Dan keeps saying that I must counter some of the nastier YouTubes in this bloody hollerday war with some sort of porn. "Naked Christmas! Naked Christmas!" he keeps telling me, with a teensy bit of drool emanating from one corner of his lip.

Well, my neighbor told me of a little something...but it is risque, so click on the link below only when you are not at work and the kids are all safe in their beds.

Then, feel free to live it up with Hot Jewish Chicks.

In somewhat related news, Big Daddy's goes belly-up. Never been in there, but the place still had an effect on me...and on some unsuspecting relatives of mine. After a less-than-stellar dinner at Antoine's (this was before we had our own waiter over there), I took said relatives down that block of Bourbon Street and they were suitably shocked and appalled. "Topless and bottomless!!!" one of 'em exclaimed as she held onto my shirt sleeve for dear life, staring at the mannequin's legs popping in and out of the building as though they were portents of disasters yet to come.

This was pre-8-29, so perhaps she was right...

Some of you might be wondering about the proliferation of Hannukah hip-hop on the interwebs...

...the insane shtick one particular guy brings to the dreidel game in this video holds one possible clue.



Fun fact: my husband actually IS a Hebrew school dropout.

I need to find that shirt.

PLUS: Waaaay too many people got roped into this one:



And this one needs to be seen to be believed. Harvey Fierstein and Bambi do NOT mix.

Dan heard about this atrocity in the Hollerday YouTube Fest and suggested I find:

a)something combining Michael Bolton, Kenny G., and Yanni all at the same time (what, no John Tesh?)
b)something related to a certain holiday for the rest of us.

Soooo, heeeeeeere's b).



Blame Dan first. I can at least use him as a human shield to get a running start on my escape from you meshuganah hordes...

...although Dan does like this one - plug the kids' ears, now:

It's my birthday, and I'm gonna head down to Lake Ponchartrain to surf to this Hannukah classic:



So don't go tossing me down a well if I'm not as responsive to this year's Hollerday YouTube War today:



Just letting you all know what's up....

If you can decipher what these kids are singing to the elderly...



...then you haven't had enough Manischewitz.

All right, fine, you treif bivalve, you! Let's raise the stakes a little more...



Don't mess with me. I got a dreidel and I know how to use it.

'Tis that most annoying time of the year...

The second annual Horrifically Annoying Hollerday YouTube Fest!



It's da bomb!!!!*

* It certainly carries the potential to explode...

Update, 11:37 AM: Speak softly, play Maoz Tzur cheesily, and carry some strong Maccabees:



...not to mention a blast from the '80's past...

Oh, and grab the Manischewitz...you'll need it for this one...

Despite some more examinations of our recent refuse woes from Matt McBride- namely, the way in which the "house count audit" of the Walking Id's administration is being done...

The "house count audit" is supposed to independently determine for the city exactly how many houses are getting trash service - nearly two years after the contracts started. In the public's minds, this would probably involve an outside firm coming into City Hall and poring over the trash companies' address lists. But that's not what this "audit" is about. In fact, it appears this audit is not an audit at all, but simply an elaborate exercise in CYA ....

...The methodology for the audit is a whiz-bang technical mashup of vehicle-mounted GPS receivers and GCR's witches brew of data pulled from Entergy bills, post office records, and Sewerage & Water Board records.

From what I can gather, GCR is producing some kind of list where they think it is likely folks are receving trash service (not where they know service is received). GBB/GCR calls these addresses "prospective refuse collection points." Then GBB, with their GPS boxes and wireless antennas, seems to be going out on trash collection days and noting who has their cans out, and then tying that into the database.

Missing in this "audit" of the trash companies is the obvious - there is no interaction with the trash companies and their records. In effect, it is people driving around looking at trash cans and creating a brand new address list. There seems to be no provision whatsoever to determine if the city is getting double billed for any of those cans, or whether those cans should even be there. I also wonder how GBB/GCR accounts for people who might not put out their cans - or who do not have them within sight of a passing car - the days their auditmobiles roll by? And what about the year and a half of service the city had already paid for by the time the audit began?

Frankly, it's the goofiest audit methodology one could come up with. It's like going to the Grand Canyon, spending the entire time in the gift shop looking at postcards, and then coming home and telling everyone how Grand the Canyon is! It seems designed to avoid looking at the actual records in order to provide plausible deniability in case irregularities are uncovered. It also avoids placing the Sanitation Department in the uncomfortable position of having to explain their very poor oversight and contrary execution of these lucrative contracts. If nobody's looking at the records - and based on the actual records it seems no one is - then no one can say anything conclusive about them and their obvious problems.

(Please give E some suggestions as to how to present his petition to remove Veronica White from her sanitation directorate. A combo of sending it to the City Council members and a media blitz on the front steps of City Hall as E presents it to the Mayor's office is a start...and then we all must keep referring to its 568 signatures on a regular basis until she is gone.)

...I have to agree with Cliff's attention to Big Red Cotton's post New Orleans - It Ain't For Everybody, and reprint it here for your consideration:

Okay, so a soon-to-be released survey identifies the 20 cities Americans say they would most want - and least want - to relocate for a job.

Guess which list New Orleans made...

Because the national economy is in the crapper into the unforeseeable future, more Americans will be faced with having to relocate to find work. So this Washington-based professionals organization, The Human Capital Institute, created a survey to help cities determine how to market themselves to attract talented out-of-town workers. They interviewed 2,500 employees and entrepreneurs nationwide who ranked New Orleans as their fourth least favorite pick for places to move to. Amongst our cited ills are population shrinkage, murder rate increase, and post-Katrina tourism industry challenges. The negative attributes rankings were health and safety (55%), image (49%), and environment (45%).

Hmph... Well on behalf of New Orleans, allow me to say that we don't want to be with anyone who doesn't want to be with us. I, for one, am tired of Homogenous Nation's negative opinion of New Orleans. We cannot be everything to everybody, especially imagination-lacking, subdivision beige house loving, mainstream America. We're busting our asses to put this city back together and take it to the next level - it's a GD mission! So if you're not feeling this, move over and let the ones through that DO wanna get with us.

Excuse my tangent folks. I'm just OVER the whole 'image' conversation.

Ironically, the other cities that made the survey's Top Worst List happen to be our sister cities:

New York/New Orleans - Disaster Soul Mates
Detroit/ New Orleans - Chocolate Cities
Los Angeles/New Orleans - Hollywood/Hollywood South

Apparently, the respondents are not so much into catastrophe, flava, or drama. Okay, I get that. Again, this aint for everybody.

The other irony is that our economy is still growing and outperforming the rest of the nation - we're actually ADDING jobs here while the rest of the country is losing jobs. And according to CityBusiness, New Orleans is fast growing as a hot spot in the tech sector. So I have a feeling some of those naysayers are going to be eating their words about us sooner rather than later.

Oh it feels good to be able to say that and actually believe it has a chance in hell of being true...

Anyhoo, I'm filing this after a fabulous Creole Italian dinner and too much wine and song at Vincent's. Now I'm off to catch one of the best live music shows in the country - the Rebirth Brass Band at the Maple Leaf, which will be packed as it is every middle-of-the-week Tuesday night. And the night won't end till the band says it ends.

Ah New Orleans, my beloved... If loving you is wrong, I don't wanna be right!

I said it before and I'll say it again: Hell, yes and Amen!

Why are we here in New Orleans a tad obsessed with garbage?

Well, aside from the fact that I'm cleaning the house today and finding all sorts of crapola in the nooks and crannies of the living room alone... Just think about this a little, people. When you live in a city that had piles of debris from flooded-out houses all over the place not too long ago, and in which there are still many blighted properties dating from before 8-29, garbage is indeed an issue not to be taken lightly.

Seems City Hall is certainly treating it as a lark, however...and as an excuse to give the trash haulers some extra moolah, according to Matt McBride:

There are many irregularities in the Richards and Metro address lists provided to the City Council. While at first blush it would appear that both firms are actually underbilling the city, it would appear Metro is definitely overbilling, and Richards is borderline.

Among the irregularities are:

- thousands of duplicate addresses being counted in the billing totals,

- billing the city for apartment buildings with more than four units, commercial buildings, and non-existent trailers (even double billing a trailer park in one case)

- billing the city for properties that have been demolished, targeted for demolition by the city, determined by the city to be in imminent danger of collapse, or which have had demolition permits granted to them.

With this many irregularities, it seems the skepticism some have expressed over the contracts' cost effectiveness is justified.

Ummmm, yep, it is.

Thanks, E. When and how will the petition to remove Veronica White be presented? Let us know, please. 562 signatures as of today!

Morning outrages:

(Note To All: Folks, Lubavitcher Hasidim are not out in places like Mumbai to convert everybody to Judaism. When they are on the street with a mini-sukkah at the Sukkot holiday, for instance, they will first ask passersby if they are Jewish. They will not bother you if you are not Jewish. Their role is to help make secular, non-observant Jews more observant in their Jewish practices, and to assist the observant in doing things such as eating kosher meals abroad. It puts the Mumbai terrorists' actions in a truly insidious perspective: they knew the Chabadniks weren't going to approach them, so they approached the Chabadniks and gained their trust only to torture them and murder them in the name of jihad. This was probably done to people all over Mumbai.)

The Jihadi as Nazi, from 9-11 to Mumbai :

It turns out, that when Jews suspected that the Jihadi hated the Jew the way
the Nazi hated the Jew, they were right.

After all this time, I am embarrassed to admit that only when the monsters entered Chabad House in Mumbai, did I understand.

Monsters, not solely for what they did there, but, if the reports are to be believed, for the fact that they were able to do what they did after having actually gotten to know the young couple who founded the center, after asking them for shelter in Chabad House, after telling them that they were Malaysian students eager to learn about Judaism.

Monsters, for having befriended these sweet people in order to better learn how to execute them. Monsters, for having targeted a young couple who had devoted their lives to helping others better live theirs, despite having had a baby who died of a genetic disease and a second child ill and under treatment far away in Israel.

Oyster updates us on the Entergy street tile replacement fiasco dating from before Ashley Morris' passing. "OAK" is there...the street corner now needs the "BIRCH". How difficult can replacing those tiles be?...wait, the question probably ought to be "how difficult can Entergy make the task of embedding street name tiles in concrete?" I want details. I also want it done.

E tells us the media is being shut out of yet another meeting regarding Big Charity's future - the old Big Charity building, that is. Something's a tad fishy when even the governor is urging LSU to let the media into the building to see what its current condition is.

My suggestion for a soundtrack:

...written about this experience.

...Yeah, all fall down, somebody help me off of the ground...

Knew there was a reason why I pulled the Working Man's Cafe album out for listening today.

Emails came from my Queens synagogue's listserv concerning the occupation of Nariman House in Mumbai by terrorists. Said to be among the hostages were a young rabbi and his wife, as Nariman House had become a Chabad-Lubavitch House in recent years.

I knew, deep down, there was only one reason why such a place would be a target, and it had nothing to do with what Lubavitch outreach is really all about....but I had to hope a little, especially when I heard that the couple's toddler-age son was snatched away from the scene and carried off to safety.

On Thanksgiving Day, I followed many tweets about the terrorist occupation of several hotels in the city halfway around the world, read a number of real-time, in-Mumbai accounts of the horrors there, and even took great pains to unfollow (and help others unfollow) those who would deliberately spead misinformation and hate at a time when most others simply wanted the truth about what was happening right that second.

It was revealed a few days later that some Israelis were killed in Nariman House, among them Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and Rivkah Holtzberg. It was revealed to me last night that their son Moshe was right there and most likely saw the killing of his parents.

"It's clear that we don't want our Chabad Houses to turn into barricaded forts," said Rabbi Menachem Brod, official Chabad spokesman in Israel. "The whole idea of Chabad is that we are open and accessible to Jews traveling abroad."

The concern has left Israeli officials fending off charges that they should do more to protect the buildings, which serve as outposts for ultra-Orthodox Jewish culture.

"Of course we care, of course we worry, but there's not much we can actually do," said Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry. "Not only is it not governmental, it's not even Israeli."

Granted, I've had some insight into some simple safety measures that can be taken to ensure that visitors can't get past the doors of a place without identifying themselves. It's called locked doors, cameras, and an intercom connected to someone who can politely ask who you are and what your business is, then open the doors once you have done those things. I personally think the JCCs here are quite lax in their security measures, and though I've never been to the Chabad House in Metairie or the one at Tulane, I certainly hope those basic security steps will be seriously considered and taken. Because there is still one sick, twisted bottom line ultimately responsible for the senseless death of ultra-Orthodox Lubavitchers who were only there to help other Jews abroad become more observant in their Jewish practices:

"This couple wasn't living in the West Bank. They weren't settlers. They weren't occupying anyone's land. They were killed because they were Jews, simple and plain."

_______________________

Oh, and for reasons of my own, I find this especially sad that it happened in a place such as Mumbai. The beguiling way in which Maximum City author Suketu Mehta writes about his city in recent days says it all:

Mumbai is all about dhandha, or transaction. From the street food vendor squatting on a sidewalk, fiercely guarding his little business, to the tycoons and their dreams of acquiring Hollywood, this city understands money and has no guilt about the getting and spending of it. I once asked a Muslim man living in a shack without indoor plumbing what kept him in the city. “Mumbai is a golden songbird,” he said. It flies quick and sly, and you’ll have to work hard to catch it, but if you do, a fabulous fortune will open up for you. The executives who congregated in the Taj Mahal hotel were chasing this golden songbird. The terrorists want to kill the songbird.

I highly recommend his book on Mumbai. Go, go read.

Update, 7:33 PM: Head to Maitri's for more on how this has affected all of Mumbai, and indeed all of India.

The prodigal broad has returned from the buckle of the Bible Belt, where large, lit-up lower-case "t"s are prominently featured on the sides of two skyscrapers in the Oklahoma City skyline. And yes, I know there's a big one on the sides of a building in the New Orleans area, but it's the Archdiocese of NOLA's building, not one belonging to J.P. Morgan Chase.

ANYway, since we don't receive too many holiday catalogs here on the gray brick road, I took great delight in perusing one of the many that my mom gets: Neiman-Marcus' Christmas Book, famous for offering all sorts of incredible gifts such as a mauve Hummer and this fantastic gem that can be yours for only a half-a-mil:

To honor battles won and heroes lost over 38 glorious years, you can put 530 square yards of sporting history into your own backyard: An entire Cowboys Texas Stadium end zone. Our exclusive package also includes the VIP treatment for the last regular season Cowboys game in Texas Stadium. Your crew gets pre-game photos in your zone with Jerry Jones, a luxury suite for the game, and a once-in-a-lifetime post-game tailgate party on your soon-to be new backyard (with the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, no less). There's also autographed memorabilia from Cowboy legends, and a VIP package to attend the opening of the new stadium in 2009. Better yet, the Jerry Jones family and the Cowboys organization will generously donate the entire purchase price to The Salvation Army®.

I only comment on this because a) I can't imagine Tom Benson doing anything like this ever ever. Offering this kind of package in exchange for $500,000 to a local charity? Over his soiled cars' bodies... ; b) Who would he really be able to collaborate on this kind of thing with, anyway? Hell, neither Macy's nor Lord & Taylor reopened in the New Orleans Centre adjacent to the Superdome. ; and c) The Dome had better not be facing any sort of demise anytime soon, especially in these financial climes.

Aaaah, hell, even if a Saints end zone were the thing being offered, I have no place to put it, except maybe I could cut it up and use it for wall-to-wall carpeting...

I'm gonna buy local - and spend a tad less moolah - instead.

And I wouldn't object to having some of these wrapped in blue paper in my home, either.