Save your knock-out punches for the freaks

One of Varg's liens is this AP story on the intensifying assholery of street barkers in front of French Quarter businesses.

NEW ORLEANS — New Orleans' most famous street is a nightly swirl of neon and happy tourists strolling with a beverage in hand.

A blend of jazz joints, strip clubs, bars and restaurants, visitors can find everything from live sex to four-star dining on Bourbon Street. They also can count on being snared by barkers determined to lure them into one place or another, or another or another.

"It's cheesy and in the last few years it's gotten way out of hand," said Louis Sahuc, a photographer who has a studio and home in the French Quarter. "Getting past them is like running a gauntlet."

An ordinance passed 25 years ago was designed to outlaw barkers, but until recently it's been thinly enforced.

Now, businesses and residents say the barkers are straying from the informally tolerated confines of Bourbon Street to other parts of the Quarter and they want it stopped.

The barkers really are becoming more obnoxious. And they inhabit a wider range than they used to. Just a few weeks ago, one of them grabbed me in the middle of the street.

"Dude, did you just put your fuckin' hands on me?"

The guy kind of bows up and gets in my face.

"I'm doin' my job here, brah!"

Now I had been following this controversy in City Business for a while and so felt informed enough to tell the guy that his job (especially the aggressive manner in which he was executing it) was a legally dubious encroachment on the public contentedness. This only encouraged him.

"I don't come disrespect you on your job, brah!"

I hate it when people use "disrespect" as a verb. I would have decked him but I was on Bourbon Street where the bouncers and police are known to literally beat people to death for less than that so I just let it go.

Besides it's a losing battle. In the long run the city will end up siding with the strip club and restaurant owners instead of what's left of the neighborhood there. I mean, if the city has so little pride in itself as to allow this whorish buffoonery to besmirch the streets in the name of promoting the tourist business, then why should they care about street barkers?