasn't ideal.  But we are pros at this and as such we had spare ponchos for everybody. The right gear really does make all the difference.  There still isn't much I can do for my camera, though. So I only got a few phone snapshots. Most of them are bad. 



I did feel obligated to get a shot of their monument joke. It wasn't as bad as it could have been. But the subject is more than tired at this point.



Druids also offered commentary on the shorter Canal route. They're correct here. Maybe a little whiny and passive aggressive in tone. But still..



There was also the traditional, but subtle, knock at Nyx which you can see in this blurry photo if you want to click on it. It's just a purse with some big bills spilling out of it. It's a reference to Nyx's iconic symbol and the ongoing controversies over the grifter in charge of the krewe.  Here she is now on her Captain's float.



As we have come to expect with regard to the "largest parading organization in all of Carnival" the problems with Nyx didn't have as much to do with the rain so much as they did with... being Nyx and doing Nyx things.

Crowds stationed around Magazine and Upperline streets got a bit more time to plead for hand-decorated purses after a float hit tree limbs on Jefferson Avenue, leading to a downed power line and a brief delay in the Krewe of Nyx parade, according to Entergy New Orleans and the city's emergency-preparedness department.

"A float came into contact with tree limbs," said Yolanda Pollard, spokeswoman for Entergy New Orleans, and the limbs fell onto a line servicing a single property on Jefferson Avenue, near the start of the parade.

Yeah yeah, it was a freak accident and could have happened to anybody. But for a self-proclamed "superkrewe" that always ends up being a little too big for its britches, not quite fitting an oversized float down an Uptown street is a little bit too on the nose as a metaphor.

We experienced the delay as an extended gap in the parade which is kind of a rare thing these days and so kind of nostalgic.  Here is the back of the parade catching up.



Due in part to the power line incident and to the weather, Nyx ended up being kind of a wreck; delays between floats followed by very large floats going way too fast through the rain to try and catch up, that sort of thing.  The typical Nyx problem of too many floats with no bands or marching units between them was in evidence again this year.  Toward the back end, it starts to feel very much like a truck parade. 

There's nothing wrong with a truck parade, of course, especially when, as is the case with Nyx, everybody seems to know one or several of the riders.  That plus the light crowd makes for a prime opportunity to catch pretty much everything.  The first-timer children in our group enjoyed the hell out of that. One can even appreciate the chaotic atmosphere of watching a parade struggle not to fall apart.  Which, really, is the most appropriate way to celebrate during a thunderstorm anyway. Nyx might not be the Prime Time event it bills itself as. But, for this year, anyway, it might be the model for pushing on through the weather for the other superkrewes to emulate.

Please don't start the toppling party without me

Hang on a sec. Just gonna dial up AreTheMonumentsDownYet dot com. Probably still in limbo and... whoah, okay.

New Orleans officials can begin the process of removing the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee at Lee Circle and three other monuments at the center of a long-running, city-led effort, a federal appeals court ruled Monday (March 6).

In the ruling, the three-judge panel with the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals found that the groups trying to block the removal of the monuments, Monumental Task Committee and the Louisiana Landmarks Society, failed to present a case that contained a legal argument that showed the monuments should stay up. The court wrote that the groups relied on two legal claims, "both of which wholly lack legal viability or support."

I last took a good look at the Lee monument a little over a week ago when our float passed (Tivoli) Circle.  I only had a second to take a picture. I was a little bit busy at the time. But I did take a moment to think about how ridiculously long the process of getting them down has been.



It's been so long, in fact, that earlier in the season I found myself sighing at monument floats in Druids and Chaos.  It had started to seem like such old news. Can't these guys just let it go?





But then I remembered the specific subject matter in question which is all about.... not letting it go.



Well it looks like the time has finally come now. When can we get started?

Mayor Mitch Landrieu's office said that a request for proposals will be issued within the next day to obtain bids for a company to remove the monuments, which will be stored in a city-owned warehouse until it's determined what will happen to them.

Oh boy. Well let's hope all the bidding contractors make sure they've got their auto insurance up to date. As for the monuments themselves, why not just give them to these parading krewes since they love them so much?  They could each make one into a recurring signature float. We'll give Lee to Chaos, Davis to D'etat, and Beauregard to Druids.  The Liberty Monument, of course, will have to be dragged down St. Charles each year to the Comus Ball where Erroll Laborde will curtsy to it thus signaling the end of Carnival for another season.

Open ended entitlement

Lee Zurik looks at the ongoing Hollywood South debacle.

NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) - When Miley Cyrus made the move from music to movies, one of her first releases was shot in Louisiana, back in 2011. "So Undercover" had a budget of nearly $14 million.

“It received a straight-to-DVD release in 2013,” says media critic Matt Brennan. ”It barely made a splash and I hadn't heard of it until I looked at it for this interview.”
But Louisiana taxpayers helped plug the movie's budget gap by writing a $3 million check - taxpayer money, handed over directly to this flop, as part of the state's film incentive program.

“It's an unaffordable program,” says Jan Moller, who leads the nonprofit Louisiana Budget Project in Baton Rouge.

I wonder how many people actually understand that the state just writes out checks to these movies studios and receives only about 23 cents on the dollar return on investment.

Moller says the Motion Picture Investor Tax Credit program is sucking money from higher education and healthcare. “This is an open-ended entitlement program that is costing the state more than $200 million a year,” Moller says, “at a time when we have a $1.4 billion shortfall.”

  If people did understand this better, then maybe this dumb Druids float would look a bit different.

Smashing return of Carnival season

Living a block off of the parade route during Carnival can be a blessing but it can also be a curse.  As the season begins to reach its climax and the bigger more popular parades start to come along, parking comes at more of a premium.  For those of us in the neighborhood who rely on on-street parking, there comes a point where we are hesitant to move our vehicles at all except under the most dire of emergencies.  It helps to have a bike available to make the occasional beer and snack run but, come the second week's stretch of parades, you're pretty well hunkered down. 

Which is why walking out to the parade only to find a car you haven't touched in two days has managed to sustain an  injury anyway can be such an annoyance.



The good news is I happened to have plenty of duct tape on hand for just such an emergency.  My car, at this point, is about seventy percent duct tape anyway.  Sort of like the Superdome electrical system. In any case I'm not moving it until after Mardi Gras anyway.  So the patch job will have to hold until then. In the meantime, there are parades.

Unlike last weekend, when we were impressed with how strong the crowds were, Wednesday night was pretty subdued. This isn't too surprising given the weather but it is kind of a shame because it means a lot of people missed the best Druids parade I've seen.. probably ever.



Druids is comprised mainly of members of other krewes who treat this parade as kind of a laid back side gig. Often that can result in a forgettable event for spectators.  Sometimes, though, it makes for some clever irreverence.  This was one of those times.

Druids' theme was "Phobias." At first glance this seems similar to Pontchartrain who went with "What are you afraid of?" last weekend.



But the two krewes approached this differently. Where Pontchartrain just played it straight theming its fill-in-the-blank float titles after typical fears, (Flying, Going to the doctor, etc.)  Druids used it as an opportunity to skewer some of the other parading organizations.

Some examples:

A "Muse-a-phobia" referenced the ongoing feud between Muses and Le Krewe D'etat.  The float featured a stiletto heel jammed into the eye of the D'etat logo.  (I didn't get a photo of this. But check Uptown Messenger who did)

There was a "Whine-a-Phobia" reference to an internal controversy within the Bacchus organization.

A Thanatophobia float featured names of several now-defunct krewes.

This "Westbank-a-phobia" float can be read as a comment on the CCC toll controversy, but I also think it was about the Westbank parades who had to move to the St. Charles route this year.




The most interesting contrast with Pontchartrain's parade involved a re-cycled float from Pontchartrain which Druids had revised slightly to fit its own purposes. Here is the float as it appeared in Pontchartrain.  The idea was that some people are afraid of "Your Mother In Law."



Because Druids had squabbled a bit this year with the Krewe of Nyx about the parade order this year, they made one slight alteration to this float.



After Druids.. well, there were many fluids.



Because of the increasingly rainy conditions, I wasn't able to get many photos during Nyx..or really take notice of what was going on with their parade for that matter. I know I caught a pink fortune cookie from Lauren "Fleurty Girl" Thom. Here is a picture of the Pussyfooters approaching along the messy street.



The good news is, if you come prepared with a decent poncho and some rain-proof shoes, you can watch a pretty heavy-throwing parade amongst a light crowd of die-hard and make off with an impressive bounty of loot. And even if you've shown up less than optimally equipped, there are always means to improvise something. I suggest keeping duct tape handy.

Friday Carnival

It's late in the afternoon on a rainy Friday and I've just put a pot of sliced and seasoned shoulder steak into the oven. It's going to braise for an hour or so in a broth with onions and garlic until it, hopefully, comes out as filler for little roast beef sandwiches like these.



I made those mini po boys about a year and a half ago and they seemed like good parade food to me. We're about to find out.

We're also waiting to find out what Endymion is going to do.

The Krewe of Endymion will decide at 9 p.m. tonight whether it will attempt to roll along it's traditional Mid-City route Saturday or will reschedule to Sunday because of threatening weather, according to a local television report.

Thousands of parade-goers battle traffic and crowds each year to see the superkrewe -- known for it's massive floats, celebrity monarchs, and generous riders.

If weather conditions appear too unsafe, the krewe will roll Uptown behind Bacchus on Sunday night.

For all the bellyaching we've done about the obnoxious Endymion crowds... and they are obnoxious... the hatches around here at Yellow Blogging world headquarters are sufficiently battened down so as to survive the assault. I'm not sure all these folks are going to feel the same way, though.

Either way, things are about to get crazy busy around here. But, since I've got few seconds now, allow me to share a few photos from the last few nights.

Druids is usually known for being kind of a rinky-dink production. Their theme is lame. Their floats are recycled from other parades. One egregious example of this being the appearance of one of the Krewe of Pontchartrain's signature floats in the procession.



Those of us who were out last Saturday will have recognized Captain Sam.



But, for what it is, Druids put on one of its more enjoyable parades this year. I especially liked these fire twirlers.



The most unusual thing that happened Thursday night was the appearance of not one but two fire engines parked on the neutral ground right behind us.



It's worth noting that although the fire department brought what had to be the biggest ladders in all of Carnival with them to the parade, they managed to keep them well behind the crowd and so didn't subtract from anyone's enjoyment.



Chaos didn't present my favorite edition of their typically satirical parade. While most of the floats were topical and creative, they also tended to come from a more elitist and conservative point of view. One float lampooning the health care reform story might as well have been a Tea Party demonstration, while the immigration-themed float struck me as downright racist. I did enjoy this float titled "Unlucky Dogs" which featured the score of every Saints loss this past season.



Muses, meanwhile, was beautiful as always.







One quibble would be that I seem to remember them throwing a bit more heavily in years past. But never mind that since we did snag this year's most coveted and infamous throw.



Alright that's enough for now. Time to pull the steak out of the oven and get back outside.

Uh oh

Gonna be one of those massive crowds tomorrow night. Nothing like Lombardi Gras, I'm sure, but still pretty big.

Krewe of Muses parade, pre-party postponed until Friday

Last night we stood out in the surprisingly-not-so-cold to catch the Krewe of Druids with about five or six other people.



As a parade, Druids is pretty much just filler. It exists as a sort of collaboration among members of other Krewes to add another "traditional" looking parade to the calendar. We're glad they do it. We tend to think the parade schedule is too compacted at the end of the week.

[Begin tangent] There are enough parades to hold one or two on each night of the week instead of what we have now. Things are a bit different this year because of the addition of the Saints parade on Tuesday but usually we get zero Monday, zero Tuesday, one Wednesday, three Thursday, and three Friday. Now some people may want to keep a short break on Monday, which is okay, but the rest of these parades could be spread out to better balance out the week. An ideal schedule of the current parades would move Morpheus to Tuesday and Muses to Wednesday. That way we get Monday off, one parade Tuesday, two Wednesday, two Thursday, and two Friday. Plus, extending the schedule opens more opportunities for make-up dates in the case of bad weather.[End of tangent]

Anyway, in parade aesthetics, there's a fine line between traditional and lame and Druids tends toward the latter category. The floats are not very elaborate. The theme is uninspired. Last night's theme was various puns on the word hole. Floats were things like "Man-hole" "Fire-in-the-hole" "Key Hole" etc. None was particularly witty or satirical or really worth looking at. Also they don't throw very much... except for this one guy but he was obviously kind of nuts.

Adding: Oh and now Babylon is also postponing until Sunday which means we'll have five parades that day.