Archive for the ‘Nola Nuts’ Category

The St. Patrick’s Day parade was this Saturday, and I’m just now getting around to the photos-but not becuase I got so drunk I couldn’t function.

Seriously! No laughing! I’m mildly embarrassed to say that I didn’t have a single drink the whole day. I didn’t even watch the floats this year. Instead, I functioned as the gang’s facilitator, thus having the title of Uber Goddess very kindly bestowed upon me. (Accent charcter was throwing off some browsers, so I have to be umlaut-less, I’m afraid.)

Hey, you bring a bunch of guys extra beer and beads and their ‘goddess’ standards aren’t as high as they might be, what can I say? There’s no chance of it going to my head, though. I’ve got a 16 year old, remember. I told her about it and she laughed so hard I thought she was going to pee herself.

I volunteered for duty, but hadn’t really considered a few basic things:
1) It was HOT. Low 80s, but it was the first hot one of the season and seemed traumatic.
2) Beads are heavy.
3) Beer is heavier.

It was, of course, a hell of a fun day. Too much was drunk by (almost) everyone concerned, and the guys looked great in their kilts- Charlie’s going to have to get one for next year. At least the kilted ones had a little ventilation going on…lol

Here’s the gang that Chris Horrell has gathered in front of St. Alphonsus’ church before they set out.

Lots more photos after the jump, and also in the main gallery.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I’d thought I might go down and see the progress down at CJ Peete today, but there isn’t any.

First there was a stop-work order put in place until the City Council fully approved their demolition. Okay, fine- that should’ve been done previously, anyway. It’s the law, go for it.

But now there’s a letter on Bush’s desk to stop the work, and I could scream- largely because I’m pretty liberal overall, and these people give liberals a bad name.

I mean, really. Do these people look to you like they have day one experience in the realities of the most notorious public housing projects in the country?

(pic courtesy of the T-P)

No, these are not the displaced poor. They’re the children of affluent parents (Loyola students, y’all- $37k a year) who want to feel like they’re helping the world.

I get that, really, I do.

But when you look around at your protest, in your jammies and your Santa hats, don’t you wonder why the residents aren’t there with you? Don’t you look at the decay and wonder who in their right mind would want to live there? I guess your prof hasn’t shared the horrendous crime stats with you, or the even higher teen pregnancy rates within them.

Here are some facts. Read the rest of this entry »

Had one to go to yesterday, sadly, for my friend Jazz’s uncle. She cared for him, bringing him food and generally running errands.

Naturally, it’s all really sad, but…he was 85. He died surrounded by his big family, and you can’t do much better than that.

So. The service:

First off, there are the programs- before moving here I’d never seen anything more elaborate than Mass & Prayer cards, but these are a different animal altogether. I had a pile of these dropped on me last year when I was asked if I could put together a program for a neighbor who’d died. I tried to change the format a bit to…um…condense. I was kindly (but in a brooking-no-nonsense tone) told to get it back on track and make it look similar (but better, if you could, because, you know, people notice).

Things you’re likely to find in a program: The full obit, many photos of the deceased, including in their coffin, long long lists of relatives left behind, texts of psalms, personalized poetry.

Here’s that first one I did- pretty typical, overall. No coffin photo, though. (Thankfully.) Read the rest of this entry »

Between Jackson & Washington:

In the white stretch limo’s window, alongside the happy, cowboy hat wearing tigers is a sign reading: Pardon me, but do you have any cheap yellow mustard?

The funniest part is that it’s almost impossible to find standard, ‘cheap yellow mustard’ in New Orleans.
Read the rest of this entry »

Zulu has all kinds of foraging toys to keep him occupied, and usually they take him a day or two to figure out, but then there’s this treasure chest.

Damn that treasure chest. Two ‘keys’ have to be turned and then pulled out keep it ‘locked.’ It’s a clear yellow lucite, so he can see the nuts and things in there, taunting him. Once the bird’s pulled the keys the bottom drops down, allowing access to the goodies locked up inside.

Well, sorta. As it turns out, it’s made for a bird with a smaller head than Zulu…he can’t fit his beak in there to get at the treat. He tried valiantly for quite some time, stubbornly not allowing me to get my hands in the cage to try and help. HE was going to do it.

But if the beak don’t fit, you must submit. With a mighty PEEP! He came barreling out of the cage, and over to the outer door of his food (making sure I was watching, of course):

Ripped open the door, and flung the entire dish out, onto poor Kassie, asleep by the cage. Not that she cared much, she started eating it up straightaway.

Mission accomplished, he swung the door shut again as if it’d never happened and feeling much better about the whole episode.

So I attended a meeting last night at City Councilwoman Stacy Head’s house on behalf of the neighborhood association. It reinforced the fact that I hate her.

Okay, to be honest, it’s more like “am deeply jealous of.”

Here’s what my afternoon was like:
1pm: Shit! I forgot I had a meeting at 5:30.
3pm: Realize I’d better change before meeting as my grass-stained jeans aren’t going to impress anyone.
4:45: Alison calls. Can you pick me up? Also, don’t you have a meeting tonight? What about dinner?
5:05: Get in shower, having realized I never got a chance to get one this morning since my schedule was thrown off this morning. (It doesn’t take much.)
5:15: Fling things around the bedroom in an effort to find “grownup” type clothes.
5:18: Give up on grownup, nonwrinkled clothes.
5:25: Leave house, hair still damp.
5:28: Back in house, find address of meeting.
5:45: Be last one to arrive.
6:33: Having forgotten to turn phone off, daughter calls. What did I end up doing about dinner? Hiss into phone that she should forage through whatever leftovers there are.
7:42: Have recovery drink at home.

Now, a breakdown of Stacy’s day:

1pm:

Okay, I give up. I have no idea, except that it involved a lot more than remembering to try to remember about the grass stains. I do not operate on the same plane as this woman.

Her house was immaculate, her kids phenomenally well behaved. She had her toddler on her lap, quietly drawing kitty-cats while we discussed matters. She got a call from her neighbor asking if she could drop her two toddlers off while she ran some errands. “Sure, no problem!” She orchestrated all four kids from the meeting, including letting them have popsicles without any ending up on furniture, in hair, etc. Her hubby called and she told him dinner was ready and waiting for him when he got home. After our meeting, she was having another meeting about the copper problem.

And she’s nice, too, dammit. Personable, funny, sharp as hell- neither shrewish nor Stepford Wife-ish in the least.

It was like watching someone of an entirely different species operate.

Possibly from another planet altogether- one that I will never, ever even be granted a visitation visa for, never mind citizenship.

From this morning’s T-P from a story entitled “Sisters Arrested for Prostitution”:

But over the past few years, flesh peddlers have begun marketing themselves in the service listings. And law enforcement agencies across the country are starting to pay attention. In New Jersey, Illinois, Washington and Florida, police have conducted stings netting advertising prostitutes as well as customers seeking to purchase a little pleasure.

The Jefferson Sheriff’s Office vice squad has made a handful of such arrests via Craigslist.org and other web sites, said the unit’s commander, Capt. Tom Angelica. Investigators would make more, he said, but they’ve been busy helping the rest of the department tackle violent crime. That leaves little opportunity to address online prostitution, where Hare said the market is ripe.

“It’s like shooting fish in a barrel,” Hare said.

Forgive the pun, but it’s all a little breathy, no? Anyone feel like purchasing a little pleasure from flesh peddlers in a ripe market?

If so, you’d better be careful because our amusingly named Detective Hare is out there to stop you from making like the bunnies of his namesake.

And speaking of fish in a barrel, haven’t we got bigger ones to fry?

So I’ve got a problem.

Luckily, I also have a solution. Isn’t it nice when things come together like that?

I have all of these photos and oodles of information about the bizarre and colorful histories of various locales around New Orleans, and I’d love to share them. So far so good.

Now, many of these purport to be haunted. I’m not sure where I stand on that subject, exactly, but a good tale is something we can all get behind, right?

Therein lies the dilemma. How far do you go? Those Haunted History tours drive me bats- the stupid capes being whipped about in what an overcompensating ex-dweeb desperately hopes is a vampiric manner.* Woefully short of history, but very high on histrionics.

The sad thing is that they’re not needed. So many truly bizarre things have happened here over the centuries that there’s no shortage of material.

So let’s make a deal, you and I. I’ll tell you the stories, sticking to as much history as is known. I’ll also tell you What They Say, as in, “They say that on dark and stormy nights you can still see her headless corpse run naked through the hall!”

But don’t expect me to wander off into “Bwah-ha-ha HAHAHAHA!!!” territory. If I do, it’s your obligation to slap me as you would any other hysteric. Deal?

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* Besides, I was once at a Laundromat in the Quarter with one of those guys. ** It’s very hard to take them seriously after you’ve seen them folding their tighty-whities in the middle of a Saturday afternoon.

** Well, not with. At the same time as.

Doing some research today for the new Voodoo section of the store, I came across this description of a particular gris gris from www.themystica.com:

Another favorite gris-gris of gamblers was made of chamois, a piece of red flannel, a shark’s tooth, pine-tree sap, and dove’s blood. The dove’s blood and sap were mixed together, and this mixture was used to write the amount that the gambler wished to win on the chamois, which was wrapped in the red flannel with the shark’s tooth between the two layers, all of which was sewn together with cat’s hair.

You took this bit of lovely, sticky, smelly goop and stuck it in your left shoe, then hobbled off to your gambling venue of choice, where, I suppose, you won because everyone folded their cards just to get the hell away from you.

Gris gris (meaning grey/grey- neither black nor white magic) are small packets that have a combination of herbs, stones and suchlike to bring about the outcome you’d like- there can never be more than 13 items, and there must be an odd number. The ones we carry are a lot more pleasant to carry than the one described above:

‘course, they’re supposed to be stronger if you personalize them with the object’s hair nails, sweat, etc, but I’m not going that far for ya, sorry…lol

So the girls at Alison’s school are required to read 3 books per summer, and give short (500 words or so) reports with enough specifics so the teacher knows they actually read the damn things.

Naturally, given that she had 3 months to do this, she was finishing her reports this morning, 15 minutes before the first bell of the first day of school. Silly girl left them up on my screen, and I just had to be nosy:

I also baby-sit as my source of income as well as one of my hobbies. I enjoyed and related to many of the humorous remarks throughout The Nanny Diaries and “Nanny Facts.” For example, “Nanny Fact: in every one of my interviews, references are never checked. I am white. I speak French. My parents are college educated. I have no visible piercings and have been to the Lincoln Center in the last two months. I’m hired. (4)” Of course there are differences between the qualities that Nan and myself think that will get you hired. I agree that references are never checked and if you appear normal, attend school, have future goals, and speak properly you will get hired.

I suppose I can’t really argue; this is a kid who saved $5,000 from babysitting and tutoring last year. And yet…it’s just so Alison, somehow.

Hmmm. I’ve now moved on to her report on a book called “Fiend.” Suddenly I much prefer pretentious nannies & wannabe pretentious teens (though I do love the last line- hell, it sounds like Thanksgiving dinner with my family): Read the rest of this entry »