Occasional Monkey-borne Apocalypse Update

The Tulane Primate Research center in Covington is going to be the end of all of us one of these days.

At a hastily-called news conference Saturday (Feb.7), a host of parish, state and federal officials announced that a U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist investigating the bacteria that led to the death of a monkey at the center last year had fallen ill and that tests revealed she had the bacteria in her blood. Investigators say it's too early to determine definitively if the scientist became sick as a result of her work at the center or whether she may have been exposed to Burkholderia pseudomallei as a result of her travels.

The bacteria are rarely transmitted from person to person or animal to person. Melioidosis is primarily a tropical climate disease and is widespread in southeast Asia and northern Australia. The bacteria that cause the disease are found in contaminated soil and water and spread to humans and animals through direct contact with the contaminated material, usually through an open cut.

Officials have said there's no reason to believe that the bacteria have spread beyond the primate center and there are no reports of sick individuals at the research facility, which employs about 300 people.

A hastily called press conference alerts the area that they do not need to worry about this thing they would not otherwise have been aware of.  That is very reassuring. Right after having been very frightening.

Anyway, longtime diseased monkey enthusiasts will note that this is not the first such incident by a long shot.  They do have fun at the Tulane monkey house.

Happy Lombardi Gras

Five years ago, Saturday, the Saints won the Superbowl.  Ever since that day, we've all been living happily ever after.

I was out at parades all day yesterday, otherwise I would have put these up. Anyway here is Super Bowl 44.  Watch it before these Youtubes get taken down.

Episode I: The Floats Awaken

It's the first weekend of big parade time season.  May the Force be with you. Failing that, at least have some money to spend on toys and such.



When we got out to the parade route tonight, Menckles and I managed to convince ourselves that this was the first year in several that it didn't rain on Oshun.  It turns out this isn't true, though.  It's just that we missed much of the Friday parades last year because we went to a show instead. Anyway, this is the first time we've seen Oshun in decent weather in a while, so that's something.



Another thing about that nice weather. This was the largest crowd I can remember seeing on a first night in quite some time.  That might have something to do with the fact that there are two parades on the first Friday now, but still, it looks like it's going to be a big year.  Here is King Shango welcoming the crowd.



Also, Oshun looked terrific... for Oshun, anyway.  There have been years when this was barely a parade at all. Some Oshuns have been little more than a few maid/duke floats pulled by pickups.  This was not the case here. 



The floats looked great. They weren't huge or elaborate but they didn't have to be.  Just straightforward fun. 




On the other hand, they could have used a copy editor.  Oshun's theme this year was supposed to be "Carnivals Around The World." Simple enough concept.  Except they spelled it "Carivals Around The World" on the title float.. which wouldn't have been too much of a big deal if only there weren't several other misspellings in the procession.





But let's not be too critical. It's Friday night. It's parade time again.  Everyone had fun. It really was the best Oshun I've seen in.. maybe ever.



I haven't seen many Cleopatras.  They're a recent transplant from the West Bank so I don't have much to compare them with.  Here is this year's Queen Cleopatra.



One nice thing we can say for them is they bring a lot of bands. I didn't stop to photograph all of them but it was an impressive line up including.. but in no way limited to.. Carver, McMain, Karr, and many others.   They were led by St. Aug.



Cleopatra also had room for a few dance teams, marching clubs, and other random units like these stilt walkers.




So it was a good parade... especially for a first Friday.  Of course, this being a first Friday, it come as little surprise that Cleopatra's floats and theming would be pretty plain. Cleopatra's theme was "Nightmare on the Avenue."  They made a banner for it and everything.




I didn't get out to see Krewe of Boo this year, but I'm pretty sure these are those floats hastily repurposed. Something tells me we'll see these a few more times this year before it's all over with.





The "Killer Clown" here was particularly memorable. We'll be on the look out for that one again.



Beyond that, there isn't much else to report.  I already said the crowd was pretty nice.  There was one dog on our block.  It didn't seem like he wanted to be there very much. Technically you're not supposed to have your dogs out at the parades but I've noticed that rule isn't enforced too strictly on the first weekend.  But that's a good thing because a lot of dogs really love it out there.  This poor baby, though, looked a little nervous.



Anyway, it's nice to be easing back into parade season.  If you stayed in, though, you might have gotten to see Anthony Davis do this.. so really there was no way to lose tonight.

Everybody still hates Bobby

This one is a little more predictable than earlier given the author but here is Tyler Bridges in Politico.

But here’s what Jindal doesn’t say: Louisiana’s budget is hemorrhaging red ink, and it’s getting worse. He inherited a $900 million surplus when he became governor seven years ago, and his administration’s own budget documents now show the state is facing deficits of more than $1 billion for as far as the eye can see. There are no easy solutions today because Jindal has increasingly balanced the budget by resorting to one-time fixes, depleting the state’s reserve funds and taking money meant for other purposes.

Aaaaand Jindal's entire tenure as Governor involved an oil boom plus a "trend bucking" stimulus of federal funded hurricane rebuilding activity.  How the hell do you fuck that up this badly?

Carnival links: Flags and revolutions

Tattered Rex flag Uptown New Orleans 2006

• NOLA.com social scene reporter Sue Strachan has provided us a handy dandy "Guide to Mardi Gras flags" this week. It comes with a photo gallery of selected flags. It's not a complete list, of course. She's asking for submissions.


There are all sorts of Carnival organizations.  Some of them stage parades, some of them, are benevolent associations, some have open memberships, some are exclusive clubs.  Lots and lots of them have their own flags.

Strachan writes that these various flags can be seen together as the city's "10th flag."  


New Orleans and flags have had a long-standing relationship. Nine official flags have flown over the city: Spanish flag of Castile and Léon; white flag of Bourbon France; Bourbon Spain; French Tricolor; U.S. flag beginning with the 15 stars and stripes of 1803; the flag of Independent Louisiana; the Stars and Bars of the Confederate States of America;  the state of Louisiana flag; and the City of New Orleans flag.

During this time of year, we can add another to this list -- the Mardi Gras flag. (A concept I first saw described in an article by Edward Branley on the GoNola site.) Who created the first official flag of the Carnival season? None other than Rex, which also originated the traditional Carnival colors of purple (justice), green (faith) and gold (power). According to a representative, "In Mardi Gras' earliest days, large banners were used to promote Mardi Gras every year. By the late 1870s, Rex had created its own flag." And so a new custom began.

Of this city's 10th flag, there are many incarnations, with many people flying ones they find in local stores or online. Many of the krewes have their own designs, with their own rules on when to fly the them.


But, really, that's not quite it. Or, at least, lumping all the Carnival organizations's flags together into one thing is a little too "One City One Voice" for me.  Carnival is too many things to too many people for it to fall under one multi-flag.  Indeed, there are many flags among them that I'd rather not be associated with at all, thank you very much.

What's great about the epic civic pageant that is Carnival in New Orleans, though, is that every socio-political element owns its status, wears it on its sleeve and parades it around in the streets while everyone drinks and dances.  One very prominent such element happens to be the scions of 19th Century neo-Confederates.

As the oldest and proudest Carnival groups, they're the most likely to display their flags on their homes.  I've been noting them for a while now.  This is from a post from 2006 where I shared some flag pics.



Every year during Carnival the former kings (or their descendants) fly these flags at their homes. The bottom right of each flag denotes the year in which this particular king reigned. This flag belongs to Rex from 1983. (It hasn't been very well maintained)

That's the flag at the top of this post, BTW.  Anyway.. sorry to go on quoting myself but rather than rewrite the same point...


The Old Line Krewes are tied to a history of racial hatred and upper class arrogance that goes far beyond the 1991 anti-discrimination controversy. (A good book to start with here is James Gill's Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans ) But Carnival doesn't only belong to the rich. 

A goodly part of it does belong to the juxtaposition of rich and poor, though.  More on that in a bit.  In any case, I'm grateful to the neo-Confederates for indicating the locations of their homes with these flags. They help Steve Scalise know where not to accidentally give a speech.  Here are some of those flags.

Proteus flag prominently displayed above humble cottage



Here is the Downman mansion on St. Charles Avenue at Third Street.  These flags indicate two former Rex and a Comus in the family. (I think the Comus flag technically indicates a Queen of Comus since the identity of Comus himself is never made public.. just like the Grand Wizzard unless he decides to run for Governor.)

Rex stops here on Mardi Gras morning for a toast.  It's on the uptown bound side of St. Charles so the whole parade has to cross the street in order to accomplish this.  It always comes as a neat little surprise to the folks camped on the neutral ground there when they have to turn around.

This is a Momus flag.



Besides Comus, they are the only Old Line krewe to abandon parading rather than comply with the anti-discrimination ordinance.  Oh but they still roll anyway.  Their floats and members parade as part of the Knights of Chaos.  Privilege has its privileges.



• Here's a look at some of this year's parade food.  There's a map there as well as blurbs about each outlet by Todd Price.  More and more of the new wave of food trucks are entering the selection lottery now and so more of them appear alongside the regular carnie fare.


Of course there are always a few random vendors who show up regardless of license. This sign is from one such truck.






• Everyone is putting out their Carnival preview stuff.  Good news, mostly.


This is from Arthur Hardy writing in The Advocate. 


The Krewe of Isis, a mainstay in Jefferson Parish for more than 40 years, has no plans to change its name in response to current events in the Middle East.

Here is a welcome message from Boh Brothers.



Happy Fucking Carnival: pic.twitter.com/Ka9yf4t0We
— 504 Not Found (@Adrastosno) February 6, 2015







• Finally, here is a PDF of this month's Antigravity Magazine.  On page 18 begins a must-read article by Jules Bentley about social changes expressed through carnival. 


If you're familiar with Bentley, you'll recognize his usual weaknesses.  Always a perceptive, witty writer,  Jules sometimes throws in unnecessary straw men in order to set up his little one-liners. He just has to throw in the word "millenials" at one point. But one can be a plumb-ignorant egotist with no sense of history or politics at any age.  There's also a passage where he describes the Chewbacchus parade as a much more stereotypical herd of nerds than it is in real life. When you read Bentley, you have to shrug that stuff off a little in order to stay focused on his point, and he does have one.  But that's more work than a lot of readers are willing to do so his better points often get lost.

The heart of this article is a parallel he draws between the arrival of Comus in the 19th Century and the arrival of the latest wave of DIY organizations, most significantly the Sci-Fi themed Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus.  Bently observes in each case a kind of assertion of status laid out by a new class of wealthy arrival to the city.

This week's Gambit inaccurately stated that "Carnival has been celebrated in New Orleans since 1856.." Sounds like they've been listening to the Mayor of Mobile too much. 1856 was only the beginning of Comus.  There was Carnival in New Orleans before that.  Like today's Carnival, it revealed glaring social inequalities.


Mardi Gras as it existed through the first half of the 1800s was unruly, a day of social levelling in which the poor controlled the streets. James Gill, in his tremendous and tremendously enjoyable book, Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans , reminds us that for our city’s only partially obsolete hereditary ruling classes, “[the holiday’s] real significance lay in the annual reaffirmation of social eminence over merit.” Their Mardi Gras was grand— private balls and parties, removed from the hoi polloi. 

While the aristocrats were safely ensconced inside, the world outside became a more raucous (and threatening) scene.


In her terrific, deep-diving 2008 FSU PhD thesis, “Setting the Stage: Dance and Gender in Old-Line New Orleans Carnival Balls, 1870-1920,” Jennifer Atkins also aggregates a great deal of the better writing on Carnival’s class- conflict aspects, including Mikhail Bakhtin’s assertion that the collective voices of the oppressed raised during Carnival render the streets, even if temporarily, “a democratized space.” “In the process of asserting status and power,” Atkins writes, “protests from disenfranchised groups, though performed in the surrealistic carnival world, can be very real threats to society."   

Comus was, for its day, what today's tech industry might call an act of disruption. It was an end run around regulation for the betterment of a hegemonic class of elites.


If Carnival in the streets was to continue, its power must be put back in the hands of the already powerful. There was talk among the Creole aristocracy of cancelling Mardi Gras, but a group of Americans, showing the entrepreneurial spirit typical of their kind, came up with a better idea. These Americans—not Creoles, not New Orleanians or even Louisianians— created the first organized Mardi Gras parade with floats. Drawing from the work of English poet Milton, the first Comus parade had two floats. One featured Comus, an ancient god of festivity whom Milton cast as a deceiving necromancer, and the other featured the Devil. They rolled in open and unpunished defiance of the bans on masking and music-making. 

Comus took on some of the forms of popular Carnival... the outdoor music and masking.. formalized them, and in the process, sanitized them to a degree.

But they didn't obliterate it entirely.  The notion of Carnival as order overturned still persists to this day.  It may, in fact, be even more powerful than ever.

Last year, in a Lens op-ed CW Cannon argued that we may now be living in the "golden age" of Carnival specifically because of the more democratic and inclusive nature of what might otherwise be perceived as chaos.


Krewe du Vieux is quite conscious of itself not just as an insurrection, but also as a resurrection, an effort to recover from the anti-carnivalesque aspects of the 19^th century Uptown Carnival model. Their mission statement expresses this ambition explicitly: “We believe in exposing the world to the true nature of Mardi Gras — and in exposing ourselves to the world.” Since Katrina, Krewe du Vieux has been joined by several other downtown parading clubs — ‘ti Rex, Chewbacchus, Red Beans — each of which follows  the Krewe du Vieux model far more faithfully than the Uptown one, especially by keeping dues affordable.

But the ultimate expression of the carnivalesque instinct in our time is what happens downtown on Fat Tuesday itself. Here the line between spectator and performer is almost totally erased as thousands — whether costumed, masked or merely bystanders — converge in the streets in a utopian vision of mass civic participation. And on this day — if only for a day — we also witness New Orleans’ idealized sense of itself come down to earth to shape the city’s social reality.

But Bentley adds a twist to this that Cannon doesn't.  Bentley recognizes, in Chewbacchus, a deliberate.. almost commercialized.. turn away from the notion of social upheaval. 


Cybernetic Carnival seeks to appropriate e.g. the irreverence of Krewe du Vieux, reducing that Krewe’s incisive political and social satire to a directionless but consumer-attractive pose of “subversiveness.” Instead of engaging current events or the foibles of the powerful, Chewbacchus participants engage in a post-modern remixing of consumer culture: a Hollywood-film alien mixed with a burlesque dancer mixed with a robot from a Japanese cartoon.

 Just as Comus sanitized the "threatening" class conflict of 19th Century Carnival, so too does the emergence of Chewbacchus seek to blunt the satirical bent of modern Carnival.  So goes, Bentley's thesis anyway.  It's not as black and white as all of that in reality.

For one thing, this town is too small for us to identify rigid divisions between newcomers and natives or between hyper-insular social groups of any sort.  There's no actual "neutral ground" in the classic sense.  Hell, KDV even crossed Canal Street this year.  The truth is, everybody knows everybody.  And, unless you really are Comus, you probably move within several of the artificially conceived circles that Jules uses to illustrate his points. But that doesn't mean there isn't at least a bit of truth in them.

This week NOLA.com, home of the perpetual "Entrepreneur Week" ran a poll suggesting that Krewe Du Vieux's style of subversive satire might be... you know.. sooo Old New Orleans.. or something.  Chewbacchus may not actually be out to sanitize Carnival, but it looks as though someone at least hopes they are.

Anyway there are parades tonight. You may have heard about this. Probably not too much satire or gentrification involved in any those so relax and enjoy.

Everybody hates Bobby

Here is a blog post about what a miserable failure Bobby Jindal has been as governor.  It appears on The American Conservative's website.

Eddie Compass thinks Brian Willams's Katrina stories were bullshit

Eddie Compass and Ray Nagin weren't the only people making up bullshit stories about the chaos in New Orleans after Katrina. Turns out Brian Williams was doing it as well.  It's good to know that in times of crisis you can rely on the Mayor, the Chief of Police and the national media to remain level-headed.

There were definitely helicopters shot down in Iraq.  Not Brian Williams's helicopter, though.  There were also definitely bodies floating in the water in New Orleans.  Brian Williams probably didn't see any.

In a 2006 interview with former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, Williams said he witnessed a body floating in the French Quarter area of the city. "When you look out of your hotel window in the French Quarter and watch a man float by face down, when you see bodies that you last saw in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, and swore to yourself that you would never see in your country," Williams told Eisner, who suggested in the interview that Williams emerged from former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw's shadow with his Katrina coverage.

Citing former city health director Brobson Lutz, the Advocate reported that the French Quarter was largely dry. "We were never wet. It was never wet," Lutz told the Advocate.

Now that we have Dr. Lutz and Sean Payton's combined record of where "it used to be wet," we can finally start mapping that.  Keep in mind, though, that this map would differ from any record of where the floodwaters actually were. It turns out that, even though Dr. Lutz was in the quarter himself at the time, he's not most reliable source on this. There really was some water near Williams's hotel.  Not a tremendous amount, but definitely some. 

Still, it's unlikely there were bodies floating in that few feet of water. At least not within Williams's view.  Had there been, Lutz would have paid them to wait in line at Galatoire's anyway.

Uber but for Galatoires

Robert Reich: 

Defenders of on-demand work emphasize its flexibility. Workers can put in whatever time they want, work around their schedules, fill in the downtime in their calendars.

“People are monetizing their own downtime,” Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s business school, told the New York Times.

But this argument confuses “downtime” with the time people normally reserve for the rest of their lives.
There are still only twenty-four hours in a day. When “downtime” is turned into work time, and that work time is unpredictable and low-paid, what happens to personal relationships? Family? One’s own health?

Other proponents of on-demand work point to studies, such as one recently commissioned by Uber, showing Uber’s on-demand workers to be “happy.”

But how many of them would be happier with a good-paying job offering regular hours?

If you want to see a picture of what the so-called sharing economy is really all about, look no further than the Galatoire's lunch line.

This is definitely not the first time the topic of homeless (or college) placeholders has come up in relation to Galatoire's Friday lunch, especially during the insanely-packed Mardi Gras season. Local critics including Ian McNulty have reported on the subject over the years. A Tiger Droppings forum once mentioned somebody who actually organized the homeless people to wait in line, and even tourists on Chowhound have brought up the subject before heading to New Orleans. For what it's worth, waiting in line is a commandment of New Orleans culture, and hiring a "day laborer" is not the standard for most patrons of Galatoire's... right, guys? Erm, like, right, guys? Biaggio DiGiavanni, the exec. director of Osanam Inn homeless shelter ("five minutes away from Galatoire's"), tells the Daily Beast otherwise:

It's competitive and the homeless people are aware of this line and they think if they can make a couple quick bucks they will hang around Galatoire's. Now more people are trying to get those spots.

But naturally this wouldn't be a truly New Orleans experience without this same homeless shelter director turning right around and approving the situation:

"Here's a homeless person and a chance to pick up a whole bunch of money just for standing around... It gives them something to do."

Right.

That's Eater commenting on a Daily Beast article just to be clear.  Maybe since the Galatoire's cattle call is how it's always been done, there's a tendency to ridicule outside media for affecting shock at it.  The Eater reporter seems to play to that sentiment a little anyway.

But whatever you think of the Galatoire's "tradition" it's hardly comforting to think that it's becoming a dominant model in the American labor market thanks to companies like Uber, Taskrabbit, et al.

I noticed this app the other day. Appears to be locally based. Still something tells be Galatoires patrons might want one specific to them.  What would we call it?  Stand-In?  Fuuder? Brunch-Me?

Where do you ultimately want to be?

The former mayor who tried to get Tom Benson to move the Saints to San Antonio will now arbitrate the Benson family feud.

Hardberger is a former chief justice of the Texas 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. Rickhoff mentioned Hardberger's time in office as mayor helping Gulf Coast residents after Hurricane Katrina. Hardberger served two terms as mayor from 2005 through 2009. After the storm, Hardberger said his city and the Saints team conducted talks over moving the team to San Antonio.

Some of Hardberger's famous remarks from 2005 while his talks with Benson were ongoing.

“The Saints are not working against this,” Hardberger said. “Benson has said on numerous occasions he wants to be in San Antonio. The players want to be here the coaches want to be here. Now, (Benson) is a businessman. But I believe him when he says he ultimately wants the team to be here and stay here.

I wonder if Hardberger still believes Benson, ultimately wants the team to be in San Antonio.  Because that might be relevant to his involvement now.

Double dip theft

Bar and restaurant managers already get away with a kind of theft via their exemption from federal minimum wage laws.

So when it turns out that they're also stealing tips on top of that, well...

Two bartenders who filed a lawsuit claiming that Pat O'Brien's managers stole from the tip jar and withheld overtime pay scored a victory Wednesday (Feb. 4) when a federal judge gave their case collective action status. The ruling allows other former and current bartenders to join the lawsuit against the French Quarter bar.

Tourism Matters, though, so I guess we shouldn't poke it too hard. 

Un-vanished

BP's aggressive use of dispersants on the Macando spill did everything it was supposed to do. It dispersed the oil from the surface of the Gulf and caused it to sink to the ocean floor.  This allowed BP (and a large volume of complicit media outlets) to set off on a misleading, "Where's all the oil?" campaign.

The confusion all of this managed to create over the amount of oil spilled into the Gulf eventually paid off last month when Judge Barbier issued a lazy, let's all just meet in the middle ruling on the matter effectively saving BP as much as $8 billion in the process.

Anyway, they're finding the oil now.

Then there’s this possibility: Though the oil has apparently separated from the water itself, it’s now burrowed so deep that it will take substantially longer to decompose. “There’s less oxygen down there,” Chanton told Live Science. “It might be there for a long period of time, a little reservoir of contamination.” He added in a statement: “Fish will likely ingest contaminants because worms ingest the sediment, and fish eat the worms. It’s a conduit for contamination into the food web.”

Worth it, though, right?

Coca-Cola proves the real money really is in PR

Here's a Pew report from last year about the tilt in the media business away from journalism and toward PR.

The salary gap between public relations specialists and news reporters has widened over the past decade – to almost $20,000 a year, according to 2013 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data analyzed by the Pew Research Center. At the same time, the public relations field has expanded to a degree that these specialists now outnumber reporters by nearly 5 to 1 (BLS data include part-time and full-time employees, but not self-employed.)

In 2013, according to BLS data, public relations specialists earned a median annual income of $54,940 compared with $35,600 for reporters. In other words, journalists on average earn just 65% of what those in public relations earn. That is a greater income gap than in 2004 when journalists were paid 71 cents of every dollar earned by those in public relations ($43,830 versus $31,320).

Most of that widening has come from salary growth in the public relations industry during a time when salary increases in the journalism field did not even keep up with inflation.

Only chumps go into news.  The real money is in telling pretty lies.  Of course some of these numbers may be a statistical anomaly.  For example, the low-wage writers who produce NOLA.com content still aren't technically counted as PR professionals for some reason. 

It doesn't help, also, that more and more journalism jobs are going to robots who work for free.

You wouldn't necessarily know it at first blush. Sure, maybe reading it in the context of this story it's apparent, but otherwise it feels like a pretty standard, if a tad dry, AP news item. The obvious tell doesn't come until the end of an article: "This story was generated by Automated Insights." According to AI's public relations manager James Kotecki, the Wordsmith platform generates millions of articles per week; other partners include Allstate, Comcast, and Yahoo, whose fantasy football reports are automated. Kotecki estimates the company's system can produce 2,000 articles per second if need be.

But there are some things even those robots can't do.  For instance, they still can't quite replicate the phony smarm necessary to run a corporate social media ad campaign. 

For the campaign, which was called “Make it Happy” and introduced in an ad spot during the Super Bowl, Coke invited people to reply to negative tweets with the hashtag “#MakeItHappy”.

The idea was that an automatic algorithm would then convert the tweets, using an encoding system called ASCII, into pictures of happy things – such as an adorable mouse, a palm tree wearing sunglasses or a chicken drumstick wearing a cowboy hat.

In a press release, Coca-Cola said its aim was to “tackle the pervasive negativity polluting social media feeds and comment threads across the internet”.

But Gawker, noticing that one response had the “14 words” white nationalist slogan re-published in the shape of a dog, had other ideas.

The media company’s editorial labs director, Adam Pash, created a Twitter bot, @MeinCoke, and set it up to tweet lines from Mein Kampf and then link to them with the #MakeItHappy tag – triggering Coca-Cola’s own Twitter bot to turn them into cutesy pictures.

Whoops! Don't you just hate when your smarmbot accidentally goes #MakeitHitler all over your shitty commercial. But then if you're gonna "tackle the pervasive negativity polluting social media"  maybe a cynical, disingenuous ad campaign set up to run on autopilot isn't the best way to go about that. 

For that kind of work you still need to shell out the big bucks. Which is why the real money for humans is in PR.... although probably not ideal for the humans with souls or consciences or whatever. They're less good at saying this with a straight face. 

By Wednesday, the campaign had been suspended entirely. In a statement to AdWeek, a spokesperson for Coca-Cola said: “The #MakeItHappy message is simple: the internet is what we make it, and we hoped to inspire people to make it a more positive place. It’s unfortunate that Gawker is trying to turn this campaign into something that it isn’t.”

The statement concluded: “Building a bot that attempts to spread hate through #MakeItHappy is a perfect example of the pervasive online negativity Coca-Cola wanted to address with this campaign.”

All they wanted to do was teach the world to sing... or something like that.  When will you humans learn it's not polite to point out that phony smarmbots are, in fact, phony smarmbots? How "negative!"

#Gentrifytoday

I like it when they just come out and tell you what they're all about.

In a series of Facebook posts obtained by ThinkProgress, the senior adviser for policy and communications to Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) posted racial comments and endorsed gentrification of his neighborhood.

Benjamin Cole, a former Baptist pastor and energy industry spokesman, posted a series of videos and comments on October 13, 2013 mocking two African Americans outside his DC apartment. In the first, he compared them to animals escaping from the National Zoo engaged in “mating rituals.” That message included a video of a woman, shouting and seemingly engaged in an argument with someone not visible as she walked. In each of his posts, he used the hashtag “#gentrifytoday.”

This is why the system is broken

Guy who created and maintains critical email encryption software is forced to conclude, "I'm too idealistic." 

Like many people who build security software, Koch believes that offering the underlying software code for free is the best way to demonstrate that there are no hidden backdoors in it giving access to spy agencies or others. However, this means that many important computer security tools are built and maintained by volunteers.

Now, more than a year after Snowden's revelations, Koch is still struggling to raise enough money to pay himself and to fulfill his dream of hiring a full-time programmer. He says he's made about $25,000 per year since 2001 — a fraction of what he could earn in private industry. In December, he launched a fundraising campaign that has garnered about $43,000 to date — far short of his goal of $137,000 — which would allow him to pay himself a decent salary and hire a full-time developer.

Guess he didn't entrepreneur hard enough.

New stop on the Traveling Governors Exhibition

Shreveport. February 24. They'll be talking to school board members so don't expect a whole lot of highbrow intellectual talk.

Working the legacy refs

Hey, big thanks to the Obama Administration for finally taking the correct stance on Net Neutrality .  Of course, by the time the multiple court challenges are about halfway done, the next administration will be able to reverse all of this.  But, yeah, this looks nice for now. And that's really all that matters, right?

The news-ish business

Non-profit news organizations, like The Lens, are really no different from commercial outlets. They don't depend on advertising (for the most part) but they do rely on their ability to pull in grants and to cultivate relationships with large donors.

They also accept smaller donations, of course.  I try to drop whatever I can in their tip jar whenever I can afford to.  But that really isn't the kind of support they need in order to sustain operations. In other words, "readers like you" are insignificant. What really matters is keeping the big benefactors happy.

What they're finding, though, is that keeping those people happy also means keeping them from looking bad in the news.  And that's not easy to do since most of the new worth writing about in this town largely involves people with lots of money doing bad things.  So maybe you see the problem.

Beatty says ceding to funders by not covering particular stories “would be a dereliction of duty on our part.

“We all know when we’re doing a story that’s going to hurt us,” Beatty says, adding that covering those stories nonetheless is tantamount to maintaining journalistic integrity.

Like a number of nonprofit news outlets around the country, The Lens is in the process of discovering whether that commitment to what Beatty calls “the kind of reporting that upsets people by design” will ultimately garner support or be its ruin, media watchers say.

Simply put, if what you're writing isn't pissing off powerful people, then what you're writing really isn't news.  But if your "news" operation depends on maintaining friendships with those same people, then, if you want to stay in business, eventually you learn to produce a news-ish product instead.  Otherwise, you're pretty much doomed. As a reader, it's possible to stay informed via the news-ish papers, but it's nicer when the bullshit filter has already been applied a few times before you get to it. 

Anyway, if you can help The Lens out, please do so. Their next "Breakfast with the Newsmakers" event features Councilwoman Latoya Cantrell. Seems like a good excuse to get out and support them.    

Bike Wars update

Episode 1: Despite the objections of its own traffic engineer, the city of New Orleans installed a bike lane on Baronne Street.  This was allowed in order to make the nice things for rich people they're building on top of some CBD parking lots seem like a hipper neighborhood for the rich people who will use the nice things.

Episode 2: Despite the presence of a bike lane on Basin Street, valets at the Saenger theater have been parking cars there anyway.  I hope the city puts a stop to that.  But since, in this case, keeping the bike lane clear might actually impede the rich people from enjoying a nice thing, I wouldn't hold my breath.

In any case, here's the quote of the day.

There's more to becoming a bicycle-friendly city than striping in bike lanes, Duckworth said. "City Hall has an obligation to protect these essential taxpayer investments by fining scofflaws who obstruct bike lanes. Otherwise we will see more unnecessary cyclist deaths," Duckworth said.

I don't know enforcement is really what's at issue.. at least not in the sense that THE CITY NEEDS TO FINE MORE PEOPLE, as that quote suggests.  But rather, the problem is the city is for whatever keeps the important people happy. 

In any case it's very true that the city has decided being "bike-friendly" is something you measure in miles of bike lane.. regardless of whether or not the lanes are making things better or worse. 

Oil royalty wayback

Bob Marshall explains what Obama's proposal to renege on Louisiana's promised share of offshore drilling royalties means for the future of coastal restoration projects.

Louisiana had always received the same share of offshore royalties as inland states, even though tens of thousands of miles of pipelines run from those rigs through its coast. Research shows canals and pipelines related to those activities are responsible for at least 36 percent of the 1,880 square miles of coastal wetlands the state has lost in the past 70 years.

The 2007 bill, passed in the wake of the devastation caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, changed that system by dedicating 37.5 percent of all royalties from specific areas of the Gulf to the four coastal states with energy development – Louisiana, Mississippi Alabama and Texas.

Louisiana has taken in less $10 million total across the seven years since the bill passed, but that amount is expected to increase dramatically in 2017 because vast new areas of the Gulf will be included. The state is estimating annual income of as much as $178 million a year, depending on the rate of pumping and the price of leases and oil. Its estimated income could jump to as much as $600 million annually after 2055 when a cap on the states’ share is lifted.

In other words, we really haven't even begun to realize the benefits of this change and now they're proposing to take it away from us. 

Not sure if this is any consolation to anyone but it's worth remembering this was already a pretty shitty deal in the first place. And that many folks said so at the time.

See also here.

More recently, Congressman Garret Graves, during his time as Jindal's CPRA head, vehemently opposed raising additional revenue via the controversial SLFPA-E lawsuit. Graves said he preferred "pushing legislation that would bring Louisiana a substantial share of offshore drilling royalties currently going into the federal treasury." 

So, nice to see that's going well.

Cap hell is self-correcting

The Saints are twenty something million dollars over the cap right now. But they will automatically become not over the cap in a few days without even having to do anything.  But they'll still be close to the cap. Which is supposed to be a problem except that it totally wasn't a problem last year.

Anyway here it is. You figure it out.

Death panelists

For as much time as the spent warning America about the notrorious Obamacare "Death Panels" which didn't exist, Republicans sure do think a lot about the ways they'd like to kill you off.  Or, I guess they'd put it, allowing you the freedom to die.

I think we probably need to consider the alarming idea that this is going to be the right’s overall approach to dealing with health care. They have no real ideas for how to deliver affordable health care to every citizen and they have no methods for controlling the spiraling costs of the former system. In order to maintain their “free-market” health care philosophy they are going to have to make it clear that you must get rich if you expect to live through catastrophic illness or accidents. If you are sick, it’s up to you to figure out how to pay for your care and shelter. That’s the only solution available to them.

As a libertarian theorist posited in the Washington Post last week,”people could die and that’s ok”:

[It] is an acceptable price to pay for certain goals — including more cash for other programs, such as those that help the poor; less government coercion and more individual liberty; more health-care choice for consumers, allowing them to find plans that better fit their needs; more money for taxpayers to spend themselves; and less federal health-care spending.

Unsurprisingly, many Republicans are backing your child's basic freedom to die of measles... or whatever you get from employees with unwashed hands.

A nice exception.. at least to the vaccination thing.. appears to be Bobby Jindal.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) on Tuesday said Louisiana requires all school children to be vaccinated, and for good reason.

"I have no reservations about whether or not it is a good idea and desirable for all children to be vaccinated. There is a lot of fear-mongering out there on this," he said in a statement. "I think it is irresponsible for leaders to undermine the public's confidence in vaccinations that have been tested and proven to protect public health. Science supports them and they keep our children safe from potentially deadly but preventable diseases."

On the other hand, Jindal's statement emphasizes personal choice.

.@ChrisChristie got in LOTS of trouble over his vaccination comments, @BobbyJindal takes a different approach. pic.twitter.com/IijTVPKdGX
— Julia O'Donoghue (@JSODonoghue) February 3, 2015

He would personally not send his kids to a no-vax school. OK but is it possible for other Louisiana parents to do that?  For instance, Jindal says "just about every private school" requires vaccinations.  If this means that some do not, are they still eligible to participate in Jindal's voucher program? 

I wonder who owns that moon

Congrats. We're sending our disgusting commercial capitalism off into space now.

(Reuters) - The United States government has taken a new, though preliminary, step to encourage commercial development of the moon.

According to documents obtained by Reuters, U.S. companies can stake claims to lunar territory through an existing licensing process for space launches.

The Federal Aviation Administration, in a previously undisclosed late-December letter to Bigelow Aerospace, said the agency intends to “leverage the FAA’s existing launch licensing authority to encourage private sector investments in space systems by ensuring that commercial activities can be conducted on a non-interference basis.”

In other words, experts said, Bigelow could set up one of its proposed inflatable habitats on the moon, and expect to have exclusive rights to that territory - as well as related areas that might be tapped for mining, exploration and other activities.

Here's a Kids In The Hall sketch that sorta kinda predicted this day.

Having a very long think

Russel Honore is not running for Governor.  But as long as people keep asking, he'll keep thinking about it.

Asked if he has plans to run for political office, Honoré said he is thinking about it. He also said that while many of the potential candidates for governor have had disparaging things to say about environmental regulators, he hasn’t heard any of them talking about environmental concerns.

“I heard one of the candidates say he’s going to put his boot on the neck of EPA,” Honoré said.

Pretty sure nothing will come of that.  But I still wonder why John Georges showed up to introduce him at Rising Tide two years ago.  

Left to the waves

Almost a decade's worth of hard work post-Katrina trying to get Louisiana its fair share of offshore oil revenues is about to be pissed away.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama is proposing that off-shore revenue sharing -- slated to begin in 2017 -- be scrapped with a plan that would provide "broad natural resource, watershed and conservation benefits for the entire nation." The proposal is part of the president's $4 trillion budget, unveiled Monday (Feburary 2).

The revenue sharing, part of 2006 energy legislation co-sponsored by Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., was expected to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue annually for Louisiana for coastal restoration.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Baton Rouge, who defeated Landrieu in the 2014 Louisiana Senate race, immediately promised a fight on the two Senate committees with jurisdiction over the revenue sharing legislation -- Appropriations and Energy. Last year, Landrieu chaired the Energy Committee.

"I will do everything in my power to use my seats on these committees to not only block the President's raid on oil and gas revenues, but fight to increase Louisiana's share of offshore revenue," Cassidy said. "Funding for coastal restoration must remain a promise to Louisiana and other Gulf Coast states."

Ha ha, freshman Senator Bill Cassidy will do everything in his power to help.  Great. 

Mary Landrieu made oil revenue sharing a top priority after Hurricane Katrina. Mary, like most Louisianians Republican and Democrat alike,  reasoned that, since Louisiana has borne the nearly immeasurable costs of an eroding coastline and increasingly catastrophic flooding in order to provide "the entire nation" the benefit of extracting the state's fossil fuels, we ought to be reimbursed for our trouble.  At least a little bit.  It's a big mess, all of this, and it will cost us at least $50 billion just to keep it in check.

For a while, we even got the rest of the country to agree with us on that small point.  Until 2015 when, I guess, Katrina is "over" so, hey, good luck!   I'd say maybe we should sue somebody but Governor Jindal and Congressman Graves have already told us that's a bad idea.

Penalizing low wage workers

The most right wing city government in our lifetime has already obliterated the traditional civil service wall between politics and service delivery.  Now they are moving on employee pensions.  Like any right wing outfit, they'll tell you they're operating out of a sense of fiscal responsibility, but really they are about punishing people for not being wealthy enough. 

The actuary said Social Security integration could be appropriate, but it wouldn't save the city much money and it would penalize low-wage workers.

The city, like any private employer, pays for half of a worker's Social Security costs, so it's not unreasonable for the city to deduct those contributions from an employee's pension package, the actuary said, but doing so would represent a "radical change" in the plan's structure. It might not be legal to apply it to current employees, he said.

The actuary also noted that Social Security's benefits are proportionately more generous at the low end of the wage scale, so the workers who benefit most from the current system are those at the bottom rung of the employment ladder. If pension benefits were reduced as a function of Social Security payments, as Head's scenario would do, low-paid workers would take the biggest hit.

The move also would provide relatively little budget relief, according to his analysis. The most aggressive of Head's scenarios would apply Social Security integration to all employees with less than 15 years service. That would improve the fund balance by .3 percent and save the city $1.5 million in 2014, and more over time as the share of employees covered by the new plan increased.

Not sure if Stacy Head actually cares about saving the city money as much as she cares about penalizing low wage workers so you can see why she likes this option.

Traffic report

Entergy truck carjacked.

NEW ORLEANS, LA (WVUE) -A worker in an Entergy truck was carjacked at gunpoint Tuesday, and moments later a woman was held up by men in same truck.

At about 1 p.m., the worker was approached by two black males in the 4400 block of Duplessis Street. The men produced a handgun, robbed the victim of his cash and stole the Entergy truck.

Moments later, a woman was robbed of her purse in the 1900 block of Wickfield. The suspects fled the scene in the truck, which was found unoccupied at Pratt and Mirabeau.

If you're gonna ride around New Orleans robbing people, an Entergy truck is probably the best vehicle to use for that.

Mayor's car stolen.

NEW ORLEANS - Mayor Mitch Landrieu's ongoing battle against the city's persistent crime problem hit home over the weekend when one of his family's cars was stolen and later recovered, according to Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office.

A Jefferson Parish deputy recovered the 2009 Jeep Grand Cherokee Saturday evening at about 7:30 p.m., about seven hours after it was reported stolen. The deputy was driving through the city when he received an alert on an anti-theft vehicle tracking device, according to a JPSO press release.

Mitch's new TV ad will demand that Sidney Torres present his plan for dealing with the crime problem.

Tom Benson's car runs over somebody. 

A car carrying New Orleans Saints and Pelicans owner Tom Benson was involved in a traffic incident that injured a security guard outside the Smoothie King Center after a Pelicans game, New Orleans police spokesman Tyler Gamble said Saturday. The security guard "suffered a foot injury and was transported to a hospital," Gamble said.

The mishap occurred Friday about 9:30 p.m. in a VIP parking lot near the arena. Benson's driver, Blake Romig, and the security guard gave conflicting statements of what happened, Gamble said. No citations were issued.

It's worth mentioning that all Rita did was verbally abuse and fire the employees.  Don't think she ran any of them over. 

Couldn't help but notice a lot of towing going on during KDV on Saturday.



If this happened to you, you might check that 504NotFound app for assistance.  But sit tight, dawlin.

Son of sinkhole

Yes, Virginia!



Just in time for Carnival season, too.  According to the 504 Not Found pothole app,  the thing to do with theses is stuff them with beads anyway.  Lord knows, people have tried everything else over the years.

In any case, you have to admire the precise placement of that Doritos bag.  If the pothole is big enough, the debris will find its way in.

Blue Steel Crucifix

Sal Perricone has published a heavily self-referential crime novel. The title of this novel sounds like it could also be a Night Ranger cover band. 

Sal Perricone, the former federal prosecutor whose outing as a prolific and pseudonymous online commenter on federal cases set in motion the eventual ouster of his boss, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten, has taken up the pen again, this time as a novelist.

Perricone will be discussing and signing his new book, “Blue Steel Crucifix,” at the Garden District Book Shop at 3 p.m. March 22.

No, this is not some sort of Krewe Du Vieux inspired joke. This is real life.

A summary indicates that the protagonist is a “young Native American law student” named Wilson Three Eagles who is recruited by the FBI. Perricone is a former New Orleans police officer who attended law school at night and then worked for the FBI before becoming a federal prosecutor.

The storyline also ties together organized crime, a corrupt ex-governor and some nasty office politics as the young protagonist finds himself crosswise with some of his new colleagues as well as the mob and the “politically corrupt.”

The book, published by Wynnpix Productions, retails for $14.99. A sequel apparently is in the works.

Fred Heebe has already opened an anoymous Amazon account so that he can write reviews. 

Carnival is interactive

KDV title float 2014

You're supposed to participate.  It's okay, though, it's not like a whole lot is required of you.  You're participating pretty much by just being there.  Just like college. Of course, you'll get a lot more out of the experience if you do the reading first.

Which is why you should have picked up a Monde de Merde somewhere by now. If you haven't, here is a link to the e-book edition.

Highlights:

 Sub-krewe of Underwear is doing a gentrification theme. Their section reports from "Uberville."

Our biggest project is bulldozing that tacky housing development near the French Quarter and erecting the Uberville Condom-miniums,” announced lacily-clad spokeswomanIma Hoh, formerly of the Hoh BrothersErection Company, noted for its insertion of the sprawling, suburban-style medical center into the heart of the city. “What’s the value of historic buildings, centuries-old cemeteries and magnificent oak trees compared to giant, boxy towers?”

In addition to ridiculously overpriced condos and apartments, the Uberville site will include many of the outlet stores that hipsters patronize so slavishly. A partial list includes the Potty Barn, Trader Ho’s, UnBalanced Shoe Outlet, Whorestrom’s, Roach, Ickya, JScrewed, Tommy Yomama, Zeropostale, and Uberzombie & Bitch.

“Why would anyone want to shop at a unique, locally-owned business with distinctive and even hand-made products when you can make your purchases at monolithic, sterile chain stores?” sniffed Ms. Hoh. “What makes us hipsters different is that we all look exactly, like, the same.

 Mama Roux is bringing us GMOs.

The Mama Roux Center for Genetic Experiments, with its substantial enDowment, has long been a player in the world of experimental mutations. M o n s a n t e a u x a n d h i s t e a m o f biogeneticists first came to public attention with their popular Glow- Pets, genetically modifi ed glow-in- the-dark cats, dogs and hamsters which perform double duty as both loveable house pets and energy-efficient night lights.

The Center then received the Times- Pick-a-loon Good Loving Cup for  their pioneering development of Moskitokazes, mosquitoes genetically programmed to dive-bomb abandoned canoes in Bayou St. John instead of biting humans. World-wide fame and fortune, however, did not arrive until the Center developed SmartMeat, a talking beef tenderloin which actually tells the cook how long to bake it, and the Frogmato, a frog-tomato combination which jumps onto a salad plate and turns itself into a bruschetta.

The paper officially endorses Bobby Jindal for President because, "Anything that will get him as far away from Louisiana as possible, we’re in  favor of."

And then there's SPANK. Last year they brought us the Guide to Dizneylandrieu. Hard to top, right?  Well they're trying.  This is 504NotFound.com It's a mobile web site designed to serve as a kind of one stop shop to all the utilities and public services that don't quite work in New Orleans.  It has music, maps, amusing sound effects, and what appears to be an actual GPS enabled scavenger hunt game. Really well done.

Oh almost forgot.  CRAPS is riffing on certain episodes of "student-teacher relations" in the news lately. I am given to understand that this Twitter feed has something to do with that. 

Anyway, "sit tight, dawlin'" Parade season is here.

Coming soon.. a new Blue Dot, perhaps?

Been in the works for a while now but NOPD is moving its 2nd District Headquarters to a new building in Gert Town.

The large vacant lot on Broadway Street near Earhart Boulevard in Gert Town that formerly held the Mary Church Terrell Elementary School received tentative approval this week to become the new New Orleans Police Department Second District station and a community pool.


The Second District station on Magazine is more than 110 years old, and has needed emergency repairs and rehabilitations with increasing frequency — often paid for by the COPS II nonprofit or even individual residents, like attorney Morris Bart. It poses logistical challenges as well, as it lacks meeting space to accommodate the district’s officers in a single room, faces the same parking congestion as other Magazine Street properties, and sits at a far corner of the district.

It may be falling apart but the current building is pretty attractive and in a prominent Uptown location.  Wonder what will happen to it. 

Carnival links: Re-routed parades, recycled throws, and ridiculous king cakes

Parade season is upon us.  I don't know why, but for some reason I'm convinced that this is going to be an especially good one. Here's what's going on this week.

• KDV changed their route.
  
  
  
  Then they changed it again! Appropriate anyway, given this year's theme. The route published in the newsletter (above) is different from the one they're actually going to take (see the Gambit article in the link.)
  

  Krewe du Vieux “Begs for Change” when it rolls at 6:30 p.m. Saturday in the Faubourg Marigny, French Quarter and CBD. The satirical and risque krewe typically picks themes with a double meaning, but this one is more socially conscious than usual.
  
  “The double meaning is the proliferation of the people on the street corners holding up signs all over the place but the other side of it is hoping for social and political change,” Krewe du Vieux Captain Joe Thompson said.
  
  Among the 17 subkrewe variations on the theme, The Krewe of Underwear “Bulldozes for Change,” taking on the issue of hipster gentrification. The Krewe of T.O.K.I.N. “Burns (One) for Change,” arguing that Louisiana should “put the bud in the budget” and legalize cannabis.
  
  The krewe is following a new parade route. For the first time in nearly 20 years, the parade will cross Canal Street, enter the Warehouse District and end at the Civic Theatre

  Just don't tell our city councilpersons about all the aggressive panhandling.
  
  
  
• One day prior to KDV, a much worse event will take place.



There's no word on whether any cat fights factored into the decision-making process — or whether any scratch marks were left — but the royalty has been settled for the all-feline Krewe of Endymeow for its 13th annual Bal Masque on Friday, Jan. 30, at The Cat Practice Veterinary Hospital in the Lower Garden District, according to a press release.

Carnival for cats. It's really better in concept than in practice... and it's a pretty terrible concept at that.  On the other hand, if your cat likes to party...






• And, of course, if you're looking for an even worse krewe to hang around with, there's always the Rex organization. This year's Rex parade is all about how great war is.. or something like that anyway.



The 2015 Rex procession, which rolls on Mardi Gras (Feb. 17), will include 27 floats on the theme of "Wars that Shaped Early America." The current Rex bulletin, reproduced here, shows artist's renderings of the floats.

Full-size Rex bulletins, which measure 19 inches by 25 inches, are sold through the Rex organization website. Bulletins from past years cost $30.


I don't want to shell out $30 just for a preview of a parade.  I'm guessing there's one about the "War of Northern Aggression" in there somewhere.  Rex also made this announcement last week.


NEW ORLEANS - The King of Carnival will ride the rails, and not the river, when he makes his Lundi Gras arrival by train this year instead of by water, the Rex Organization announced Tuesday.
Since 1987 (though the practice harkens back to the 19th century), Rex has arrived at the Mississippi Riverfront at Spanish Plaza, via Coast Guard cutter, at 6 p.m. on Lundi Gras.

This year, on Lundi Gras, the King will arrive by train – reviving a tradition that Rex archivist Dr. Stephen Hales says dates back to the mid-1880s.

"He's going to revisit an old tradition, long since forgotten," Hales said. "He'll arrive by train, a specially decorated train car pushed by the N.O. Public Belt Railroad will arrive at Riverwalk. The King of Carnival and his entourage will emerge, greet the crowds, greet the mayor, proclaim Carnival and receive the keys to the city."

Trying to get as much use out of that N.O. Public Belt as possible before Mitch sells it off to John Georges's father-in-law, I guess.



• Here's a list of the top 10 revenue generators among Carnival krewes. City Biz loves to kiss the asses of these clubs. Which is why you end up with bullshit like this. 
  

  An analysis on the most recent tax documents available provides a glimpse at the prolific spending of Carnival krewes. What it doesn’t show is the revenue they direct to charitable causes.
  
  The Rex organization, for example, provided more than $860,000 in grants to charter schools and educational groups, through its Pro Bono Publico Foundation.

  Yeah, hey, thank you, Rex, for profoundly fucking up the very concept of public education in New Orleans... for the good of the public, of course.  There's also this factoid.
  
  

  Non-parading Krewe Momus (disappeared after non-discrim ord) has $1.48m in assets. Richest Krewe? Endymion. http://t.co/tSYkxirerF
  — Andrew Tuozzolo (@ATuozzolo) January 29, 2015

  
  
  Momus doesn't parade anymore because they never got over that War of Northern Aggression that Shaped America.  But it's more or less an open secret that the Knights of Chaos is their parade.  Chaos uses the Momus floats and their membership is basically Momus, from what I understand, anyway. Wonder how the money gets moved between organizations, though. City Business isn't likely to tell us. 




• Riders, do you have all your beads, yet?   The timing is getting weird.
  

  NEW ORLEANS - A labor dispute in California is turning into a possible Carnival crisis. Delays at a Los Angeles port has thousands of signature Mardi Gras beads on back order and local businesses are now concerned the throws will not make it in time for Mardi Gras.
  
  Krewes spend all year making, designing and buying throws for Mardi Gras, but right now much of that is just sitting in containers on the West Coast.
  
  "It's about 20 percent of what we would normal bring in that is not here now," says Dan Kelly, president of Beads By The Dozen. "Unfortunately, a lot of it is the custom product we need for the krewes."

  On the positive side, recent years have brought a build up of rumblings about the quantity of non-biodegradable plastic beads that get tossed around every year.  Maybe this is an excuse to cut back a bit.
  
  
  
  Several krewes, like Chewbaccus here, have begun a deliberate movement toward fewer but more interesting hand-crafted throws made from recycled or recyclable material.  Riders also have come to rely more and more on organizations like Arc of New Orleans, who collect and recycle beads each year, for the bulk of their throws.
  
  Arc rolls these bins behind many parades.  If you're not taking yours home, consider tossing them back.
  
  




• The wacky king cake trend has reached such levels of baroque absurdity that it no longer does any good to question whether or not a thing is real.  If it can be imagined, it exists.  Take, for instance, this week's king cake mini-fad: Boudin.
  

  "I saw it, and I thought, 'Why not?' It was a spur of the moment thing," said Steve Himelfarb, the owner of Cake Café, and arguably the godfather of modern king cakes in New Orleans. He made a dozen mini king cakes filled with boudin and topped with crunchy bacon.
  
  At 7:45 a.m., the Cake Café Facebook page posted a photo of one of them, and credited his inspiration, the boudin-filled and cracklin topped king cake conceived by Robert Carriker, who runs BoudinLink.com and kingcaker.com out of Lafayette. The boudin-stuffed king cake he conceived took social media by storm on Tuesday morning.
  
  BoudinLink.com replied: "That is awesome. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery - and we appreciate the recognition!"

  Did you get that?  A guy made a boudin king cake but then had to stop and give credit because, come to find out, someone else had already made a boudin king cake.  And hey, that's not all.  You might think that should be all. But it is not.  
  

  Himelfarb said they do not bake other savory king cakes, but for their small catering gigs - they have several this weekend for Krewe de Vieux parties -- they make stuffed breads. One is filled with muffuletta ingredients, one with vegetables and one with roasted pork.

  Actually the savory king cake genre has been explored previously.  Here's a meat pie cake that looks pretty good.
  
  Muffuletta king cakes, though.  Is your mind blown?  Well you are too slow because it turns out this has also been done.
  
  
  
  No satire too outlandish that it can't also be real.  Welcome to Carnival 2015. If you don't like it, you can stay in Mobile.

"Once in a lifetime leader"

God I hope there aren't any more like this before we're all dead. 

The political action committee that’s been set up to support Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s potential run for president started circulating letters to Republican donors Wednesday, pitching Jindal as a “once-in-a-lifetime leader.”

Buzzfeed obtained a copy of the letter, which is signed by former Congressman Bob Livingston, chairman of the pro-Jindal “Believe Again” super PAC.

The letter largely touts Jindal’s gubernatorial track record, including sweeping cuts that have been made to state government — without noting the state currently is facing significant budget struggles.

Bring the baggage

Won't happen, of course, but, for what it's worth, David Duke briefly entertained the notion of running against Steve Scalise (AKA "David Duke without the baggage") on a radio show yesterday.

Meanwhile, Duke said he’s considering an electoral challenge to Scalise.

“I am not registered to vote right now. I have legally been able to vote for years but I haven’t registered right now and I’d be able to vote for, but I might just register,” he said. “Just so, I might have to run against Steve Scalise because you know, I really might. I mean, I’m definitely going to consider it because its so disgusting to me to see…he got elected on false pretenses.”

Duke added that “the Republican Party’s issues are my issues,” but said “the difference with me in the Republican Party is that I didn’t betray them when I got elected.”

He's not even registered to vote.   Anyway, if there's anything we can do to encourage him to pursue this fantasy, then let's get on that.  Running Duke against Scalise is very much like running Stormy Daniels against David Vitter.. except, people will actually pay attention to this. 

Hell even the pineheads are worth 50 Blue Dogs a piece

Somebody stole a bunch of Varg's stuff out of his truck last weekend.   That sucks.  Maybe Sidney Torres will make a TV commercial about it.

QOTD

Tom Benson:

In a brief interview with Fox Sports New Orleans sideline reporter Jennifer Hale that was shown on the video boards of the Smoothie King Center at halftime of the Pelicans game against the Nuggets, Benson dismissed accusations that he's not healthy enough to make sound business decisions.

"People think there's something wrong with me," Benson said. "I've been in the office everyday putting in a full days of work. I feel fine."

He can feel any way he wants. We're still gonna think there's something wrong with him.  Also, we heard this interview in person at the Pelicans game last night but could barely make out what he was saying thanks to the exceptionally crappy sound system in the Blended Beverage Building. Maybe some of the inheritance can go to getting that fixed.

Update: As a bonus, here is Drew Brees feeling some balls on TV.

Upperdate: Wish I'd seen this before making this post.  This is an excerpt from Brian Boyles' New Orleans Boom and Blackout: One Hundred Days in America’s Coolest Hotspot about the run-up to  Superbowl XLVII  in New Orleans.

“We’re here today to witness a major miracle,” Governor Edwards announced at a press conference on June 3, 1985. “I can’t tell you how many times it took just another little miracle to keep the deal afloat.” [i] The governor rarely shied from hyperbole, but he had a point: after seventeen losing seasons under original owner John Mecom, the woeful Saints were rescued by a native son. Mecom was a rich man’s son, an unpopular Texan whose family owned oil wells and chemical plants. His Saints never finished with a winning record, going a combined 83-187-5 and driving fans to don paper bags over their heads in shame. Some predicted the franchise would relocate. Instead, Tom Benson returned to purchase his hometown team. He entered the bidding as an underdog: the NFL required an owner to purchase 51 percent to officially hold a controlling stake in the team. Unable to hit the percentage on his own, Benson lobbied successfully for special approval by league owners to be declared the principal owner among a group of ten investors. Once again, the Saints found themselves on the positive side of a rule change. Together with Edwards, Benson wrestled a new Superdome lease and a sales-tax waiver on concessions from a skeptical state legislature. On May 31, 1985, the sale was approved. “I want everybody to know who I am,” Benson reportedly told his lawyer. “Everybody is saying, ‘He’s just a used car dealer.’ Let them see me now.”

Benson needed help from the state, and from the Governor's political pull just to have himself installed as the Saints' owner.  He's been benefiting from state largesse ever since. It has made him a billionaire.  But even so, he and whoever inherits his fortune somehow retains the prerogative to remove the team from the city on a whim. 

One such whim could be the owner suddenly thinks the Dome is out of date.  Where would he/she get an idea like that?

This vehicle is making a turn

Megan Braden-Perry is bringing her old Gambit Public Transit Tuesday series back via her website.  These were a lot of fun before. Try and remember to follow the new ones.

Meanwhile, it's Carnival time and that's going to affect a number of RTA routes.