The latest effect of the Saints making the Super Bowl: Drew Brees getting a piece of the advertising bonanza that has largely been Peyton "Extra Cheesy" Manning's thing for so long.

Just watch. You WILL be entertained.



More on this whole crazy past weekend later, when my knees have recovered more fully from dancing my butt off through the Quarter and the Marigny to stave off the 39-degree chill whilst having tons of fun. The crowds lining the streets were a great bunch. I even saw five people I knew and got my special cups to most of 'em (sorry, Coozan Pat, I need to get'cha some sweet Superdome beads).

Check the Flickr pics here for now and shake your heads a little that you missed it.

Look out for me tonight if you're in the Quarter or the Marigny. I'll be accompanying this and wearing a cape with a couple of these on it:

There's nothing like Krewe du Vieux...especially on such a night.

And because we've been watching this a lot lately, I can't help but think of the recent Who Dat copyright controversies in terms of the teensy-man battle that happens between 1:09 and 1:20 in this movie trailer (sorry, couldn't find a clip that had the whole thing on it; it is really funny).

"Extra cheesy, just like me."

No we haven't forgotten PimpGate...and neither have these people:

Your grandmother's chinchilla jacket cannot save you now! : One big ol' NOLA blogpocheh roundup from Coozan Pat.

The Lens has loads of stuff.

And keep checking CenLamar, Adrastos (at home and at First Draft), the yaller blog, Oyster, TPM and Dambala (especially the comments) for more.

My costume for Krewe du Vieux this Saturday is all in. Look for a crazy broad with a light-up ribcage on her dress in the Quarter. That'll be me. The dress is from Miami...and the Saints are going to Miami. Koinky-dink? I think not.

liprap Umm, sportswriters all over this country, Imma let you finish, but the SAINTS are the ones going to the SUPER BOWL.

curly_emmy Cop in his car stopped in the middle of Magazine to say, via bullhorn, "can we please have a moment of silence... for the retirement of #4?"

Nolascratch If you want to know what this win means to new Orleans, I just visited a cemetary, and more than one grave had todays newspaper on it.

Well, one can't say we haven't been reveling in the Saints' big win in these parts. This is a big deal for this city. It really is.

If anyone out there can tell me who it is doing the confetti angel on the Dome field, I'd greatly appreciate it.

I mean, a guy who looks for all the world like he ought to be hawking the latest energy drink on teevee kicks it squarely through the uprights and an entire city goes berserk. Signs and portents pertaining to the Big Game seem to be coming hard and fast as the collective consciousness of this town in tune with its biggest stars of the moment does its best to give those boys in black and gold a psychic boost. Hey, it can't hurt.

Something else can hurt us right now, though - and it'll hurt even more if we don't do it before Carrollton/King Arthur/Barkus/Super Bowl Sunday.

DCrais On election day for #nola Feb. 6: 8 parades, and Saints fans in Miami for Superbowl on Feb. 7. Turnout may not break 25%.

First off, if you know you'll be in or at one of those parades or you will be in or at the Super Bowl, VOTE EARLY, PLEASE. Locations are at City Hall, the Algiers Courthouse, and a "Voting Machine Warehouse" at 8870 Chef Menteur Highway. Not sure where your polling location is if you decide to dodge the parades and all, or maybe you're looking to organize a second line to your nearest polling place? Check here.

This is too important to leave behind in the Mardi Gras and Saints revelry. It's tempting to throw it at the bottom of the party pile and claim it's a buzzkill. You want a buzzkill? Try this on for size: The Saints' win over the Vikings killed the community-gouging dreams of two NFL owners. Benson cannot move the Saints ever ever, and Vikes owner Zygi Wilf can't be sure that his referendum to get a new stadium for his team will be met with straight faces by the Minnesota lege.

But this election is bigger than that, even.

There wouldn't even be a Saints team without this city. New Orleans was here long before the Saints franchise was even a thought in Dave Dixon's head. We need to ensure that this place will be here for many more generations to come, and the current mayor hasn't been helping that cause much. We might well be in danger of electing another one that won't be much better than a bump on a log - but we also have city councilmembers, an assessor, judges, and other city officials to elect. Get informed, if you aren't already. Get your votes on, so that we can be a town that can sustain ourselves as well as a world class NFL franchise.

skooks Bracing myself for 2 weeks of national media getting shit wrong about NOLA

That's always going to happen, sadly. But if you love and care for this place as much as I and most of the people I know do, find a voting booth here and get some good people in City Hall working for the good of all of us. It'll even get you back some more time you can devote to the revelry...and to problems such as the one I now have.

My son has watched so many Saints games on the tube with us this season. It ain't easy for a seven-year-old to stay fairly dull-roar-ish while all the adults are watching grown men pummel each other on turf and yelling about it as they eat and drink. He kind of started to feel what the games were all about after the Arizona game, and once the Saints had this one in the bag, his rallying cry was, "I want a Saints jersey, Mom! A Drew Brees one! Can I have one? Can I? CAN I????"

Just checked at a local store: a #9 kid size jersey is $60.

I've created a monster.

Anybody know where I could get one for a lower price than that?

______________________

Update, 2:07 PM: Eli comments on the "distractions" over at The Lens...which, incidentally, is a great place to start to get informed about the issues that affect all us everyday New Orleans citizens. Good on Karen Gadbois and company for getting it up and running at a marathoner's pace.

GOOD GOD ALMIGHTY, 7:25 PM: And these purveyors of PimpGate thought they could put all this attempted wiretapping of a senator's office in a federal building past our recovering-from-euphoria eyes and ears? Umm, NO.

Why the GOOD GOD ALMIGHTY, you ask?, 7:38 PM: Well, check it:

I am friends with Jim Moore, co-author of Bush's Brain and The Architect (in fact, I am in the acknowledgments of this one), and he, like many journalists I have spoken to over the years, believes that Rove bugged his own office as a frame-up.

Now imagine a Watergate corruption alumni like young Karl Rove, training a crop of young Republicans in illegal domestic political warfare. Then imagine this man acting as a consultant to elect certain candidates where this pattern of abuses seems to always occur. Now imagine this individual heading the RNC at the national level, training combatants, and then as a key adviser to the POTUS, issuing directives to those foot soldiers. This break-in is not an isolated incident. It is part of a larger, more insidious political scandal: the recruitment and brainwashing of young Americans into political dirty tricks and illegal activity as part of a political Cold Civil War.

These operatives even have a name for such activity, one less polite than Cold Civil War: ratf---ing. Here is an excellent overview of some recent examples...

...The crime which occurred today is not just a joke gone too far. These are educated young men. These are members of the College Republicans. These are intelligent and well brought up individuals who know what is legal and what is not legal. They knew what they were doing, because as political operatives, they were indoctrinated in this art of war.

Not only is this the way we live:



...we live this way, too:

The New Orleans mayoral election is now on Superbowl Eve while we dodge 8 parades to vote. Only in New Orleans.

Sean Payton on winning the NFC Championship: This is for the city of New Orleans.

Who Da Hell Dat.

Morning after update, 1/25: Go read Editor B's beautiful post. And Maitri's. We miss Ashley Morris terribly here. It's not only for the city, it's for the departed big man with a heart the size of this city. For more, go check out hangover-addled Clay's roundup.

I was told about this by a friend at the synagogue last night:

Here's a good test of social media's muscle: The re-branding of Mardi Gras in New Orleans as family-friendly entertainment.

That's a tough brief, for sure, but it's already attracted major brand and media backing from Louisiana pantry staple Tabasco and broadcaster Belo Corp.

"We want to show people that Mardi Gras can be clean and wholesome," said Jan Carroll, Tabasco's marketing director. "It doesn't have to be 'Girls Gone Wild.'"

To most of the country, of course, it is -- a vision of frat boys and party girls pouring into the French Quarter for a bacchanalia of booze, bare breasts and beads. Programs such as "Girls Gone Wild" and "Cops" have reinforced the image.

And that's long frustrated Tom Martin, president of local marketing firm Zehnder Communications (and a contributor to Ad Age's Small Agency Diary), who, like a lot of New Orleans residents, says the event ought to be better known for cultural and culinary aspects than for its debauchery. "As long as I've lived here, I've listened to people bitch and moan about how people around the country just don't get it," said the Texas-bred adman. "If you're going to whine, do something about it or shut up."

What he's doing? The family-friendly My Mardi Gras Experience, which won't begin its posts from bloggers showing what a great experience it is for people of ALL ages until February 1st.

Take that, Jefferson Parish and Baton Rouge!

...at least, until the first posts begin popping up. Jury's out on how well they'll be written or received.

'Til then, I offer you my humble postings on past Mardi Gras celebrations with MY family.

• Feb 28th 2006
• Feb 9, 2007
  
• Feb 19, 2007
• Feb 4, 2008
• Feb 6, 2008
• Feb 19, 2008
• Feb 23, 2009

And this doesn't even go into Homan's posts on Barkus, whose participation includes ALL of his family and close friends. If you have any other "family-friendly" reminiscences of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, I invite you to share. If it gets too long for a comment, just write it out in a post and throw the link back in your comment.

"Re-branding", my tuchus. Families have ALWAYS enjoyed Mardi Gras here, and always will.

There's been so, so much time spent tapping in to the hive mind that is Twitter for the past few days...it pretty much began with the Haitian earthquake, and was kicked into overdrive by the Saints winning the playoff game against the Cardinals.

Oh, sure, I've been logging in in the evenings when there have been local mayoral forums and the like, but I can sense from the tweets from the last forum about a day ago that both attendees and candidates might be getting tired of the roadshow. Marathon, not a sprint. We all need to breathe sometime.

Speaking of breathing, it seems the Twitter addiction I have will be dying very, very hard. I get up in the morning early, and I check Twitter, even though most of the people I follow are barely awake and, if they are, are tweeting that they are up much too early and should just go back to bed. I come home after dropping off my child and check Twitter. Rehash, repeat, retweet stuff I missed when I was in a car trying to get my child across town. Hashtags can act as more than denoting a subject people can search in order to find related tweets - poignant irony, memorial marking, fan-binding, and softly humorous hashtags can be wielded just as deftly as the most elegant of metaphors. It's amazing what 140 characters can do.

It's warping my fragile little mind.

I guess the craziest Twitter episode of recent days was when I learned about this article through the Gambit's postings on Twitter. I retweeted it, got a response back from a follower asking me if Muses had moved to the Red Stick and concurring with my assessment that Baton Rouge having the best Mardi Gras parade was bogus, and thought no more about that irksome item that got my ire up momentarily.

Until we got my son's first issue of Ranger Rick yesterday, a gift subscription from his grandma.

The little guy opened it up, asked me about the pictures of the nice dog parade inside, where the participants were throwing beads as they were pushing and pulling dogs on small floats, and, thinking I'd caught a glimpse of the Municipal Auditorium in Armstrong Park, I assumed it was the Barkus parade in New Orleans, which the kiddo had never attended. I told him how much fun it was and said we'd have to go together sometime.

"But, Mom..." he said.

Guess what?

My son's new issue of Ranger Rick has an article about a Mardi Gras dog parade...in Baton Rouge. First the Chicago Tribune, now THIS??

click on the picture to enlarge

It's enough to make parents such as ourselves - we who live only a block and a half from the parade route and love the ones that come ambling by during the season - completely insane.

And then I get this tweet:

@liprap Is the Mardi Gras story a good thing or a bad one? I wrote it, so not sure what you mean by ur Tweet. Libby (RangerRick)

Uh-oh. Must explain to the nice author what I meant.

Took a few 140 word missives, but I did it.

The point being?

Watch out on Twitter, kids. The world online is a-shrinking rapidly because of it, so tread carefully and be extra mindful of what your words say. Now more than ever.

Update, 1/22: I could justify my Twitter addiction by saying I am simply tapping into the eternal plumbing of the Internet on a regular basis now - but I'm still a junkie.

Commemorate Martin Luther King Jr Day here by participating in the SilenceIsViolence Strike Against Crime activities, which begin with the following activities today:

• Crime Happens Here: Community crime reporting public awareness campaign throughout the week. Signs available at Sound Cafe (2700 Chartres Street)
• Mayoral Candidates Forum: Candidates for Mayor discuss violence in New Orleans and ideas for community/government partnerships toward public safety.
  Location: Goody's Restaurant, 3200 St. Claude Avenue at Louisa Street. Time: 7PM
  Hosted by: SilenceIsViolence, Social Aid and Pleasure Club Task Force, and Stooges Brass Band
  Moderator: Lee Zurik

..and culminate in the Strike itself, which will be on Friday the 22nd.

Internationally, the victims of the earthquake in Haiti still need our help, as Nordette Verite notes. If you haven't contributed to help Haiti, please do so today. The circumstances there are still dire, even for those who escaped bodily injury but must cope with the aftermath.

As Coretta Scott King's words on this holiday tell us:

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is not only for celebration and remembrance, education and tribute, but above all a day of service. All across America on the Holiday, his followers perform service in hospitals and shelters and prisons and wherever people need some help. It is a day of volunteering to feed the hungry, rehabilitate housing, tutoring those who can't read, mentoring at-risk youngsters, consoling the broken-hearted and a thousand other projects for building the beloved community of his dream.

Dr. King once said that we all have to decide whether we "will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. Life's most persistent and nagging question, he said, is `what are you doing for others?'" he would quote Mark 9:35, the scripture in which Jesus of Nazareth tells James and John "...whosoever will be great among you shall be your servant; and whosoever among you will be the first shall be the servant of all." And when Martin talked about the end of his mortal life in one of his last sermons, on February 4, 1968 in the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church, even then he lifted up the value of service as the hallmark of a full life. "I'd like somebody to mention on that day Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to give his life serving others," he said. "I want you to say on that day, that I did try in my life...to love and serve humanity.

We call you to commemorate this Holiday by making your personal commitment to serve humanity with the vibrant spirit of unconditional love that was his greatest strength, and which empowered all of the great victories of his leadership. And with our hearts open to this spirit of unconditional love, we can indeed achieve the Beloved Community of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream.

May we who follow Martin now pledge to serve humanity, promote his teachings and carry forward his legacy into the 21st Century.

Yeah, so the euphoria hasn't worn off yet.

Maybe it's simply that my homemade black and gold king cake hasn't been completely eaten...

NAAAAH.

Sean Payton gave the Saints baseball bats before today's game.

That's right. Baseball bats. Telling the players to... *AHEM*... "Bring the Wood".

This season, it seems only the Saints can mix sports metaphors and still come up with a win.

I'm just so, so happy they didn't bring this sort of wood:

Who Da Hell Dat.

My wishes for my fourth blog day tomorrow?

We keep helping Haiti in any way we can. Vet your charities first.

AND

The Saints stir the pot tomorrow...

...and come up with the right recipe for NFC Championship playoff gumbo.

One game at a time, people. One game at a time.

Mardi Gras parades will be a picnic after this.

Forget the Mardi Gras Marathon. Just a lengthy trot.

Crescent City Classic? Walk in the park.

As tests of endurance go, they all pale in comparison to this entire month's slew of politicians on parade. I speak of the innumerable forums for all the local offices up for grabs in the upcoming elections. Most of these forums have been for all the mayoral candidates to speak generally and specifically about the issues of import to the city that they will do their best to work on if they get elected - which, considering all the incompetence and corruption we have been experiencing for decades in these parts, is a marvelous idea. What better way to gauge a prospective mayor's future performance in office than by grilling the people up for it incessantly, seeing how they react to the questions and to each other's answers to these questions, and getting it all out in the open for the public to take it from there?

Really, it still is a marvelous idea - except that it seems that nearly every night this month there are one or two mayoral forums, increasing the possibilities of election overdosing for political junkies (something that has been aided and abetted by Twitter, especially - just checking the #nolamayor tweets on there is a plotzworthy activity. Really, lie down before you check.) and also testing the mettle of the average voter in trying to make a decision. Even if one only reads the dead-tree Times-Picayune reports on the forums after the fact, the effects are overwhelming. Short of performing MRIs on each candidate and consulting lie detectors they are hooked up to while we ask them these questions, it seems we are bound and determined to vote them off the Isle d'Orleans one by one, because we know what we don't want more than what we do want of our city's top official.

• We don't want incompetence.
• We want crime to be brought under control, and the NOPD with it.
  
• We don't want any more contract hijinks.
• No more stonewalling on how things really work in City Hall.
• Don't lie, of course.
• Don't say anything to get elected.
• And God forbid you should miss a forum.

It's enough to drive a New Orleans resident even battier. And we're already batty from all the other stuff that's going on this time of year.

The best I can say about all of this is it's a good break from having to supervise my seven-year-old son in tracing a map of Canada for a school project. Yes, you read that right. He had to trace Canada...and include the capital and three major cities...and the major rivers, mountain ranges, bordering oceans, and lakes...and label them all...and when's the next forum, somebody?????

My biggest worry about it all? That the sideshow entertainment of all these forums will be distracting us from continuing to act in ways that will sustain our city and enable it to thrive above and beyond the current service economy dominating it at this time. Improper use of a magnifying glass can cause burns if one isn't careful. Take the humor, outrage, and occasional truths revealed in stride, dig deeper if something is really nagging at you about a candidate and/or the issues, and keep on keepin' on.

47 more days...

Update, 4:10 PM: Forgot an important part of that list: quit using race to divide us all.
_______________________

G directs us to musician and Haitian native Wyclef Jean's Yele Haiti Earthquake Fund to aid victims of the disaster there. People need help. Keep it up.

Anudder update, 1/16: Stuff I missed, from the comments:

RECYCLING!
One issue that we DO want is the return of curbside recycling to stimulate the economy.
http://nolarecycles.com/

I've been amazed--this is a POSITIVE change, it will help the city, seems to be one issue on which most New Orleanians agree, but i have not heard it raised.

AND: Yele Haiti is suspect. Try Doctors without Borders or

Cathedral of the Incarnation
2015 West End Av.
Nashville, TN, 37203
Ph# 615-327-2330

They are sister parish to St. John the Baptist in LaVallee, 50 miles west of Port-au-Prince, and have been offering relief there for 30 years.